theyarecomingforyou wrote on Nov 14, 2012, 02:17:

eRe4s3r wrote on Nov 13, 2012, 23:34:
Blame the Athlon XP - because that was when AMD started to drop the ball. This was the short time where they had a serious lead, and could have afforded to push the tech forward with a serious jump into dual and quad core cpu's that could have bested the core stuff from Intel by a margin and in price, doubling efficiency, investing in new architecture and cpu design that makes them even more effective etc.... They did nothing of the sort. And then Core tech and I7 came, and AMD got totally pwned.

That's utter nonsense. The Athlon XP did fine and it was followed up by the Athlon 64, which gave AMD the performance advantage and had gamers flocking to it. It was the first time AMD was taken seriously in the industry, forcing Intel to play catch up with regards to 64bit. The issue was that its successor - the Athlon 64 X2 - required a new chipset, meaning all the advantage it had built up was lost. That wouldn't have been an issue had Intel not released the Core 2, which simply smoked the competition.

I'd been an AMD user since the K5 back in the mid-90s but they lost the performance edge when Intel launched the Core 2 and they weren't any cheaper either, which had been one of their previous strengths. Since then I've been an Intel user. It would be great to go back to AMD processors but they just don't cut it for top-tier gaming any more.