Fanboyz AMD and Fanboyz Intel, lay aside your bickering. The truth of the matter is both manufacturers make a quality product. Intel is still thye dominant share because of name recognition alone IMO. Back in the day when the 8088 was king, Intel broke ground with the 486. The 486 was the sh*t, better than anything out there at the time and intel made their fortunes and secured their place in the pc market based on that and that alone.
Since then, AMD and Cyrus joined the bandwagon, making 486 clones that were 'almost as good as" intel's 486 but not really and they always ran a lot hotter.
Then came the pentium era. Intel came out tieh the pentium I further sinking it's roots into the pc market... Cyrus and AMD soon followed with their 586 cpus, which were, once again, almost as good as the pentiums, and once again ran a lot hotter.
Then cometh the 686 era, the AMD K6 II and K6 III to battle INtel's PII and PIII (Cyrus was still there but loosing market share faster than the second hand on a clock and thus will not be considered anymore. AMD's K6 II and K6 III cpus equalled or bettered Intels PII and PIII cpus in a lot of areas but not all, but again, they ran a lot hotter still
Thats ancient PC 101. The rest is fairly modern and known stuff.. the athlons and the P4's are both quality cpus. It all depends on what the end user wants or is biased towards. I have myself run pretty much all AMD cpus since the K6 II's but have always kept an eye on intel cpus as well. as a system builder (ms certified) I am well versed in the advantages and disadvantages of both manufacturer's offerings. I just purchased my 1st Athlon64 cou/mb combo and eagerly await it to see if the hype is all that. my roommate is going to be getting Intel's counterpart (we both run simular environments and programs == winxp dual booting with SuSE linux) so it will be interesting how things work out.

Can someone please tell me why AMD does not yet support faster than DDR ram?

the best current processor is the transmeta that currently equips the sony vaio's and the future is the cell!!!

Lets cut the bashing here shall we. Some of us like intel and other like AMD. Sad truth is it dont matter who is better. From chip generation to generation the crown passes back and fourth. Currently the fastest chip on the planet is the Pentium M. Yeah you read that right. When placed in desktop Mobo with the benifit of the latest hardward it beats everything hands down. Cause of it's Ultra low clock and heat it can be easily overclocked to without hesitation beat any AMD or Intel Chip out there.

i think this is only the first step to the new generation of desktop pcs,this is a great advantage to the computer world but not the top,the tecnology never stops to grown up.

Good work AMD =]

The real technological heavy hitter of the PC processor industry has again delivered.

Technologically bankrupt "me too" posers need not apply.

'nuff said.

Hi i have a 64 bit 3000 processor allready it was quite cheep to upgrade about £200 uk (with new motherboard) i have water cooling which meens its idling at the moment at 35.c the new processors look alot dearer but i might upgrade just for time saver when changing avi to dvd from 32 bit to 64 bit halves the time it takes to convert i just hope a double halves that again.

I've been working on both P4 and Athlon XP based systems for the last 4 years, and generally, the XP based systems are head and shoulders above the Intel systems, on both price/perfomance and stability. The only real issues I've had with either were directly related to some wishy/washy VIA chipsets, and Intel's flaky chipsets, rather than the processors.

Given experiences with both, I'd happily recommend anyone purchasing or upgrading a PC to opt for the AMD or AMD64 over any Intel solution, using an NForce chipset rather than VIA or SIS. comparably clocked AMD chips run circles around Intel chips...

The only downside to AMD now is they know they make the better product, and their pricing reflects that... they're not bargain basement anymore. Up until the K6 series of chips, they were certainly second tier, but now the only thing keeping them from knocking Intel off the top of the market is long term exclusivity agreements Intel has with several vendors, and a reputation that is no longer true, of producing the highest quality, most stable chips - in that arena, AMD matched or surpassed Intel some time ago.

While I agree in general Squire72, you obviously didn't have a lot of experience with nForce2 chipsets for AMD.

The nForce2 had a known and unresolvable problem with USB 2.0 compatibility (particularly the Genesys chip). This would result in loss of connectivity, or standard functionality under USB 2.0.

