Intels PR at work?

[Fogey]

Up untill my last build, I was die hard Intel all the way. AMD would kick Intels butt in gaming on a regular basic, but Intel would sometimes pull ahead in others. From the real world angle, I just figured there wasen't that much of a difference to go AMD. When the N force chipset for SLI came out and I was looking for a new top end gaming rig, it was time to try AMD[FX-55,last May].
Seems AMD had it right form the start, forget about Mgz. madness. AMDs idea on dual core also seems to playing out well. No big deal, Intel will learn a hard lesson once again at the feet of AMD. So Intel has lots more money, staff etc. and will just build anew while trying to kick AMDs ass. Untill you play catch up with AMD, you put out interm CPUs till you get the good stuff coming. Kinda like the socket 423 P4 till we get the socket 478 out hard sell tactic. Anyhow, I found this article I read this morning interesting.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30000

[-mogwai]

i've been becoming more and more disenchanted with intel...

[infinitevalence]

There is one thing that i think intel always has as an advantage. Stablility: the intel CPU with Intel chipset gives a much more stable overall system. There are fewer quirks and hardware concerns when building an Intel based computer. This is not true with AMD systems. This is changing though as AMD gains marketshare in the low end, server and gamming markets people are spending more time in testing and driver writing.

Right now as far as i can tell AMD is winning in desktop, workstaion, gaming, and server proformace. However Intel has the lead in low power high performance markets like Laptops, Super SFFPC's like the new Apple Mac Mini. And soon low power high performance Blade server markets.

The truth is both offer great features and performance, there is some dependence on the applications your running, but the performance crown will move from one to the other. I seriously doubt that Intel will let AMD hold the lead for long, they will come out with a serious A64 competitor. And AMD needs to get off its laurals and start on the next real refresh because the A64 arch is not going to scale much better at 65nm than it is now.

[wuzy]

There is one thing that i think intel always has as an advantage. Stablility: the intel CPU with Intel chipset gives a much more stable overall system. There are fewer quirks and hardware concerns when building an Intel based computer. This is not true with AMD systems. This is changing though as AMD gains marketshare in the low end, server and gamming markets people are spending more time in testing and driver writing.

Right now as far as i can tell AMD is winning in desktop, workstaion, gaming, and server proformace. However Intel has the lead in low power high performance markets like Laptops, Super SFFPC's like the new Apple Mac Mini. And soon low power high performance Blade server markets.

The truth is both offer great features and performance, there is some dependence on the applications your running, but the performance crown will move from one to the other. I seriously doubt that Intel will let AMD hold the lead for long, they will come out with a serious A64 competitor. And AMD needs to get off its laurals and start on the next real refresh because the A64 arch is not going to scale much better at 65nm than it is now.

As a system overall that used to be the true until Prescotts came. If only Intel made southbridges for AMD/nVidia too...

The thing that plagued AMD was solely VIA's fault, ok chipsets with horribly messy drivers. Lukily when nVidia stepped in with nForce2 that cahnged everything about AMD's stability.

As of today AMD+nForce4 systems are more stable than post-Prescott+Intel chipset systems.
The performance&stability gap between the two northbridges are barely minimal and when combined with AMD processor they're simply more stable than Intel systems now.

In fact I would say stability is a thing of past now when back then there was nothing more stable than BX440.

[pointreyes]

There is one thing that i think intel always has as an advantage. Stablility: the intel CPU with Intel chipset gives a much more stable overall system. There are fewer quirks and hardware concerns when building an Intel based computer. This is not true with AMD systems. This is changing though as AMD gains marketshare in the low end, server and gamming markets people are spending more time in testing and driver writing.

Yeah, here's some very current examples of what you are talking about.
My Intel D955XKB motherboard will boot my SCSI drives but it's very slow and I cannot use True Image to back it up. However, this was not an issue with an AMD nForce4 board I had.

And then last week I solved the problem with the onboard firewire. For some odd reason my Canopus ADVC300 would not work with the Intel board but it worked just great with my AMD laptop. The solution, I had to replace two of the firewire drivers with SP1 drivers. Both of my Intel systems required this but yet no configurations were required to get the AMD laptop to work.

Er, whoops - you said, "There are fewer quirks and hardware concerns when building an Intel based computer." Sorry. You are correct about times are changing though.

I'm not fanboy of either AMD or Intel but I'm getting rather ticked with Intel. I can run 32-bit and 64-bit OSes at the same time on my laptop that was purchased back in October 2005 but yet only now does Intel have a proc that can do it. I'm glad to see that Intel has virtualization in their Preslers but I'm not about to spend another $400 for a proc that is only going to get replaced with a Conroe later this summer and yet also have to replace the mobo at the same time.

[Fogey]

Infinitevalence: One of the biggest reason why I "WAS" a die hard Intel fan was because of stability with Intel CPU/Chipset issues. I build gaming/high end system for freinds and family[no cost, they just pay for the parts]. The last thing I want is problems with the systems I build. I want them trouble free. If they are having problems with them, then my reputation as a custom builder will be at stake, not to mention what free time I have will be at stake. I'd rather be working/playin with my own stuff than having to fix a system I built for someone. One customer of my work had one problem and it was a virus. The virus was via ICQ, overwrote all the windows files[It was impressive] and had nothing to do with my build, but I spent four hours on it fixing it for free. Other than that, which had nothing to do with my build,I have had no problems with any of the machines I have built for them. I didn't build AMD gaming rigs allthough they had better performance because I didn't want to have to deal with problems related to the sometimes quirky issues with AMD and various chipsets via different vendors. I wanted 100% stability/reliability, PERIOD! Now, things sem to be changin. I've had this AMD sli rig up and running now since last May. Zero problems/NADA. So, AMD is looking real good to me. Now, with the rumours of two GPUs on the 7900GTX being able to give you quad SLI on an current SLI rig. Wooh! I have no problem down the road building with Intel, It just won't be untill Conroe at the earliest. But then again, once the new M2 socket with MB/Chipsets are out, prices will fall on the 939 hardware. Don't you just love it