This is a war that has been raging for a long, long time. These two companies are the two main contenders in the CPU market, and boy, does the dust fly!
Before I begin, let me introduce the two contenders:
This guy has been the reigning champion for a long, long time (196 – to be precise). These guys made the first commercial microprocessor in 1971. They made steady progress through the decades and are still numero uno when it comes to processors, at least when you look at it in terms of performance. They have been constantly ahead of all competitors when it comes to introducing new manufacturing processes (65nm, 45nm, anyone?)
When they rolled out their first processor, it was for manufacturing for IBM under contract from Intel. After some time, Intel withdrew the contract, they went into major litigation that reached the Supreme Court of California! Then they started manufacturing their Intel ‘clones’ because they followed te same architecture back then. But later it evolved and changed. Now AMD is just AMD, just like Intel, another player in the market.
The Fight
Ever since Intel broke off the contract with AMD, they’ve been at each other’s throats. AMD has always been the underdog in this fight, simple because AMD is smaller in every aspect than Intel (including the footprint on you electricity bills!).
Intel’s Strenghts: These guys have always spearheaded the effort for fast CPUs. This, however, does NOT mean that AMD does not have stuff to match it. It simply means Intel’s top-end processors don’t have equivalent AMDs. These guys have also been the first guys to make dual-core, quad-core, and soon, maybe even octa-core.
AMD’s Strengths: The founder of AMD maybe was a miser, and didn’t like large electricity bills, so he decided to make energy-efficient chips, which is EXACTLY what AMD is known for. Their Intel equivalents guzzle much more power. This is becuase although AMD chips run at lower clock speeds, the FSB (Front Side Bus – link between CPU and memory, rest of system) is way faster ans is called HyperTransport. Also, AMD chips are much cheaper than Intel ones, so personal PC assemblers prefer AMD.
So, now the code’s been written and compiled. Let’s execute it.
Intel will still rule supreme for the uneducated. It’s too well known for a layman to think of an alternative (well…recently, that may have changed, ask a layman 
). Intel’s Quad Core Extreme is drool maal (maal – ‘stuff’ in Hindi). However, these things guzzle a lit of power, which does not appeal to people manufacturing servers, coz’ these things remain on for a lot of time, and datacenters would end up with huge bills.
AMD makes cheap processors, which many people like. For all but the top Intel offerings, AMD has a cheaper and more energy efficient version. So it makes sense to buy AMD. The reason that they lag behind Intel is that their coffers are not as large as Intel’s. So they can’t setup large enough plants. So, recently, AMD had to postpone the rolling out of its quad-core Barcelona chips because they could not keep up with the demand for the current chips, which basically points at the problem of nto enough infrastructure. Tough luck!
Basically, Intel will rule for some time, but AMD will surely catch up, sooner or later.
Tags: AMD, Intel
Sanuj on 
The Nut on 
