Since the introduction of its K8 architecture in 2003, AMD has benefited from almost unprecedented success. This situation isn’t all that surprising to the general public, a market for which the K6 and the K7 had already instilled a certain credibility.

However, there was some shock in the professional market, where up until now Intel had reigned supreme. With this change a new market opened up to AMD where the volumes may have been sparse but the margins considerable. All was well for the Sunnyvale firm and it wasn’t the competition with multiple derivations of the Netburst architecture that was going to push the company to the state it’s in now.

This situation did see AMD slow down somewhat; the modifications to the K8 architecture are still largely incremental, apart from certain adjustments to the cache and the integrated memory controller, the architecture has been relatively unchanged since its debut. Of course, in between these small updates we had the appearance of dual-core processors but even then there were few changes to the K8 architecture. This leaves the door wide open for Intel to take the lead with regards performance.

This was particularly easy given the fact that Intel already possessed a modern architecture, a result of the major modifications brought to the P6 and which had itself known enormous success in the laptop market.

After a new series of improvements, the Core 2 architecture was born and, since its introduction a year ago, the situation was gradually degraded for AMD. AMD, beaten on the grounds of pure performance, then had to cut down on prices to remain in any way competitive.

Combined with a complicated fusion with ATI, business seems to be off to a bad start for AMD. The last hope seems to be the K10 architecture, combining 4 cores on one chip and the amelioration of the internal architecture of the cores. Will the first real update since the introduction of the K8 be sufficient to battle against the ogre that is Intel’s Core 2? Let’s not forget that Penryn, the update of the Core 2 is already inbound.