Slashdot Mirror
AMD Launches Budget Processor Refresh
MojoKid writes "AMD has again launched a bevy of new processors targeted squarely at budget-conscious consumers. Though Intel may be leading the market handily in the high-performance arena, AMD still provides a competitive offering from a price/performance perspective for the mainstream. HotHardware has a performance quick-take of the new 3.2GHz Phenom II X2 555 and 2.9GHz Athlon II X4 635. For $100 or less, bang for the buck with AMD is still relatively high."
I agree, I have a Phenom x2 and my whole system cost me a mere €300, - including sound, HDD and good enough video to have a 3d gnome desktop.
...will not matter if their energy consumption gets too expensive. We need more energy, and cheaply. I swear, it's like The Little Shop of Horrors. Only this time, it's the computers screaming, "Feeeed me!!!"
Life is not for the lazy.
The standard whitegood market, where everything is cheap and disposable.
The standard pleb doesn't really give a damn whether it can crunch a billion petaflops in under a nanosecond, or heat a cup of water standing on the desk by its sheer awesomeness.
All they care about is whether they can chat to their friends, write a letter, browse the intert00bs and lose the last bit of their privacy by posting everything on facebook.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
i know we're not to rtfa, but you're off by ~100w
for both phenom ii processors in the review
which are 80w and 95w.
very cool :)
and when i see one near me i am gonna grab it getting these features will allow me at least to even consider the odd purchase and yes im on a low income.
Would you please elaborate on the "poor performance". What are/were you doing? Gaming, video encoding, or what? I have a 64-bit X2 dual in a system I built for $300. The only reason I considered a 64-bit processor was so I could stick 4gb of RAM into it, so please further elaborate on how "they burned (you) with their 64 bit processors". What additional benefit were you expecting from 64-bit architecture? I've used this machine for some CPU-heavy statistical/programming work (Natural Language Processing), and it performed adequately. It even handles high-detail Civ4 games well, despite using only onboard video.
The Atom is FAR inferior in terms of performance, so to answer your question, no. The Atom is designed for mobile computing, so it sacrifices performance for power-saving gains. This is meant to compete with intels low priced desktop-orientated CPUs.
Not really. For a while, I had the highest-end Phenom II 965 (the 140 W one), and it never drew anywhere nearly as much as you said. I switched to the 125 W model after I was tired of having a space heater running during the Summer, though.
Would like to get one of these discount quadcore AMD processors, don't know which is the best option for a Hackintosh, though. Any recommendations? My current hackintosh is Intel-based and I don't know how tricky it might be to configure a working AMD--based hackintosh. Links appreciated.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
hurr durr imma retard
It's fast enough for any usual non-gaming usage...and also for most games, if you're fine with mostly ignoring latest gen ones (and really, with so many great older ones that's easy). Plus it is consistantly passively cooled.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I too refuse to use AMD processors anymore, but I can see why someone would want one of these. It's a processor fast enough to do anything you're likely to want to do for less than you can get any Intel processor for. I didn't look too closely at the benchmark results, but it looks like the Intel processors win every time, but not by enough to be noticeable unless you're running benchmarks or playing this year's Crysis.
Actually I think with Intel you can get burned more easily. Phenom II X2 3.2GHz tells you really all you have to now. If you are buying higher numbers you get a better CPU.
On the other hand with a Core2 the case is not that clear. Is a Core2 Duo 3000 MHz better than a Core2 Duo 2833 MHz? Nope, the former one is an E6850, the latter an E8300. And even those numbers won't tell you much. Higher model numbers are often better, but not always. For example the Q6xxx models have Intel VT, the Q8xxx don't.
That is not a big problem for us enthusiasts who get and understand every information about that CPU. But to less tech savy people I will always suggest AMD. Even if Intels good chips are better than AMDs chances are they pick a bad one and would be better served with AMD.
AMD and Intel rate their processors differently, they can't be compared. FWIW, the E6300 is nowhere near as powerful either.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
What are you talking about? AMD64, also known as x86_64 or EMT64T was invented by AMD.
