Long story short, this has been a detrimental year for Intel and a colossal win for AMD. For myself, however, the story isn't as simple as one or the other. My first AMD machine was a Turion 64 X2 back in April 2007. The machine itself was fine, it got a little toasty from time to time and it certainly couldn't play many games of its time and it eventually broke down three years after purchase. AMD had let me down.
But way back in 2005, I was always very skeptical of the performance of my beast (but only in physical size) of a laptop that was supposedly a desktop replacement when compared with the AMD powered version. The Athlon XP and Athlon 64 versions often outperformed the Pentium 4 version and although AMD CPUs were perhaps better than Intel's at that time, AMD didn't have the market.
Things got doom and gloom in 2010 onwards for AMD. AMD had definitely lost grip of the market. But as my blog followers will have noticed, I now keep banging on about AMD Ryzen and how it's the current reigning champion in the CPU market, with Intel struggling to keep up.
So where am I, a long-term Intel fan who has finally switched to AMD for the first time in over a decade?
I would say that I am on the boundary edge of switching to AMD for my other computers. Every innovation that they add to their chips such as the recent PCI-E Gen 4 makes me want to stay with AMD more. Performance on my PC is much higher than before, especially saying as I paid less than I have ever done for my PC this time around.
However. AMD's lack of Thunderbolt, particularly in the laptop segment, means that I cannot connect some of the peripherals that I own to my computer. Uh oh.
So what do you think? Team Red or Blue?
