AMD and Their Struggles

If you have been in the tech news loop for the past year or two, you probably haven’t heard much good news from the AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) headquarters. In this article, we will take a look back at what has happened and see where things might be headed in the near future. Will AMD end up going bankrupt or could they topple Intel? Read on to see where AMD is going.

Chances are that you have heard of AMD and probably know they make CPUs. Things have been going down a bumpy road for the company for some time. The Phenom quad cores are buggy and only the low end ones are out. ATI doesn’t have a killer card on the market yet and only recently put out a decent card in the HD 3800 series.

History

Most people's first memories of AMD chips are probably the AMD Athlon XP CPUs. Until then, most people probably only knew of Intel. The Athlon XP changed that. It offered the same or better performance in many applications and also cost less than comparable Intel chips.

AMD carried their success into their next generation of CPUs, the Athlon 64. Once again they came out on top of Intel in price and performance. They also had support for 64-bit computing, which was a step ahead of Intel, and looked set to change the computer world. Sadly, 64-bit is still at the market entry stage. A vast majority of computers being sold are running 32-bit software.

AMD’s last smashing of Intel came with the Athlon X2 dual core CPU. They didn’t beat Intel to the market with their dual core, but they managed to make it more efficient and consume less power. AMD didn’t rush to the market, but took their time. Intel slapped two cores into a single CPU, but in the long run it hurt them. AMD's slower approach meant they got it right the first time.

After this AMD started running into some snags. Intel released their Core Duo processors that overtook AMD’s best CPU clock for clock. They also were able to run at a higher frequency. From this point on, many things have continued to swing against AMD.

read more here