Besides, software incompatibility didn't kill Jaguar (IMO)
Software incompatibility didn't kill Jaquar as much as lack of available software. If gret Jaguar games were widely available at a decent price it would probably have at least established a niche.
Ad for IBM's OS/2 and 3DNow
OS/2 never had anywhere close to the software and driver support that Windows had. And IBM seemed particuarly inept in marketing it (even other IBM divisions didn't support it, or in may cases offer it).
3DNow is in many millions of chips and is still around today. In that sense it didn't fail. Of course it wasn't the main reason that most of these chips were sold and you don't get a lot of people putting effort in to coding for it, but than MMX wasn't a huge deal either despite the fact that Intel was and is much larger then AMD and that other companies (including AMD) adopted MMX.
64bit is a much bigger deal than MMX or 3DNow. It probably doesn't matter as much in the average laptop as the average desktop right now, and it matters much less in either than on servers, but eventually it will take over all 3.
Another big difference is that Intel has adopted AMD's 64 bit scheme. Its not a scheme only pushed by a relatively small chip maker, like 3DNow. If Intel had put out a 64bit extention of x86 that was incompatible with AMD64 and if the market starting using it than AMD64 would be like 3DNow, or even be in a worse situation, because chips that support 3DNow can also support MMX2.
The fact is also a difference of AMD64 from OS/2. Microsoft played lip service to OS/2 for awhile but they never really supported it. Eventually they dropped the lip service. Intel and Microsoft both support AMD64 even if they don't call it that.
I don't think customers are going to pay a lot more for their laptops to have AMD64, and they won't accept poor performance or other problems in order to get AMD64, it just ins't a big enough deal for most customers to put up with such things. But they don't have to put up with them. AMD has reasonably priced high performance chips. And customers of PCs (including laptops) are getting more and more choices that include AMD chips.
I don't think that AMD is going to dominate the laptop market or anything close to that. But they have a more competitive product now than what they had last year so I think they will gain marketshare even while Intel continues to get the lions share of the sales.
Tim
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