My favorite part of the story is later when AMD created the Opteron and created the AMD-64 instruction set. It was just nice to see Intel using AMD's new instructions for a change.

The particularly poetic follow-up to this story involving the AMD64 extensions that Intel had to go to AMD for, hat in hand, after their own Itanium designs failed to achieve broad market success is also an interesting chapter, and I hope you cover it too! These two companies have a complicated and deeply intertwined history, and it's in large part because of this that we can still have meaningful multiple vendor options for x86-compatible processors these days.

Its a miracle that AMD is still standing and hadn't gone bankrupt after Bulldozer's massive failure, and in spite of all the anti-competitive practices that Intel done in the past few decades.

I had a tour of the Intel 8008 line when I was in high school.

The AMD 386 DX 40 was an awesome awesome awesome CPU. It ran Linux like crazy. The AMD AM486 line was legendary in the day. The AM5x86-133 was by far the best '486 ever made.

I love hearing the back story and history of the events that I remember hearing about during my career. Thank you.

As we get on with the decade in which Intel struggles to recover its mojo -- and AMD basks in the sunlight it pined for, for the past generation... As always, well done, Jon.

I had my first PC a 5 year old Pentium and it's then I discovered K6, Athlon, Duron. AMD was always a rebel, a skunk work, but it wouldn't be such w/o Intel. Very interesting and nostalgic video reminding old computer magazine articles from childhood

I'd be curious to hear you cover the GPU price-fixing lawsuit that NVIDIA and ATI fought until like 2008.

Back in the days, the central processors were relatively easy to r&d and manufacture, so the market was NOT an oligopoly of just Intel and AMD. In addition to the mentioned Zilog, Motorola and NEC there were also IBM, DEC, HP, MIPS, SGI, Sun, Hitachi and many more. I especially note Cyrix's x86 compatible processors that were not half as fast at the same frequency, but also required less power and emitted less heat, so they could afford working without a cooling fan when all the other x86s were already in need of it.

Mike Hunt lol. They almost got you.

Never been this early. I feel I've Ascended to a new level of Asianometry. Great work!

That was an interesting side note about Mostek. I was firmly in the Motorola camp from the time the Atari ST came out (and Amiga, I guess) powered by the MC68000, whose assembly language and processor architecture I found far more comprehensible than the Intel 386. I stayed in that camp until the NeXT computers were discontinued, by which time Intel/AMD had finally come around to a sane form of memory addressing.

9:50 - The 386 is not just 32-address bus, but internally 32-data, from bus to registers, to addressing. The x86 pipelining may make that a bit opaque. A true 32-bit processor, that scared IBM, hence lost their PC lead. You want to know the real reason for the Pentium name. When they added 100 to 486, they did not get 586. The pentium's built in math coprocessor had an obscure math bug.

my 1st pc was AMD 486 DX4 100mhz... followed by K6 200, K6-2 500, athlon xp 2500, athlon64 3000 - 3200, A8 5600k, A10 7870K, ryzen 3100 & now ryzen 5500... yeah I'm a fanboy 😂

Nice video! Definitely an important part of history and it's good to see both companies alive and well with renewed competition.

Nice work! This needs a part 2

Definitely crazy to see just how fierce the competition is between these two, although us the consumers are definitely better for it.

21:31 Mention to the Pentium FDIV bug, and how that put them in a vulnerable position for some time. F00F bug got almost no fame though. It's been forgotten now, sometime Intel was the laughing stock of IT cause of this. It would be interesting to know how that bug was able to reach production products. Best wishes.

Wanted to see something like this for a while, thank you 🙏

I hope you keep goin with this one... Part two is where the FUN begins!!!

Thank you for this great history lesson on Intel & AMD. I always wondered why they stopped using the numbering system and changed to the Pentium brand name.

Cyrix were also producing x86 compatible CPUs at that timeframe. Did they have an agreement with Intel ? Or were they small enough to pass under the legal radar ?

Competition is the only thing that keeps anyone honest and hungry. Self improvement is merely iterative and incremental because you don't know what you don't know until someone else does it.

Happy Easter y'all

While microcode can be updated/configured by firmware in some instances, it is still microcode and quite different from firmware in its function in a processor architecture. Microcode determines the multiple steps taken by the different hardware elements in a processor during the execution of each processor instruction. This is a fascinating period in computing history. My first PC (in 1989) used an 80286 made by Harris Semiconductor, another that was locked out of this market by the introduction of the 80386 design by Intel.

Ever since Ryzen came out, I am a big fan of AMD. Just competition back in the marketplace got Intel to straighten up and actually come out with decent products, plus knowing that you can get 95% of the performance at 2/3 the cost of an Intel chip is just good business.

amazing - You tell the story so perfectly

Thanks for the history lesson 🤓 I only really came across AMD once Intel started their Pentium advertising - a mate had a 486 PC and another bragged about his P60 - a couple of years later when transitioning from an Amiga to PC the decision to go AMD vs Intel with a K6-233 for uni was a no-brainier based on price - since the other hardware was pin compatible I wrongly assumed that up until the divergence of sockets/slots that there was still some sharing of the underlying architecture - looking forward to the next instalment 👍👏

Thank you for bringing these stories to us again and again.

