The day of the conspiracy theorist
The facts you listed are interesting and I don't doubt them. Intel is definitely known for their crappy business tactics. I have internal knowledge of several other organizations that have even worse tactics regarding getting sales. I always thought it was quite humorous that an an engineer, I was forced to take an ethics course in the university, but the salesmen who worked their way up through the ranks of major companies never did... possibly if they had, they would never have been able to make the climb.
But please don't confuse the facts here.
Pentium 4 was a major design disaster for Intel. It was a processor that failed on so many levels, it was just awful. Among a few is :
- They overheated like mad!
- They never had a proper chipset solution
- They had a very long pipeline (though we consider that part good these days) which wasn't tied tightly enough into the cache prefetch mechanism so a branch could easily cause a full pipeline miss and trigger a L1 cache flush.
- It had terribly bus performance
- It lacked an internal memory controller to compensate for the terrible bus performance
- It used enough power that quiet systems were completely out of the question
so forth and so on. During the dark years of post Pentium 4 and pre-Core, AMD made MANY steady improvements to their processors. A tweak here, a pop there. Intel focused almost entirely on Itanium for 64-bit and AMD introduced x64. If Intel could have sold the world on a new architecture (instead of charging $3000 a chip for it) Itanium was by far a superior architecture to more or less anything on the market. Even now, it's technology is possible the best there is. But technology doesn't sell computers. Never did. These days, a new instruction set would be fine in the same price range, but back then, we were locked into x86.
Well, Intel is really amazing sometimes. Thanks to being the massive multi-gazillion dollar a quarter company they are, they had the luxury to fix what they did wrong with Pentium 4. And that's why your statement is wrong. Intel invested 5 years into running (if I recall correctly) 7 independent development teams around the world to reinvent the x86 processor. They were all in competition with one another and there were some basic requirements.
1) It had to be good enough that the world would forget the Pentium 4
2) It had to be good enough that AMD would not be able to catch up again anytime soon
3) It had to be solid, there has to be a way to fix bugs in the field.
4) It had to be 100% compatible with existing software.
So the 7 teams started off competing against one another. Eventually the Israeli team won the competition and the next few years were spent integrating the best of the best from the other 6 teams into the new Israeli chip making it that much better.
The result was the Core series of chips.
What makes your commend truly just crap is your obscene ability to hold a grudge this long. From a technological perspective, if AMD isn't just full of marketting BS, it'll be the first time in years where they are competitive against Intel again. Intel's sales assholes definitely hurt AMD, but let's be frank. The Core 1 and later architectures have been clock for clock clear winners in performance and performance per watt over AMD for a long while now.
Since you don't seem to care about things like actually technology and numbers, I'll avoid explaining things like AVX and such to you. You'll just have to come up with a reason to dislike those on your own. But, an intelligent person wouldn't discount them too quickly.
If you're interested in actual facts, let me point out something here.
Bulldozer has half as many floating point units as integer ALUs. This means that while it may perform really well for things like business apps and virtualization, it couldn't hold Intel's jock strap in high performance computing. So, if all you're doing is running a farm of web servers... great bulldozer might do wonderful. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that NVidia will offer something quite a bit better when they get around to releasing the ARM chips. But when it comes to raw, brute number crunching performance, Intel will be king a while longer. No, don't bother talking about GPUs, they have a different purpose altogether. If you don't know how the code differs for them, don't go there.
BTW, you're the second idiot I've come across today peddling bullshit conspiracy theories that are so full of shit that someone has to respond just in case another person decides to read your post and believe it.
P.S. - I actually like AMD. I use them for lots of cases where I don't need great performance but just need a cheap cpu.