I had two Bulldozers. Bulldozer wasn't competitive at the top end, but I always found Athlon chips to be cheaper than their performance equivalent Intel part. So the fastest AMD chip would be cheaper than the third fastest Intel part. Still a good value. Terrible for AMD's bottom-line though.
Fair enough. I feel like I got decent value out of my Athlon. At the time, it sure seemed like a gross power hog. I suspect I would be shocked by its modest TDP if I went and looked back at specs.
I owned a Pentium 4 as well (oh boy did I save for a long time as a teenager to afford that). It wasn't really as bad as what this article claims. On the other hand, the dual-core parts probably really are that bad.
The article did call out in particular the late generation P4s with the super duper extra long pipeline that simply couldn't keep themselves fed when working with anything but synthetic benchmarks.
Intel was too expensive for me, so I ended up buying a Cyrix => performance (floating point) was terrible in Falcon 3, I was sooo sad - but on the other hand that gave me until today the push to really focus on details before taking a decision => thank you Cyrix for having changed my life hehe.
Nothing to be ashamed of on the cyrix and AMD, both were better price/perf than what you would have bought with the same money from intel. The same can't be said of the P4, which was right in the middle of AMD giving intel a good solid whumping.
For P4 i underestand ( legend says that P3 was faster at the same clock rate and that's why there are no P4 at the same speed as P3). But Cyrix and Buldozer ?