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Well... Im not gonna buy cpu's based on which company i personally think is better. Ill buy the better CPU, as always. I think Intel is the best company, i dont like following the crowd, and ive simply always used Intels (until 2004).


Non peformance related firsts for Intel:

1. Intel introduced IHS's to the FCPGA package cpu's. Big whoop? Well yes actually, otherwise you end up with weak crap like the athlon xp, wouldnt survive a light prod with anything.

2. They had overheating protection before AMD, toms first ever video seriously impressed me, that the pentium 4 2ghz ran a game with no heatsink or fan, that was pretty amazing.

3. First to have LGA socket CPU's, no more broken pins for the consumer.


As for performance & architectures, Intel has been the performance leader more than AMD has in the last 10 years, theyve had the Penitum I//Penitum II//Pentium III to some extent until the athlon came along, and the Pentiun IV B/C revisions, have all been leaders in performance overall.

Major architectures for Intel:

P6 - From the pentium PRO to the core DUO today, this is a pretty impressive lifespan for somthing that was though up back in the mid 90's. AMD's equivilent K6 is dead and will most likely remain that way.

Netburst - Yea ok some revisions of netburst sucked, namely wilamette & prescott. Wilamette wouldnt have been all that bad if it wasent for the RDRAM which it got stuck with, expensive and no upgrade path. It was decent performance wise. Prescott basicaly has shown this architecture has reached its limits, its been a 50/50 run for netbust, about half of its lifespan its spent as the performance leader and the favoured CPU. Not bad... Could be worse, could be the K5, or K6, spending its life as an underdog.

Major architectures for AMD:

K7 - No idea where they pulled this from, but its lucky it didnt suck, as everything from 1999? when it was introduced till today has been based off of it. This is AMD's answer to the P6 architecture. The current amd cpu's still have the original executon core present on the pluto slot 1 athlon. Not sure if this applies to the K8, but i think it does. It should since the K8 is just a K7 with an integrated memory controller, not to knock it, its a fantastic cpu but thats all it is.

So overall Intel have done more in the past 10 years than AMD have. Although credit where its due, AMD were the only ones to compete with Intel on any significant level, since cyrix was bought by VIA, and IDT went to who knows... Every other cpu company either got bought over, left the buisness or simply have such a small market share noone even cares anymore. Transmeta anyone? So kudos to AMD for pulling off what they have with significantly less resources than Intel.
 
Originally posted by: jazzboy
Sorry but this is rediculous. I'm not going to be "pledging" support to anyone. I'll buy the best bang for the buck when the time comes.

It's getting really sad nowadays as it's obviously become fashionable to bash the leader ("they never do anything right and/or are a monopoly") and support the underdog ("they can't do wrong").

I know that AMD are certainly competitive - their standard A64s are equal or better than Intel's P4 and their A64 X2s definitely beat Intel's PD. But look at the prices AMD charge - apart from Intel's Extreme Edition dual cores, AMD charges more compared to rivaling Intel dual cores. When it was AXP vs Northwood I remember people saying that AMD would never be so cruel to charge lots for their CPUs if they were leading.

And lets not forget that, thanks to AMD, computers are staying on nice-n-outdated x86 instead of the better IA-64 that Intel proposed. Many computer experts have always said that IA-64 was going to be better. But thanks to AMD's unwillingness to look at IA-64 (or something else) we'll now very likely have processors which are slower than what we could have had.

Sorry but to me, AMD are not the 'nice' company that people make it out to be. They will be fine, there's no need to do any of this "pledging alliance" to them. They've been in much worse situations before and pulled through just fine.

In my view, saying that you're going to purchase an AMD chip just because they're the underdog is silly and makes you look as silly as Mac "Steve Jobs is god" fanboys.
Click to expand...



Actually ur right about one thing and thats is that IA-64 would have blown x86 out the water, no more register renaming and the artificial limit on registers.

But what ur wrong on is "how" intel was introducing IA-64, it was their intension to take amd out of the market, as if IA-64 took off amd would not be allowed to use it.
Anyways we are stuck with x86 for a long time for now.


