AMD finds some deep pockets - Consumers should be glad
Nothing epitomizes the value of competition more than the contrast between the price changes in computer hardware compared with the price of Windows. The former gets cheaper while the latter goes up in price. We owe a lot to AMD for the fact that PCs are not only more powerful but cheaper every year. If Intel had the sort of monopoly that Microsoft has, there is little doubt that PCs would be slower and more expensive. For some years, the AMD David had better and cheaper chips than the Intel Goliath. But the competition finally spurred Intel enough that it came out with the present leading group of multi-core chips. Their superiority has caused AMD sales to shrink and it started losing a lot of money. Since AMD doesn’t have the immense resources of Intel, the company’s future began to look shaky. Last July, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote:
The direction that AMD is headed worries me because over the past year Intel’s main competitor has been hammered so much that it now doesn’t offer Intel much of a challenge, and there’s always a danger that a complacent Intel will fall back to the lazy 486 days where innovations were few and far between. Sure, Intel has come out with some killer products lately, but this has been in response to AMD. Without AMD, I fear that things to stagnate over at Intel.
Other observers have been equally pessimistic about AMD’s future but AMD has found some financing that may keep it alive. Consumers should cheer. An Intel monopoly would not be good news.
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