Apple went Bankrupt in the late 1990s??????????????
Not quite.
But they went close - due to confusing the market, and building too much garbage to go along with decent hardware and allowing clones.
ATOM, their GPUs, their GPU drivers, generally hot chips and other questionable endeavors. The fact is Intel has shipped a lot of crap over the years and has been out of tune with the market for some time. Only in the last few years have they gotten their act together with the Core products and an honest effort to address the needs of their customers.
Having built PCs since 1992 and supported customers with them I have had far less trouble with intel products than others.
Sure, the P4 was a bit of a dog performance wise. However it was generally "good enough". It was also the only CPU that really ran excessively hot compared to others. It was a bet on a technological path that didn't pan out. Back in the days before the P4, CPU speeds were increasing every year (typical mid-range clockspeed went from say 300mhz to 1.6ghz in 4 years between 1997 and 2001), unlike today where we've been stuck around the 3-4ghz barrier for well over half a decade.
Intel was expecting to hit 10ghz with that technology and did not foresee process issues that held it back. Unfortunately, as a result the design trade-offs that were made to target 10ghz were a liability.
A P4 that hit 10ghz would have absolutely smoked anything AMD had in the pipeline.
Be that as it may...
More importantly however is that intel can generally make a reliable,
stable chipset. I don't care if intel is 10% slower on benchmarks if it crashes so much LESS often due to not having the chipset issues (the fact that the current core series smoke AMD is just a bonus for me).
I've lost count of the number of bugs, stability issues and general flakiness I have encountered over the years with chipsets made by VIA, SIS, etc.
With intel, the CPU is not necessarily the selling point for me.
The selling point is that I can get an
intel chipset, which is the reference for most other hardware vendors to ensure they are compatibile with.
I suspect this is a major reason (in addition to power consumption) that Apple have been intel exclusive since the x86 switch, also. I also suspect this is why Apple didn't bother with a third party non-intel USB 3 controller. Having dealt with third party USB 3 drivers on PCs, the drivers are often garbage.
For far too long AMD did not make a chipset to go with their CPUs and left production of such to a bunch of companies that shipped garbage. Which is unfortunate, as the K6, Athlon and later were really good CPUs.