DRF
User
Platinum Osdever
| Posts: 123 |   |
Karma: 1
|
Re: [poll] Intel vs AMD - 2005/05/13 22:12
In the x86 market AMD and intel are the main companies involved however as a CPU market as a whole there is IBM (Power PC chips as used in apples I believe), and a few companies competing for the ARM architecture market (can't remember any off the top of my head).
Where x86 was concerned it was a case of clock speed vs cache.
Intel trying to process information as fast as possible
AMD trying to process as much information as possible at once.
Personally I prefered the AMD approch (maybe just me thinking that making stuff run faster was the easy approch, or just the support the under-dog story).
Must say for a while was a little annoyed by the less technical minded people saying "look it says on the box it runs faster it must be better" (Intel must have sold a lot of there celerons etc that way, can't blame them tho if you didn't know anything about processors and saw on the shelf AMD K6 450mz and next to it Intel PII celeron 600mhz which would you pick without someone explaining the cache etc to you?)
When I was making my first proper PC the choice was:
Cirix (cheap but not so good performace), AMD (good affordable reliable competitive product), Intel (High end expensive chips with only a slight edge on AMD).
Needless to say I opted for AMD so got some sense of loyalty.
In this new 64bit age AMD and intel have vastly different approchs. To which I prefer AMD's.
AMD64 - Evolution of the x86, backwards compatible. (So allows 64bit to develop and a slow conversion rather than forced on you)
Intel64 - Used the oppertunity to completely re-write a lot of the internals so it isn't backwards compatible but some claim that the chip benefits from it's originality. (However I think intel should of made an intermediate chip first like AMD, also there 64chips are still mainly server based so maybe we will yet see there equivilent of the AMD64 for desktop users)
PowerPC - Most of there users are with apple or specilist server companies not customised desktops so they could move to 64bit and distribute them with the 64bit OS's pre-installed.
I could be a bit behind on the CPU market (not needed to buy a new CPU for nearly 6months and with technology a lot can happen in 6months).
Of course if you want an objective view compare the price of each processor (AMD/Intel as otherwise hard to compare properly) and then compare those prices to there performace on the benchmarks at tomshardware.com
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/cpu_charts-13.html direct link to the bench mark of the modern chips. While finding the link I noticed an article on the new AMD dual core chips. (will they give AMD the edge and if so how long for? Time will tell).
Btw look at 'all' the bench marks as on some programs 1 chip does better than on another programs also nowadays cost is an issue (no point Intel making a cpu that can beat AMD hands down if it is so expensive no one can justify it)
Does this mean we will soon see an ATI vs nvidia thread? People all have there prefered companies and in many cases it's 6 of one and half a dozen of the other. (to use a common phrase).
Companies by market factors to remain competitive tend to have to price similar products at a similar price so it comes down to what works for you and what your happy with. (ATI/Nvidia and Intel/AMD are the main companies for this argument but I'm sure people can think of other examples)
To end on a question. Whats peoples views on x86 as it's quite a popular opinion that it's been left 'as is' for too long and that it should be phased out completely in favour of a newer (more RISC like?) achitecture. (ARM is supposed to be quite a nice CPU to write code for tho I've never tried not wanting to mess up my palmtop)
Daniel
My points tho based on facts are from a subjective point of view and other peoples views might (and almost certainly will) vary as the CPU's mentioned are so similar.
|
Forums 
