Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

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Re: Banias/Dothan and when released, Yonah/Merom will likely avert the meltdown Intel was leading up to with their EPIC and Netburst micro-architectures. But it is yet to be seen if it will achieve performance leadership that P6 had during some periods of its life time.

P6 never held huge performance leadership gaps for any extended period of time.

Pentium Pro launched in November, 1995, and was a huge step towards putting x86 into the enterprise, where RISC was a formidable opponent. It's moot to compare to AMD at this point, since Pentium Pro sold for >$1000 and did not compete in mainstream markets.

Pentium II launched in May, 1997, and by this time AMD already had the K6 processor. They went pretty much tit for tat for the next couple years until AMD launched the K7.

I think the Merom generation will have no problem living up to this legacy, and perhaps it will have an opportunity to exceed it.

Re: It remains to be seen where the competition will be in the future, so comparisons vs. the competition will have to wait for a while.

True, but I'm not expecting any miracles from AMD until their K10 micro-architecture, whenever that is.