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It's not so much that AMD "stuck" it to Intel as Intel shot itself in the foot. The only reason AMD was successful was that Intel made a gigantic mistake in Net

It's not so much that AMD "stuck" it to Intel as Intel shot itself in the foot. The only reason AMD was successful was that Intel made a gigantic mistake in NetBurst ("10 GHz or bust!") When Intel finally rectified that mistake and released Conroe it was game over for AMD. AMD simply can't compete with Intel whether in architecture or fabrication. What AMD could've done was to concede the PC market to Intel and focus on the emerging mobile device market - the classic disruptive attack. ARM went that route and now has a market cap that's 10X bigger than AMD. Qualcomm adopted a similar strategy with Snapdragon and now has a market cap equals to that of Intel's. Lesson: never fight a dominant incumbent in its own game. You will get killed. Play a different game. Better yet, invent a new game where you know the rules best.

InclinedPlane 13y ago
That's only part of it. Intel had an epic once in a generation stumble with a combination of very bad, very high impact choices all at once. The NetBurst (Pentium-4) architecture was both hugely expensive to develop and manufacture and also extremely underwhelming. But that's only part of it. They also staked out the next generation advancement of the instruction set to a revolutionary and untested architecture (a VLIW variant) with certain compromises, all of which turned out to be a huge and costly mistake. It took almost a decade for the architecture to fully mature and even today it's still not very suitable for everyday computing. They hitched their system wagon to RAMBUS memory, which priced their systems out of the consumer-grade sweet-spot and their long-term contract with RAMBUS screwed them when DDR came around as an equally fast or faster alternative at a much lower cost. And they struggled with making decent chipsets for several years. One of the last pre-RAMBUS/pre-NetBurst chipset was the legendary 440BX which was hugely reliable, flexible, and high performance. After that intel chipsets had a long period of utter mediocrity. In that window AMD made several strong moves. They produced high performance, low-cost chips using a very solid architecture. They developed an excellent next-generation 64-bit instruction set (x86-64) which had a great deal of heritage with the IA32 (x86) architecture and included mostly just very sensible changes and extensions. And they were able to create hardware which both ran existing 32-bit code extremely well and also ran new 64-bit code at competitive levels of performance. They also managed to put together a "whole system" in terms of cpu, chipset, and RAM which was at a very excellent intersection of affordability and performance. Unfortunately for AMD, Intel very much learned from their mistakes, adopted DDR ram, vastly improved their chipsets, cut their losses on mistakes like IA64 and the early generation of EM64T systems, adopted the AMD64 / x86-64 architecture, and developed some excellent CPU technology in the form of the Core, Core 2, and Core i{3,5,7} architectures. Meanwhile, AMD ran into a few stumbling blocks and has had a tough time getting over them, let alone getting up to being able to compete head to head with intel again.
- bane 13y ago
  IIRC, there were several points during that period where AMD tried to become the default CPU for large computer builders at the time (e.g. Gateway, Dell, etc.) due to far better price/performance ratios, yet frustratingly they stuck it out with Intel. I'm guessing Intel offered some sweet sweet long term deals to keep AMD out of the picture. The landscape could have looked very differently today had those deals gone through. I think AMD actually ended up with the superior technology all the way back with the Athlon line (when Intel was still PIII) with a better memory architecture and a few other good odds and ends. They tried to get back in the game with some bold moves, like buying ATI, but it just hasn't panned out for them.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    Three things that have always been in Intel's favor have been their truly massive and always cutting edge fab capability (which no other cpu manufacturer has been able to even come close to), their extremely well-funded R&D teams, and their industry relationships (largely due to those other two factors). Intel is able to field several different processor lines and architectures simultaneously, and also develop multiple new architectures at the same time. That's not something that most other companies can do. They've also been reasonably good at recovering from mistakes quickly (something that Microsoft has also been fairly good at). That said, it'll be interesting to see how things pan out with the changes to the computing landscape that are in the works now.
    - Osiris 13y ago
      things that have always been in Intel's favor have been their truly massive and always cutting edge fab capability (which no other cpu manufacturer has been able to even come close to) On a flight a while back I struck up a conversation with a PhD that specialized in chip design. He suggested that if AMD was able to manufacture their chip designs in Intel's fabs, that they would be out Intel chips in terms of performance and power. The idea was that because AMD uses fabs that are, basically, two generations behind Intel, that their designs have to be more innovative to be able to work within the constraints of the older process. I'm no electrical engineer, so I took him at his word, but it certain points out that Intel's fabs are a distinct advantage.
ScottBurson 13y ago
NetBurst wasn't Intel's only big mistake. The other one was being unwilling to disrupt their own 64-bit strategy, which rested on Itanium, with a "low-end" 64-bit design. I am grateful that AMD forced Intel to rectify both these errors. Too bad AMD wasn't able to ride that wave to long-term success.
kinkora 13y ago
>>Lesson: never fight a dominant incumbent in its own game. You will get killed. Play a different game. Better yet, invent a new game where you know the rules best. What about Google[1], Apple[2], Facebook[3], etc? Not disagreeing with you but I'm genuinely curious on what you think about these companies. I probably can think of many more examples but these are the ones that sprang to mind when thinking of companies that "fought the dominant incumbant in its own game".
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- continuations 13y ago
  1) Google - when Google came into existence in late 90's there were no dominant search engines. The orthodoxy at that time was that there was no money in search. Accordingly nobody wanted to be a search engine and everyone tried to be a portal. The dominant player back then - Yahoo - emphasized its use of human editors and partnered with AltaVista and Inktomi for search. So Google never really defeated a dominant search engine - it merely took advantage of a giant vacuum in the market. 2)Apple - Apple never defeated Microsoft in the PC game. Instead it focused on emerging markets: ipod, iphone, ipad. Eventually these new products (smartphones & tablets) became powerful enough to erode the PC market. Even now Microsoft is still dominant in the PC market. It's just that PC is no longer where the action is at. 3)Facebook - there were no dominant players in social networking when facebook was founded. Myspace was the biggest player, but "big" was a relative term back then. Even at the height of its popularity the vast majority of the population was not Myspace users. Sure if you were 16 year old in 2004 then you were probably on Myspace. but outside of that demo Myspace was far from dominant. Most people were not on any social networks. In short it was a wide open market. I'm sure there are examples where a challenger took on a dominant incumbent head on and won. But those are the edge cases. You pretty much need all the stars to align perfectly to have a chance. It's not a strategy I'd bet on.
  - k__ 13y ago
    1) Google > Apple in mobile 2) Apple > Nokia in mobile 3) Facebook > Google in ads
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
marshray 13y ago
> The only reason AMD was successful was that Intel made a gigantic mistake I don't think that's entirely fair. AMD has put out some darn good chips that should be considered successful on their own merits.
hasker 13y ago
Excuse my pedanticism, but QCOM's market cap has more to do with their intellectual property connected to CDMA, 3G, and LTE standards than anything else.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

