Stardate 20010808.1620 (On Screen): Among the uninitiated, Intel's P4 sounds as if it should be a more powerful computer than the AMD Athlon because it runs at a higher clock rate. However, there are a number of technical reasons why it isn't really, although that varies by application. But generally speaking, a 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird is approximately as powerful (in practical terms of getting things done) as a 1.8 GHz P4. Not to put too fine a point on it, Intel has pretty badly botched the P4 design and it's probably going to take it a couple of upgrade cycles to fix the glaring problems with it; and in the mean time its actual performance is not commensurate with its purported clock rate. Intel made at least four major errors in the design.
AMD is trying to increase its marketshare, which necessarily will happen at the expense of Intel. So far AMD has done a superb job of it, carving a full ten points off Intel's share in the last couple of years. Last time they announced figures they had 21%; they're hoping for 30% by the end of calendar 2001 and though they admit that it's an aggressive goal (especially during an industry slump) they may pull it off. It's certain that their marketshare will continue to rise. (Intel has announced plans to take marketshare back, but they have almost no chance of that.) AMD comes into this struggle with considerable assets. AMD's chips are cheaper to manufacture, so they can win any price war. The quality of their designs is well known among fans of the bleeding edge, the so-called "early adopters", the computer hobbyists and hard core gamers and computer geeks. These people are generally recognized as having influence all out of proportion to their numbers, because when more mainstream users want a computer they'll often seek out their nearest hobbyist and ask for an opinion, and these days overwhelmingly said hobbyist will say "Go with AMD". AMD's biggest problems so far have been weaknesses in certain sectors, particularly in laptops and in workstations, but with introduction of new products this year (chipsets and processors) they have made that good and now are capable of competing in all segments, instead of only competing in the desktop segment as they did last year.
But their biggest asset in convincing the public that their ostensibly-slower chips really are as powerful is that this is actually true and has been proved many times by independent tests (and those with Thunderbird, not even the new and faster-per-clock-cycle Palomino, alias the Athlon 4). This is in stark contrast to a certain other company who is grousing about the "megahertz myth". Note to Steve: test with something other than carefully selected Photoshop filters and test against the Athlon, if you've got the cojones. (discuss)
