Amd vs. Intel


AMD vs. Pentium



A couple of years ago when Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced it's K5 microprocessor, the phrase 'too little, too late? was plastered across their name countless times. At that time, if anyone were to name an underdog to the Intel dominated microprocessor market, Cyrix with their dirt-cheap 5x86 processor would have been the favorite.

Intel had been the only processor that could handle day-to-day functions at reasonable speeds. Such simple tasks as word processing and calculations, then later gaming and educational work, the processors were unable to perform. The Pentium processor was introduced in 1994; no company could compete with Intel at this point. It took until 1997, for AMD to even be noticed, and then later in 1997 the AMD k6 series was introduced.

When AMD's k6 was introduced to compete with the Pentium!! Processor, it fell short in all areas, except one-price. It was the cheapest micro-processing chip (chip) on the market. The downside to this chip is that it did not follow the same format as Intel chips. It needed a different motherboard, a socket-7 motherboard. This hurt AMD's chances at the beginning, but in early 1998 they unveiled their mighty K6-2 processor. The K6-2 Processor was ?bigger, better, and cheaper.? The processor ran on a 100mhz bus, while Intel's chips still ran on a 66mhz bus, this made AMD's chip faster. It also was nearly 16% cheaper than any Intel based Pentium!! computer.

The gaming community accepted the k6-2 with cautious, but open, arms. With their new SIMD-Enhanced (Single Instruction Multiple Data) 3Dnow! the graphics this processor were able to produce were amazing, for the time, due to the use of floating point intensive programs. With the new processor and their own design they were not only keeping up with the giant Intel, but they were innovating.

Intel answered back with its ?SSE?, which was to be included in its Pentium!!! processors. This new enhancement was to push graphics acceleration twice as fast as AMD's 3Dnow! could. When Intel prematurely released the Pentium!!! processor it fell short. Many people got chances to take the new P3 for a run, and they were barely faster than the similarly clocked AMD K6-2's. Not only that, but they sold for over four times the price. When news of this reached the dealers and public, K6-2s sales had sky rocketed to 43.9 percent of the ...