This despite the fact that the original introduction of the K7 came with prices far in excess of Intels and now the situation has truly reversed as competition grows. The question is, how long will it be before Intel catches on (if ever, they have a history of high prices). Current score:- AMD [2] = INTEL [1].

Stability

The saying goes that Intel is better because it's well supported and everything runs with it, so you'd naturally assume that stability would be in their pockets as well. Yet surprisingly it isn't, unlike past designs AMD have somehow developed a super stable design with their K7, almost remarkably so. Previously my Win98 based Intel systems would crash perhaps at least once a day. Not uncommon when you have 40Gbs of space, 200 apps and 30 odd games installed along with a ton of graphics, sound and multimedia hardware.

Yet the Athlon based (others are varying coppermines) systems we have crash perhaps once every two weeks, why? We have no idea. I've tried system after system and haven't re-installed Windows98 for a full year because it's so stable under the K7. You'd have expected problems by now, the internal hardware has changed at least three times before completely (Motherboards, CPUs.. everything). Yet the K7 is the most stable chip we have EVER seen.

Three of our friendly participants who helped us research this article agree, they were all tech nuts with the latest from both sides of the war and found AMD's K7 to be the most stable. So quite what has happened between the K6-2/3 and the K7 is anybody's guess because the K6's were as unstable as Intel's. Current score:- AMD [3] = INTEL [1].

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