In the 386 days, AMD-made CPUs ran at higher clock speed than Intel's owns.
Same with 486: AMD shipped DX4/120, while Intel limited itselft to 100.
In the Pentium days, AMD's K6 did have Intel's chips for breakfast except on FPU computations, and until the Pentium II came out.
From the day the original K7 Athlon came out to the day it was renamed 'Sempron', Intel lost at ALL FPU and IPC benches against AMD. It even lost the Gigahertz race to AMD!
From the day the original Opteron came out, to the day Intel finally got the Core2 out, AMD had Intel beaten everywhere performance wise.
That's, like, 15 years of pure performance domination! But, of course, Intel has the OEM deals. And now, a processor that performs better than AMD, by using...
- 64-bit: ah, AMD actually created that.
- power management: ah, AMD actually started that with the HLT instruction in 386SXL. Intel caught up eventually, and then got ahead - but AMD is close.
- multicore: ah, AMD had the dual core Operon out first. And a real quad core too. And a tricore, too.
- integrated RAM controller: AMD had it first on the Opteron.
- virtualization tech: AMD had started it on the K8. AMD-V adds a few instructions to complete.
- security: PAE and NX are available on all K8 and later chips.
Intel may have a stronger R&D laboratory, a much larger marketing fund, and much better weight on the OEMs, but AMD sure wasn't that far behind performance-wise for quite some time, and has a tendency to invent stuff first.
You just have to see how Intel pissed their pants when, threatening to revoke AMD's x86 licence, AMD counterattacked by revoking Intel's x86-64, IMC, serial bus licence...
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