Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel

Athlon was my second computer(cpu) after i486. I think the core was K7 architecture and it had 700MHz clock, iirc. I rememebr Athlon/AMD being much cheaper than Intel and it was very exotic even thinking about it as Intel was EVERYWHERE(it was THE computer - "intel inside") and getting AMD was quite literally a question whether I'll even be able to install Windows and run normal programs(we really didn't know back then). I think I had another AMD after that in desktop(1.4GHz, dual core....iirc), then Intel in a laptop and now AMD again in a laptop. Will probably stick with AMD for the future as well.

I remember the days of cpu clock speed being displayed on the outside of the computer case using an led display. There was also this turbo button but I'm not sure whether that really did anything.

Generally, Turbo toggled some form of slow mode. Back in the XT era, enough software relied on the original 4.77MHz CPU clock of the PC and XT that faster Turbo XT clones running at 8MHz would have a switch to slow things back down. It persisted for a while into the early ‘90s as a way to deal with software that expects a slower CPU, although later implementations may not slow things down all the way to an XT’s speed.