The performance is absolutely stellar.
AMD did this so well, Intel decided to try to copy them, and came up with Intel 64T.
As a whole, there is barely a noticeable performance difference between the two platforms.
Of course there are some low-performing 64-bit procs for budget users, just like there are slow Intel procs for budget users.
But overall, Intel 64-bit procs are no better than AMD 64-bit procs.
Also, when it comes to hardware virtualization and IOMMU, AMD has a very significant edge.
Don't blame AMD because you bought the wrong proc model for your system, or misconfig'ed it. Processor is definitely not the only thing that impacts performance. There are many other ways you can screw your system's performance in picking hardware components -- not all procs are ideal for all configurations.
Hell, i'm very often getting better performance with Linux and Windows (dual boot) out of my AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Windsor 2.6GHz than with my Intel Core2 Quad Core Q9400 2.66Ghz, and much better benchmarks for certain types of workloads.
Even though the Quad Core machine has 8gb of RAM, and my dual-core machine only has 4gb...
I blame it on the Linux and Windows kernels' poor support for multi-processing and seedy memory management.
Intel processors in lower-end price brackets might often score a win, but only if you consider the price of CPU alone. Intel GFX is crappy. There's Nvidia integrated GFX available...but for some reason the motherboards with them are usually quite a bit more expensive than AMD ones. Cheap AMD CPU with cheap integrated GFX offers best all-around performance - as good as any other setup for "daily" tasks, definatelly more 3D oomph than comparatively priced alternatives.
One that hath name thou can not otter
We already know you are Willie Hill and repeating the fact will not make it any less true.
Um, of course you are entitles to your opinion. However, if you want to air your opinion in the public square and are not willing to share any details to back it up, you're no better then the crazy dude on the corner talking about the faeries that visit him at night..
For example, AMD outperforms Intel pound-for-pound in graphics and video rendering (which would make sense since they acquired ATI). If you're building a media center, get a computer with an AMD processor. It's one of the few things in life where cheaper is better.
The Institute of Incomplete Research has determined that 9 of out 10
that's like saying you bought a 318i expecting the performance of a M3, and then claiming the 318i under performs. It's only under performing to your unrealistic expectations, but performs where it should for the money.
did dey durk yur jebs two?
A couple of years ago I ran two very similar five day long geophysical jobs (pre-stack time migration) on an 8 CPU AMD system and an 8 CPU Xeon system of equivalent speeds. All CPUs were at 100% over that time with the exception of some disk access at the start and disk writes every twelve hours for checkpoints. There was a five minute difference over that week and the margin of error was probably more than twice that.
I haven't been able to tell the difference since then either.
and Ford backwards is Driver Returns On Foot. congratulations you have invented a backronym that happens to support your prejudice, don't do too big dance in celebration it is only slightly harder than inventing the acronym in the first place. FUCK Fornication Under Consent of the King
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
Q8XXX got VT in mid 2009.
I have a Q8300 and it has VT, see http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=39107 for further details.
Got a heck of deal on it, so I can always upgrade the CPU to a Q9XXX and still come out on top.
So say you, but can you prove it was an issue with the processor, and that it was a design issue, do you have information backing this up?
I think slashdot readers might be interested in the remarks of someone more experienced with both AMD and Intel processors, rather than someone who tried an AMD CPU once, didn't do due their due dilligence, and just assumed all AMD procs were broken because their system was.
It's happened too many times to count that I got a defective Intel processor that had the thermal monitor "broken" in some way that caused the proc to always throttle its clock down.
Chips were replaced under warranty, and then all was well. Every manufacturer had bad batches, that's why you do burn-in testing on CPUs, memory, and motherboards, before deployment.
I've dealt with different systems totalling a few hundred different AMD CPUs, and not run into any defective ones yet, or caveats to 32-bit or 64-bit AMD procs.
I'm not saying Intels are unreliable or anything, and I hope i'm not jinxing myself: but so far, all (perhaps) 10 DoA or otherwise defective CPUs i've seen in my life were Intel processors.
