Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel

Intel and trying to kill their most successful product name a better duo.

When amd64 came out, Sun should have started to migrate out of SPARC.

Ironically it is Itanium that killed of most of the RISC competition, but its the Athlon that actually delivered on that killing blow.

I still worked with SPARC as recently as 10 years ago. Horrible CPUs. Price for performance wise, a SPARC CPU with Solaris was significantly worse than a Xeon processor with Linux, probably by at least one order of magnitude if not more. Amazing how Sun managed to get people to pay for that garbage.

Path dependency has long been the savior of under-performing companies. The amount of coasting all the companies from IBM down did once they had an install-base is crazy. Sun just couldn't do it in the long term because the software that ran on Solaris was to easy to move to Linux and arguably their install base was to small.