For those people who don't know the incredibly simple reason the Ath xp/64 times where AMD gained market share but was unable to topple the uber great Intel. It's so incredibly simple, AMD had two fabs capable of supplying circa 20% of the market. They pushed up to the market share they could actually produce chips for. To push up every 10-15% further in market share would have required an extra 5 billion dollar fab. To provide 100% of the chips the market required at the time they'd have needed, conservatively 4 decent fabs costing a total of 20billion and taking 5 years to build.
You can't ever own more of the market share than you can produce. If the market needs 1billion chips a year and you can make 200million chips a year, it would be impossible to get past 20% market share.
Then theres things like customer loyalty, brand recognition, long term supply deals so the likes of Dell would have commited to buying X millions of chips a year from Intel which doesn't simply dissappear because their chips weren't as good.
Then the killer thing, 99% of home users could run on an old p3 system without issue still, the fact they could get home users to buy 2-3Ghz amd dual cores, or 3.6Ghz Intel dual cores was impressive to say the least. Marketing was a key tool and from early thunderbird/socket 423 P4 days, through to Prescott and Ath 64 X2's, how many AMD ad's did you see on tv, and how many Intel Inside ad's?
Then again if you're at 20% market share with a better product and can't produce more chips, marketing is literally a wasted cost. Intel were losing market share and could make quite a bit more than they were providing, marketing worked for them.
Either way, the first quads were maybe the first time in history we got such a monumental jump forward in total processing power. The Q6600 was certainly impressive in that sense, overclocked well, was fantastic value for the extra power and was really the first time in an uber long time Intel brought out a low end varient that cheap.
The first X2's were also similarly impressive jump in power and would last a long time compared to general required power for higher end home use. However we'd been at circa 3Ghz in single cores for so long that the dual cores were more required than a luxury, almost 3Ghz for almost 2 years before we got 2x 2.4Ghz X2's. The switch to quads came far far more quickly than the switch to dual cores and completely outpaced the need for cpu power, while the X2 just satisfied it. Quad's also came along at a time where overclocking up to 4Ghz on air(on a decent IPC chip) became more frequent so you got a decent bump in clockspeed with new processes aswell as the extra cores.
I7 is boring as hell, overly expensive, moving the mem controller on die is a big step but not new. tripple channel mem is more brute force and expensive and obviously(from i5) not entirely useful for the cost increase in mobo's.
LIkewise the Core2Duo is a nice architechture but its really a P3 with a lot of improvements, the P3 however was awesome.
and has lived through many silly OC's by a Noob lol rock solid cpu can get them now days for £2.50 !!!
