The big sea change that AMD caused is that 64-bit processors are now a commodity. Intel COULD have done that without AMD, but I doubt that they WOULD have if AMD hadn't essentially forced their hand.
And it's so ironic that people who were not married to x86 architectures enjoyed 64-bit computing a full decade before it became mainstream (as in "you could order a box from Dell")...
And that Sun had one of the first full implementations (I think MIPS got there first).
