After years of an Intel-dominated market place, the true features and reliability of AMD processors are finally starting to be noticed by someone other than us computer geeks. The truth is that previous to AMD's thunderbird core, the AMDK6-2 and -3 lines ran as well, or in the K6-3's case, faster that the Ever-popular Pentium, Pentium MMX, and Pentium II lines.

For a long while after the Intel Pentium III was released, there was no true AMD equivalent and therefore the market became dominated by an expanding Intel for a number of months. When the AMD Athlon came out it, once again, outclassed all of the Pentium processors and even broke the 1GHZ barrier in october of 1999, long before Intel had even scheduled to be able to do so. AMD developed and released for sale its GHz processor before Intel had even gotten thier processor out of R&D.

Today's battle is between the Intel PIII-Coppermine and AMD's Athlon-Thunderbird processors. AMD clearly has the better processor. The architecture of the Pentium III processor was specifically built for the in-development, now nearly deceased RAMBUS memory bus. The architechture was made to be able to support other types but was geared to the Intel in-house, proprietary bus.

When the RAMBUS venture fell through, PIII lost some of the performance capabilities that it had the potential of generating. AMD, on the other hand, was and is continuing to work with present and advancing technology to produce processors that can work to the fullest possible potential. They are built to use scalable front-side busses and high speed RAM but are also able to work on older athlon motherboards as well.

The AMD driver support is extensive and, while not as comprehensive as Intel's, is continuing to grow as new bugs and security holes become apparent and are addressed. AMD also sells thier high speed processors to any who want or can afford them. Intel, on the other hand only makes thier GHz+ processors availible through "limited edition" packages sold by thier closest buisness partners, dell and gateway.

For server operations, the pentium and athlon processors run neck and neck. When you remove the graphics processing features from each processor, you still will find AMD has a little bit of a competitive edge. Unfortunately, it will cost you an arm and a leg to attempt to use the GHz PIII in a server due to the fact that they can only be gotten ahold of through dell or gateway through overpriced machines that, on the whole, arent very well built in the first place.

Recently, we have seen the battle for processor dominance change from the R&D labs that are developing hot, fast, and expensive processors to the stores who are looking for products to offer thier customers cheap, reliable solutions for thier computer problems. It would seem that the budget processing category, once overlooked by the major producers, is where today's market-share battles are taking place. Today, we see the battle of the Intel Celeron and the AMD Duron. While the Celeron was originally a very good processor, it has since fallen behind due to the fact that very few major overhauls have been done to update the processor's secondary features such as on-die cache and floating-point pipelines. In this respect, the AMD duron far outdistances the Celeron in nearly every performance category and still manages to be competitive in pricing. (For more information on the DURON, check out my review through my profile.)

All in all, AMD's mix of reliability, availibility, speed, and compatibility make it the perfect choice for today's computers.