Eli Kane wrote:

Mirko wrote:

Hello
in Italy there is a big diffusion of Amd. Intel is considered an expensive
and useless brand compared to Amd. In our newsgroups there is a big
quantity of trouble messages with Amd, and not with Intel.
I would know, as a little survey, who win between Amd and Intel, what is
your opinion about....

Thanks!


Note: opinions expressed below will probably inflame passions about things.
I state here that these are just my opinions and observations. Bleeding
edge game players will take exception to some of my statements, and I
realize that they are a special case. I am making general statements about
the average user.

In my opinion, which is not all that important, there is no real difference
between the competing processors from AMD and Intel, except the price.

Not quite. Look at benchmarks for Doom 3 for example. Even a $1,000
Pentium 4 3.4 ghz EE doesn't come close to the performance of a $285
Athlon 64 3500+ running Doom 3.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2149&p=7

A $185 Athlon 64 3200+ socket 754 beats the $1,000 Pentium 4 3.4 ghz EE
running Business Winstone 2004.

It isn't just a price difference, but the higher level Athlon 64 chips provide
performance for some very widely used applications that no Intel
desktop processor can match. The Athlon 64 also allows upgrades to 64
bit software. The Intel 64 bit desktop processors are expensive and
very hard to find(unless you want to buy a system with one from Dell).

For
most users there is no noticable performance difference no matter what
software you are running. Years ago it used to be that AMD lagged behind
Intel for floating point performance, but even then you would not notice
the difference unless you were doing modelling of the atmosphere or
something like that.

If you are a bleeding-edge game player, the difference between the two makes
no real difference since the graphics card does most of the work.

Not true for Doom 3 and many other games.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2149&p=7

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. At least with an Athlon 64 3500+
or higher processor, a high end video card can finally achieve its potential in many
games.


For the
money you save getting an AMD you can get that much better a GPU and more
system memory. In addition, you may squeeze out a few more frames per
second. Benchmarks (see www.tomshardware.com) currently show the latest
from AMD being faster than the latest from Intel for this. But you must ask
yourself if the difference in frame rates is really that great, since frame
rates in the lower two hundred range are way faster than your brain will
notice. And even if the latest game taxes the CPU, other bottlenecks like
memory bandwidth have a far greater effect(IMHO).

For business applications, benchmarks showing the difference between the
processors are measured in seconds or tenths of seconds. Faster memory
makes the biggest difference because more data is moved per unit time, but
even then you are talking about sub-second measurements.

The bottom line is the price difference. Even if the current benchmarks
showed that Intel edged AMD, I would still get the AMD because for the
lower price I could get more of something else, like memory or better GPU.
The performance difference has long since ceased to be anything worth
considering except in exceptional cases.

I would add that a true 64 bit machine like AMD offers provides added
incentive to get it, to take advantage of software written for 64 bits.

Sorry if what I have written was a bit long, and if it incites flames. That
is not my intention.

Eli