When AMD introduced the Athlon, everyone seemed to notice, but especially the geek crowd. It was a great new processor. When they introduced the Athlon64 and Intel stated that 64-bit was not in their desktop future, the geeks and techies went crazy for AMD. It's been hugely successful and AMD64 is a great architecture. It almost feels like amazing good Alpha CPU didn't die, in some ways it's lived on in the AMD64.
The pendulum swung in favour of AMD and stayed there.
Intel backtracked and then copied the AMD64 and called in EM64T. But Intel were in a mess, developers, geeks and techies wanted fast 32/64-bit capable Athlon64 chips and didn't want the high power usage Pentium4. Company trouble at Intel also made things worse for them, layoffs occurred to try to sort things out.
But....
Geeks have respect for Intel again after it ditched the Pentium4 and released the Core CPU. The Core is a great CPU, lower power usage & very fast performance. Core Duo in a latop out performs the fastest AMD laptop CPU (Turion64). But it didn't stop there, they released desktop and laptop Core Duo CPUs and then enabled 64-bit CPUs for all via the Core 2 Duo. Core 2 Duo is even faster and even more energy efficient. I can understand why Apple switched to it (although it has taken me a long time to accept it & then try to understand why, I liked PowerPC).
Intel have raised the stakes yet again by releasing a Xeon 64-bit Quad CPU that uses 50W
Intel Xeon
The Register : New Xeon
I think that AMD made improvements, some of the dual core Athlon X2 CPUs use less or the same power as the old single core CPUs. But at the same time, Intel introduced a new CPU architecture and then improved upon it with the Core 2 Duo. AMD should have had the K8L out and ready, it does look interesting.
DriversLinux people that want to try out the great looking features of Beryl/Compiz etc. they are finding that ATI does not support this in their binary driver. Linux devs and users are being forced to switch to Intel (open source driver) or NVidia (binary driver supports AIGLX) instead.
