IBM POWER processors vs. AMD or Intel processors

The processor world used to be only Intel, now there is another contender, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices). A couple years ago when AMD first made its way into the scene there were many incompatibility problems with AMD processors and programs. However due to changes in the design these incompatibility problems no longer plague the AMD line of processors. But it is a known fact that an AMD equivalent of any Intel processor is about 30 to 50 MHz slower than the Intel counterpart. Up until recently AMD has had a boost in speed, that Intel has lacked, in certain games due to 3DNOW!, a SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) technology. But with Intel's new line of processors named Pentium III they now have their own SIMD, KNI (Katmai New Instruction). AMD's line of processors used to be able to keep up with Intel using 3DNOW but with KNI Intel will once again take a very large lead in speed. Thus I believe Intel builds better and faster processors than AMD.

The first ever problems AMD had were with incompatibility problems that plagued their entire line of CPU's until the K6. These problems hurt AMD because nobody wanted a CPU that could not run 15% of the programs out. People wanted a processor that had programs optimized specifically for it, people wanted a computer with a sticker that said "Intel Inside" because they knew every program would run on it. If people wanted a cheap solution then they went with the low-cost AMD CPU and faced incompatibility problems with a lot of programs. But most people were willing to spend the money to get the genuine Intel processor and this is a major reason AMD became the underdog and left Intel to reign as King.

One point that people paid much attention to was 3D graphics, and the PII, with it's superior FPU (Floating-Point Unit), could easily outperform the K6 processor in 3D applications. The FPU on all current AMD chips is sub-par and costs what could be a very fast chip a major performance hit. Without losing a large amount of performance due to the poorly designed FPU the K6-3 is actually a very nice processor. Ever since the days of the 286 Intel has had the processor that performed the best and had no compatibility problems which made it the choice of almost everyone. Since most people buying a computer were buying an Intel processor instead of an AMD Intel became the major supplier in the consumer market.

Realizing that their K6 was falling behind in FPU performance, AMD toddled along back to the drawing board to tweak the K6 in order to support a new 3D API (Application Program Interface) called 3DNow! that would dramatically improve 3D performance in what was to become the K6-2 CPU. But unfortunately for AMD, they couldn't convince many software developers to include support 3DNow! Because of this, there was only a limited number of games and graphics cards that ...