Why buy AMD?

First benchmarks are in, and it seems that Intel is still king of the hill at the very highest end, at least in single core performance which still seems to be major selling point, especially in gaming. In heavily multithreaded loads AMD seems to win out, just because they have more cores on the chips, but so far games are not really utilizing multiple cores. Ah well. Not exactly surprising.

I'd still suggest that you go for AMD if you can choose. I certainly can - I am not looking for the very highest end gaming experience, but for software stuff high thread count surely helps (make -j8 ...). But not just because AMD is underdog here - because there must be an underdog. If a single company has a monopoly, at any field, the general public always loses.

Did you notice how Intel dropped their prices massively immediately after AMD's launch?  If AMD wasn't around that definitely wouldn't have happened. On the contrary, prices would by even higher.

As long as AMD is alive and kicking, Intel can't extort customers for every last cent they have as the customers will just slip away. But if AMD were to die... Well, for everyone's sake I hope that will not happen. If you think high-end Intel CPUs are expensive, the cost is nothing compared to what the prices would be if AMD weren't here to keep them at bay.

So do support AMD, if possible. It's best for everyone (except Intel and their stockholders) that they remain viable competitor for Intel.