Apart from that tho, I agree 100%. AMD have certainly offered our customers a much better bang-for-buck system, that's more reliable than the Intel ones.

Now, bring on the multi-processor games! ;)

nForce1 and 2 were both complete garbage.

nForce 4 finally got it right.

Via chipsets have been rock solid since the KT333. ATI chipsets are similarly solid. However, current offerings form both vendors lag behind nForce 4 in the options category.

The nVidia chipsets I'm referring to are the nForce3 and 4 - I never ventured to use 1 or 2, but everything I heard would lead me to believe you're bang on there.

the VIA chipsets I used were generally good, but they did have issues with USB2, which worked well, but only when they worked...

If I had $800 to build a machine today it would be a Athlon 64 4200+, it simple outperforms most of the Pentium D's and is a worthwhile investment.

When overclocked the 4200 becomes a bargain.

Make one negative comment about Intel and their supporters start coming out of the woodwork. These counter insults toward AMD are rather pointless and sound like they were made by immature teenagers. Whether a CPU manufacturer designs their own chipset has no bearing on how good their CPUs are. Intel chipsets have historically performed worse than 3rd party chipsets. I for one, am perfectly happy with nForce chipsets for the AMD platform. Also, AMD processors include all Intel extensions such as MMX and SSE, whereas Intel refuses to include AMD's own 3DNow! technology in any of their chips. AMD chips run much cooler than Intel processors. There are independent reviews all over the net showing that high end Athlon processors run about as hot on full load as a high end P4 does while idle. An AMD processor performs much better than an Intel CPU running at the same clock speed, that is why a 2.8Ghz AMD processor is actually better than a 3.6Ghz Intel chip. I used to be an avid Intel supporter for many years, but have switched to AMD when their Athlon processors were released. This is because AMD chips and motherboards were considerably cheaper than Intel and performed just as well, if not better. So to the person who posted about AMD stability issues, I can say the opposite; I've had rock solid performance from my AMD system for many years. I suppose it's a matter of preference, but one thing we can all agree on is that having two microprocessor manufacturers does create some healthy (and much needed) competition and a need for innovation for years to come.

I agree you have to have competition.

AMD once again Tops Intel junk. With the a higher price this time, but at least it will work!

So many people that have never owned or AMD or have ever looked at the stats.

If you were to look at an AMD 2.1g and then a P4 2.8 you would see that the AMD runs a little higher but faster and Intel is only the most sold because people like you have NO IDEA what you are talking about and will buy junk when they think it has to be good when it costs more and they see it on TV.

AMD Founder and Intel Founder use to work for the same company.

Lets just say you have never researched AMD and Intel you have only watched to much TV.

Intel Junk? Intel is a far more stable chip than GAYmd will ever be! price and speed isnt everything, stability is! Intel is playing the cheaper/consumer market. That's who buys the most PCs, hence, the most chips. At $1000 a pop, that's a lot of money for one chip that doesn't have a lot of software support, yet.

Saying Intel is junk is a little strong. Considering they own the market share right now. Don't get me wrong, I'm an AMD fan, and almost all my systems are AMD. I've been with them through the good and bad, but Intel is a good company and they make good products. Just like AMD does. What have you used Intel chips on that make you say they are any more junk than AMD? Show me a bad Intel chip, and I can show you a bad AMD chip. AMD's biggest credit, isn't that their chips are better than Intel. It's that fact that the push and redefine technology. As a result Intel has to to compete and push and redefine technology as well. As a result, the consumer gets better products and better pricing. And it's not really AMD doing it, but the competition for better product and better pricing. The reverse would be true if it was Intel. So in a sense you should be thankful there's both an Intel and an AMD. :)

yeah, whoop-dee-doo... I'm so tired of AMD making "innovative headway" when they can't even get teh old stuff right. ALL the AMD's I've ever used have had problems. another thing, why should I, let alone anyone, buy a CPU from a manufacturer that dosen't design their own chipsets? Intel does, Motorola (Mac) does, so why can't AMD? ooh, AMD has SLI, so? there's an nForce chipset for Intel due out soon.. another thing, if you're a windoze user, what's the purpose of a 64 bit processor? the 64bit windows OS just came out, and there's squat for drivers etc for it. a lot of software now dosen't support 64bit. if you want to use 64bit, don't do it with Windoze, use Linux or Mac... if you want to have issues and problems, use AMD and Windoze...

thanks, and have a nice day...

