A testament to competition

TgDaily has a rather disappointing news about the performance of AMD in the last quarter (Q1 2007): How AMD plans to sail through the "perfect storm".

This has been one of their worst quarters ever. They have lost a significant amount of market share despite significantly reducing their prices. Core 2 Duo by Intel simply crushed them for the time being.

And when this happens it is always worrying. Will AMD survive this time around? If it doesn't Intel becomes a monopoly and that would be a disaster.

I'll just quote one of the comments to this story:

I feel we are only at current Intel levels due to the competition that AMD has brought on over the years. We owe it to AMD and their success for where we are at today. AMD will catch up and spank Intel once more. To deny this is to discount their past accomplishments. Just be sure to thank AMD next time you turn on your DUO chip set. Competition has got us where we are today!!!!! --testy

AMD forced Intel to come up with a killer, in a way. What ensued is a series of significant price cuts. This means that customers get better technology for prices we couldn't imagine before. And even though Intel created Core 2 Duo (the current technology edge), AMD can be thanked for keeping the competition going.

I already decided to go with Intel for my next computer, mostly because Core 2 Duo is newer, their chipsets are overall better supported on GNU/Linux and its more power efficient (and the price cut for it is due today), but I do feel kind of sorry for AMD and I wish them well.

If they could only turn a page, though, and say no to things like DRM, release official free drivers for ATI cards and become someone the Free Software community could really appreciate. They probably still underestimate that strategy.

Right now, overall Intel in fact seems more friendly to Free Software than AMD.