Is AMD Worth A Professional Reputation?

heyetv asks: "AMD has finally proven itself strong in competition to Intel. For over a year now. Old story; read TomsHardware or Sharky's. For overclockers, hackers, and the rest of us, this is great, but what about high volume, mission critical environments with hundreds, or even thousands of machines? What about high-performance clusters? I'm in a growing University/College Intel house of several hundred and trying to figure out why we are still as such. Are AMD's fast, cheap Athlon processors ready for production situations where a lack of support or seemingly minor failure could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and reputations/careers? I'm sure some of you have rolled out Texas-style processors in large-scale corporate situations. Have you had positive or negative experiences in doing so? I'm not interested in a flamewar over which is the faster or more technically superior, but opinions on which one is a processor to base a professional reputation on and given that AMD has only been performing on par with Intel for a year now... is this long enough?"

Comments

Re:Crippled Karen

[billyo]

Sitting at my desk reading stuff on /. like normal, I noticed a new topic about AMD vs Intel. But only one reply? I started to read the message and found my self reading a rather odd story about a man making love to a certian "Crippled Karen". Don't get my wrong, it was a great short story. But I'm still not sure what cpu he feels is better. What about Karen? Would she rather have an AMD or an Intel in that new motorized wheel chair with a computer and an lcd mounted on the left armrest?

Anyway... good story, just possibly the wrong the place to post it.

--we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams.

Do you trust Intel?

[NetJunkie]

With the problem that Intel has had, do you really trust them too? I have no problems rolling out AMD machines. I know how stable the Athlons are. They don't have compatibility problems.... Look at the number of machines being sold by Compaq and Gateway with Athlons in them.

The real question about high availability situations are the rest of the system. Motherboards...power supplies... disk subsystems...etc. I don't think anyone is building real Athlon servers yet. I know Dell, Gateway, and Compaq don't yet. I wouldn't even consider putting in a clone in a situation like you describe.

Re:Do you trust Intel?

[lizrd]

I have to agree with you completely. What's important here is not who made the CPU, but rather who put the box together. If you're buying your boxen from a reputable vendor (i.e. Gateway, Dell, IBM) and getting a good price then it's a good deal. I recently built out an Athlon box for myself, I think that it's great. However, I would not base my professional reputation on several hundred boxes that I put together in my living room.

AMD has been in some disfavor with the reputable vendors because in the past machines that didn't have an Intel Inside sticker on the front were typically big old hunks of shit (well, cyrix even more so) the vendors who chose to save a few bucks by buying a non-Intel processor usually chose to cut costs on other parts too and the quality suffered. This, combined with a lack of SMP support by AMD really ruled them out of the high-end/business market.

If you have the time and are able to support the machines yourself I'd be the first to recommend AMD chips and hand building your machines. I suspect that you don't have those kind of resources so your choice of vendor is going to be much more important than the CPU that's inside.
_____________

AMD works...

[Ami Ganguli]

I'm not sure I understand the question. You're a College/University with severl hundred PCs? That's hardly a mission-critical environment. In fact, I would think it's the sort of environment where you owe it to the institution to look for the best bang for the buck.

But even in production environments, I haven't had any problems with AMD and would certainly trust them at least as much as Intel. If the environment is really that critical I probably wouldn't use either.

Sun and IBM both make rock-solid hardware (Sparc and RS/6000, not x86) and IBM at least has _incredible_ service contracts (Sun probably does too, but I have no personal experience with their service dept.). You pay _way_ to much money for that support, but in a truly mission-critical environment it's worth it.

But again, for a university environment, Athlon is definately the way to go.

Re:AMD works...

[Ami Ganguli]

I didn't mean to imply that student labs aren't important, but the failure of a single machine isn't going to cost millions of dollars.

Put another way, would the students rather have 100 PCs that performed OK and had a 5% per year failure rate, or a 120 PCs that were somewhat faster but had a 10% per year failure rate? I bet the students would prefer the latter. They would have more PCs available on average and they would be faster too.

Ask a stock-broker on a trading floor the same question and he'd definately go with the more reliable, less performant setup. In his case a failure is really very expensive

Re:AMD works...

[jfrisby]

Getting "the best bang for the buck" means a LOT more than just how much you pay for the box. If you go with a brand that is prone to failure you will spend more time (and time is money) fixing problems. Your time is consumed. The time of the employee/student is consumed. Money is consumed in the replacement parts. Opportunities are lost. (you *could* have been applying security patches to the servers, or setting up that new computer lab, or...)

TCO is a VERY big issue when you have hundreds of machines. Now, I agree that "mission critical" is a term usually reserved for much more failure-sensitive environments than a university but that doesn't mean that the cheapest box is automatically the best.

