I was an AMD fan in the 90s, they were more enthusiast and gamer friendly, overclocking was easier, and they were generally just less enthusiast-hostile than Intel.
In the 2000's AMD all but disappeared, and with the Core2 and eventually i3/i5/i7 series, Intel was the only option, so people like me bought Intel, we had no choice.
But the second AMD came back with (Ry)Zen, I ditched Intel in a heartbeat; after years of their complacence, shitty upgrades, constantly changing sockets and ridiculous prices, there was finally a "better" option again.
This is great for everyone because it's forcing Intel to wake up, more competition and better prices, and hopefully better products from Intel.
In the early 2000's, AMD's Athlon trounced anything Intel had to offer and would for years.
This followed soon after with the Opteron, where AMD single-handedly switched "x86" over to 64-bit essentially overnight while Intel failed to shove Itanium and a number of other ill-fated ventures down the market's throat.
If anything, the 2000's were AMD's golden years, admittedly mostly made possible by Intel's own incompetence at the time.
I haven't bought an Intel CPU in over 15 years but I also don't think that AMD will do that much better if they are left without sufficient competition. We already saw them dropping non-pro Threadrippers, leaving an entire segment with only sidegrades. Hopefully Intel will be able to compete going forward.
We are talking Amx86 to K6-3, always the worse budged/upgrade option. Nobody chose AMD for performance, overclocking or enthusiast friendliness. Price advantage evaporated in 1998 with the release of Intel Celeron https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/p_cpu.ht... ~120 yen to $1
First K6-3 to show up in Japan was K6-III/400 at hilarious 35,500 yen aka $295!! in March 1999. Athlon shipped very late in 1999 with barely 4 months left. K6-3+ on the other hand was April 2000 at $140-180, almost twice the price of faster Celerons and Durons.
>In the 2000's AMD all but disappeared
Did you mean to say AMD started leading x86 CPU race by taking performance crown and being first to 1GHz? https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-official-amd-hits-1000mhz-... Intel wasnt happy and in turn shipped 1.13-GHz Pentium III just to recall them all due to instability https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-recalls-1-13ghz-pentium-... Faster processors, first dual core, first 64bit. First half of 2000 was when AMD started shining, only to be cut down by Intel bribing scandal - MCP (Meet Comp Program) in exchange for strict no AMD commitments. DELL, HP, pretty much all mayors took Intel $, $6 billion in kick-backs.
I was an AMD fan in the 90s, they were more enthusiast and gamer friendly, overclocking was easier, and they were generally just less enthusiast-hostile than Intel.
In the 2000's AMD all but disappeared, and with the Core2 and eventually i3/i5/i7 series, Intel was the only option, so people like me bought Intel, we had no choice.
But the second AMD came back with (Ry)Zen, I ditched Intel in a heartbeat; after years of their complacence, shitty upgrades, constantly changing sockets and ridiculous prices, there was finally a "better" option again.
This is great for everyone because it's forcing Intel to wake up, more competition and better prices, and hopefully better products from Intel.