I have nothing against them personally. On the contrary, I think that for the most part Intel makes VERY GOOD products. The Pentium line of processors did not gain a near monopoly in the CPU market because of Intel's marketing alone.
As for the people (all engineering type) at Intel, all of them I've talked with have been great!
Now if you are asking me whether or not I approve of some of Intel's business practices, the answer there gets more complicated.
I DO NOT like Intel's recent marketing practices.
The first recent thing that bugged me about Intel was back when the P3 came out. The P3 itself was originally only a VERY MINOR update to the P2. The only noteworthy addition was the SSE 1 enhancements and the processor serial number (hated this one). I personally felt that the only thing Intel was doing was to try to trick people into thinking that this was a whole new design. The ads at the time also led you to believe that it (p3) would greatly enhance your Internet experience and would make voice recognition possible, etc, etc, etc. Of course all they were advertising was the possible benefits of SSE enhancements, but they didn't tell you that.
There was also the infamous MTH cover-up, but at least on this one Intel did the honorable thing and gave everybody Rambus Ram. (Which coincidentally actually decreases performance on P3 systems versus SDRAM because of it's very high latency. Intel and Rambus would have you believe the opposite.)
The main thing I don't like recently is the P4 marketing claims, and specifically the word "Netburst." I'll bet you if I asked 50 random people what they thought this refered to and I told them it was associated with the P4 that probably 98% of them would think that owning a P4 processor would "speed up your Internet." The problem is that "netburst" has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet in any way shape or form. No PC processor can change the speed of your "Internet."
Though not the fault of Intel, the p4 itself is really designed to maximize the clock speed that it can attain and most of "netburst's" features are there just to minimize the damage to performance the p4 suffers as a result. Another thing I don't like about the p4 is that the socket it fits in will be changed very soon, and that change was known to be needed the day the first P4s hit the shelf. This leaves current users with no upgrade path at the end of this year.
I should also mention that AMD is not without fault in my eyes. They too have recently done a few things that I don't like:
1. The 750 chipset, called Irongate, was incompatible with GeForce cards at anything other than Agp 1x. AMD took forever to admit to this and never did offer compensation to the victims who suffered hours of bills for PC repair when the problem was unfixable. At least Intel gave everybody expensive Rambus ram.
2. Until the palomino (which just got delayed for no reason other than timing to compete better with Intel) AMD did not include a simple component called a thermal diode. This little device shuts the processor off if it gets too hot. (Say you didn't get the heatsink on correctly.) Intel has had this forever. There is NO REASON this shouldn't be in the Tbirds and Durons (and they DEFINATELY need them with all the heat they can put out). The only reason I see is for Amd to sell more processors to people who burned up there old ones needlessly.
3. The current Tbirds and Durons are FAR too fragile IMO. AMD should have taken more steps to protect the CPU dies. (Heat spreader like the P4s and earlier socket 370 Celerons have.) The only reason is that it probably costs them $.10 less to make the cpu. (Intel does this on the p3 coppermines too though, but they are a little less fragile.)
Hopefully I've cleared it up a little.
