Because sometimes, somebody else does it better, faster, and more compatible. And they do it cheaper, on top of it.

Intel didn't make anything faster than a 386/33. AMD put out a 386/40 and got it on boards that sold for $99 - that's $50 less than the Intel and board. My Intel 386's had a tendency to be very full of many chips and hence seemed to run very warm and occasionally crash. My AMD 386's worked for years - some boards were hardly more than enough PCB to hold the slots and RAM. I recently decomm'd a 2.0R box that had idly been running in the corner for half a decade or something like that. CPU? AMD 386/40.

Intel made a bastard selection of 486's. They stopped at the 486/100, and I never did see one that ran stable enough to do a buildworld, at least not when they were still selling them (seen a few since). The ones I had did have an annoying tendency to run _hot_, and you could melt both the fan and the socket if the fan seized up, which they tended to do because they ran so damn hot. AMD made reliable CPU's like the 486DX2/80, a 100, a 133, and a 160... unfortunately the 160 required a faster system clock, so I topped out at 133. But the 133 came in three variants, the ADW, a "standard" unit which needed a fan/heatsink, the ADY, a unit which needed only a heatsink, and the ADZ, a unit which could run without fan or heatsink. Later experience shows the ADW doesn't need the fan, actually. And all of them were cheaper than the Intel counterparts.

Meanwhile, Intel was off doing the Pentium thing, and AMD was kicking Intel's low-end-Pentium @$$ with their high-end 486's. Especially when put on a good board like an ASUS PCI/I-SP3G, the AMD CPU's excelled. The 133 was billed as "P75 equivalentish", but actually ran better than many early P90's I saw, mainly due to crappy chipsets on the Pentium boards.

And don't forget that Intel took a beating with the FPU bug. Sure, I'll take a CPU that can't do floating math correctly, and pay more. Sure. How many P60's, P75's, and P90's did they grind into powder, I wonder?

So then AMD started losing, for a while. And I'm embarrassed to admit that when the SP3G was discontinued, I actually started buying Intel CPU's, since I could not find another good 486 board, and the AMD parts were getting hard to find. But we all hated the early Pentium chipsets, and everything up to the Triton I stank. AMD was still working on the K5, but it just wasn't viable for reasons that escape me (maybe high price, maybe not available soon enough, and I also am notorious for doing swap-and-trades). In the meantime, Intel raced along and finally outted the Pentium Pro, and things were looking sour for AMD. Except the PPro didn't take off, and Intel fell behind - again - as AMD went to town putting out faster and faster K5's and then K6's.

Then Intel gets clobbered with the F00F thing. Definite justification to eradicate all those old damn Intel Pentium CPU's.

So AMD is putting out this wide range of K6's, all the way from K6/200's to K6-III-400's, all of which work with existing boards, and do not exhibit the monopolistic arrogance of Intel's Slot 1/2.

In the meantime, AMD was actually developing new architectures, as was Intel, and it became more of a head-to-head race to see who could develop the better CPU.

So? Here, for me, today, I find myself in a dream world. For many/most of the tasks I would want to assign a machine to, I don't really need any mondo mega super server. A good 486 would probably do... a 486 web server can saturate a T1, after all. So, I've got this plethora of ASUS P/I-P55T2P4's, and a good supply of various AMD CPU's, and so I'm building servers for pretty much any task. Why? Because I can. :-) The stuff is cheaper than Intel, is backwards-compatible with legacy boards, and yet is modern enough to offer some real horsepower.

And AMD is creaming Intel with the K7/Athlon.

AMD has historically been _very_ good to me. The price is less, the performance is as good as (or better), and they have historically done more to maintain compatibility with older technology. Why support a company like Intel, who has repeatedly pulled stunts like Slot 1/2 in order to maintain a "motherboard monopoly"?

The only things I'll grant w.r.t. Intel CPU is that they do SMP, and that I have not had many serious problems with their CPU's since about the P200 days. Intel finally figured out how to make CPU's - a trick AMD mastered years back.

Yeah, so I'm an AMD fan. Sue me. :-)

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