From one who modded you down, I did so for the following reasons:
/. is to be a meaningful, intelligent, mature discussion of a particular article, and
1. Screaming and yelling at a poster for being a idiot because they do not agree with you,
2. Failing to recognize that the commenting system on
3. Not understanding that capitalization of words is to be done in accordance with proper rules of grammer, and not as a means to yelling louder over your percieved persecution.
Thank you, the AC who burned 3 mod points on one poster in one article. Posting as AC, obviously, to preserve my moderation.
"I paid for a product which , IN MY OPINION, underperformed. AS A CUSTOMER, MY OPINION IS SUFFICIENT TO DETER ME FROM BUYING AMD AGAIN" That is sufficient for me and all that needs said.
Yes, something with an intel processor. Save yourself the headaches, its not worth the savings.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Despite the above comment being made by an intel troll you will need an intel system to run osx. Most any of the cheap intel chipsets (like the g31) will work with osx.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Uhm, media centers require little processing power really, not particularly sure why you seem to think they are special.
I've got a 3800 that handles 4 incoming tv streams at a time, in HD, streams to two televisions at a time, and re-encodes for my iphone. The heaviest part is re-encoding, everything else is done in silicon elsewhere, incoming streams are already mpeg or the card encodes analog streams to mpeg so thats just disk IO, streaming TV or displaying it doesn't require much, its just disk IO again as the video card does the decoding ...
Media center PCs just aren't processor intensive devices.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I've been out of the PC building loop for years since I moved to a mac, and while I still plan to keep a mac laptop, I am studying scientific computing in grad school starting in April and was looking to buy a beefy linux machine. These CPUs look really interesting, but I was hoping not to have to buy a tower to house it in. Do these things run alright in a mini-case? Any suggestions on a good small case to house one of these in?
Monstar L
You were modded down because your comment provided no useful information for Slashdot readers.
As far as I'm concerned, you said AMD CPUs were "garbage" while refusing to back up these claims with supporting evidence. I and a lot of others visitors know from personal experience that AMD products aren't garbage. If you're going to make this claim, you'd better back it up with meaningful performance metrics.
And by that I mean
The moderators read your comment which , IN THEIR OPINION, underperformed.
Honestly there is a very big learning curve you're going to need to overcome in order to get a reliable hackintosh build on an AMD platform. To be honest, your best bets are an intel (socket 775) based platform. Various motherboards there will have issues (usually audio), not to mention video cards. AMD chipsets tend to have more issues still. If you want to go with a Mac, I'd just suggest starting with a mini, if that doesn't suit your needs bump up to an intel based hackintosh.
Don't get me wrong, imho the AMD 785G motherboards with a nice Athlon X2/X4 are a great starter platform, just not a great hackintosh platform. I've built 4 780/785 based setups in the past year and a half, they run great for mom, grandma, my media center etc. What does seem like it *should* be promising would be an nvidia 9300 series board with a core2 quad. Note: if you're into heavy gaming at a higher resolution than say 1650x1024 or so, then you won't be happy with onboard graphics.
On the other hand with a Core2 the case is not that clear. Is a Core2 Duo 3000 MHz better than a Core2 Duo 2833 MHz? Nope, the former one is an E6850, the latter an E8300.
And the wildly different model numbers - the things they're sold by - tell me right off they're fundamentally different and need to be looked at closer. Without even looking, one's 65nm and one's 45nm. I pull up the specs and the cache sizes are also different.
Maybe it's just me, but that the difference between AM2 and AM3 was that the AM3 had a 2 after the name (Athlon II and Phenom II) didn't strike me as the most obvious way to advertise that change.
Conclusion: Buying parts because of a single number will eventually get you burned no matter who you buy from.
Posting as AC, obviously, to preserve my moderation.
Yea, it frustrate me too that you can't post and mod using the same account on slashdot.
Some of us like the higher fidelity from the unsmoothed pixels that software rendering masters!
Damn kids with your fancy bicubicly stretched pixels and anti-aliased edges. Get off my screen!
