Core Architecture was technologically superior to every thing available at the time and AMD could not close the gap in performance for years to come.
As I said before in another thread, most of AMD's failures were due to their own laziness and poor business sense. Intel was always a leader in their own segment (x86 CPUs) and not because they unfairly destroyed AMD. Companies like AMD and a couple of dozen others built their business on making clones/fakes of Intel Processors some with licenses and without. This all changed after Pentium came into the picture and most of the other companies making Intel clones had to stop. AMD managed to survive in the market by implementing their own chips instead of just reverse engineering and cloning Intel chips. In the late 90's and early 2000's, AMD chips were used by assemblers to defraud customers by charging for Original Intel chips and installing AMD Cyrix chips instead. From that stage, they reached their peak with the Athlon 64 architecture which sold very well. But in next 2 years they started taking advantage of their dominant position and over priced their subsequent generations of chips till the Core 2 architecture caught them completely off guard and has since not been able to compete toe to toe till Ryzen.
As for the discount fiasco, nobody was stopping AMD from doing the same, but because AMD was an underdog and Intel was at the top of the market, they utilized the Anti-monopoly laws to prevent Intel from selling their CPU's at a lower cost than them. If AMD were doing the same thing (predatory pricing and massive discounts), nobody would have given it a second look. Its just the law punishing Intel for not giving a handicap to the underdog.
I agree to most of the points you mentioned but not all.
AMD was the one who brought 64bit instruction set to the consumer market which first Intel cloned and later cross licensed.
AMD was the the first processor manufacturing company which brought dualcore processor first to the consumer market which later intel copied and launched the Core 2 Duo series.
So saying that AMD always copied Intel and didnt invent anything is wrong.
And in the past every processor manufacturing company was copying each other, later on when they start suing each other, they started cross licensing technologies.
If AMD wouldnt have been there in the market, we would have been paying exorbitant prices for the Intel CPUs (which we are already paying for Intel CPUs IMO) and Nvidia GPUs which people enjoy having in their rigs these days.
Just imagine a market without competition.
People who criticize AMD wouldnt have been criticizing them, if Intel processors had starting prices of $1000 or so, they forget that AMD is the only competitor which is keeping Intel in check.
Just having the presence of AMD in the market is so beneficial for the consumers.
AMD always tried to provide the best value to the consumers for every dollar spent on their products. AMD Ryzen processor still kick (Intel's) a$$ when it comes to price performance ratio.
So no matter how far Intel and Nvidia have brought the processing power of CPUs & GPUs, i would still support the underdog AMD so that we can have processors and GPUs in our rigs at affordable prices.
