This happened to Intel with Athlon and Opteron back in the early 2000s. Intel came back swinging pretty fast. They might this time too. In any case the consumer wins. Intel needed a swift kick in the butt.
They came back fast by bribing OEMs to only sell Intel and were fined for it by the EU because it was an antitrust violation. It's unlikely they can repeat that.
Intel had seriously better more reliable hardware at that point. You couldn't pay me to buy AMD after all the hardware I lost to thermal issues.
HN likes to believe that AMD is and was always the best if only Intel hadn't used monopoly tactics but the reality is that it's not as simple as that.
That being said, I'm truly happy with what AMD is delivering now and I hope they can sustain it for years to come. My next workstation is probably going to be AMD for sure.
As for Intel swinging back, if they had something ready, I believe they woulnd't have allowed a competitor to get close and surpass them like AMD is doing. Intel has gone through so many boring architecture at this point that I doubt it's just "strategy" on their part. They must be really struggling to deliver something competitive now.
Or maybe if Intel wasn't a monopoly AMD could've solved the heat issues better and faster. It's hard to play fair and win when the other one is cheating.
Actually, that's proof that the Athlon will still do the correct thing all the way to its death, whereas the Pentium crashed and thus also saved itself. Also, the P4 has more thermal mass due to its heatspreader, and therefore can sustain non-HSF operation longer.
Motherboards/CPUs in those days didn't really have thermal shutdown failsafes, in fact, we had to rely on the motherboard to report CPU temperatures, there weren't any built into the CPU itself. What we did have was shutdown on CPU-fan fail.