"As far as I'm concerned, you said AMD CPUs were "garbage" while refusing to back up these claims with supporting evidence"
That's funny, when I read it, it seemed he was saying, "100 bucks isn't enough of a price advantage to coax me into buying", which is a claim that in no way involves anything other than his opinion,and thus needs no "backing it up".
I guess you need to work on your reading comprehension, cause you're just making shit up out of thin air, and modding people down because you can't read worth a damn is pretty shitty.
Totally agree. Hackintoshes just don't play nicely with AMD CPUs.
Just to join in the fun; if you post your opinions on a public forum you are expected to back up your claims with examples and logic. If you cannot do so, either because of personal beliefs, or other restrictions such as NDAs, then do not post them.
Of course, while you are certainly entitled to your opinion, that alone worth little on a discussion board. The merit of this system comes from the fact that others may examine your arguments, and either adjust their own beliefs, or reply to your data with their own data. Saying you believe something and not backing it up adds little to the discussion; none of us know you, so we cannot judge if your opinion really has merit. And do not be too surprised when people start trying to interpret your post and "putting words in your mouth." That just means you didn't explain things well enough, so they had to draw their own conclusions.
While I do not believe you are trolling, I do think you completely missed the point of the comment system, at least for this topic.
The case size doesn't matter so long as you can pull enough air through it. I look after a few 1U sized servers with 2 twin quad core machines in each fed by the same power supply in between the motherboards. You could almost use the things as a hair dryer.
Are you honestly arguing that a poster's choice of "an" vs "some" disqualifies his entire argument? Getting into semantics much? The point still stands that he tried a very small number of CPUs, and by virtue of that small number, his opinion is not likely to be worth much.
Perhaps if the original poster said he ran a cluster of a thousand AMD CPUs, or even just tried several different generations of AMD CPUs your point would have merit. However, a person is not a fanboi for pointing out obvious inconsistencies, regardless if he mis-remembered a not particularly significant number.
So, would there really be any difference if Nvidia board similar to Intel 9300 ones was the variant...for AMD?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Flash, sure it barely makes a dent in my Q8300 but my old p4 could never run any of the popular flash sites fullscreened.
Intel processors in lower-end price brackets might often score a win, but only if you consider the price of CPU alone.
Odd... Looking at a major webshop around here, there are 6 AMD CPUs to chooce from before you get to the 2nd cheapest option from Intel. And that includes a QuadCore from AMD.
Yes, it doesn't have a Intel processor in it and isn't "GenuineIntel". OS X looks for some hardware chip flags. It won't install on a AMD CPU.
Ifwm : Your response contains false specious claims such as "You just overtly lied", quoting you. Your response is clearly defamatory, and malicious, or so negligent as to rise to the level of malice. I hereby request and strongly urge you to be more careful in the future.
Speaking of due diligence,if you'd actually read his post, you'd realize your claims in that quote are addressed, specifically,where he said he had TWO of them.
Ok.. then.. so he had two of them, I misread that. So frickin' what? I would have to say that having touched 2 64-bit procs doesn't tell you much about the performance of the AMD 64 processors, let-alone the current generation of AMD processor.
The means of measurement and validity/scope of the benchmark are questionable. Of course the OP will not use AMD processors, that's his choice, but other readers are interested in whether that choice really holds any water, and is based on a valid foundation.
you're talking about, this is slashdot and you're a fanboi, you're entitled.
You have the wrong idea here. As in most cases I prefer and recommend Intel procs. But due to heat output, not performance.
I mean, why ask him anything when you don't intend to debate accurately, or even attempt to? You just overtly lied, and the proof is in the posts you were responding to.
You are misconstruing my post as a flame, and you are misconstruing true statements as "overt lie".
You don't *have* to justify your opinion, but no one *has* to listen to it or give it any relevance.
By posting here it can be assumed that you want your opinion to be heard and considered and thus probably do care about people listening to it. Thus it would be assumed that you would justify your opinion and not respond in like a flaming mule.