However, it may very well be that AMD boxes are as reliable, or more reliable than Intel -- if so you're lucky.

My daytime employer uses pure Intel for our x86 based servers -- Intel motherboard (with rare exceptions (820 chipset) they tend to be VERY reliable), Intel chip (with rare exceptions (original Pentium), very solid), Intel network cards (always great). However, for our server environment we are more memory bound than CPU bound -- we can afford to go with a slower (but more proven) processor and spend less money that way.

-JF

Re:AMD works...

[jfrisby]

The managed version, and multi-port version work well for us. I should point out that we only use the 100+ series and the company is not old enough to predate that... :)

-JF

Re:AMD works...

[drix]

It's a question of semantics. I think the original poster's idea of mission critical was more along the lines of "If this computer crashes, X will lose millions of dollars, nuclear war will break out, etc." That's how most people would define mission critical. A good example of this would be Ebay's Sun E10000 Starfire server, which is mission critical in the sense that when it crashed last year, they lost millions of dollars in business and the very existence of the company could have been threatened had it gone on for an extended period of time. Another example would be any one of hundreds of air traffic control computers, which rely on the finest in 1960's computing technology (read: vacuum tubes) to make sure that your jet flies from point A to point B without bumping into any other jets. If they were to crash on a wide enough scale, and there were no backups, a lot of people's lives would be in danger. A lot, lot more people wouldn't be able to fly until service would be restored. Those type of scenarios are traditionally regarded as "mission critical".

Contrast that with what you are saying and it's a weak comparison, at best. As a college student I think I'm well qualified in saying that public use/lab computers certainly aren't mission critical to my education, or anyone else's I know. When my internet access goes AWOL, I somehow still manage to educate myself by doing things like (god forbid) reading books. When my Sun Netray terminal dies for no apparent reason in the computer science labs, I do math homework. Certainly it's an annoyance but computers that crash periodically are of no real concern to me from an educational standpoint.

If you can't tell I'm squarely in the corner of the original poster. When the computers do work, which is most of the time, they are godawful slow. I would gladly trade a little bit more uptime from something to work on besides a PPro 200 running Slowlaris x86, a 486 with Windows, or one of 250 Sun Netray NCs all feeding into the same antiquated Sun E5K. Hooray for public schools, I guess :)

Not quite ready

[colonel]

The biggest problem with AMD chips is the motherboard.

While the Athlon is a great chip, you can't get a 4-way SMP system with it yet. And most high-end boxes need SMP. They're so expensive to build that customers need a clear upgrade path - and if dropping in a second processor isn't easy, they don't want the solution.

I build LVS/HA clusters for a living, and one thing I don't think I can do without is the EMP, (Emergency Management Port) which isn't available on AMD motherboards.

The chip really is a smaller portion of the decision. When I build a cluster, I usually recommend an Intel L440GX motherboard, which has all the necessities like onboard dual SCSI, EEPro and EMP. Once you pick out the best motherboard for the lifecycle of the system, you look at the processors that it supports.

If AMD had a motherboard similar to the L440GX that supported SMP thunderbirds, they'd break in to that market. But they don't.

Their motherboards are designed for low-cost deployed workstations or gamers.

Really, motherboard choice is more important than chip choice if you're building LVS, HA, Beowulf, etc. PPC is an option, though.

VIA

[Cyrano_De]

The only thing that would keep me from betting my career on the current AMD CPU lines is the VIA chipset. From a stability standpoint they don't hold up for anything. I would not bet my least favorite user's career on anything that uses a VIA based chipset. While I have no experience with the AMD chipset, everyone seems to only want to push motherboards built on the VIA set. For a gamer running wintendoze I am sure it is fine. Rebooting every couple of days is not an issue for most. But when you want a machine to run as close to 24x7x365.5 it is very much an issue. My 440BX based boards have run for as long as I can remember without a problem.

What many seem to neglect to speak about is how quickly the 4x AGP and PC133 memory advantage is tossed out the window on the first crash. Who needs speed if that speed is unusable. Give my 2x agp and pc100 8 days a week if I can run my computer for more than 6 days a week.

Just MHO.

Re:VIA

[rlsnyder]

Testify. Those VIA pieces of rubbish have cost me more headaches that any AMD processor will ever be worth.

Trust AMD

[DoomHaven]

I have been using AMD for 2 years (an AMD K6-2 300 and a first gen Athlon 600), and my next computer will have at least a 1GHz Athlon in it (as soon as PC2100 RAM is available and relatively affordable, and the AMD 760 chipset is in a ASUS motherboard).

