Giant killing: The 64-bit desktop Now there's the smell of change in the air. AMD is about to release the Hammer series of processors. It's the first real step ahead of the game that any of Intel's competitors have ever made. Oh, there have been other innovators; Transmeta with its Crusoe processors; NEC with its V20 and V30 all those years ago. But Intel always set the standard by which those processors were created.
AMD has come up with something new in the form of x86-64. It means, for the first time since the early 80s, Intel has found itself following instead of leading. It has spent so much time concentrating on the Itanium as their future that it could be its undoing