It's great that you have somehow managed to venture out of your mother's basement to meet these people who have told you about their experiences with AMD processors. I have been using AMD processors for years and the only time my computers have ever had a problem with locking up or crashing was when I was running Vista. I suspect these people you know were mistaken. Furthermore, how does Intel support open source more than AMD? Although I'm not familiar their "open-ness", I've never had a problem running any open source software on my AMD sporting computers.
Sent from my iPhone 5
Nice try, Blappo.
And the person who asked for more information said please! Imagine that. He was pleasant, and Blappo or whatever was rude in response.
After all, I am strangely colored.
After a tirade like that where you basically tell everyone to fuck off and let you live in ignorance, I'd say it was a well deserved mod. In fact, next time I get mod points, I'll keep an eye out for you...
I build new boxes every 6-8 months or so and rotate them into production boxes to make room for the next set. Until recently the Intel chipsets were ahead of the game vs the AMD chipsets with regards to things like E-SATA, AHCI, and PCI-e. AMD has caught up in the last 8 months, though. High-end Intel cpus tend to be a bit faster than high-end AMD cpus and you can also stuff more memory into small form-factor Intel boxes vs small form-factor AMD boxes.
On the flip-side, AMD boxes tend to be cheaper all-around and aren't quite so gimicky when it comes to managing cpu speed vs heat dissipation. Whole systems based on AMD seem to eat less power and from a cost standpoint when running systems 24x7. Power is getting to be quite important.
If you are trying to create the fastest, highest-performance box in the world Intel is probably your game (and for graphics you are going to be buying a 16x PCI-e card anyway with that sort of setup).
If you ratchet down your expectations just a bit, however, you can slap together a very good box with AMD at its core for half the price and 85% of the performance, and that is going to be plenty good enough for just about anything considering how overpowered machines have gotten in the last few years vs what people actually run on them.
Personally speaking I see no point purchasing the absolute bleeding edge when it is just going to become non-bleeding edge in 8-months when I can instead purchase two of something just slightly behind the bleeding edge at a much lower price.
These are just my observations.
-Matt
Flash is supposed to be hardware-accelerated but I have to say from first-hand experience, I just retired by AMD Athlon XP 2600+ / GeForce 4 Ti4200 128MB, with an Intel i7 920/6GBRAM/2GBGTX285 and now I can actually play Flash in HD or even HQ for that matter!
You are right you don't have to justify anything you say on here. But unless your a complete moron you realize that you are on a website and seemingly engaging in some kind of conversation. During conversations you explain things.
I never said the OP was such a person. I'm leaving it to the OP to clarify the details, if he cares to post more; the OP could probably add a lot of useful info for readers, like 'details of the slowness', observations, etc, which would increase the usefulness of the anecdotal info.
As it stands the OP hasn't chosen to provide better details that could be useful, but instead made a vague remark about trying AMD64 procs once (or twice).
To be clear: trying two AMD64 processors twice or once is _NOT_ significantly different from trying just one AMD64 processor once, the sample size is still very low, especially if the two procs were of the same generation, stepping, or batch of CPUs.
Or if the CPU was not fully singled out... Trying one AMD64 proc in a system, deciding it's too slow, then getting another AMD64 proc, doesn't identify the proc itself as an issue, if the choice of cooling, PSU/bus/MB/dip switch settings/etc was at issue.
Another observation would be that it's unfair to compare a 1st gen AMD64 proc vs a 2nd gen or later Intel EM64T proc. Even if the GHz happen to be the same. There were also some times when the most comparable CPU (at the high end) was not brought to market by both vendors at the same time.
Many procs of even the same Ghz and cores have different performance characteristics. Many purchasers of CPUs forget things other than GHz that are important, such as L1, L2, L3 cache sizes, FSB, and certain features such as Hyperthreading.
Please visit the OSx86project wiki page to have those questions answered. I'll tell you off the bat that you will have to patch the kernel, which already puts you at risk for a world of hurt if your other components don't play nicely either.
