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

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.

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.