An Underdog Has It's Day..

Posted 7/2/13 

Hi guys

So.. I wanted to talk a little about.. that ol'stick, the one that sits in the corner unnoticed.. but looming ever present..

AMD vs Intel. its not really 'vs' as the old fanboi-ism of yesteryear is dead like 'zombie + shotgun' .. the community has matured somewhat, and at least much less often do we hear the heated words of blind stupidity & brand loyalty without an actual 'reason'.

I use and like.. even a fan of AMD, I also like Nvidia's cards.. I like Intel Core2Quad & 2Duo too..but what I really wanted was to share some background for the newcomers to building, what on earth happened that AMD could even challenge Intel at all. For a long time.. Intel was king with the Pentium range.. no one could touch or even think of touching them..

But in 2005 (era roughly) AMD released the first 64 bit cpus.. then a year or so later dual cores.. they really caught Intel napping.. fast asleep like a little child after a bedtime story, and warm glass of milk. AMD stormed the market after years of having so-so cpus, they gave Intel a shock that ran to the 'cores'. Intel had only the Pentium 4 and quickly whipped up the Pentium D, which was a 'nightmare in drag'.. an awful horror movie where the hero is also the villain.

Well.. as you can guess. Intel was supremely embarrassed, and when they heard AMD had four cores coming...this is when they pulled their act together, like a lonely guy with a hot GF 5 days before an ugly break up. They created the Core2 Series.. it is still to my mind a thing of great beauty.. like walking around a beautiful building made of silicone.. a masterpiece.

AMD *did* bring out their 4 cores.. but it was much like the aforementioned zombie.. and still to this day should be shot on sight. AMD brought out the Phenom 1 (one) series, as contrasts go, it was the opposite Intel's structural wonder. So much so Intel gave AMD a slap in the face with release of the Q8xxx range.. just to show everyone, that even a poorly made Core2Quad could beat the Phenom 1's. and it did.

This hurt AMD is ways that would last until the Vishera came out, only last year. The Phenom one had set AMD back 4/5 years.. a boring three hour movie that you could hear the other movie goers breathing by industry standards. what happened?.. The Phenom II series kept fans alive, but didn't even touch any of Intel's stock offerings.

Intel had built on the Q9xxx .. and refined it to create the Core-i series..refining a masterpiece in efficiency. wow. Mensa start taking notes! and Intel still do to this day. the original Zambezi FX series, was a disappointment, for the fact that Phenom II could outperform it.. it wasn't until the Vishera FX came out only last year.. we had a new king in the AMD camp. The 8350 (i feel) sits nicely between the I5's and the I7's of Intels range, with the 8320 on level pegging with the top i5. all of the i7's beat the 8350 without question, but the 8350 'clips at the heels' of the lower i7's not reaching but.. almost.

it's my old adage 'AMD for price & capacity, Intel for performance & efficiency'. truck vs race car.. and this last truck, Vishera, was full of soldiers ready to shoot zombies.

peace.

Dava