ANyways i dont follow amd or intel, i follow the best cpu u can possibly get at the time, ie Northwood over Axp(which was a sucky hot crap, yes i hate athlon xp's, donno why never had one before now in my random comp i made) and Athlon 64 over prescot (still think northwood is better for general purpose over single core a64, with HT and stuff it makes a HUGE difference for me) and the X2 rules all at the moment.

I think it rediculous to follow a company, i mean if a company did something for me, (ie give me free stuff) sure i would follow them as long as i kept getting free stuff (lol poor student 😛)


 
Cyrix for Life!

Seriously, I just buy what performs best at the level I want to spend at the time. Yeah, I can appreciate AMD more currently, because it has been a real case of the underdog coming back from the bottom of the barrel to overtake the big corporation, I'm always in favor of that, but if Conroe is all that and a bag of chips, and it's still at the top when I decide to upgrade next time, I'd go Intel. I currently have an Opty 165 running at 2.8GHz, so I dunno that I'll need to upgrade anytime soon tho. When it's all said and done, having both companies scratching to retain the top slot for more than 6 months is good for us, since it keeps them competitive and keeps pricing in check.

So I guess I pledge my loyalty to fair competitive practices from whoever runs the best CPU. God knows, we've never gotten it in the OS market.
 
Originally posted by: Soviet
Well... Im not gonna buy cpu's based on which company i personally think is better. Ill buy the better CPU, as always. I think Intel is the best company, i dont like following the crowd, and ive simply always used Intels (until 2004).


Non peformance related firsts for Intel:

1. Intel introduced IHS's to the FCPGA package cpu's. Big whoop? Well yes actually, otherwise you end up with weak crap like the athlon xp, wouldnt survive a light prod with anything.

2. They had overheating protection before AMD, toms first ever video seriously impressed me, that the pentium 4 2ghz ran a game with no heatsink or fan, that was pretty amazing.

3. First to have LGA socket CPU's, no more broken pins for the consumer.


As for performance & architectures, Intel has been the performance leader more than AMD has in the last 10 years, theyve had the Penitum I//Penitum II//Pentium III to some extent until the athlon came along, and the Pentiun IV B/C revisions, have all been leaders in performance overall.

Major architectures for Intel:

P6 - From the pentium PRO to the core DUO today, this is a pretty impressive lifespan for somthing that was though up back in the mid 90's. AMD's equivilent K6 is dead and will most likely remain that way.

Netburst - Yea ok some revisions of netburst sucked, namely wilamette & prescott. Wilamette wouldnt have been all that bad if it wasent for the RDRAM which it got stuck with, expensive and no upgrade path. It was decent performance wise. Prescott basicaly has shown this architecture has reached its limits, its been a 50/50 run for netbust, about half of its lifespan its spent as the performance leader and the favoured CPU. Not bad... Could be worse, could be the K5, or K6, spending its life as an underdog.

Major architectures for AMD:

K7 - No idea where they pulled this from, but its lucky it didnt suck, as everything from 1999? when it was introduced till today has been based off of it. This is AMD's answer to the P6 architecture. The current amd cpu's still have the original executon core present on the pluto slot 1 athlon. Not sure if this applies to the K8, but i think it does. It should since the K8 is just a K7 with an integrated memory controller, not to knock it, its a fantastic cpu but thats all it is.

So overall Intel have done more in the past 10 years than AMD have. Although credit where its due, AMD were the only ones to compete with Intel on any significant level, since cyrix was bought by VIA, and IDT went to who knows... Every other cpu company either got bought over, left the buisness or simply have such a small market share noone even cares anymore. Transmeta anyone? So kudos to AMD for pulling off what they have with significantly less resources than Intel.
Click to expand...

