Quad-Core CPU - Intel or AMD

[Count Chocula]

I stand corrected.

[Stark]

Don't worry, you don't have to apologise for for making hilariously baseless claims from fictional characters with no evidence in a thread full of IT professionals.

[Starglider]

From what I understand, my IT guy's perspective on it was not higher processing speed benchmarks, but his own experience on the stability of AMD vs. Intel quad cores with 64-bit systems in both standalone and network configurations. In his words, the Intel cores run Vista, 64bit XP, 64bit Office and CAD programs faster and are more stable. Intel's processors seem to handle multithreading tasks better than AMD's cores, despite AMD's faster benchmark speeds.

Oh well I run lots of heavy computing tasks on both Opterons and Xeon servers, most of which I wrote myself using inline assembler for the most compute intensive parts, and in my experience the AMD chips are totally awesome. Since that's first hand experience vs your second hand experience I win!

Oh wait, 'awesome' is a worthlessly subjective judgement? Are you saying that maybe I am pulling an opinion out of my ass, one horribly biased by observer selection effects and other preconceptions?

AMD chips are in general just as reliable as Intel ones. Both manufacturers have had the occasional run of defective chips and they all have lots of low-level errata, but in general, they're both highly reliable at the hardware level. Any difference in failure rates is due to some other problem, most likely software or user incompetence but possibly motherboards. AMD chips are frequently slightly slower on applications than they appear in synthetic benchmarks, because the applications are specifically optimised for Intel chips, whereas the benchmarks are optimised for both. This is not an issue if you use high quality software (e.g. Apache vs Microsoft-pile-of-crap I mean MS-IIS). Needless to say they run Vista (and other versions of Windows) completely stably, and if you have stability problems (on a newish system) they are probably a driver issue.

Anyway, the i5 line just came out and it has fairly amazing price/performance, so it's difficult to make an argument for AMD right now, in a new-build system. I think 'budget overclocker' is the only place they're still ahead.

[phongn]

Since when was IIS crap?

[Starglider]

Since when was IIS crap?

Microsoft software always starts awful, so the appropriate question would be 'when did IIS stop being crap?'

In fairness though open source software has an inherent advantage on support for less-popular platforms. Aside from the optimisation benefit of locally compiling the binaries, all the really popular OS projects have crazy people trying to port them to PowerPC, SPARC, ARM, MIPS, Z80s embedded in toasters etc. Meanwhile Microsoft discontinued NT for PPC back in 1997.

[phongn]

Microsoft software always starts awful, so the appropriate question would be 'when did IIS stop being crap?'

Probably around IIS6?

Meanwhile Microsoft discontinued NT for PPC back in 1997.

Supposedly the Alpha port was maintained until about 2000 (when Compaq abandoned it).

[Crayz9000]

ITT we learn Crayz9000 can't change themes.

Are you kidding? Changing themes is usually the first thing I do. Most shee^H^H^H^H users, however, do not know how to. There is this little something called "working out of the box", which traditionally Microsoft has been very, very bad at, and shows very little sign of really changing soon.

On the other hand, Apple has "working out of the box" nailed down tighter than the lid on Jimmy Hoffa's coffin. But I digress.

That said Win7 explodes a little bit when you change themes.

Cue 'OMG TEH TASKBAR IS RUINZ' discussion.

PS why doesn't Win7 have an expose button? way better than 'giant annoying preview' function.

Yeah, there's that too...

Frankly, I'm still quite happy with my combo of Ubuntu for 99% of my work and XP for games only (although the one I usually play the most frequently is Unreal Tournament, which actually gets higher framerates on Ubuntu than it did on XP). Plus, with things like VirtualBox, I don't even have to reboot... but I'm digressing again. What were we talking about?

Oh, right, Intel vs AMD. Go for whichever one gives you a better deal... frankly, I've been finding that the most critical thing in most systems now is the mainboard. Make sure you get a good one, with a reliable chipset and one that's not skimping on features.

[Starglider]

Oh, right, Intel vs AMD. Go for whichever one gives you a better deal...

Having just praised the i5, I'd note that AMD just launched the Athlon II X4 for $99. A (reasonably fast) quad core processor... for under $100. It works with cheap AM3 motherboards too, so if you are making a budget PC (<$300 not including monitor) that's probably unbeatable value.

frankly, I've been finding that the most critical thing in most systems now is the mainboard. Make sure you get a good one, with a reliable chipset and one that's not skimping on features.

Probably true for 'mainstream' desktops, but a little less so for the i5 now that the (main) PCI-Express interface is on the CPU, not the chipset. When CPUs with integrated GPUs start coming out next year, the scope for performance/reliability impact from the chipset will decline even further.