Life is great when you have lots of choices. I mean, who hasn't had a little party in their head
when getting off at a highway exit and seeing two dozen fast food places
vying for your attention, please, Colonel, I'm married.
But this isn't the case in the CPU world
where you basically only have two choices on desktop,
AMD or Intel. So how did this happen?
I mean, with as many computers as there are in the world, do no other companies want a piece of the action?
To understand why there are only two CPU options
we have to go back to the first PC, the original IBM personal computer from 1981.
IBM chose the Intel 8088 CPU to power the machine,
which was based on the x86 instruction set. This ended up being an enormously consequential choice
as the IBM PC exploded in popularity
and pushed lots of its competitors out of the market because it was a versatile, well-built computer
that offered great value for money at the same time. This meant that software developers wanted to write programs
for the IBM PC and compatibles that utilized x86 CPUs,
meaning Intel quickly became a very powerful name
in the microcomputer CPU space. So powerful, in fact,
that they ended up licensing out the x86 architecture to other companies in order to keep up with demand
without having to manufacture x86 chips completely on their own, but still make money.
Ironically, AMD was one of these licensee companies.
And although Intel and AMD obviously remain rivals to this day, AMD still has an x86 license,
which it's used at various times to beat Intel at its own game.
Obviously, their Ryzen lineup is the one currently giving Intel fits,
but this was also true back in the 1990s, when AMD started improving upon the x86 design
and competing directly with Team Blue rather than just being Intel's second source chip supplier.
Although AMD wasn't the only x86 licensee
that tried to make inroads into the market, they did have the knowledge and resources
to become a serious contender, as they were already a publicly traded company
that had multiple chip fabs. Other firms that had access to the x86 architecture
simply didn't compete all that well. One notable example is Sirix,
who tried to go toe-to-toe with Intel's new Pentium lineup in the mid 1990s.
Sirix promised big time performance, but their chips rarely delivered.
And they made an infamous mistake when they decided to focus on integer performance
to compete with the Pentium. At the time, Sirix thought that the trend
of most desktop programs using mostly integer based processing would continue.
But what actually happened is that the low cost but powerful Pentium became so popular,
developers instead coded for its floating point unit.
And if you're confused about the difference between integer and floating point,
you can learn more about it in this video. So Sirix's challenge didn't last very long.
And other potential competitors were typically late to the game
compared to what Teams Red and Blue were offering. Think about how Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel,
partly because Intel chips were simply more powerful per watt.
And of course, the next major innovation in desktop CPUs,
64 bit processing, was developed by none other than AMD,
who subsequently cross-licensed that technology to Intel,
paving the way for the modern era of x86-64 computing,
employed by virtually all modern PCs and making it even harder
for smaller chip makers to get a foothold in time to be relevant.
Now of course, because most of these issues revolve around the x86 architecture,
chip makers who have focused on other instruction sets have done quite well.
Qualcomm, you might have heard of them, for example, is a huge force in the mobile space
with its ARM based chips. And Apple has made headlines recently
for releasing its non x86 M1 processor,
which offers very impressive performance for Mac users. But if you're a PC loyalist,
I wouldn't expect the duopoly to disappear anytime soon.
But don't worry, at least this red versus blue fight
shouldn't involve politics or frag grenades.
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