Backing the Underdog: Advanced Micro Devices

As a technology enthusiast I have a special place in my heart for AMD. I bought my first AMD (and indeed my first computer) in late 2006, just as home computers had gone dual-core and Intel had freshly revamped their architecture under the "Core" label. And It wasn't long afterwards that I realised that both AMD and ATI were on their way under.

As the benchmarks amassed on various review sites comparing Intel's inarguably superior Core series of CPUs to AMD's ever-slightly-behind Athlon X2 series it became increasingly clear that the reign of AMD as a 'gaming' CPU was over.

The once infamously superior AMD Athlon 'enthusiast' CPU and chipsets had been eclipsed by a corporate monolith and throughout 2007 the future looked bleak for AMD – which had been all but abandoned by computer enthusiasts for their inferiority. At the end of the day if an Intel chip can outperform an AMD chip for roughly the same price, why would you spend your money elsewhere?

Through 2007-08 (at the time working in a retail electronics store) I sold several dozen laptops, and did my very best to draw a fair comparison between AMD-powered systems and Intel-powered systems, but for a disproportionate number of customers they had a familiarity with Intel which became a discriminating factor against AMD, and the sheer number of units which sported Intel chips were simply insurmountable.

Now three years on and AMD has still yet to produce an answer to Intel's "Core" architecture, which has relished a runaway success since 2006. AMD has been rifled with management issues – both in their processor division and in their (acquired) ATI graphics devision. To put it simply, both business units were almost always "second best" to either Intel or Nvidia (processors and graphics chips respectively).

Now let me be clear: AMD chips are by no means any less well-built, nor have they ever really been sub-par as compared to Intel. The trouble, it seems, AMD chips are just not cut out for competing with Intel, cycle-for-cycle.

What fascinates me however, is the humility and innovation that AMD have shown over the last few years, accepting their place whilst pushing to evolve PCs rather than squeezing more out of the PC as it is. They've maintained their best to engage the enthusiast community with their sponsorship (along with ASUS) of the world's first Live Overclockers Competition, and they've managed to create a completely new type of processor (triple-core) out of an otherwise complete disaster (four-core chips with manufacturing faults?).

Done with the growing pains of acquiring ATI in 2006 under a massive ($US4.5b) debt, and having to sell their manufacturing plants to stay afloat through the crippling financial crisis of 08-09 it seems AMD has finally begun to align itself for the future. Their latest technology is a 'Fusion' system, whereby the power of the GPU and CPU are communal, hopefully leaving the specialist CUDA protocols of NVidia behind and forging a much more universal increase in the performance of a personal computer.

I admire AMD for its courage and resilience, its innovation and defiance. I own two AMD desktop chips and my laptop houses an older AMD Turion. You could say that I back the underdog. I look forward to seeing what AMD come up with in 2010/11 and hope that we can one day see them as the brilliant innovators us computer enthusiasts once heralded them as.

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