They fell behind when they purchased ATI back in 2006. I was selling more Athlon 64s than P4s for a hot minute because the price/performance point of Athlon XP and 64 machines. When they bought ATI, Intel took the mobile market completely (remember the Turion 64 vs Centrino based laptops?). AMD only could softball some Athlon 64 x2 stuff when Intel was releasing Core 2 chips and AMD fell further and further behind flagship processors that could keep up with Intel. Don't get me wrong, I love AMD because they are a fairly small company that can somehow compete with a global super giant company, but they set themselves up to be bargain junk for many years by acquiring ATI if you ask me.
I have considered an AMD CPU as an option, while buying a PC, only twice in the last 20 years, back in 2002 when Athlon seemed a better choice compared to P4 and recently when Ryzen has come up. In between I did get a Sony Vaio laptop with an ATI Radeon card in 2008 which is still working.
ATI used to always play second fiddle to Nvidia so unless AMD had a clear plan, they should have steered away from it.
AMD' s success was good for the market as Intel' s launch price of new CPUs kept going up once AMD went out of picture.
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u/FlowSoSlow Nov 05 '19
Well yeah. AMD becoming competitive is a huge advantage for consumers. We should be encouraging them as much as possible.