And who's to blame them. They wanted to play good capitalists (talking about AMD here), sitting on their good product (Athlon 64) for far too long with virtually 0 innovation, enjoying rise in sales, profit and share prices.
K7 architecture is what, 5+ years old now?
I've been using AMD since the 166mhz days, then duron 700@900, Tbird 1400, A64 3000+ etc. And the performance was good, albeit accompanying chipsets weren't so stable and one had to make careful selection of what he buys.
But AMD imo, abused the underdog card for far too long. A64 ended up being $400+, and AMD quickly became the new Intel, a period that lasted for almost 18 months!
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I'm glad Intel did the price reduction strategy, first with PentiumD and then with the awesome performing C2D. I now have 4 systems all with Intel processors which run without any problems with all sorts of ram (ddr, ddr2 value and more enthusiast alike).
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Same thing with ATI. They had a great run with 9700pro!
But what happened afterwards? 9800pro > X800 > X1800 (lol) > X1900
Did we see any innovation and breakthrough? No, same mistake as AMD!
One is led to conclude that the A64 and 9700 gems were just extremely lucky shots by these 2 companies.
I'm saddened to think that there will be nothing in the next 3-4 years to challenge Intel/Nvidia.
The 8800 series are an amazing breakthrough, same goes for C2D. Sadly, without competition NVidia's prices will now remain stagnant and you can't expect anything more interesting than a 8800gtx in the next 2 years.
K7 architecture is what, 5+ years old now?
I've been using AMD since the 166mhz days, then duron 700@900, Tbird 1400, A64 3000+ etc. And the performance was good, albeit accompanying chipsets weren't so stable and one had to make careful selection of what he buys.
But AMD imo, abused the underdog card for far too long. A64 ended up being $400+, and AMD quickly became the new Intel, a period that lasted for almost 18 months!
-
I'm glad Intel did the price reduction strategy, first with PentiumD and then with the awesome performing C2D. I now have 4 systems all with Intel processors which run without any problems with all sorts of ram (ddr, ddr2 value and more enthusiast alike).
------
Same thing with ATI. They had a great run with 9700pro!
But what happened afterwards? 9800pro > X800 > X1800 (lol) > X1900
Did we see any innovation and breakthrough? No, same mistake as AMD!
One is led to conclude that the A64 and 9700 gems were just extremely lucky shots by these 2 companies.
I'm saddened to think that there will be nothing in the next 3-4 years to challenge Intel/Nvidia.
The 8800 series are an amazing breakthrough, same goes for C2D. Sadly, without competition NVidia's prices will now remain stagnant and you can't expect anything more interesting than a 8800gtx in the next 2 years.