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

To: gvatty who wrote (247834)	2/15/2008 12:10:19 AM
From: wbmw	Respond to of 275872

Re: The PIII debuted in May, 1999 at 500 MHz. February, actually. Re: A year later with competition from AMD it went to 1 GHz. That's when the ramp really accelerated. I don't disagree. Pentium III Coppermine had a natural limit around 800MHz, maybe 900MHz. Pushing it to 1GHz to meet AMD's performance hit the wall. Then Pentium 4 and Netburst broke through the wall, but by sacrificing IPC to do it. If you don't count the small window of performance leadership that Intel got with Northwood due to the year long delay of Hammer, AMD held the performance crown from the time they reached 1GHz (and integrated on-die cache with the TBird core), to the time they lost the crown to Core 2 in mid-2006. Since then, Intel has been widening the lead with each new launch. Re: BTW a license is very important. Why hasn't another viable semiconductor seriously company challenged Intel during the last 25 years if it's such an easy business? There's more than one way to challenge Intel, besides battling on their own turf. AMD has been the only prominent x86 vendor, but many other semiconductor companies have been innovating and growing over the last 10 years. Samsung has turned into an intimidating force, and so has nVidia. TI and Broadcom are also very powerful semiconductor companies. Any one of these could have stepped up to challenge Intel in the absence of AMD. IBM challenged Intel in the mid-90s with PowerPC, and they had a strong vendor - Apple - who was willing to champion the architecture. Had Intel not innovated and pushed the envelope to compete with AMD, IBM would have been that much closer to putting up a serious fight. And nothing would have prevented TI or Samsung from developing an ARM based core for laptops or cheap PCs, if Intel weren't innovating enough. Again, the world is full of competitors. AMD just happens to be the one who gets the spotlight.