What brand of CPU do you like?

[Eagle_Driver]

My personal CPU history (not including CPUs borrowed from my brother):

1. Intel Celeron-333
2. Intel PII-450
3. Intel PIII-700
4. AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (Palomino)
5. AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (Palomino)
6. AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (Barton)
7. Intel P4-2.80C
8. AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Toledo-512)

Those CPUs in bold are currently in my two rigs (X2 3800+ in my main rig, AXP 2000+ in my "guest/auxillary" rig).

I still have the CPUs from the PIII-700 onwards.

 

[majid]

I've switched almost all my company's servers from Intel to AMD Opteron boxes (made by Sun). We stopped buying computers from Dell because they don't carry Opteron boxes.

The Opterons are superior in almost all respects (memory bandwidth and latency, multiprocessing performance, 64-bit support), and that's in absolute terms before even factoring Intel's inflated prices (hey, someone has to pay for all the bunny ads). Did you know in servers, Intel had to eat humble pie and now makes AMD-compatible chips (for 64-bit extensions)?

Intel still has an edge in process technology because with their size they can afford the hugely expensive fab investments. If they did not have the ability to push clock speeds higher than AMD, their inefficient architecture would be completely dead in the water.

Intel has top-notch engineers and fabrication technology, but they got complacent and distracted big time by their incompatible Itanium processor (so far a complete commercial failure), and have dropped the ball big time on the Pentium 4 and Xeon lines that actually pay the bills. Some of the evidence coming out of the AMD anti-trust trial also looks pretty damning.

 

[ADS]

Quote:

Originally Posted by majid I've switched almost all my company's servers from Intel to AMD Opteron boxes (made by Sun). We stopped buying computers from Dell because they don't carry Opteron boxes. The Opterons are superior in almost all respects (memory bandwidth and latency, multiprocessing performance, 64-bit support), and that's in absolute terms before even factoring Intel's inflated prices (hey, someone has to pay for all the bunny ads). Did you know in servers, Intel had to eat humble pie and now makes AMD-compatible chips (for 64-bit extensions)? Intel still has an edge in process technology because with their size they can afford the hugely expensive fab investments. If they did not have the ability to push clock speeds higher than AMD, their inefficient architecture would be completely dead in the water. Intel has top-notch engineers and fabrication technology, but they got complacent and distracted big time by their incompatible Itanium processor (so far a complete commercial failure), and have dropped the ball big time on the Pentium 4 and Xeon lines that actually pay the bills. Some of the evidence coming out of the AMD anti-trust trial also looks pretty damning.

How are those new Sun Opteron servers, if you don't mind me asking? I've heard a lot of good/bad things about them. From the price and performance standpoint, they look excellent. How are they working out for you?

 

[lan]

heh. Since we're listing CPUs we've had, I might as well. I'm curious also. Let's see...

Intel 486 SX33
Intel 486 DX2/66
Intel Pentium 90@100
Intel Celeron 266@448
2 x Intel Celeron 300A@450 (The SMP madness begins)
2 x Intel Celeron 366A@500
Intel Pentium III 550 @ 733 (I thought this was a joke upgrade as it didn't do much for me)
4 x Intel Pentium II Xeon 450 2MB cache. My god I remember when these once cost about $4000 each.
2 x Intel Pentium III 800
AMD Tbird 1.4ghz@1.6 (This was another joke upgrade and didn't see it was worth it. Single CPU systems sucked

)
Pentium 4 1.6@2.4
Pentium 4 2.4
Pentium 4 3.2 Hyperthreading. Ah the only time I felt at ease going back to 1 CPU.
Pentium 4 2.6@3.2

And my main system now, AMD Athlon 64 Venice 3000+ @ 2.66ghz. I see a value in many different computers. I don't really care about brand but which ever suits my purpose at the time. Just by the pure numbers it would seem I liked Intel. My next system is probably going to be dual core opteron. But uh... I have a new hobby called head-fi not computers

Wait I have a few more CPUs I remember having

Duron 600@900 I think. That was short lived
My laptop has PIII-M 800
And I had another P4 1.6.Ok done

 

[fewtch]

I don't see any *big* advantages of either brand right now, except maybe price... AMD good for gamers, Intel good for office/graphics use but stuff like that is constantly changing.