I trust AMD enough to be stable for my needs; that my 300 is stable enough for my parents needs, and that my 1GHz AMD will be stable enough for my future needs. Admittedly, there were some problems with AGP cards with AMD chipset implementations (a lot of problems with 3rd party AGP implementations with the K6-X chips, and the GeForce cards on the ASUS K7M motherboard; problems, AFAIK, that have been worked out), but at a university, high-end graphics is not high on the priority list, at least from my background as a part-time computer technician at my University for 2 years (the CAD labs were the exception, of course).

Re:AMD = cheap

[ashshy]

For an example of running high-load web servers on AMD systems, check out AnandTech's Web servers. Anandtech.com is a highly trafficked site, and they run off of a mix of AMD and Intel systems. Specifically, 4 out of the 5 web servers are T-Birds, and the rest (1 webserver, forum server, couple of databases) are Xeons.

The article linked above is a fairly in-depth explanation of why Athlons are good servers (for some applications at least). Personally, since that configuration was put in place, I haven't seen Anandtech down or slow even once. Used to be crawling around major release time (GeForce, Athlon, that magnitude of news).
-----
#o#

Worth your reputation?

[yamla]

Is it worth your professional reputation? No, definitely not. Your professional reputation is hopefully worth much more than you'd save by going AMD, despite the fact that AMD is significantly faster. I mean, virtually nobody has run into any problems with AMD CPUs, at least at the Athlon or better (at least, those that are not the result of motherboard defects or invalid assumptions in programs... which could just as easily affect Intel CPUs). And many (most?) of us are now running computers with AMD CPUs at home.

But that doesn't make it worth your while staking everything. I've run into problems with AMD CPUs before, back in the 486 days. I haven't run into any with the Thunderbirds and Durons but who knows, they may exist.

So should you stake your reputation on Intel CPUs? Most definitely not. There have been far more problems with Intel CPUs recently compared to AMD CPUs. Far too many to risk your reputation.

Except, of course, you almost certainly won't be. If you go AMD and you run into any problems, your reputation is shot. If you go Intel and you run into problems, your reputation is likely as not unaffected.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. 'Nobody ever got fired for going Intel'. (Of course, this used to be 'IBM').

Would I go AMD over Intel? Yes. Would I risk my reputation on it? No, though it is clearly the better (and safer) option theoretically.

Re:Worth your reputation?

[Manic Miner]

"..virtually nobody has run into any problems with AMD CPUs, at least at the Athlon or better.."

Well I would like to put a word in as a site which has had problems. We currently run 100+ workstations for students in the UK which run RedHat Linux or Windows 2000 (roughly 50/50 split). A while ago we bought new machines with Intel 733 Pentium III processors which all run Windows 2000 just great. We also bought a AMD machine of similar spec (700 Mhz) which was flaky as hell! We run all our machines 24/7 and the intel boxes running windows were ok (not as good as the linux boxes which practically never crash), but the AMD box was rubbish crashing out 3 or 4 times a day! - after that experience we are going to use nothing but intel.

It makes our department look to bad if our machines aren't very reliable, we cannot risk using AMD chips as in our experince they just don't work. It seems a shame, but I wouldn't risk it when your reputation is at stake.

What really matters

[stuce]

Fretting over one's CPU, if reliability is at stake, is a real waste of time. There are four high risk components in any computer.

• The hard drive
• The power supply
• The CPU fan
• The OS

Hard drives fail. Raid arrays and hot swap can reduce the danger here

Power supplies fail. Having redundant hot swappable power supplies are the only way to go

The CPU fan will eventually stop and you should have software monitoring this and reporting to you when it starts slowing down.

The OS is the most complex and error prone part of the system. It's very important to have a good one and very hard to find. Heck, that's why most of the people at this site are here. You won't find a slashdot site for power supplies or CPU fans.

If your hardware is going to fail the CPU is just as likely to blow as a network card or some RAM. It has no moving parts, just pushes electrons around the same way again and again and as long as its well cooled will give you no grief. As for CPU quirks, just about any CPU will have them. Once a CPU has had a few months to season it's bugs are either well known and the chip is avoided or fixed with a BIOS upgrade or OS patch (never to be an issue again). The Athlon is well seasoned and stable.

But honestly, if hundreds of thousands of dollars and people reputations are on the line there is no alternative but high availability clustering. None. Zero. Nada. It's even better if the nodes are in different time zones. So for Pete's sake, make a nice fast cluster of Athlon boxes with RAID 5 and three power supplies a piece running Linux or QNX. Then pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

Re:AMD, compatibility problems.