That's only part of it. Intel had an epic once in a generation stumble with a combination of very bad, very high impact choices all at once. The NetBurst (Pentium-4) architecture was both hugely expensive to develop and manufacture and also extremely underwhelming. But that's only part of it. They also staked out the next generation advancement of the instruction set to a revolutionary and untested architecture (a VLIW variant) with certain compromises, all of which turned out to be a huge and costly mistake. It took almost a decade for the architecture to fully mature and even today it's still not very suitable for everyday computing. They hitched their system wagon to RAMBUS memory, which priced their systems out of the consumer-grade sweet-spot and their long-term contract with RAMBUS screwed them when DDR came around as an equally fast or faster alternative at a much lower cost. And they struggled with making decent chipsets for several years. One of the last pre-RAMBUS/pre-NetBurst chipset was the legendary 440BX which was hugely reliable, flexible, and high performance. After that intel chipsets had a long period of utter mediocrity. In that window AMD made several strong moves. They produced high performance, low-cost chips using a very solid architecture. They developed an excellent next-generation 64-bit instruction set (x86-64) which had a great deal of heritage with the IA32 (x86) architecture and included mostly just very sensible changes and extensions. And they were able to create hardware which both ran existing 32-bit code extremely well and also ran new 64-bit code at competitive levels of performance. They also managed to put together a "whole system" in terms of cpu, chipset, and RAM which was at a very excellent intersection of affordability and performance. Unfortunately for AMD, Intel very much learned from their mistakes, adopted DDR ram, vastly improved their chipsets, cut their losses on mistakes like IA64 and the early generation of EM64T systems, adopted the AMD64 / x86-64 architecture, and developed some excellent CPU technology in the form of the Core, Core 2, and Core i{3,5,7} architectures. Meanwhile, AMD ran into a few stumbling blocks and has had a tough time getting over them, let alone getting up to being able to compete head to head with intel again.

