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The Quake 3 engine may like the memory transfare, but AMD still beats Intel there.Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:Intel is only good for gaming if you play anything based on Quake III engine, which is pretty memory bus-hungry. However, in everything else AMD beats Intel.
Really? Which benchmark did you read? Anyway, now there's another reason to not regretting my choice sticking with AMD no matter how much FSB clockspeed boasted by Intel.Ace Pace wrote:The Quake 3 engine may like the memory transfare, but AMD still beats Intel there.Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:Intel is only good for gaming if you play anything based on Quake III engine, which is pretty memory bus-hungry. However, in everything else AMD beats Intel.
Things have come a long way since the bad old days of the eighties and early nineties when AMD was essentially producing Intel clones. The architecture of a modern Pentium 4 and the architecture of an Athlon XP/Duron/Sempron differ greatly. AMDs execute more instructions per clock cycle, allowing for similar performance to an Intel part, at a lower clock speed. However, Intel CPUs can move data through memory and in and out of cache a fair bit faster than AMD CPUs can, so an Intel wil own an AMD at tasks requiring high memory bandwidth (such as video and image processing.)Terr Fangbite wrote:For years I have worked with chips from both companies and generally I buy AMD chips over Intel chips. I have no real reason why though, just a matter of preference. What I was wondering is if there is any real difference between the Athlon and Pentium chips and the Duron and Celeron chips.
did you go for a substandard, cheap as possible board, or one of the more top of the line models? i've not had any problems with AMDs high end boards.Arrow Mk84 wrote:I prefer Intel chips. The main reason being several bad experiences I've had with AMD motherboard chipsets (VIA - what a total fuckjob - and SiS). I haven't had trouble with Intel chipset motherboards - everything works with them, no questions asked (the advantage of being the big name in the chipset game).
Also, I love hyperthreading. I tend to do multiple things at once, at work and at home, and having two logical cores compiling programs, or one running a game while another manages some downloads, just kicks ass. Also, if something locks up and won't give back the CPU, the other hyperthread still accepts input, allowing me to kill the offending process. Now, with multiple core chips becoming standard, this advantage won't last too much longer.
Multiple cores won't be out for some time and even then will only be available in the very best CPUs at first.Arrow Mk84 wrote:Also, I love hyperthreading. I tend to do multiple things at once, at work and at home, and having two logical cores compiling programs, or one running a game while another manages some downloads, just kicks ass. Also, if something locks up and won't give back the CPU, the other hyperthread still accepts input, allowing me to kill the offending process. Now, with multiple core chips becoming standard, this advantage won't last too much longer.
I guess it depends on what you consider to be "some time"... both Intel and AMD are expected to demonstrate their dual-cores later this year and release them early next year. They are likely to be expensive, though, due to lower yields per wafer.Multiple cores won't be out for some time and even then will only be available in the very best CPUs at first.
I avoid the cheap route, if at all possible. It always comes back to bite you in the ass.Darth_Zod wrote: did you go for a substandard, cheap as possible board, or one of the more top of the line models? i've not had any problems with AMDs high end boards.
Err, what chipsets are these? I know plenty of people have had issues with VIA chipsets, but the Nforce chipsets have always sounded like winners to me from all the praise I've heard about them.I avoid the cheap route, if at all possible. It always comes back to bite you in the ass.
Anyway, the AMD motherboards I personally owned were Asus boards. At work, back when built our computers, we used Abit boards (and I think an MSI board or two were used). All of these boards are the high-end of the non-server boards. And most of them have had some problem or another, which usually got traced back to the chipset (memory controller and AGP being the most common problems), and most of these boards (including my personal ones) have been shit canned.
The poor quality on those chipsets has put me off from using AMD. Every Intel ship I've used (at home and at work, again) has always run flawlessly.
Arrow said "multiple core chips becoming standard" and I intended to point out that this was not yet the case. I fully expect to see single-core chips still being sold two years from now.I guess it depends on what you consider to be "some time"... both Intel and AMD are expected to demonstrate their dual-cores later this year and release them early next year. They are likely to be expensive, though, due to lower yields per wafer.
These were VIA chipsets and I think a SiS chipset. Its been a while, so I don't remember the model numbers. But this was back in the timeframe from slot K7s to the Thunderbirds.Uraniun235 wrote: Err, what chipsets are these? I know plenty of people have had issues with VIA chipsets, but the Nforce chipsets have always sounded like winners to me from all the praise I've heard about them.