Currently still running an Athlon 1.2GHz, and will probably stay with AMD just because I hate seeing that damn Intel logo and theme song pimped everywhere.

 

[crazyfrenchman27]

I'm a major Intel investor, but I buy AMD processors.

-Matt

 

[majid]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ADS How are those new Sun Opteron servers, if you don't mind me asking? I've heard a lot of good/bad things about them. From the price and performance standpoint, they look excellent. How are they working out for you?

Well, we have the V20z (dual-processor Opteron 248, 1U rackmountable servers, 6 machines in all), not the newer "Galaxy" series. The V20z are essentially Newisys designs, unlike the Galaxies which were designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which should have improved I/O throughput and better power efficiency, and Sun's ALOM system processor.

Newisys was started by ex-IBMers, and each V20z actually has an embedded PowerPC management processor running Linux, with its own Ethernet port. From this service processor, you can power off or power cycle the machine, monitor environmental conditions like temperature or voltage, or grab the console from any SSH client. This is very important when you are running a server in a remote colo. Dell or Compaq make you pay hundreds of dollars for their remote management cards that don't even have integrated remote power switches, they are included in the base price on the Suns.

We run the V20z on Solaris 10, with Apple (LSI Logic OEM) PCI-X fibre channel cards and XServe RAID storage. The performance is simply phenomenal, as is the system stability. We got them about 9 months ago, with perfect uptime since then. I've had some of them run for hours at a stretch with load averages in the 40s, without seeing them buckle or drop in efficiency. I still have Sparc database servers running Oracle due to database migration issues, but the V20z has twice the speed for 1/8 the cost...

I haven't tried running other operating systems on those machines (they are certified for Linux or Windows, but you have to get your Windows license from somebody else).

The only bad point about them is that they are quite noisy, and the airflow design is such I wouldn't pack them together without leaving a gap for the vents on top of the machine. then again, no real-world data center can accomodate a 42U rack fully populated with 1U servers due to heat dissipation and power density issues. The initial setup with the RAID controller and the serial port/console config set to 9600bps also needs to be streamlined.

 

[cerbie]

Quote:

Originally Posted by majid Intel still has an edge in process technology because with their size they can afford the hugely expensive fab investments. If they did not have the ability to push clock speeds higher than AMD, their inefficient architecture would be completely dead in the water.

Actually, they did lose that ability (raw clock speeds don't mean much anymore, but they expected more...). That's why they're stuck at 3.8GHz, when Prescott was supposed to get them to near the 5GHz mark. It will be the great-great-grandchild child of the Pentium Pro (not counting slot-PIIIs as a real generation shift) that saves their performance, once they get them out as desktop/server chips.

So now, for their new Xeons, they are pulling all the stops, and using dual FSBs and 4-channel FBD RAM...it will be competitive (note that it is 3-6 months out), but still pricey and power-hungry.

 

[Kenny12]

IBM mmx166 XD
amd 900mhz Athlon
amd 2100+ tbred b
amd x64 3500+

windows 64 > windows 32 in most cases

 

[lini]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kwisatz I have built and used computers with both, (...)

...at the same time?

I only have that on the Commodore A2286AT pc-at card in my Amiga 2000, with an Intel 80286 and an AMD 80287 working together, of course dominated by the mighty Motorola 68000 on the A2000 mainboard

, which itself can be overridden by an even mightier combo of Motorola 68030 and 68882 in the Commodore A2630 turboboard.

And it has another AMD (the 5380) on the Nexus scsi controller card. Whereas my C128 sports a MosTek 8502 (1 or 2 MHz selectable) and ZiLOG Z80 (4 MHz) for C64/128 and CP/M modes.

Another interesting AMD I have is the X5-133 on a maxed-out 486 pc. I also ran a K5 for a while. And I've liked the K6-2 on the Super Socket 7 platform, too. I was never much of a fan for the Athlon and Athlon XP, though, especially in combination with VIA mainboard chipsets - I've prefered the PIII (especially with Tualatin core) and i815EP socket 370 platform. Nowadays, I like the A64/nForce4 combo for standard/performance pcs - whereas I prefer Intels Pentium-M on the i855/i915PM platforms for notebook pcs and (especially with i915PM) also for silent and media center pcs.

