Quote Originally Posted by R101 View Post
Athlon vs P3 there wasn't a clear cut winner, Athlon XP vs Willamete was a bloodbath.
Northwood changed that picture a bit and with intruduction of HT intel left Athlon XP standing.
A64 was singlethread monster of the day, but in some cases P4 had its' way.
X2s were clear winners, but they showed one big thing for me - that AMD would price their CPUs as steep as they can, if they can get away with it. Even the cheapest X2 3800 was too pricey.

Just a piece of history from my standpoint.

And as for Intel cpu exclusive optimizing with Intel compiler - that's a completely true story. Intel defended with 'if its our CPU we know it can take the optimizations, if it isn't, then we do not know, and do not apply them'..

Agree with most of your history except this part. At the time, IntEl's anti-competitive, illegal and market abusive tactics were in full affect (now they're just implimented in different ways). IntEl were selling their selling their hotter, slower and more power hungry chips for a significant amount more, and selling them well. The market balance would have stayed exactly the same whether AMD sold their top of the line for $300 and IntEl sold theirs for the same $1200. IntEl was controlling pricing, it wasn't open market competition.



As far as the 'smoothness' that many refer to, of course it is noticeable and quantifiable. People would notice it as 'lag' or 'latency' when opening applications, switching windows, switching tasks, etc.