[hga]

It's even worse than you enumerate: echoing lsc and his mention of "stunningly inefficient and expensive rambus ram", the highest level architects at Intel were petrified by DRAM size, I think it was, concerns, and ordered some stunningly stupid things that at least in some cases the engineers under them knew wouldn't work. Intel had not one, but two *1 million part recalls", one of which was for motherboards just before OEMs were going to start shipping.

And AMD, which only occasionally manages this, did everything right for a short period of time with their K8 microarchitecture (P6 style, 64 bits, HyperTransport plus on-chip memory controller) while Intel was screwing up so much.

I wonder how history would have gone if they hadn't then taken 2.5 years to start delivering the successor K10 microarchitecture, and another half a year to deliver one that didn't have a screwed up TLB. Intel is not the sort of adversary you can just give three years to get its act together, especially with their historical manufacturing prowess keeping them at least a process node ahead of you (and pretty much everyone else?).