Basically,
Intel's nightmare.
AMD relased the Athlon fall of 99, and have enjoyed a slowly rising stock price ever since. The processor outperforms Pentium IIIs in style, and costs quite a bit less (roughly $100 for a 850 mhz part). The Athlon series is continuing on with the
Duron an
Thunderbird series. From a technical standpoint, the processor has a number of improvements for the
x86 field:
- Alpha 200 Mhz EV6 Bus
- nine execution pipelines: three for address calculations, three for integer calculations, and three for executing floating point instructions.
- .18 micron fab process
- 128 kb L1 Cache
- 256 kb L2 Cache
More recently, AMD has added PC133 support and will shortly have DDR ram support (Upping the Bus speed to 266 mhz) -- with Intel likely to follow suite if their
Rambus RIMMS keep giving them the feeling they are feeding a black hole of a technology.
Basically, AMD is the current top dog. Intel is holding market share due to its strong brand recognition and OEM support, but AMD clearly has the better product. The Duron has been introduced to compete with the Celeron, and is quite a bit better, once again, at a lower price. Athlons are not however available for portables, and are quite demanding for other computer components. In the beginning, it seemed as if though the Athlon would never make it to the hands of Joe Consumer because a multitude of motherboard & power supply problems. Now the kinks have been worked out, Intel's rushing out Overclocked junk in the name of competition, but IA-64 tech may leave AMD just another stepping stone of the road for speed.