It was a while ago, but I remember one of my professors said that AMD hired all the design people from DEC when Compaq brought them. He said AMD's Opteron proce

It was a while ago, but I remember one of my professors said that AMD hired all the design people from DEC when Compaq brought them. He said AMD's Opteron processor was highly influenced by DEC's Alpha processor. That little advantage led to AMD's golden years when their processors we're a better value then Intel's. It was even enough to overcome Intel's obvious fab advantage. Remember the Pentium 4 Extreme editions? It was a desperate attempt to keep AMD at bay by stuffing it with cache.