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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

I believe he's speaking historically.

AMD wasn't really a consideration but for budget until they launched the Athlon in the late 90s. The success of Athlon was as much about Intel's fumble with Netburst as it was with Athlon being a solid competitor.

It took Intel almost a decade to roll out Core and in that time AMD failed to capture the market despite making tremendous gains and legitimizing itself.

Ultimately AMD fumbled with the Bulldozer/Excavator lines of CPUs and lost almost everything they had gained.

The reasons AMD couldn't capture the market are complex but the short answer is that Intel influences every aspect of a computer from software, to compilers, to peripherals, to firmware.

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> It took Intel almost a decade to roll out Core and in that time AMD failed to capture the market despite making tremendous gains and legitimizing itself.

And by AMD failed you mean Intel used illegal means to stop them from it, right ?

The US, Japanese and Korean fair trade comission equivalent all either blamed Intel or fined them. The EU was still too young in that area to be in time but in 2009 they gave one of their biggest fine ever at 1.45 billions € to Intel for what they did, along with an approriate "oh and if you do it again we won't be late, and won't be so nice".

Calling it "AMD failed to capture the market" is technically true, but that's one funny point of view.

>AMD failed to capture the market despite making tremendous gains and legitimizing itself.

Because Intel played dirty and illegal[0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osSMJRyxG0k

> Ultimately AMD fumbled with the Bulldozer/Excavator lines of CPUs

I've heard this baseless assertion before but so far I've never heard any semblance of support. Why do you believe that AMD "fumbled" with their Bulldozer line?

As someone who works on low-level CPU performance code, everyone I work with "knows" that Bulldozer was a performance dud for most use cases.

This article about Zen starts with an overview of why Bulldozer failed to deliver: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amds-moment-of-zen-f...

How about the fact that it performed about as good as the previous generation at multi-threaded workloads but worse at single-threadwd workloads?

Or that while it was power efficient at idle, it was exceptionally power hungry under load?

Maybe it was when the CEO admitted it failed to meet expectations, said we'd have to wait 4 years for a successor, and then stepped down?

Idk... I'm probably way off base.

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