[hakfoo]

I wonder if there was also some business sabotage in effect.

It would have been extremely tempting for Intel to pressure motherboard manufacturers with some subtle messages like "Nice AMD750 board, too bad we don't have any more 440BX chips for you."

The Athlon debuted with only like three compatible mainboards, and two of them were minimally rebadged versions of the AMD reference design. Of course, it was still too compelling of a platform to ignore, and everyone got on board soon enough. But if R&D had stayed away from the Athlon market for an extra 6 months or a year, that could manifest in worse board design and optimization for quite a while.