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AMD Back in the Black
XaXXon writes "CNN reports that AMD had a profitable quarter for the first time in over two years. According to the story this is mostly because of their 64-bit line of chips (both Opterons and Athlon-64). AMD has forced both HP and Intel to change long-standing plans of only supporting Itanium, with HP coming out with Opteron-based systems and Intel releasing chips mimicking the 32/64-bit behaviour of the Opteron. According to the story, 64-bit processors are better than 32-bit ones because 32-bit processors 'can't take advantage of more than 4 megabytes (sic) of memory at a time.'"
Today AMD has achieved something that their processors have been able to do, quite easily, for quite a while now. Don't belive me? Take off the heatsink and find out.
*RIMSHOT*
I'm not a hater though. My thunderbird is serving as a space heater; keeping me warm on those cold Canadian nights.
Cheers AMD!
"Much better workhorse" is a very subjective definition... Some would claim that durability was the essential factor in proclaiming something a better workhorse, which the Athlon definitely didn't have. Remember the cooling rigs that rivalled icebergs? Which if fell off, let all the magic smoke out of the CPU?
I'm not bashing AMD - far from it - they've injected so much life into the CPU industry it's great - but people saying their chips have no down-sides is siding in zealotry :) AMD chips run hotter than their intel equivalents. The Intel chips have always had better survival rates from failed cooling - even a P4 with no cooling (yes, NO cooling) will work.
AMD chips are cheaper in every essence. The low price is only possible because they're not fabricated to as high standards as Intel. I've got no problem with this - it makes cheap chips for us, but when people gloss over this fact it promotes a skewed (and down-and-out untrue) view of the marketplace.
I hope I'm not coming off as pro-Intel/Microsoft nutcase (I'm not). I just wanted to air what is an oft-missed point. :)
AMD chips, especially the 64FX and Opterons are no longer much cheaper than Intel. I for one, purchased an AMD chip because it was cheaper than Intel. Given the choice, especially for the same price, consumers are likely to pick the brand that they know, being Intel, over AMD. I think it was a big mistake for AMD to raise prices. They think they are charging for 64 bitness, but most consumers are not using it, and even when Win64 comes out, they still won't buy more than 4 gigs of ram, so 64 bits really means nothing.
At least Intel's hyperthreading is actually useful to more people. More consumers multitask than use more than 4 gigs of ram