Let's see....
3. I believe the LGA socket was introduced more for electrical reasons than for broken pins. Anyhow, supposendly LGA socket pins break slightly easier, but the motherboard is usually cheaper to replace than the cpu at this point

P6 - That's a pretty big stretch saying they kept it all the way to core duo. It underwent several major revisions throughout, and you could just as easily say the Pentium 4 is also a P6 core at heart. With the Pentium 3 they integrated the cache on die, the Pentium M's saw a significant overhaul and recieved most of the additions the P4 was given over the P3, minus the extended pipeline length. (and even still, it was slightly extended)

Netburst sucked for two out of its three revisions, and only the Northwood B's and C's were able to regain the performance lead.
The K5 was AMD's first self developed cpu, don't think it was designed to be a performance leader though it did win quite a few benchmarks prior to the introduction of the Pentium Pro.
The K6 was a design acquired when AMD bought NextGen, who I believe did a lot of the research for modern cpu design as well. I believe it actually could take integer based benchmarks, and 3dnow could bring it on par with a Pentium 2. (the k6-3, though stupidly expensive to produce for the time, I think actually won most of its benchmarks...but I think it also came out after the athlon and didn't even scale as well as the k6-2)
The K7 was a combination of the K6 design expertise and what AMD pulled from the defunct DEC Alpha team. The core was quite advanced, the memory bus was quite advanced (And well suited for multi cpu systems), but AMD has always largely trailed Intel in cache design.

But yes, Intel has done a heck of a lot more than AMD has done, Intel is essentially the PC market and has the most advanced fab facilities in the world, AMD is little more than a cpu manufactuer, though they are trying to become more. AMD may be a much smaller company, but they only focus on one thing, and even their multiple cpu lines are all based on that one design.
(Geode, Turion, Opteron, Athlon 64, etc have almost no architectural difference from each other...ok, geode does, that's a renamed athlon xp, but amd does a lot less work for multiple cpu lines than intel does...or maybe amd just designs more cautiously and with more forethought and planning, the athlon core from the start was designed for multi cpu systems, and by sticking with one advanced core for so long it allows everything else to catch up and make it easier to implement additional things onto the core...on the other hand, the core is now decidely dated when compared to conroe)

Actually ur right about one thing and thats is that IA-64 would have blown x86 out the water, no more register renaming and the artificial limit on registers.
Click to expand...

I'm not so sure about that, considering how Itanium has been out for years and in most things offers horrible performance. Not just in x86 tasks, but in native tasks it can only do well in very specific benchmarks. Itanium (and presumebly IA-64) are too compiler/programmer dependent to give decent performance in most tasks.
Also, IA-64 would not eliminate register renaming and the artificial limit on registers, it would just reduce those problems, every cpu design has to deal with those as the core expands beyond the capabilities of the original instruction set.
And there's no way you can say how much of a performance boost switching instruction sets would give. It's not let x86 is completely crappy, it was design by a large team of competent engineers and has been added to, plus it's been largely decoupled from the actual cpu cores. It also tends to be more memory (and thus cache) efficient than other architectures (and significantly harder to write assembly for). There's definetely a lot of room for improvement, but there's no telling how much performance boost would result from that.

ANyways i dont follow amd or intel, i follow the best cpu u can possibly get at the time, ie Northwood over Axp(which was a sucky hot crap, yes i hate athlon xp's, donno why never had one before now in my random comp i made) and Athlon 64 over prescot (still think northwood is better for general purpose over single core a64, with HT and stuff it makes a HUGE difference for me) and the X2 rules all at the moment.
Click to expand...

Athlon XPs weren't that hot, they just didn't have any sort of idling so they pretty much always ran at max temp. Prescotts idle about the same, and then get much hotter when they're doing stuff.
A northwood, even with hyperthreading, will get beat in multitasking by the higher clocked Athlon 64s. Northwood did cap out at 3.2ghz.


Anyhow, my next cpu purchase will probably be a Conroe, though only if there's software there to drive the purchase. I'm still on an athlon xp and in the past 3 years haven't really found any reason to upgrade. Sure, the net performance has doubled almost exactly (counting athlon 64s, higher speeds, and dual core), but there's nothing out there to make use of the performance. Nothing gamewise anyway, and anything else I do on my computer so far is fine with an athlon xp.
 
The K8 is far more then just a K7 revision, yes they use a lot of the same hardware but what new CPU revision does not?? the P4M uses the execution engine from the P3. AMD for the last 5 years have been designing low cost, low power, high efficiency and very fast processors. In my opinion, AMD's innovation in the last years have been substantial.
 
OP has a point though people. THough you should get bang for the buck, you have to realize if AMD falters you'll be being $1000 for mid range cpu's 🙂

SO not it isn't fanboyism its long sighted fiscal rationalism.
 
