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Is AMD Worth A Professional Reputation?

Posted by Cliff on from the is-it-ready-to-play-in-the-big-sandbox dept.

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?"

1 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Not quite ready by colonel · · Score: 5

    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.