So, pleae tell us WHY Intel chips are junk.. If that were true, why on earth do they hold 80% market share?

Yes, 8 out of every 10 systems and CPUs sold are Intel CPU's

AMD have found a niche for the bang for buck crowd of mostly gamers, who want that extra 10% performance.

Personally, I prefer the guarenteed stability of a Intel CPU and Chipset, where you get 100% compatability and stability, something which you only get with AMD and it's chipsets (AMD/NForce/Via/SiS)if you are lucky.

Part of the reason is because to me, Intel is far worse than MS--you guys buy the competition, so IBM and Dell, for example, cannot sell anyone's processors but yours. Seriously, though, Intel does have the clear market share advantage--it surprises me that P4's are doing so well when Pentium-M chips are actually faster and more reliable. I believe much of that gap will be closed late this year when (according to rumors confirmed by a few of my buddies) many manufacturer's exclusivity contracts with Intel will expire. We'll see...I think Intel needs to work on dethroning that God-awful Prescott core and replace it with Pentium M or a completely redesigned core.

Agree with you there--while the Prescott core--in my opinion--sucks, Intel is far from junk. I disagree with the next comment, as field tests show that AMD XP 3200+ actually lasts longer than a P4 Prescott 3.4GHz with both running at 100% cpu utilization, before the cpu crashes (multiple examples, one in particular is at tomshardware.com). In many ways the modern AMD cpu is much more stable than a modern Intel CPU (yep, the OLDER amd chips were lacking in this area...) Why? Heat and the basic laws of entropy--heat breaks down, and even with the Prescott's E0 revisions, they're still hotter than hell. Intel was so worried about GHz that they lost the race in other areas...I mean c'mon, the guy would never have said "...the time is now." (refering to 64 bit desktop processors) if AMD hadn't sold so many Athlon 64's.

Why wouldnt you want a 64 bit processor. Say i want a nice new system now and 64 bit is moving up in the world. I want to have my nice new system working with the newest technology when it does become developed and why would developers have any reason to make 64 bit software if there is noone using 64 bit software. And by the way DIVX has a 64 bit version which means you can already do encoding on the 64 bit platform. Also the 64 bit platform will provide better performance in windows xp 64 simply because windows doesnt need a lot of processor in 64 bits like they needed a lot in 32 bits. I am on an AMD system and i havent had one processor related problem since i bought it and it is running very cooly and i cannot hear any fans. This system has been running for two weeks and the last time i shut down was because there was a power outage. If your interested im using a 3500+ processor. It runs on the gigabyte GAk8NF9 motherboard which uses an NVIDIA chipset. It uses a socket 939. If i can just buy a new processor when these prices come down a little bit and drop it in instead of buying a new computer i would love to. I like third party chipsets very much because they cant become a monopoly. I would really like to see dual core take off.

"And by the way DIVX has a 64 bit version which means you can already do encoding on the 64 bit platform. Also the 64 bit platform will provide better performance in windows xp 64 simply because windows doesnt need a lot of processor in 64 bits like they needed a lot in 32 bits."

This really sums things up. There are many people that believe that 64bits is the answer to everything.

1/ just because it's 64bit, does not make it faster. It means it can address much more memory than before, and there are a few more CPU registers to play with, thats all. Nothing more than this.

2/ for 64bit encoders, you need 64bit application support. You cannot have 64bit directshow encoder for a 32bit app.

So just which 64bit Mac OS are you talking about?

Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger" is 64-bit and works well with the new cpus from IBM, which by the way is what you should be comparing to intel&amd.. I personally think the power pc is going to make a big dent in the next couple of years, including cell processing.... Why did Micrsoft's own xbox go with it and the new ps3...

