When Lisa Su joined AMD and started reorganising, I could tell she was Doing Big Things. At that point, AMD was either going to go bust in the near future or they were going to go all in and pull rabbits out of hats. IIRC, I think I read some article on Semi-Accurate talking about her future plans, her building a war chest to go after Intel and Nvidia, and those first couple of years seem to indicate that she was doing exactly that. Intel has been pretty moribund since that time, so I'm not at all surprised they've been surpassed. Intel took their eye off the ball, AMD has innovated like never before.
This is why I believe AMD is not fussed about Alderlake, because they've jumped those fences and run into the distance a long time ago. AL gives Intel a little breathing room on the desktop, it does nothing for Intel in the HEDT or server space, and has no way forwards. It's a nothing burger in the big scheme of where the industry is going and the problems it has to overcome to get there (many of which AMD has already solved, built into products, and is selling left, right and centre).
Intel has to start pulling rabbits, not give us this nonsense of shaving dies and cranking up the power to silly levels and then sticking some little cores on the side to claim efficiency. That's all just trying to put a square peg in a round hole while marketing like crazy to convince us that's a good thing.
Robert Moore (Intel founder in 1968) and Jerry Sanders (AMD founder in 1969) were both from the Fairchild Semi Conductor Company, colleagues.
Long Story short...
Intel made Volatile Memory (RAM) AMD Logic Processors like the AM2901 (1975), they kept out of eachothers way early on, perhaps even complimenting eachother as they made different technologies used in the same systems.
RAM is obvious but Logic Processors are like CPU's only they are hard-wired to perform specific tasks, so you would need different ones to perform different tasks, or logic add-ons.
About a decade later, in 1978 Intel had a breakthrough in innovation, they created a processor programmable through logic extensions, a suite of extensions neatly packaged into the silicon, X86, with it there was no need for lots of Logic Processors performing specific tasks, now it could all be done on this single
Central
Processing
Unit.
That meant computers could be used outside of institutions with all of their computer technicians and programmers, there was no need for them.
IBM thought they could sell these machines to the ordinary public for home use and gave Intel the contract to make the CPU's for them, the
Personal
Computer was born.
At the time silicon processors were difficult to make and yields were bad, supply was unreliable, IBM requested Intel use AMD as a second source of manufacturing, this required Intel to licence X86 to AMD, which they did, however Intel never actually gave AMD any orders.
So AMD made their own X86 Designs making AMD competitors to Intel, AMD's designs were better than Intel's, through the 1980's and 1990's AMD grew as a company, until eventually in the early 2000's AMD had grown its market share to equal that of Intel. Intel didn't like this and was gearing up to cancel that X86 licensing agreement, AMD knew this was coming and set about creating their own extensions, ones that would be important to CPU customers, X64 or AMD64 (64Bit) which they tagged on to X86, that's where you have X86_64, which proved extremely successful, Intel tried to compete with their own 64Bit architecture (Itanium) which was not successful, that forced Intel to licence X64 from AMD, now they are tied at the hip, Intel cannot cancel AMD X86 licence because they would lose X64. Today there isn't anything that doesn't use X64, X86 on its own is actually dead.
Its ironic but everything that made the CPU what it is and Intel with it is now little more than a dud platform for what's important to sit on. On your Intel and AMD system go to C:\Windows\WinSxS what you will find there is this.
Intel could see where this was going and used their considerable war chest to buy off any would be AMD customer, denying AMD sales, not only did that arrest AMD's growth it very nearly killed them, the next thing AMD crapped out was Bulldozer but prior to that they used the few Billion $ (5.7 i think it was) they had left to buy ATI, doing that actually saved them. Just long enough to get back in to the games.
This is the history between them, there is animosity, AMD have scores to settle, they want to pick up where they left off.
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