Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

Intel is resilient, if anything.

They have had a ton of flops and misdirections. The 186. iAPX. i740. Xscale. Itanium. The FDIV bug. Pentium 4.

AMD has had Intel up against the ropes more times than they can count. Faster and cheaper 386 and 486 clones threatened them. The K6 came around and beat the Pentium II. AMD leap-frogged them with their 64-bit chips. Intel has always came back and stomped them right back into oblivion. They'd probably be close to turning the lights off if it weren't for Ryzen.

View on HN

> Intel has always came back and stomped them right back into oblivion

Intel illegally abused their monopoly to prevent AMD from getting as much traction as they should have gotten. They've been convicted and payed billions in fines over that behavior.

Intel should have suffered much more at the hands of the Opteron and Athlon 64 chips; if they hadn't been abusing their market position things would have worked out better for AMD and their stumble with Bulldozer wouldn't have hurt as much as it did.

For the curious, Intel would sell CPUs at retail to OEMs, then provide a rebate/kickback to discount those CPUs. Shipping AMD processors would reduce those rebates. Shipping too many AMD processors would eliminate the rebates outright. This made selling AMD-based systems non-tenable for many OEMs.

Intel hasn't paid a cent of those fines, in fact they lately successfully appealed for the first time.

https://www.ft.com/content/f460ef98-930f-11e7-bdfa-eda243196...

Interesting, thanks for pointing that out. However, your link is paywalled. Do you have another source?

damn FT, it wasnt paywalled when I went there from google :/

https://www.google.com/search?q=Intel%20wins%20review%20of%2...

This is exactly what I was thinking, too. I remember well the days that AMD was beating Intel to market in 800MHz clock speeds for a fraction of the cost of an Intel chip and lots of people were assuming AMD was going to overtake Intel. But for some reason the chips were either overhyped or just weren't able to gain mindshare of the average PC consumer on a large scale and AMD's stock price has seemingly been frozen in time.

I'm not sure whether or not the latest jabs at Intel and the prophecies of their inevitable decline are accurate this time or seeded in people's hate of older giant tech companies, but this is not the first time I've read of Intel's demise. Just going by earnings its at best premature to cede the future to AMD. I will say that BK's abrupt departure did raise some concerns in my mind.

Was the 186 really a flop? Maybe it wasn't successful as the CPU of a PC but it was used in embedded systems and peripheral cards. That seems to be the role it was designed for with the 286 intended as the solution for PCs. It was manufactured for 24 years so clearly somebody found it useful.

IBM was considered resilient, now they are on the way to becoming Unisys.

Sorry to nitpick but Pentium 4 was a temporary flop until the HT version came along for which AMD had no answer. And I don't think the K6 beat Pentium II. Having bought a $2000 K6-2 computer in 1998 with maxed out RAM and graphics, I instantly regretted that decision as all my friend's mediocre Pentium II's ran applications and games better than my K6-2.

Not even a nitpick, the claim that P4 HT had "no answer" from AMD is just false.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1517

Intel never definitively reclaimed x86 until Conroe/Core 2.

The original HT implementation was so incredibly bad that people would turn it off to improve performance on multithreaded loads.

So true! It only worked on example code, it was very difficult to get an improvement in a real world app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com