India Knowledge Wharton has an interview with Vinod Dham who worked at both Intel and AMD.
Dham: For a few months, [AMD's] K6 was the highest performance X86 processor in the world. That got a lot of people excited, both inside and outside Intel. We were able to create what I call a "Pentium killer." It didn't last for too long, because Intel with its might was very quickly able to assemble processors that went beyond the K6. But there was a brief moment of celebration as we created a product that was faster than what Intel was selling. But the biggest thing was not that we built something faster -- that's not really a sustainable advantage. I think the biggest contribution I made was in creating for the first time a legitimate sub-$1,000 PC industry. Today, of course, people take it for granted. You can go out and buy a desktop for $300 or $400. But back in the 1980s and 1990s when I was at Intel, our plan always was to let the price point of the PC stay around $2,000 and continue to deliver into it a higher-performance microprocessor every year -- that is, to give higher value for the same money to the customer. There was really no intention of selling computers that were cheaper -- just selling computers at a high price point where everybody makes a lot of money, and continuing to deliver higher performance, more value and more applications on that computer. What I created with the K6 at AMD was a sub-$1,000 machine. It forced Intel to quickly come up with a makeshift solution to counter us because they were caught totally unprepared for that type of onslaught.
Dham: For a few months, [AMD's] K6 was the highest performance X86 processor in the world. That got a lot of people excited, both inside and outside Intel. We were able to create what I call a "Pentium killer." It didn't last for too long, because Intel with its might was very quickly able to assemble processors that went beyond the K6. But there was a brief moment of celebration as we created a product that was faster than what Intel was selling. But the biggest thing was not that we built something faster -- that's not really a sustainable advantage. I think the biggest contribution I made was in creating for the first time a legitimate sub-$1,000 PC industry. Today, of course, people take it for granted. You can go out and buy a desktop for $300 or $400. But back in the 1980s and 1990s when I was at Intel, our plan always was to let the price point of the PC stay around $2,000 and continue to deliver into it a higher-performance microprocessor every year -- that is, to give higher value for the same money to the customer. There was really no intention of selling computers that were cheaper -- just selling computers at a high price point where everybody makes a lot of money, and continuing to deliver higher performance, more value and more applications on that computer. What I created with the K6 at AMD was a sub-$1,000 machine. It forced Intel to quickly come up with a makeshift solution to counter us because they were caught totally unprepared for that type of onslaught.