I've been a computer technician for about 10 years and I can honestly say that Intel is no longer the great CPU manufacturer that they used to be. Things started going south for them once they abandoned efficient processing in the name of Ghz speed. Granted, they have made a choice when it comes to the Pentium M, their desktop CPUs leave much to be desired--especially with the Prescott heat debacle. Don't get me wrong, I still like Intel processors and I think they're far from junk. The truth is, they really don't hold much of an advantage in terms of stability anymore because of the heat issue...that plus the fact that AMD CPUs and chipsets have made significant headway in recent years towards stability. I go through PC upgrades constantly and now all but 2 of my systems at home are Athlon 64s, with one of my Intels being a Pentium M based notebook. In my opinion, I think AMD setups now have every much the stability as Intel setups...and most definitely AMD does hold the performance crown from my recent experiences. Unfortunately, since Intel has such a stranglehold on the market and the major PC vendors, it makes things difficult for AMD to gain marketshare. It's like comparing a show that's on a major national TV network like ABC or NBC to a good show on a cable network like USA: Who do you think is going to get more viewers?? The a good thing here though, is it forces Intel to produce a better product and of course making AMD do the same. To all those "die hard" Intel supporters with knee-jerk reactions here, you need to be more opened-minded and spend a good amount of time using new technology before you knock it with weak insults. So that's my take on it and I'm not taking anyone's side per say...I'm just saying I use whoever makes the better product at the moment.

That "guarantee" is a myth. Obviously you've managed to conveniently forget both chip and chipset recalls by that worthy in recent years.

Having run AMD processors since 1998, I can honestly say that the whole stability issue is FUD.

Intel tops the market share because they give manufacturers like Dell, HP, Gateway and Compaq really nice price cuts and $$$ incentives to either only use their chip or focus most of their systems on their chip. The same used to happen for ATI video cards. Besides, the "Intel processor being more stable/compatible" comments are non-sense

ALL the AMDs you used had problems?

Speaking as a long standing tech (been in this biz for 15 years), I'd have to say that what we have here is a definitive case of trouble squarely between the keyboard and the chair.

Period.

Lemmings who buy into the whole "intel mystique" marketing schtick? A head start in the marketplace? Massive FUD on the part of their PR department with corporate accounts?

Pick one.

it became very clear with the XP line that intel was losing ground technologically (they could only intentionally overclock to try and maintain dominance - then the core couldn't take it any more). The A64 family put them to bed (a true 64-bit implementation rather than a me-too add-on kludge called the Emergency Edition). The dual-core scenario buried them (performance reports are conclusive - period).

Hey, I bought intel once. I haven't found a processor from them worthy of my money since the K6-III came out.

They had the edge in chipsets until they were forced to table products on AMD's timetable instead of their own. Having to rush things to market to keep pace started to produce cracks which eventually burst with products that had to be recalled - something unheard of in the company's***ory.

Now they're reduced to copying the ideas of others just to stay in the game.

Even the most died-in-the-wool intel supporter cannot deny the evidence of history, no matter how much they would like to.

It's all there in black and white, BS rhetoric aside, and nothing can change those facts.

Pretty interresting how the dedicated fanboys always use terms like 'GAYmd' and 'Windoze' and never present any facts..

Let the chip makers fight. We can choose the best. IMHO, AMD is better from some time, but if intel doesn't exist, AMD could rise the prices, which is no good.
Do you like intel? Great, buy it. That's competition and is great. That makes the products renew and lower their prices, and that is good for all of us. Look what happenned in software market by the lack of competition! You still have to pay a LOT of money for a crappy and insecure product (yeah, I'm talking about windows).
By now, I'll stick with AMD, but I'm not going to get married with AMD and hope that pintel could develop a good procesor again, soon.

Absolutely agree about Intel (and strangely, I've been a tech for nearly 10 years as well...)

So please tell us all, the difference between the "true [AMD] 64-bit implementation rather than a me-too add-on kludge called the Emergency Edition".

As far as I can tell, the Intel implemtation misses a unused operation that AMD64 implements, and add 2 extra operations that the AMD64 does not.

Making it sound like Intels EMT64 is a sub quality implemetation of AMD64 just makes you look like a AMD fanboy.

Read up, OSX 10.4 Tiger is only partially 64bit. Large swathes are still 32bit...