Note, when I say &quot;blew Intel out of the water&quot;, I&#x27;m talking only about AMD64 K8.<p>As I understand it, this was true for &quot;Big Iron&quot; AMD64 sales, for one thing, AMD had a whole year&#x27;s head start where they were the only ones selling it, and then Intel played catch up for a long time.  For multi-chip machines, not until Intel had their own version of the Hypertransport + local memory controller architecture.<p>I believe what you&#x27;re talking about only happened in consumer grade chips, although I know HP for instance found a way to sell AMD based consumer systems, my parents bought one in 2004-5.