Yep. Intel sat on their asses for a decade pushing quad cores one has to pay extra to even overclock.
Then AMD implements chiplets, comes out with affordable 6, 8, 12, and 16 core desktop processors with unlocked multipliers, hyperthreading built into almost every model, and strong performance. All of this while also not sucking down power like Intel’s chips still do.
Intel cached in their lead by not investing in themselves and instead pushing the same tired crap year after year onto consumers.
Don’t forget the awfully fast socket changes
They really segmented that market in the worst possible way, 2 cores and 4 cores only, possibility to use vms or overclock, and so on. Add windoze eating up every +5%/year.
Remember buying the 2600(maybe X) and it was soo fast.
The 2600k was exceptionally good and was relevant well past the normal upgrade timeframes.
Really it only got left behind because of its 4C/8T limit as everything started supporting lots of threads instead of just a couple, and just being a 2nd Generation i7.
Really it only got left behind because of its 4C/8T limit as everything started supporting lots of threads instead of just a couple, and just being a 2nd Generation i7.
Past me made the accidentally more financially prudent move of opting for the i7-4790k over the i5-4690k which ultimately lasted me nearly a decade. At the time the advice was of course “4 cores is all you need, don’t waste the money on an i7” but those 4 extra threads made all the difference in the longevity of that PC
Yes, that was a beast! I was poor and had to wait and got the generation after, the 3770K and already the segmentation was there, I got overlooking possibilities but not the VM stuff…
Coincidentally, that’s the exact cpu I use in my server! And it runs pretty damn well.
At this point the only “issue” with it is power usage versus processing capability. Newer chips can do the same with less power.
Worse product and worse consumer practices (changing sockets every 2 generations) made it an easy choice to go with AMD.
I’ve been buying AMD since the K6-2, because AMD almost always had the better price/performance ratio (as opposed to outright top performance) and, almost as importantly, because I liked supporting the underdog.
That means it was folks like me who helped keep AMD in business long enough to catch up with and then pass Intel. You’re welcome.
It also means I recently bought my first Intel product in decades, an Arc GPU. Weird that it’s the underdog now, LOL.
AMD almost always had the better price/performance
Except anything Bulldozer-derived, heh. Those were more expensive and less performant than the Phenom II CPUs and Llano APUs.
To be fair, I upgraded my main desktop directly from a Phenom II X4 840(?) to a Ryzen 1700x without owning any Bulldozer stuff in between.
(I did later buy a couple of used Opteron 6272s, but that’s different for multiple reasons.)
I’ve got an FX 8350, sure AMD fell behind during that time but it was by no means a bad CPU imo. Main PC’s got a 7800X3D now but my FX system is still working just fine to this day, especially since upgrading to an SSD and 16GB RAM some years ago. It can technically even run Cyberpunk 2077 with console like frame rates on high settings.
I mean… It functioned as a CPU.
But a Phenom II X6 outperformed it sometimes, single thread and multithreaded. That’s crazy given Pildriver’s two generation jump and huge process/transistor count advantage. Power consumption was awful in any form factor.
Look. I am an AMD simp. I will praise my 7800X3D all day. But there were a whole bunch of internet apologist for Bulldozer back then, so I don’t want to mince words:
It was bad.
Objectively bad, a few software niches aside. Between cheaper Phenoms and the reasonably priced 2500K/4670K, it made zero financial sense 99% of the time.
Bulldozer was AMD’s Pentium 4.
Even down to the questionable marketing.
I’ve been buying since the the Phenom II days with the X3 720. One could easily unlock their 4th core for an easy performance boost. Most of the time it’d work without a hassle.
Wish I knew about that trick back then! I shelled out for an X4…
