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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

These things go in cycles and predate Ryzen by a lot. The late-model Pentium 4 chips were overheating power-guzzling garbage compared to the Athlon XP, and the Athlon 64 was a serious competitor to the Core 2 series. Ryzen is the current incarnation of AMD coming into vogue in desktop, but it's not like it took them 40 years to get there.

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The last time I built a PC was around a decade ago but I always bought AMD simply because they were cheaper for equivalent performance in the middle. Getting an adequate CPU for hundreds of dollars cheaper than the higher-end Intel chips meant that I could afford the second-highest-end GPU that NVidia had at the time. This made a lot more sense for gaming workloads as $300 towards the GPU had a much bigger effect on frame rate than $300 towards the CPU.

These days iGPUs run pretty much any game I care to play so it doesn't matter.

My desktop is now about 12 years old with a 1650 GTX GPU. Still does everything I need perfectly fine. It is funny seeing some lower powered offerings with iGPUs that run circles around this thing. It is looking like my next machine will probably not have a dedicated GPU, at least at first. The intergrated stuff is pretty decent when the newest games you have are about 4-5 years old or just target lower specs.

Athlon 64 competed with first-gen Core, but Core 2 thru Sandy Bridge is what left AMD in the dust for 10 years.

In the past we had only x86 and they were produced by AMD and Intel, no other serious competitor left. Of course in that market it will swing back and forth between these two. The stronger competitor will not go for the kill due to government intervention.

Now we are in a different situation. There are several big competitors using ARM instead of x86. The software world is actually transitioning away from x86 in masses. Apple does their own CPUs better than Intel. AMD outsourced production already. Everybody is pumping money into TSMC who are are already ahead of Intel and they are moving faster.

Either Intel gets a really really lucky run with their new technology or they need to split off the foundry business. The government may put it on life support until TSMC themselves may run into serious problems.

The better way into the future may be to split up TSMC in multiple redundant and competing companies.

AMD had been gradually working their way up for a long time - the K6-III was an excellent CPU for the time.

The K6 line was a functional CPU but I wouldn't call them "excellent". The K6-III was basically a K6-2 with integrated cache, much the same way the Pentium III was a Pentium II with integrated cache. Despite the fact that AMD tried to replicate Pentium branding on the K6 line, they very much competed with Celerons in terms of market place and performance.

Indeed that's how they were marketed where I worked (Office Max) and were priced and spec'd comparably to the Celeron based offerings from IBM, HP, and Packard Bell.

Another issue with the K6 line was they were always a generation behind at a time when Intel was rapidly rolling out technologies like MMX and SSE. Intel coordinated with software manufacturers and had launch day examples that presented significant performance gaps between the CPU lines.

The K6 also had a shorter execution pipeline than Pentium so it struggled to hit 400mhz when Intel was approaching 500mhz. That's why the Athlon was such a shock because it arrived at 700mhz and stomped everything.

Looking back at the K6 line now, they likely perform far better then they did at the time because software eventually got around to supporting the hardware.

Minor correction. Athlon arrived at 500MHz, 550MHz and 600MHz. But they were still a big shock when they arrived. They were the first chip in a long while to really take on Intel and succeed.

The 650MHz came two months after than, and 700MHz another two months later. 6 months later 1GHz! It is easy to forget just how rapid performance increased in the late 90s.

I'm trying to reconcile that with my memory. Pre-launch the AMD rep approached the electronics salesmen where I worked and offered us a deal to purchase a K7 700mhz for like $200. It came with a Biostar motherboard, a brand I'd never heard of back then.

I remember it was a K7 700 because it was the first from scratch PC that I ever built. Everything before and probably since has been a Ship of Theseus.

Athlons official announcement June 23 1999, official shipping date August 17, 1999. A week after announcement reservations started at Akihabara https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990703/p_cpu.ht... https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990703/price.ht...

"AMD Athlon 500-600MHz (bulk) price display. The product is scheduled to arrive in mid-July, and reservations are being accepted. However, there is no specific arrival schedule for compatible motherboards yet."

"the K7 revised "Athlon" has been given a price and reservations have also started. The estimated price is 44,800 yen for 500MHz, 69,800 yen for 550MHz, and 89,800 yen for 600MHz."

Those were Pentium 3 450-550MHz prices.

A week before official AMD shipping date retail Athlons arrive in Japan https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813.html

"AMD's latest CPU "Athlon" will be sold in Akihabara without waiting for the official release date on the 17th is started. All products on the market are imported products, and 3 models of 500MHz/550MHz/600MHz are on sale. The sale of compatible motherboards has also started, and it is possible to obtain it alone, including Athlon"

https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/p_cpu.ht...

~$380-800 depending on speed.

https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/newitem....

Picture of one of the Akihabara stalls full of CPUs being sold retail before official AMD launch date :) https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/at...

For reference in US 4 days later on August 17 Alienware was merely teasing pictures of Athlon system https://www.shacknews.com/article/1019/wheres-my-athlon According to Anand "OEMs will start advertising Athlon based systems starting August 16, 1999" https://www.anandtech.com/show/355/24

K6-III was never excellent. It was a short lived overpriced option for desperate socket7 users unwilling to do the sensible thing and upgrade whole platform (brand new Celeron 300A + 440BX motherboard cheaper than just the K6-3 cpu alone). Paper launch in February 1999 with first real chips shipping in March. First K6-3 to show up in Japan was K6-III/400 at hilarious 35,500 yen = $295! https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990313/p_cpu.ht... This is the price of full Pentium II 400MHz or over four almost year old by this point and still faster Celerons 300A.

By January 2000 prices corrected to saner bus still delusional levels https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000108/p_cpu....

K6-III/450 14,550 $140

K6-III/400 8,980 $85

Celeron 300A $57

First time Duron shows up in Akihabara is June 17 2000 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu....

Celeron 533A 10,570 $100

Duron 600MHz 9,990 $95

K6-III/450 24,800 $236 haha whats up with that price? Either AMD stopped shipping already and its leftovers or its a sucker tax for ss7 owners wanting to max out.

K6-III/400 14,800 $140

K6-2/550 7,949 $76

K6-2/533 5,970 $57

K6-2/500 5,350 $50

Week later https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000624/p_cpu....

Celeron 533A 9,980 $95

Duron 600MHz 9,480 $90

K6-III/450 24,800 $230 AHAHAHAHAHA

K6-III/400 15,800 $150

K6-2/550 7,940 $76

K6-2/533 6,700 $63

K6-2/500 5,300 $50

Looks like by the time Durons showed up nobody was bothering to stock K6-3, only 3 vendors in Akihabara had them. Those crazy prices werent limited to Japan, Poland September 1999:

Pentium III 450MHz 1260 $308

Pentium II 400MHz 943 $231

Celeron 366MHz 348 $85 (300A missing from the list, but was still available and selling cheaper)

K6-III/450 1108 $271 HAHA

K6-III/400 877 $215

K6-2/400 397 $97 haha

K6-2/350 230 $56

For a brief moment in 1999 AMD pretended K6-3 was equal to Pentium 2/3 and tried to price it accordingly but market corrected them swiftly. There was a 1/3 performance gap between K6-3 and overclocked Celeron.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080418185205/http://arstechnic...

https://web.archive.org/web/20070918073530/http://arstechnic...

https://web.archive.org/web/20070918135927/http://arstechnic...

They made the amd64 architecture. Let’s not forget that.

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