bane 13y ago
IIRC, there were several points during that period where AMD tried to become the default CPU for large computer builders at the time (e.g. Gateway, Dell, etc.) due to far better price/performance ratios, yet frustratingly they stuck it out with Intel. I'm guessing Intel offered some sweet sweet long term deals to keep AMD out of the picture. The landscape could have looked very differently today had those deals gone through. I think AMD actually ended up with the superior technology all the way back with the Athlon line (when Intel was still PIII) with a better memory architecture and a few other good odds and ends. They tried to get back in the game with some bold moves, like buying ATI, but it just hasn't panned out for them.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Three things that have always been in Intel's favor have been their truly massive and always cutting edge fab capability (which no other cpu manufacturer has been able to even come close to), their extremely well-funded R&D teams, and their industry relationships (largely due to those other two factors). Intel is able to field several different processor lines and architectures simultaneously, and also develop multiple new architectures at the same time. That's not something that most other companies can do. They've also been reasonably good at recovering from mistakes quickly (something that Microsoft has also been fairly good at). That said, it'll be interesting to see how things pan out with the changes to the computing landscape that are in the works now.
  - Osiris 13y ago
    things that have always been in Intel's favor have been their truly massive and always cutting edge fab capability (which no other cpu manufacturer has been able to even come close to) On a flight a while back I struck up a conversation with a PhD that specialized in chip design. He suggested that if AMD was able to manufacture their chip designs in Intel's fabs, that they would be out Intel chips in terms of performance and power. The idea was that because AMD uses fabs that are, basically, two generations behind Intel, that their designs have to be more innovative to be able to work within the constraints of the older process. I'm no electrical engineer, so I took him at his word, but it certain points out that Intel's fabs are a distinct advantage.

ScottBurson 13y ago

NetBurst wasn't Intel's only big mistake. The other one was being unwilling to disrupt their own 64-bit strategy, which rested on Itanium, with a "low-end" 64-bit design. I am grateful that AMD forced Intel to rectify both these errors. Too bad AMD wasn't able to ride that wave to long-term success.

kinkora 13y ago

>>Lesson: never fight a dominant incumbent in its own game. You will get killed. Play a different game. Better yet, invent a new game where you know the rules best. What about Google[1], Apple[2], Facebook[3], etc? Not disagreeing with you but I'm genuinely curious on what you think about these companies. I probably can think of many more examples but these are the ones that sprang to mind when thinking of companies that "fought the dominant incumbant in its own game".

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
continuations 13y ago
1) Google - when Google came into existence in late 90's there were no dominant search engines. The orthodoxy at that time was that there was no money in search. Accordingly nobody wanted to be a search engine and everyone tried to be a portal. The dominant player back then - Yahoo - emphasized its use of human editors and partnered with AltaVista and Inktomi for search. So Google never really defeated a dominant search engine - it merely took advantage of a giant vacuum in the market. 2)Apple - Apple never defeated Microsoft in the PC game. Instead it focused on emerging markets: ipod, iphone, ipad. Eventually these new products (smartphones & tablets) became powerful enough to erode the PC market. Even now Microsoft is still dominant in the PC market. It's just that PC is no longer where the action is at. 3)Facebook - there were no dominant players in social networking when facebook was founded. Myspace was the biggest player, but "big" was a relative term back then. Even at the height of its popularity the vast majority of the population was not Myspace users. Sure if you were 16 year old in 2004 then you were probably on Myspace. but outside of that demo Myspace was far from dominant. Most people were not on any social networks. In short it was a wide open market. I'm sure there are examples where a challenger took on a dominant incumbent head on and won. But those are the edge cases. You pretty much need all the stars to align perfectly to have a chance. It's not a strategy I'd bet on.
- k__ 13y ago
  1) Google > Apple in mobile 2) Apple > Nokia in mobile 3) Facebook > Google in ads

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

marshray 13y ago

> The only reason AMD was successful was that Intel made a gigantic mistake I don't think that's entirely fair. AMD has put out some darn good chips that should be considered successful on their own merits.

hasker 13y ago

Excuse my pedanticism, but QCOM's market cap has more to do with their intellectual property connected to CDMA, 3G, and LTE standards than anything else.