I was always intrigued by AMD processors in the 90s, although pretty much stuck with Intel. I built an Athlon 64 PC in 2004 - it was the first 64-bit consumer

I was always intrigued by AMD processors in the 90s, although pretty much stuck with Intel. I built an Athlon 64 PC in 2004 - it was the first 64-bit consumer processor. Intel was going down the Itanium path, and AMD just added 64-bit extensions to X86, which ended up being the winning strategy. I remember writing an article about it for my job at the time. That served me well until I upgraded to a Phenom II X6 in 2010. I was super excited by the prospect of having 6 cores, even though I had no real use for that many. That PC lasted me for over 10 years, although I did upgrade the RAM, added an SSD, and upgraded the GPU twice. Was still a competent PC at the end for both gaming and software development, and managed to part it out for a decent amount of money. Late last year I finally succumbed the the Ryzen itch and upgraded to a Ryzen 5600x. It's a fantastic platform, and hopefully that PC will last me another 10 years with only minor upgrades.