I was discussing the article with someone and when we started discussing about how the transition to AM2 happened and how there was no performance gain when moving to AM2, you quickly think to yourself, well that is fair enough, if there is no performance gain why bother upgrading? Let us have a look at some of the new technology over the past few years.
SATA: Initially we found ourselves with no real performance gains so why did everyone feel that it was worth making the move across? It was the latest and greatest in a RAID situation but this appeals to a minority of people. Then motherboard companies started placing less IDE ports on their boards forcing people to eventually go SATA, if they ever wanted to have a decent number of hard drives, without buying separate IDE controllers.
PCI Express: Here we have another technology that at launch offered little to no performance gains against its counterparts. You have to wonder what really kicked PCI Express. This is another technology that was forced upon users, so much to the point that if you wanted to get the best, you had no other option.
DDR-2: If there was one advancement that you would expect to take forever to kick off you would think that it would be DDR-2 memory. High prices, high latency, lack of range, and more would make you think that we would be using DDR for the next 10 years. But, like the other technologies above, it started being forced upon us, range increased, prices dropped and eventually everyone was buying DDR-2.
So what happened with AMD, why didn’t the same strategy work? Well, that is the million dollar question, AMD's bank account was looking healthier than ever, so it could have put its head down into R&D and made the AM2 system something to actually be had. Is Intel the better processor now because the company is smarter? I do not think so. AMD just did not make the right moves. At the prime of its game, it turned around and spent millions and millions of dollars on buying a company called ATI.
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