Meh, I'm not supporting either. I buy whatever is the best chip under $200 at the time that has good overclocking headroom.
 
My support goes to CPU maker who can process the most threads in a single chip as many of programs I write are heavily mult threaded .
 
I'm not so sure about that, considering how Itanium has been out for years and in most things offers horrible performance. Not just in x86 tasks, but in native tasks it can only do well in very specific benchmarks. Itanium (and presumebly IA-64) are too compiler/programmer dependent to give decent performance in most tasks.
Click to expand...

Not if u make it RISC type processor, but to the point IA-64 has 64 general purpose registers avalable to one program at a time, while in x86 u only have 8 to deal with. I havent looked at IA-64 much but from the few programers etc i talked to they all agree that it would be better.


Athlon XPs weren't that hot, they just didn't have any sort of idling so they pretty much always ran at max temp. Prescotts idle about the same, and then get much hotter when they're doing stuff.
A northwood, even with hyperthreading, will get beat in multitasking by the higher clocked Athlon 64s. Northwood did cap out at 3.2ghz.
Click to expand...

And yea i just found out that fact from experiance, lol my 1700+ Xp.

Here i'm not speculating, i've owned a 3.2ghz p4 northwood, and a A64 3200+ at 2.5ghz, sure in games, encoding and the lot the A64 was faster, but when it came to just general multitasking the northwood was far better than the athlon 64, ie i didn't have the whole comp reduced to a crawl when starting trillian, or when someone sent me a message while i was playing a game etc.
By the way Northwoods caped out at 3.4ghz 😛
 
AMD cpu is always cheaper than Intel. I wanted to buy Intel P4 3.6GHz (I am hoping AMD A64 3500+ is fastest than Intel P4) but it costs more than A64 3500+ so my money comes first.
 
Originally posted by: Soviet
...
So overall Intel have done more in the past 10 years than AMD have.
...
Click to expand...

This may or may not be true, but your descriptions and examples are far, infact very far form being anywhere near complete for either company.

With more reasearch, I think you might be very surprized at some of the things AMD (and Intel) have brought to the table.

Back on topic, I have to agree on price vs. performance (never really cared for the term bang for the buck).
 
Originally posted by: justly
Originally posted by: Soviet
...
So overall Intel have done more in the past 10 years than AMD have.
...
Click to expand...

This may or may not be true, but your descriptions and examples are far, infact very far form being anywhere near complete for either company.

With more reasearch, I think you might be very surprized at some of the things AMD (and Intel) have brought to the table.

Back on topic, I have to agree on price vs. performance (never really cared for the term bang for the buck).
Click to expand...

I didnt feel like writing a book 😛
 
Originally posted by: Soviet
Originally posted by: justly
Originally posted by: Soviet
...
So overall Intel have done more in the past 10 years than AMD have.
...
Click to expand...

This may or may not be true, but your descriptions and examples are far, infact very far form being anywhere near complete for either company.

With more reasearch, I think you might be very surprized at some of the things AMD (and Intel) have brought to the table.

Back on topic, I have to agree on price vs. performance (never really cared for the term bang for the buck).
Click to expand...

I didnt feel like writing a book 😛
Click to expand...

I agree with that 🙂 thats why I didn't quote your whole post (glad to see you didn't have a problem with that, some people do).

Maybe I just haven't kept up with Intel as much as AMD but your post looked a little unfair twards AMD IMO.

 
Originally posted by: swtethan
Originally posted by: Shenkoa
These numbers are way to high to be realistic, I would not be suprised if Intel has created the Conroe with a special unit inside of it that makes it produce high numbers in benchmark application.

Imo their marketing team are scum.
Click to expand...

shenkoa is the ultimate fanboi

(from another thread)
Click to expand...


You are flaming biggot.
 
need a "best price/performance ratio" vote, because i don't buy what's fastest or cheapest, just what's at a good pricing point that can be o/ced like crazy!
 
Cheaper

Bang/buck is king with me.

That said, I haven't owned anything but an AMD since my K6-2 350mhz machine. AMD's bang/buck is almost always better.
 
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