How can Intel fail so spectacularly?
They have decades of X86 experience(they invented it) and literally more money than God(they probably spend more on office supplies than AMD on R&D).
How do you have everything going for you and still lose?
They have decades of X86 experience(they invented it) and literally more money than God(they probably spend more on office supplies than AMD on R&D).
How do you have everything going for you and still lose?
Sure, but AMD has decades of X86 experience, too. They were, after all, the second source supplier of the the Intel 8286, the AMD version being called the Am286. And AMD did, after all, invent the x86_64 ISA that we're all now actually using, while Intel was over fucking around with the utter failure that was Itanium.
They then bought a new chip startup called NexGen which became the K6/K7 later the Athlon.
AMD benefited by TSMC basically already investing in smaller nodes for Apple, combined with new manufacturing innovations caused by their innovative chiplet/infinity fabric designs. This enabled them to glue more cores together at higher yields and therefore winning massive benefits in multicore performance.
Intel had to worry about constraints caused by both the architecture combo-ed with manufacturing. I'm also not sure if they were even looking at something like chiplets at the time.
Complacency
End users lamented the lack of real improvements, but Intel continued to sit on their laurels because it was the easy thing to do - they simply didn't need to do anything drastic. Which it pretty sad - with different leadership with technical vision, who knows where computing power would be today? But that's business...
Intel took it too far though, and didn't seem to see AMD catching them up in their rearview mirror. IMO it serves them right, and I'm so happy there is a underdog challenger that is outpacing them in so many areas. The desktop I bought last year has an AMD processor - the first in my household in many years, but hopefully not the last.
And AMD invented AMD64 ;)