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Upside interviews Jerry Sanders of AMD
An Anonymous reader writes "Titled The Last Man Standing, this Upside interview offered an inside view of the bloody war between the two CPU makers from Sanders' point of view. He also talks about upcoming Hammer, flash memory, Transmeta and telecomm bubbles. Somehow I get a feeling that both companies are living under the heavy cloud of Microsoft. Pretty lengthy, but an interesting reading.""
Why people insist on publishing his looping rants as corporate manna is beyond me.
Well, I'm a geek...and I've extensively studied computer architecture in grad. school. I won't put an Athlon into an important machine. Its fine for casual desktop use, but in my experience, an Athlon is not as stable as a PIII (I have no experience with a P4). PIII's draw half as much power thus you don't need to worry about a great power supply. You don't need to worry about subtle incompatibilities such as the AGP cache coherence bug. And there are just too many lousy Athlon motherboards out there. That may not be AMD's fault, but its the truth. I know dozens of Athlon users who consistently tell me that their Athlon machine will freeze every few months or so. I've never heard of such a thing with PIII's, that is unless they are using a lousy OS such as Win9x.
Granted I do in fact use an Athlon for one of my machines and am generally happy with it. I just wouldn't trust it when things really matter (like a server situation or when doing a 10-week numerical computation).