Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel

It's probably important to note that the AMD64 platform isn't what got Intel in it's current situation. After adopting AMD64 Intel once again dominated AMD and the Bulldozer/Piledrive/Excavator series of AMD processors where not doing well in the competition with Intel.

With Zen AMD once again turned the tables on Intel, but not enough to break Intel. Intels downfall seems entirely self-inflicted and is due to a series of bad business decisions and sub-par product releases.

Yeah. The article tells a good story and I agree with it. I even bought an Athlon 64 CPU back in ~2004.

What I want to add to the story is that when Intel Core 2 came out (and it was an x86-64 chip), it absolutely crushed AMD's Athlon 64 processors. It won so hard that, more or less, the lowest spec Core 2 CPU was faster than the highest spec Athlon 64 CPU. (To confirm this, you can look up benchmark articles around the year 2006, such as those from Tom's Hardware Guide.) Needless to say, my next computer in 2008 was a Core 2 Quad, and it was indeed much faster than my Athlon 64.

The Core 2 and all its sequels were how Intel dominated over AMD for about a decade until AMD Zen came along.

My takeaway from the article is that Itanium could have been the equivalent of Apple's switch to M1 if Intel doubled down instead of panicking.