AMD did the same when they got an advantage through Ryzen. Intel quickly overtook them again and now they're back to being the underdog.
Threadripper got killed off because it was starting to compete with AMD's own products, performance increases started to diminish, AMD very much took a short break when were at the top again. The only difference is that Intel managed to stay on top with their Core architecture for so incredibly long.
That's not necessarily bad, of course. This behaviour has led to competition and competition is almost always good for the consumer.
The reason Intel gets more negativity here is that time and again they try to prevent fair competition. Itanium was an attempt to break AMD’s ability to sell x86, and each of the previous times AMD was providing better performance or pricing, Intel used their market position to require things like exclusivity or minimum volume commitments.
Given how well competition has worked for consumers, I do wonder if there’s some regulatory option here to reduce those back room deals. Given the way the world runs on microprocessors now there’s a decent argument that maintaining a robust market is like what we used to do to prevent one railroad or steel company from getting too much control.
You are right. Intel is terrible for competition. They had to be dragged, along with their SandyBridge, kicking and screaming into the future in order to keep up with AMD for the better part of a decade now.
I've owned AMD CPUs before. 386DX-40 and Athlon II and such.
But Threadripper was unreal. And seemed like it was going to be the norm for an era of HEDT.
But AMD got greedy on the promise of corporate desktop dollars, over-stratified, and let a flagship technology fade into "what about Threadripper? No, it's for Lenovo customers."
Openly an AMD fanboy, but this year's offerings by Intel were too good to pass up in comparison, as I was due for an upgrade. Same with NVIDIA - instead of AMD went with them.
Threadripper got killed off because it was starting to compete with AMD's own products, performance increases started to diminish, AMD very much took a short break when were at the top again. The only difference is that Intel managed to stay on top with their Core architecture for so incredibly long.
That's not necessarily bad, of course. This behaviour has led to competition and competition is almost always good for the consumer.