This was awesome! Thanks for the history lesson :)

目前俄罗斯在二手市场收购Intel这颗DX结尾的I386CPU制作武器，陶瓷封装有不错抗干扰能力。

17:48 I remember working on similar looking mobo decades ago. Pentium 2 proccy's (slot 1) came in like mini catridge. ISA, PCI and AGP slots wow! miss those days.

Good job. There was a bit of conflation there with microcode (its firmware?). It would have helped to underline that it is entirely internal to the chip and operates the internals of the CPU. In any case, microcode was discarded with the Pentium series, KINDA. It actually lives on today in so called "slow path" instructions like block moves in the later cpus, which use microcode because nobody cares if they run super fast or not, since they are generally only used for backwards compatibility and got deprecated in 64 bit mode. I await the second half of this! Things took off again with the AMD64 and the "multicore wars". Despite the mess, the entire outcome probably could have been predicted on sheer economic grounds, that is, the market settling into a #1 and #2 player with small also-rans. Today's desktop market, at least, remains in the hands of the x86 makers except for the odd story of Apple and the M series chips. Many have pronounced the end of the desktop, but it lives on. I have many or even most colleges who use Apple macs as their preferred development machines, but, as I write this, I am looking out at a sea of x86 desktop machines. Its rare to see a mac desktop, and in any case, at this moment even the ubiquitous Mac pro laptops the trendsetters love are still x86 based, although I assume that will change soon. Me? Sorry, x86 everything, desktop and laptop(s). At last count I have 5 machines running around my house and office and 4 laptops. I keep buying Mac laptops and desktops, cause, you know, gotta keep up with things, but they grow obsolete faster than a warm banana. Yes, I had power PC Macs, and yes they ended up in the trash. And yes, I will probably buy Mac M2s at some point.

If you post another CPU story, would be nice to include Cyrix processors in your next vid, along with Intel and AMD. And maybe MOS too.

After my various glorious student Atari machines, I had a Harris (?) no-wait-state AMD based 40Mhz 286 and it was fantastic. I still have it.

Eagerly awaiting for part 2 of this feud. 🍿🍿

The competition between AMD and Intel since 386 has changed the world. Not metaphorically. We are fortunate it isn't dominated by one player. Fast forward to this year and Intel is back in the High End Desktop space with chips cheaper than AMD's. Not many times that has happened in the past where AMD is more expensive. Now I know why AMD seems to always have good support from Motherboard makers. Great storytelling as usual.

If AMD wasnt around we may have to spend a fortune to afford an Intel CPU. Well done AMD. The world needs u. 🎉💐

"spent his first night after the settlement eating a pint of...ice cream" thats a mood, damn

13:25 Please don't tell me you fell for a 3 year old Mike Hunt joke.

I'm not sure what your sources are, but the IBM PC used the 8088, which was a more economical version of the 8086. The 8086 was a true 16 bit CPU, whereas the 8088 was 16 bits internal with an 8 bit external data bus - much cheaper than to implement. Also, the 80286 was used for the IBM AT and was very successful.

The next 30 years is where it gets REALLY interesting :D

Subscribed and catching up.

Didn't you do an AMD vs. Intel story before? Are you revisiting and expanding on the story in greater detail now?

The 386's legacy isn't only about 32 bit address buss. iirc it introduced Virtual Memory with an MMU. This is a huge evolution that is indispensable for multiuser multiprocess machines

Part 2 !!!! please!

The entirety of the Intel competitive strategy of the time period covered by this video was driven by Intel's success in their "Orange Crush / Crush Motorola" campaign. (Another future video, maybe?) Grove, Barrett and the Intel senior leadership teams (at least up to Gelisinger) realized that using bad faith legal arguments could squelch their competition, allowing Intel to milk the profits for a product over its lifecycle and preventing the entry of competitors until the product was no longer profitable. Once they had succeeded with driving Motorola out of their competitive space, they went after AMD, Cyrix (and later National), NEC, Intergraph, and so on. Why compete when you can lawyer your way into monopolistic practices, creaming off the profits and starving your competitors from access to capital through bad press? Oh, and forcing your competitors to spend hundreds of millions on legal fees instead of engineering research is a useful feature, too. Eventually, the string of legal losses started to really hurt, so Intel switched to leveraging their pile of cash into Marketing Development Funds as a rod for AMD's back, but I am sure that MDF will feature in future AMD-Intel videos from Jon.

