"No brand loyalty here, whoever is faster"
Now for the longest time that was Intel, so naturally I went there. But, I had my Athlon days and CPUs of that era that competed well. But then of course after a certain time Intel just took off, and AMD had really nothing. But now it's swinging back around after so long.
My next upgrade this July is a Ryzen 3000 CPU/X570 system for my main computer, upgrading from a 4770K that I recently upgraded to 7700K. Now I'll be upgrading to a Ryzen 7 3800X or Ryzen 9 3900X, I want the 3900X.
For all but about a five year period in the last two decades or so, AMD was that
"other" CPU company. A company that produced CPU's which were at best, budget alternatives and at worst, cheap knock offs of Intel's CPU's. It has at times even been in third place as far as prolific PC CPU vendors go. People often fail to realize that AMD has never truly beat Intel on equal footing. It seems AMD has to both produce a good product and Intel has to falter in some way to create conditions favorable enough for AMD to win when it comes to performance. When you compare the size of each company and their capital, R&D budgets and manufacturing, it's always a David vs. Goliath type story.
It's certainly never competed financially. AMD only gained the ability to design a better performing processor than some of Intel's offerings due to circumstance and making the right business decisions. Its acquisition of NexGen Systems and the hiring of former DEC Alpha engineers allowed AMD to create the wildly successful K6, K7 and K8 processors. At the same time, Intel happened to bet on the wrong horse with Netburst and they ended up being stuck with the high clocking, inefficient design for several years allowing AMD to win the performance crown. Intel had bet on its superior manufacturing and deep pipeline design to allow for clock speeds upwards of 5GHz and beyond to counter AMD's more efficient design. This obviously never happened as even reaching 4GHz proved to be beyond Intel's capabilities at the time.
I've often said, it wasn't a case of the Athlon being that good, but more about Intel's Netburst being that bad. Its obviously a combination of both, and the Athlon series
(especially, the Athlon 64) were certainly innovative, but Intel made several blunders which allowed AMD to come out looking much better than it otherwise would have. Intel choosing Rambus' RDRAM was one blunder, Netburst itself was another. You had chipset fiasco's with i820 and its MTH issue during this time. NVIDIA's nForce chipsets helped give AMD what it was sorely lacking at the time which was a quality platform. Something that's hard to believe given how bad NVIDIA's Intel chipsets were.
Today, security mitigation not withstanding, AMD is still at an IPC and clock speed deficit compared to Intel. AMD is in a unique position once again, but its less about how good its products are and more about how Intel has faltered and made bad decisions once again. Intel's design allowed for outstanding performance while leaving their CPU's vulnerable. Intel drove the market for so long that it became complacent and overly greedy, even by its own standards.
It's general greed and complacency created a climate which allowed AMD to come in with a core count advantage and good enough IPC to beat Intel in some applications and provide good enough performance for gamers and general enthusiasts. AMD made all the right decisions regarding platform features and pricing. X399 motherboards are just as expensive as their X299 counterparts, but they provide more features for less money as you don't need special license keys or processors topping $1,000 to leverage the full capabilities of the platform. You also don't need to step up to the Xeon to gain access to ECC memory support. Of course, Intel's security issues and discovered flaws have allowed AMD to close the performance gap and move up the food chain. Not only does the performance deficit get reduced, but Intel's reputation has taken massive hits lately.
Now, things will certainly get more interesting once we get Ryzen 3000 series CPU's in hand and do some testing. We'll see how its IPC advantage over Ryzen 1000 and 2000 series CPU's stacks up and whether or not it can fully close the gap (or surpass) Intel's newer CPU's.
