Well okay. But they had the same problem Intel is in now: they pushed an inefficient power hungry chip to the limit. So it was cheaper, and performance was only somewhat lower, but it was much hotter and used a lot of power —- so pretty useless for laptops.
Re:How fast is 12th Gen Intel Core?
by Beltalowda on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @07:14PM
(#32405857)
On laptops AMD was indeed not very good; but their desktop CPUs – far more important in the 00s and early 10s than they are today – were pretty decent. That is not to say that Intel also didn't have good CPUs at the time, but (much) more expensive and for people just doing their browsing and occasional gaming on their desktop AMD was a solid (and cheaper!) choice IMO.
Their top performance was lower than Intel in many cases, but it was certainly not "absolute garbage". For low- to mid-range they offered similar performance with usually a (much) lower price point. For normal "average person" usage they were often the better choice in terms of "bang for your buck".
The main reason we were selling Intels is because we got a rebate from Intel for every CPU we sold. Financially it didn't really matter if we sold a €400 computer, €500, or €600 computer: the profit margin for us was roughly identical (a little bit more, but not much), but with Intel you got a rebate back-channelled, so then it did matter.