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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gvatty who wrote (247829)	2/14/2008 6:13:39 PM
From: wbmw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: wbmw, actually what I meant was look how long it took them (AMD and Intel) to get to 1 GHz. It took years to get out of the 15, 25, 50 MHz machines and up to 1 GHz. Once AMD took the 1 GHz performance crown, Intel made it a priority to catch up. If AMD didn't exist the Intel ramp to 1.5 GHz machines may still be occurring. That's why I brought up the timeline to show you that Intel started this steep frequency ramp BEFORE AMD even launched the Athlon, and well before the race to 1GHz. You need to consider the timeline, because your theory doesn't fit with it. I seriously doubt that we would be using 1.5GHz processors today without AMD, because they would have had plenty of headroom by now to get there - and go beyond it. Moore's Law has gone on in the semiconductor industry, and if Intel didn't have AMD to worry about, they still couldn't ignore it, because if AMD weren't racing to 1GHz, then somebody else would - like Transmeta. Contrary to what you might think, x86 architecture doesn't exist in a vacuum. It has thrived on the PC, because it has remained competitive with other architectures, like ARM, PPC, and others (such as TMTA's VLIW core). AMD hasn't been Intel's only competition - they have just been the most relevant, because PC computing has such a high barrier of entry due to the software ecosystem and Windows. But consider if AMD didn't exist, and Intel was still stuck at 1.5GHz on an old, underperforming architecture. By today's standards, it would have opened themselves up to exposure from the cell phone and handheld markets. Why invest in PCs if your cell phones are capable of acceptable levels of performance? Would Intel have been in a position to compete with TMTA without cores with superior performance? Think, gvatty. You have such closed-minded AMD tunnel vision. They are not the only other viable semiconductor company. They just happen to be one with an x86 license and an attitude that has kept Intel on their toes for the past couple decades. But it doesn't mean that without them, someone else wouldn't have already taken their place.