There are less "garbage processors" from AMD. Less intentionally crippled varieties that are missing little bits of this and little bits of that compared to what Intel offers. With Intel I always have to read the fine print on every processor to see if it supports virtualization extensions, for only one example.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yet suck Inte£'s tiny corporate dick even after 3 convictions for monopoly abuse.
Dumb hypocritical dipshits.
Remember... WIntel?
They were anti-competitive from way back in the 80's and 90's... talk to some OEMs and resellers... they were the microsoft of the chip world yet they got free pass after pass back then and it's even worse now.
Do the right thing... stop supporting monopolist scum!
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
How about in 3 months?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's a pretty decent/entertaining review. He also speaks about over clocking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNcE3GND3sQ&feature=sub
You know, 1 core, 2 cores, 3 cores, 1,000000 cores I have realize means exactly jack if the data they need to crunch is still sitting on frigen hard drive.
My processors and I would do flips and flops, if we could just get some dam data off our drives. Come on? We have basically not had a real leap in hardrive speeds or technology in how many years?
I mean solid states and all are great, but they still have a long way to go. What happens when we need to start pushing terabytes like megabytes?
We got a ram and catch arms race going on because, the hard drives suck and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
The best we can do are raid tricks to get any more performance (or reliability for that matter), and that has well known limits and problems.
Living in Chile
Well if all you can come up with is variations of "IT SUX!" then don't be surprised if most of us out here think you are full of shit, okay?
After building a couple of budget AMD boxes for customers this lifelong Intel+Nvidia man couldn't be happier when he switched. For less than $750 after rebate I got a 925 Quad with 8Mb of total cache, 8Gb of DDR2 800MHz RAM, a nice 780V board that supports up to 32Gb, 1Tb of HDD, a 4650HD 1Gb, and dual DVD burners along with Windows 7 HP X64. And you know what? I could NOT be happier! This bitch chews through video transcoding like nothing, World in Conflict, Bioshock, HL2, Far Cry 2, all play nice and pretty with nary a slowdown, Windows 7 plays really nice with the new AMD quads and my boot and shutdown times are lightning quick, the quad is only 95watts and doesn't turn my apartment into a space heater, in fact it rarely gets over 105f and that is under full load for hours with stock cooling, under normal use it sits right at 83f, yeah this baby is nice and didn't break my wallet.
So I don't know what your problem with AMD chips was/is, especially since you won't actually bother to elaborate other than "IT SUX!" but I can say my customers can't be happier with the new AMD line. The bang for the buck is incredible, with $50 duals, $70 triples, and $99 quads, the new IGPs support just about every format for hardware acceleration out of the box so video is nice and smooth no matter how big a monitor they buy, much lower heat and power usage which helps keep the electric bills down, motherboards for AMD are less expensive for really good boards, all around it is just a really good buy.
So unless you are one of those that just has to have the largest ePeen, which in that case you shouldn't have been looking at anything less than a $1000 Core I7 chip anyway, I just don't see what the problem could be. I could add an AMD 5xxx to my PC and play any game I want with out a problem, and for a PC that cost less than $750 that is saying a lot. I could easily see myself still using this machine 5 years from now simply because it has room to grow if I need to, but frankly everything I have thrown at the 925 has just gone off without a hitch, so I really don't see the need for any bigger. And many of my customers are "Joe Average" and are quite happy with their new AMD duals and Triples, and just rave to their friends about "how fast" everything is and how nice it all runs.
Lets be honest here-for most folks PCs passed "good enough" quite a few miles back and with $99 quads anybody can have ludicrous speed at their fingertips. Even my 67 year old dad is running AMD quad right now, and couldn't be happier. While he didn't really need all that power I figured at that price it was better to give him room to grow, and with this he can watch videos and chat and do whatever he wants and never even hit the chips hard. All that for a PC that cost less than $600 after rebate. Man you just can't beat that!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If you can't back up your trash talk, then the rest of us can just assume it's mindless noise.
If you make a claim, then expect to be called out it.
