Yeah but AMD still got the initiative and strategy correctly done for those cases, purchased or not, they got the thing done, doing the first 32bit + 64bit processor.
Yes they did, but the point is that the opportunities to make those strides thanks to picking up IP and chip architects from other companies don't really exist in both numbers and at affordable prices in this era. Remember they basically purchased an IHV with a ready-to-go next generation architecture (NexGen) for $847m, and DEC's IP which laid the foundation for all AMD's subsequent processors for next to nothing thanks to the 1998 FTC Consent agreement.
Back on these opteron 64 days, intel execs said AMD were crazy. But this changed Intel plans for their Itanium processor.
That is incorrect. Intel's x64 program actually was two distinct developments. The first was a 32/64-bit program (the original P7, later renamed Merced -
Here's a magazine article outlining the original concept in 1995, so pre-dates AMD's K7). This original program was shelved because Intel realized that they were being marginalized by Microsoft as the industry prime mover. Concentrating on Itanium - a purely x64 architecture, was a gambit to both wrest control back (since MS's software was 16-bit/32-bit based), and to head off competition from x64-based RISC architectures, which Intel perceived as the long term threat to x86.
Where AMD won wasn't on landmark originality (both AMD and Intel were incorporating RISC architectural features into CISC processors), it was a willingness to partner with Microsoft and open source SUSE group to get the compiler and ISA (AMD64) up and running- and accepted as an industry standard, where Intel wanted full control of IA64 and to bend the industry to their way of thinking. Having MS and SUSE on board gave AMD64 instant respectability, instant and inbuilt adoption (thanks to MS), and a fast introduction, - so fast that Intel had to bow to AMD64.
Their processors today are not the disaster people believe. Bad press is all they've got. They had the TLB bug on the Phenom and questionable design in their bulldozer architecture.
Their biggest issue is slow execution and a lack of strategic planning, compounded by the huge debt burden they took on in buying ATI (rather than just licence the IP) which led to having to sell off the foundry business, and their mobile IP to Qualcomm - both of which came back to bite them in the ass, but both that were a necessity thanks to Ruiz paying twice the market value for ATI.