I guess the 8086 is proof that there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

It would be nice to give some technical datas to this early processors. Meaning Data- and Addressbus size, Register size and number. And clock rate. Also if floating point numbers are supported.-

Mama Su is killin it at AMD right now...it's a much different company now than even in the early 2010s.

This is great, needs another chapter…

Continue this timeline! :) I watched this just before I wanted to start reading "Chip War".

486sx 25 was my first computer:) I had to upgrade no sound to a sound blaster 16 and a Supra 28.8 modem.

Would love to see a video on semiconductor testing including ATE companies like Teradyne and Advantest.

So good memories. For PC, I started with 80286 (for computer it was a MSX, using a Z80A). Then 386 came in, AMD was pretty good and got a share because it was CHEAPER and worked perfectly fine. Who can't remember 486-DX2, DX4?

Thanks!

What does '[other companies would not accept that novel chip] without A SECOND SOURCE' mean? That term occurs in a line of text starting at about 6:40 in the video.

"His name was not Mike Web it was Mike Hunt." ROFL!

Dude took a Mike Hunt joke way too seriously.

This history was told plenty of times already, but I want to see your take on the next decade and half in your words.

Great video! Can't wait for part two.

where does DM&P and the vortex86 soc come into the picture

I had a compaq 386 dx computer. It was really sturdy. I also had a ncr 286 computer. It had a high qualit svga monitor. Nice for games. My dad bought it in canada in the early 90s. I loved that machine.

can you do a section on memories and storage during these times....

Did John just went to a library to get a photo of all those clips of newspapers that is shown throughout the video?

Please make a video about "Multitech Micro-Professor MPF-I."

Nobody else curious how Asianometry got inside Jerry Sanders’ apartment? Sounds like something you could only accomplish with a time machine.

Interesting that you referred to IBM's Boca Raton team as the 'toy' computer makers. Through the '80s, the IBM Fab in Burlington VT had really strong process tech, but mediocre products. IBM got second source rights to the 486D micro, and got good yield on initial builds. It would have been a great line filler to turn the focus from technical papers to manufacturing discipline, but the PC team used it for price leverage on Intel purchases.

very nice!

Хороший обзор, спасибо

lol mike hunt. an old classic prank phone call name.

Was there a winner in the chip wars? Yes, the lawyers.

Been rooting for AMD since around 1994. I hope you cover the events that transpired after this video, beginning with AMD deciding to create their own completely in-house CPU design, the K5, to Bulldozer, and now their rise with Ryzen, with their market cap going past Intel.

I'm just happy that Ryzen brought back the competition.

16:29 “Intel had developed the AM486 using what it called clean room … procedures” Interesting that Intel had to RE their own chip an rebranded it like an AMD product. ;)

You are a well researched good story teller. I like your video on the historical Japanese. Computer chips are not as fascinating to me.

My first PC had an AMD 486 100 mhz processor. Old good days.

Good Video but it makes me ooold!! Hahahaha!! Yes, the slow old time of Chips! Greatings to all and stay safe and healthy!!!

It's a very nice and well done video, but at 16:30 I think you should have said AMD, not Intel.

The technology has evolved in a much quicker path since 80s. There's no way a product can hit a market 5 years later but still create 1 billion revenue.

I thought I read that the 4004 microprocessor was developed for use in places like elevator controls and someone then realized after the release of engineering samples that it could be the core chip for a calculator.

The hotel story sounds like espionage.

Hate is such a strong word, we wouldn't be where we are in terms of performance to cost without AMD competing with Intel.

And the lawyers grew rich.

Micro computers were around before IBM PC. Vector Graphics was the first pre-built Pc years before IBM's pc. IBM didn't want to get into pc's until 1980's.

Check out a similar relationship between Honda scooters and Taiwan Sym scooters

Intel and AMD are "definitely not friends?" Oh, how my expectations are shattered! :)

An ad every 5 minutes?

6:57 what? Intel had a second source? Intel WAS a source. Do you mean that buyers had a second source? And Mostek "went with Motorola?" Huh? Do you mean that Mostek decided to start making Motorola compatible chips instead of Intel compatible chips? This is confusing/unintelligible unless you already know what it means, which I don't.

Wait are you ai generating your own voice now?

I lost track after 3 lawsuits...

Imagine in 2024 customers forcing Nvidia to make a second source arrangement for their latest GPUs

13:15 I'm pretty sure you just missed a "my cunt" joke

I'm glad AMD fought with all they had until the end. And nowdays the tables turned, because AMD is the creator of the x64 we use on PCs.

I think this is first unbiased video on this topic lol

I used to hate Intel, now I hate them less. AMD has always been on their coattails except Athlon and Ryzen. Glad there's competition but if they didn't make it we might have seen more arm devices like ACORN's ARM computers.

Literally never seen one of your videos this full of ads😂

Umm, you know the Mike Hunt Reddit comment was a crude joke, right?

intel: traps your chip in legal shenanigans until it becomes useless.