WEBVTT

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Life is great when you have lots of choices. I mean, who hasn't had a little party in their head

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when getting off at a highway exit and seeing two dozen fast food places

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vying for your attention, please, Colonel, I'm married.

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But this isn't the case in the CPU world

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where you basically only have two choices on desktop,

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AMD or Intel. So how did this happen?

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I mean, with as many computers as there are in the world, do no other companies want a piece of the action?

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To understand why there are only two CPU options

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we have to go back to the first PC, the original IBM personal computer from 1981.

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IBM chose the Intel 8088 CPU to power the machine,

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which was based on the x86 instruction set. This ended up being an enormously consequential choice

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as the IBM PC exploded in popularity

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and pushed lots of its competitors out of the market because it was a versatile, well-built computer

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that offered great value for money at the same time. This meant that software developers wanted to write programs

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for the IBM PC and compatibles that utilized x86 CPUs,

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meaning Intel quickly became a very powerful name

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in the microcomputer CPU space. So powerful, in fact,

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that they ended up licensing out the x86 architecture to other companies in order to keep up with demand

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without having to manufacture x86 chips completely on their own, but still make money.

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Ironically, AMD was one of these licensee companies.

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And although Intel and AMD obviously remain rivals to this day, AMD still has an x86 license,

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which it's used at various times to beat Intel at its own game.

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Obviously, their Ryzen lineup is the one currently giving Intel fits,

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but this was also true back in the 1990s, when AMD started improving upon the x86 design

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and competing directly with Team Blue rather than just being Intel's second source chip supplier.

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Although AMD wasn't the only x86 licensee

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that tried to make inroads into the market, they did have the knowledge and resources

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to become a serious contender, as they were already a publicly traded company

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that had multiple chip fabs. Other firms that had access to the x86 architecture

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simply didn't compete all that well. One notable example is Sirix,

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who tried to go toe-to-toe with Intel's new Pentium lineup in the mid 1990s.

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Sirix promised big time performance, but their chips rarely delivered.

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And they made an infamous mistake when they decided to focus on integer performance

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to compete with the Pentium. At the time, Sirix thought that the trend

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of most desktop programs using mostly integer based processing would continue.

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But what actually happened is that the low cost but powerful Pentium became so popular,

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developers instead coded for its floating point unit.

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And if you're confused about the difference between integer and floating point,

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you can learn more about it in this video. So Sirix's challenge didn't last very long.

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And other potential competitors were typically late to the game

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compared to what Teams Red and Blue were offering. Think about how Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel,

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partly because Intel chips were simply more powerful per watt.

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And of course, the next major innovation in desktop CPUs,

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64 bit processing, was developed by none other than AMD,

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who subsequently cross-licensed that technology to Intel,

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paving the way for the modern era of x86-64 computing,

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employed by virtually all modern PCs and making it even harder

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for smaller chip makers to get a foothold in time to be relevant.

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Now of course, because most of these issues revolve around the x86 architecture,

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chip makers who have focused on other instruction sets have done quite well.

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Qualcomm, you might have heard of them, for example, is a huge force in the mobile space

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with its ARM based chips. And Apple has made headlines recently

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for releasing its non x86 M1 processor,

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which offers very impressive performance for Mac users. But if you're a PC loyalist,

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I wouldn't expect the duopoly to disappear anytime soon.

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But don't worry, at least this red versus blue fight

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shouldn't involve politics or frag grenades.

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Well, that's it for this video. Thanks for watching, guys. Like the video if you liked it.

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Disliked it if you disliked it. Check out our other videos because why not?

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and then we'll be like, oh, we should do a video on that. Oh my gosh.