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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

Now if I was an AMD exec I'd suddenly announce that "all versions of all our drivers for all hardware on all platforms will be available forever".

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Don't hold your breath. AMD has been terrible at marketing themselves against Intel for nearly 2 decades.

I feel like there was a period of time around 2000 when they had some edge, at least with gamers. Soon after that they disappeared for a while and only now i'm hearing about them again.

They lost a ton of ground right around 2006 when Core2Duo became a thing and they couldn't keep up.

I remember the K8, Almost every gamer I knew had one. Everybody was rooting for AMD at the time. They were the king. Dual core, 64bit support, almost double the IPC of Intel, lower power than Intel, and more stable. The frequencies weren't as high. My 2.6Ghz Athlon 64 3700+ demolished many Intel CPU's. And then I remember when Core2Duo became a thing like you said. Completely ruined AMD in every benchmark. I believe that Intel had switched their architecture over to what was Pentium Mobile at the time and refactored it. Prescott was optimized for frequency, but the IPC was terrible, as was the heat. We had 4GHZ CPU's back in 2004.

K6 was monumental by AMD, for the price those suckers ran circles around the Pentiums of the time and were more stable at that.

Well, they're back now. Ryzen stomps Intel's latest, from what I hear

Yep. The original Athlon and Opteron was the only decent period of time when it seemed like they had a decent edge. Really because Intel so horribly botched P4. So much so they buried the Pentium name they spent billions building up.

It almost felt like a cartel. At least for us, the consumers on the desktop side.

AMD never really made boards. That was part of their problem for a long time. They didn’t even make or support chipsets. It was just VIA and other third party stuff that was so riddled with bugs it was hard to recommend for anything other than enthusiast gaming.

Now now, the Nvidia chipsets were highly coveted for both Intel and AMD.

nVidia was rarely competing on their merits in the chipset space.

They were popular on AMD because the other options were spotty at best. I loved my SiS 735 and ULI M1695 boards, but virtually nobody touched the chipsets-- almost exclusively second tier manufacturers. VIA was the leader before nVidia hit, but they had a long string of half-baked launches... you had to assume that you'd wait for the second-revision chipset.

On the Intel side, the only place they competed was in a specific enthusiast gamer segment. The nForce 780i chipset was hot running and unpopular, but people bought it because they wanted to run SLI. I srtill have one sitting around, from a "gaming PC" I fished out of a dustbin The heatsink on the chipset is comically large and cries out for a fan.

Nvidia chipsets came from AMD IP originally.

Great, my Brazos APU would welcome getting their OpenGL and video hardware decoding capabilities back to the level of fglrx.

I never understood why AMD did not push that angle more, it is an act that would be very hard to follow by Intel unless they bought NVidia or something extreme like that.

It also would allow AMD to potentially gain an edge over NVidia in the GPGPU space. Missed opportunity imo, it still seems like an excellent idea.

AMD's market cap (44B) is much smaller in terms of market cap than either nVidia (124B) or Intel (251B), and pre-Zen they bet on mulitcore more heavily which lead to a decade of non-ideal hardware. As a result AMD didn't really have the money to dump into software for drivers and developer experience.

That said, they have been working on opening up the GPU space via ROCm: https://rocm.github.io

I find it hard to believe that a company with a market cap in billions can't afford, say, a dozen of developers to maintain its open source drivers.

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