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It wasn't the multiple cores that allowed AMD to steal market share from Intel. It was the original Athlon chips around the turn of the century. They were the
by TimGebhardt 15y ago
It wasn't the multiple cores that allowed AMD to steal market share from Intel. It was the original Athlon chips around the turn of the century. They were the first chips that ran at a lower clock speed but produced far superior benchmark numbers in just about any benchmark. Combine that with the much higher prices that Intel charged for inferior products and AMD had a great run until Intel ditched the Pentium 4 line.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon
Dual core chips came along much later.
- wtallis 15y agoThe original Athlon was all about clock speed and the race past 1Ghz. The P4 quickly surpassed it, though, and left the Athlon competing on the basis of cost (P4s required RDRAM, which was much more expensive.) In the fall of 2001, the P4 hit 2Ghz and added DDR SDRAM support before the Athlon XP showed up at 1.5Ghz, and the Athlon XP was never really able to clearly beat Intel's fastest. It wasn't until the Athlon 64 that AMD was able to win across the board with significantly lower clock speeds.