Greetings from Hannover!

Manfred / lini

 

[star882]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mjg wow, if your compring processors to sex, i gotta wonder if you ever had good sex heh.

I guess you've never felt the pain 9 months later. Thankfully, neither have I, although I do know some people who have felt it. Based on their descriptions, it certainly sounds scary! It's not something I would do unless I have to.
Quote:

Intel for stability...

Moot point. Intels and AMDs are equally stable when used properly.

 

[majid]

Quote:

Originally Posted by cerbie Actually, they did lose that ability (raw clock speeds don't mean much anymore, but they expected more...). That's why they're stuck at 3.8GHz, when Prescott was supposed to get them to near the 5GHz mark.

Keep in mind the true clock speed of the dual-core Opteron 280 is 2.4GHz, that of the single-core 254 is 2.8GHz, 30% less than Intel. The AMD64 architecture simply gets twice as much work done per cycle and per watt. And the the integrated memory controller and switched Hypertransport interconnect are way ahead of Intel's tired bus. The Indian-designed CSI bus, touted as a replacement, seems to have been canned along with the entire line of Bangalore-designed server chips. Sure, you can push the existing FSB to 1GHz, but like brute-force Detroit "muscle cars" with inefficient pushrod or hemi technology compared to the more sophisticated Japanese or European timed multi-valve designs, this comes at the cost of even worse energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency is not just a buzzword. Intel has been making much noise about it, but the reality is, their current lineup needs twice as many watts than equivalent Opterons. I pay $4000/month on power in my data center, significantly more in a year than the cost of all my servers put together. While power-hungry hard drives make up a big proportion of my power budget, I would be prepared to pay a significant premium for more power-efficient servers as they allow me to ramp up without having power costs explode. That is also why I am retiring servers that are fully functional, simply because the savings from more modern and power-efficient systems outweigh the cost of the new machines.

The current Intel designs are stop-gap measures to staunch the bleeding for the time it takes them to design a competitive cpu and memory interconnect. It will take another year or two for Intel to catch up with the lost time caused by Itanium distraction.

This is not a new story - read Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a new machine" for another good example of a company that almost died on an overly ambitious green-field processor design instead of a more pragmatic one designed for maximal compatibility. What is more surprising is that Intel got caught in that same trap, as the reason they are number 1 today is precisely because they always emphasized compatibility in the past. The only explanation is complacency and arrogance - at some point they assumed their success was due to their superiority rather than the strategy of maximising compatibility, and thus they believed the lessons of others' failures did not apply to them.

 

[averydonovan]

For PC desktops, AMD does it for me. My 2 1/2 year-old Athlon XP 2500+ Barton that I overclocked to 2GHz with a 200MHz (400MHz DDR) FSB kicks some serious ass even today. It has a very powerful math processor and any audio or video processing is fast on it. The main downsides are heat and power draw. There are no questions that Intel beats AMD in this area, and in a portable I'd take a Pentium III-based Intel mobile CPU any day of the week over an AMD.

My main system is now an Apple iBook G4 and the Motorola PowerPC 7450 (G4) in this thing is both fast and very power-efficient. I've read the CPU in this thing only draws 7 watts. The fan doesn't even turn on in this thing very often.

 

[Duncan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by donovansmith For PC desktops, AMD does it for me. My 2 1/2 year-old Athlon XP 2500+ Barton that I overclocked to 2GHz with a 200MHz (400MHz DDR) FSB kicks some serious ass even today. It has a very powerful math processor and any audio or video processing is fast on it. The main downsides are heat and power draw. There are no questions that Intel beats AMD in this area, and in a portable I'd take a Pentium III-based Intel mobile CPU any day of the week over an AMD.

That isn't strictly true anymore... although its probably classed as cheating, AMD do now have the "Cool'n'Quiet" stepping... right now my CPU is running at 45% of its potential and 1.3v - and with a temperature (whilst sitting pretty idle admittedly) of about 35 C, Even at full load, my CPU doesn't get hotter than 45 C

 

[HiWire]

AMD for me. I have an overclocked 3200+ at home and a new Dell 2.8 GHz P4 at work.