It was actually earlier than that. Regular Athlon vs. Pentium III. The K7 architecture is where they finally came out on top, which was released in 1999. I'm

It was actually earlier than that. Regular Athlon vs. Pentium III. The K7 architecture is where they finally came out on top, which was released in 1999. I'm not sure how deep into the Athlon line they kept their lead, but the Pentium 4 was a miserable line which first debuted in 2000. I don't know any friends that were serious about gaming or performance computing at the time that would have chosen a P4 over an Athlon or Athlon 64 which came out in 2003. I think maybe part of AMDs downfall was their investment in the x86 64-bit micro-architecture extensions they added in the Athlon 64 (which Intel then adopted in their chips). During that time, Intel had refocused on heat and power usage which has paid dividends in the out years. That said, I think the 64-bit extensions came at a necessary time and allowed us to get past the 4GB barrier without having to resort to weird memory paging schemes like PAE.