Yes, but I expect to see single core chips primarily being for the low-end market.Arrow said "multiple core chips becoming standard" and I intended to point out that this was not yet the case. I fully expect to see single-core chips still being sold two years from now.
I am a programmer, and I have to ask you: What the fuck are you talking about??! Every major game engine is multithreaded. I remember looking at the thread count for UT2k4 a while ago, and it was running 11 threads during one game (use the task manager to view your thread count for each process). Typically, you have threads for handling scene traversal/submitting data to the graphics card, AI, Physics, Input, Networking and Script execution. If you tried to run these things in a single thread, your game would crawl. Executing these threads on any multicore CPU will give you a nice speed boost (now, running across multiple CPUs won't, thanks to bus speed).Ace Pace wrote:
Intel is going way wrong with their duel core plans, starting from desktop and mobile and going to servers, which as any programmer will probebly tell you, is fucking stupid, as Servers are the platform which will benefit the most from an added core.
Gamers won't enjoy the extra core, because very few games are multi-threaded.
Not to mention heat, the first Intel CPU's will be basicly 2 presscott-2 cores stuck together with no inter-connection. Now imagine the heat from 2! prescotts....
VIA had some bad years, but every review says their new chipsets are rock solid.Arrow Mk84 wrote:
These were VIA chipsets and I think a SiS chipset. Its been a while, so I don't remember the model numbers. But this was back in the timeframe from slot K7s to the Thunderbirds.
But, I have been considering an Nforce solution for my next computer (which I'll probably be building at year's end).
Do you understand the differance from a game(UT2K4) made by many of the top programmers in the games industry, and the average game?I am a programmer, and I have to ask you: What the fuck are you talking about??! Every major game engine is multithreaded. I remember looking at the thread count for UT2k4 a while ago, and it was running 11 threads during one game (use the task manager to view your thread count for each process). Typically, you have threads for handling scene traversal/submitting data to the graphics card, AI, Physics, Input, Networking and Script execution. If you tried to run these things in a single thread, your game would crawl. Executing these threads on any multicore CPU will give you a nice speed boost (now, running across multiple CPUs won't, thanks to bus speed).
Define average. Because if average is something running on the Quake 3, Unreal 2, or some other middle of the road engine, I'm very sure they're all multithreaded (hell, the Q3 engine could take advantage of mutliple CPUs).Ace Pace wrote: Do you understand the differance from a game(UT2K4) made by many of the top programmers in the games industry, and the average game?
While top games like UT and HL2 are multi-threaded, look at the average game.
A game capable of running on multiple CPUs or cores is the exception to the rule. Yes, there are a few games that do it but the meat of the program seems to remain on a single core. Networking, sound, input and whatnot are not exactly the most CPU intensive tasks.Arrow Mk84 wrote:Define average. Because if average is something running on the Quake 3, Unreal 2, or some other middle of the road engine, I'm very sure they're all multithreaded (hell, the Q3 engine could take advantage of mutliple CPUs).
Uh, no, multithreading properly is hard, especially for something like a game--nevermind if you want a nice performance boost over multiple cores. Why else do so few programs use it? Not all solutions lend themselves to parallism.Also, it doesn't take a genius to use threads. Any decent programmer can use them and avoid deadlocks and races. How efficient the implementation ends up being is another matter.
Which is why I said it could take advantage of multiple cores, and not that every game uses it.phongn wrote: A game capable of running on multiple CPUs or cores is the exception to the rule. Yes, there are a few games that do it but the meat of the program seems to remain on a single core. Networking, sound, input and whatnot are not exactly the most CPU intensive tasks.
First of all, multithreading is more of an issue of design than anything else. Spawning threads and using mutexs is pretty simple to code. If your design is piss poor, yes, you're going to have a bitch of a time making your multithreaded engine work. But if your tasks are grouped together in a logical fashion, and have a defined communication mechanism for moving data to your threads and between threads, then you'll have fairly smooth sailing when you code it.Uh, no, multithreading properly is hard, especially for something like a game--nevermind if you want a nice performance boost over multiple cores. Why else do so few programs use it? Not all solutions lend themselves to parallism.
