- Tom’s Hardware was founded in 1996 and gained early fame with a controversial pre-release review of the Intel Pentium II, leading to Intel backing down after legal threats.
- The late 1990s saw AMD challenge Intel with the K6 and Athlon (K7), culminating in the 1 GHz milestone and the Pentium III 1.13 GHz recall due to stability issues.
- In the early 2000s, Intel’s Pentium 4 (NetBurst) dominated clock speeds, but AMD’s Athlon XP and later Athlon 64 proved that performance isn't just about raw frequency.
- The introduction of dual-core CPUs (AMD Athlon 64 X2 and Intel Core 2 Duo) shifted focus to multi-threading, with Intel’s Core 2 Duo marking a major turnaround.