[levendis]

You blame AMD for a Linux kernel bug? If it was indeed panicing on the CPUID call, that is clearly Linux's fault. There are alot of commands that are supported on one CPU and not on another (MMX, 3DNow, SSE, etc), even when comparing all Intel chips. The kernel should trap it and move on, not panic. This is just sloppiness on Red Hat's part, not AMD.

AMD =~ Intel, and has for ever

[BattyMan]

...given that AMD has only been performing on par with Intel for a year now... is this long enough?

That is just plain incorrect.
AMD has tracked _every_ major device made by Intel for over 25 years. Back in the Plestocine era (1973-1975), Intel & AMD made a technology exchange agreement, wherin AMD got the masks to the 6104 (4Kbit DRAM) and Intel got the masks to the 2704 (4KBit EPROM)(I'm guessing here, anybody with better data is welcome to supply it). Later this deal grew to include the 8080/82xx uP/peripheral family and by the time the 8085 & 8086 came out they were solid partners in competition against Zilog and their Z80. You see, in those days, they had a thing called "second-sourcing", which meant that if you wanted to sell your microelectronic-based devices to the military, you had to establish at least two parts suppliers, so the DoD wouldn't be invested into a proprietary (or outright unavailable) part. The 8086 technology partnership was supposed to be "for the lifetime of the iAPX86 product family", which Intel decided ended with the 386. Since the 486, AMD has been forced to reverse-engineer Intel's CPUs, and has been generally drop-in compatible with Intel, except for occasional issues. Look at AMD & Intel's OEM price lists. THEY MAKE THE SAME CHIPS! (Many of which, like the 8051, you've never heard of.) Except that AMD usually has smaller dice and better yields, which translates to faster and cheaper parts. I guess AMD has drawn the line at licensing Intel's proprietary socket, and now they're no longer drop-in compatible. Intel has from time to time done other things to break AMD compatibility, but they catch up, and AMD usually offers comparable or better parts for less, both because they _have_to_, and because they don't spend millions of bucks for TV commercials with people dancing around in tinted bunny suits. That's what jars me the MOST: the unwashed masses now _know_ that Intel makes superior parts, because they've seen silly blue men advertize the PIII on TV, but they've never heard of that AMD outfit.

To build a High-Availability system, I would:

AVOID the bleeding-edge technology. It COSTS TOO MUCH, and has compatability and reliability issues. Anybody in chip manufacture can tell you that it takes a year to _really_ get a new chip really rolling off a line. Then they come out cheap.

Use AMD for a more reliable CPU, assuming that other factors (such as motherboard chipsets) are equal, which I gather from the discussion they may not be.

Spread the load out among a bunch of cheap machines if possible, rather than build a single expensive world-killer and single point of failure. If the job can't be spread among several machines, forget the x86, you need (or will need in the future) a bigger gun.

Think about this statement: "The Intel Pentium III processor will make the Internet COME ALIVE!!!" Now that's a blatent lie. I hope I'm addressing an audience that's well enough informed to know that _yer_connection_speed_ has one whole lot more to do with the quality of your Internet experience than your CPU speed.

Please guys, leave the engineering to the engineers, and quit wasting money on Intel, even if they _do_ have pretty graphics.

i440GX sux, go ServerWorks instead (Intel did!)

[BitMan]

The Intel 440GX is way behind the curve. Intel has poured so much into the Rambus avenue they forgot about the high-end where 4GB RAM and 2 standard PCI busses don't cut it. And the MTH (memory translator hub) failed to produce the SDRAM alternative they needed with the i840.

Enter ServerWorks' (formerly Reliance Computer Corporation, RCC) ServerSet III chipsets. They product chipsets for the big-boys, now for mainboard OEMs like Tyan, Asus and SuperMicro. 2 to 3 PCI busses (1 or 2 are 64-bit x 66MHz -- NOT slots, but whole busses!), 2 to 4-way PC133 SDRAM (supports upto 16GB), DDR SDRAM on the way, just awesome. The massive PCI I/O blows anything Intel's got away, and meets or beats most RISC vendors. Cheap too as the 2 CPU, 2 PCI bus, 2-way PC133 bus ServerSet IIILE can be had for just over $250 in SuperMicro mainboards.

ServerWorks is so good, Intel has adopted their chipsets for their own branded mainboards. Again, check them out!

P.S. As far as AMD, stay _away_ from Gateway 2000 -- the cheapest/worst components. Stick with a vendor that builds quality AMD systems, with AMD-approved components. Try Micron PC as they just introduced systems based on the new DDR SDRAM AMD i760 chipset mainboards and PC266 CPUs.

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith