AMD definitely did x86-64 better than the ill fated Itanic's reliance on fictional compiler magic that largely would never materialize, but I don't know how muc

AMD definitely did x86-64 better than the ill fated Itanic's reliance on fictional compiler magic that largely would never materialize, but I don't know how much of an edge of provided. It was still too early for 64bit to really provide any benefit and operating system support was weak. At least people I remember saw it for what it was- marketing. It happens that in the long term it ended up being the way to go, but at the time the Athlon64's were coming around there wasn't much point (for consumers at least). By the time 64bit came of age Intel had already buried AMD by a combination of foul play and legitimate innovation. IMO AMD could compete because the manufacturing and design processes were still accessible enough that they could still produce chips with competitive performance without the massive amount of capital Intel invests in new designs today due simply to diminishing returns in processor performance. Nowadays the difficulty of new processes means that very very few foundries are capable of using the latest fabrication processes and Intel has a stranglehold on them. It's harder for AMD to play catch-up, because there is less slack for them to work with using the next-best-thing. Nowadays, all the money AMD could spend on innovating with genuinely new technology is instead spent trying to keep up just keep up, whereas before they had more breathing room. There's a comparison to draw with the engine wars in Formula 1 in the 90s. The sport was in major trouble financially, because teams were spending gigantic sums of money chasing small gains in engine performance on the extreme tail end of diminishing returns. The small teams were imploding trying to keep up because while the performance delta might have only been a few horsepower between the big and small teams, those few extra horsepower had a big impact on how competitive you were. And engine development is astronomically expensive on the far side of the returns curve, so additionally even the big teams were outspending themselves trying to keep up with each other before they implemented rules changes to limit engine development.