AMD vs Intel: Battle of the Giants

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) and Intel (previously known as Integrated Electronics Corporation) are the two biggest names in the computer industry today. And these two companies have been locked in a battle for decades. The two companies were created just one year apart with Intel being the older (1968) and AMD the younger one (1969). Both were mostly involved in producing a lot of electronic devices ranging from memory chips to modems. But it was intel’s early foray into the microprocessor market in 1971 that allowed it to gain an iron grip on the industry for a couple of decades.

For a short period that began in 1975, both companies had worked together in building the Intel 8080 microprocessor for IBM. But that was short-lived and from then on, the battle for microprocessor supremacy has started to take place. From that time on, Intel enjoyed being the undisputed leader when it came to microprocessors. Often employing what others might say as underhanded tactics to make sure they have supremacy.

Intel was fairly focused on building faster and stronger microprocessors. Their success was fairly evident with the release of their pentium series and the Intel inside marketing promo which catapulted their microprocessor sales way above all competition. That is until the dot com bubble burst and the need for super fast microprocessors started to wane. Although Intel still holds the number one spot, there are already serious incursions of AMD into its territory with some AMD processors rivaling the performance of Intel’s; and at some occasions even exceeding.

AMD on the hand offered the masses value for their money. They may not have the fastest processors, but it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to buy one and. They have been well known to be the underdog of the industry and have often been involved in lawsuits by Intel. AMD started to gain ground on Intel in the early years of the 21st century when cheaper computing become more reasonable than faster computing. They have also merged with ATI Technologies (The maker of the famous Radeon graphics cards) in an attempt to grow their business.

A contributing factor to the substantially higher price of Intel processors is in the size of their L2 cache memory. Most Intel processors have double the amount of L2 cache than their counterpart in AMD. Cache memory allows the processor to store the most frequently used data within the processor itself for speedy access. AMD counters this by integrating the memory controller within the processor in order to shorten the data that the path took. This move also allowed AMD to close the performance gap between the two manufacturers.

Summary:
1. Intel processors outperform AMD processors in most cases
2. AMD processors are generally much cheaper than their equivalent from Intel
3. Intel processors generally have double the amount of L2 cache
4. AMD processors have integrated memory controllers which Intel processors don’t

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