We believe that competition is good. Competition is the principal driving force for progress in a free and open market. Competition is the natural state of affairs in a market economy. There is no monopoly on good ideas, and innovation occurs more rapidly, with more widely distributed benefits, in a competitive environment. In the 1980s, there were as many as 15 competitors, licensed or otherwise, building microprocessors based on the x86 instruction set pioneered by Intel.
Today there are only two.
AMD is the only surviving challenger to the company that dominates the market for the most critical component of a personal computer. Our dream is to be a formidable competitor in the microprocessor sector, delivering better value to our customers with higher-performance products based on better ideas. Introduced the following year, the AMD-K5 processor demonstrated total software compatibility with the Microsoft Windows operating system and all the applications software running under it. The introduction of the AMD-K5 processor served notice that there would be real competition in the microprocessor arena. Technology and a 100-megahertz system bus.