Your complete inability to articulate why exactly the AMD gear isn't fast enough is a pretty good indication that any objective speed difference is moot. ...and yes there is an objective difference. Some of us can even give firsthand accounts of those differences and actual numbers. However, I don't think it matters so much for the vast vast majority of consumers. The cheaper AMD gear is going to an equally effective choice.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
EXACTLY!!! You really have to look at the total picture. I'm not really a hardcore gamer (between playing music, working, and my GF, I just don't have the time) but I do like to break out some games on a lazy Sunday when I get a chance, so I went ahead and ordered a 4650HD when I built my 7550 dual (when the quads got so cheap I went ahead and upgraded to a 925, but that's another story) but wouldn't you know it, because the 1Gb model was like $35 after rebate it was back-ordered.
So I figured fine, I'd just go ahead and install my games and set them up when the card came. I didn't get the baddest board, just a 780VM due to the fact that it supported 32Gb of RAM. After dealing with Intel IGPs I figured what the hell, I could use a laugh, I'll fire up one of my games just to watch it stutter....but it didn't! Bioshock, HL2, Swat 4, all played with nary a stutter or skip! Now granted I wasn't playing in HD, but considering every Intel IGP I'd ever dealt with was lucky to play any slightly modern game in more than slideshow mode I was impressed. It also had hardware accelerated video built in for all the popular formats, making video smooth as butter.
By the time the card got here I had actually forgotten I was playing on an IGP! I was too busy blasting bad guys in Bioshock or killing mercs in Far Cry to even think about the fact that I was running an IGP. And quiet, talk about quiet! Even with the quad in here it is so quiet and stays under 100f on the stock cooler! So I have to agree, as a former Intel + Nvidia man you really have to look at the overall bang for the buck. You can get a LOT better quality AMD board for less money than what you spend on an Intel board, and for those like my dad that simply watch video and do video conferencing the built in IGP is smooth as butter and gives them more than enough power for their day to day. And at less than $650 for his quad, with 4Gb of RAM and Win7 HP X64 it has so much room to grow I can seeing him keeping this computer for a decade easily.
You really have to compare the "whole smash" between the two companies, and I think that time will show that buying ATI was a damned smart move on the part of AMD. It really gives them a total solution that is much more compelling, at least to my customers and myself, than the slightly faster budget CPUs but MUCH worse GPUs and more expensive boards of the Intel camp. I never thought I would switch, but now that I have I just can't see shelling out the bucks for an Intel anymore, only to have to shell out again for a GPU just to do anything more than draw the desktop. I wouldn't wish an Intel IGP on my worst enemy after actually seeing what having a decent budget IGP is like.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The Hackintosh has to look as much like a real Mac as you can manage.
Of course that means Intel only for the CPU.
An alternate ATI or Nvidia GPU (beyond what's in actual shipping Macs) might even be a problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
3 is a bit optimistic if you're calling it bleeding-edge.
High-end, sure, heck even ultra high-end, but as soon as a slightly better version comes out you're not bleeding-edge any more, and that often happens in less than 3 months.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Is that AMD chipsets have been buggy in my experience. Well, for the most part it seems like there haven't been actual chipsets made by AMD, they've always been third party like nVidia, VIA or ATi. At any rate they seem to have bugs, sometimes minor, sometimes severe. The worst was back with the original Athlons, I got one and could not make it work with my GeForce 256. I found out this was because the AGP bus was out of spec and didn't work the GFs at all.
That is one of the main reasons I've stuck with Intel. I find that Intel chips on Intel chipsets, and particularly with both on an Intel board are rock solid. To me, that's extremely important. I spend all day fixing computer problems of one sort or another, I want mine to just work.
At some point I'll have to give AMD another look, though probably at work not with my own money initially.
Also I've got to disagree on the power/heat thing. Modern Intel CPUs are really efficient and throttle very well. They also do quite a bit of work per watt when run to full power. Their 45nm Core 2s are quite amazing and their 32nm Core i7s are supposedly 50% better.
Intel graphics seem to have three major advantages for Media Center PCs: power consumption, L5.1 h264 is possible, and open source drivers. I didn't check but AMD graphics might be faster with non-realtime low level h264 decoding on Windows, which is a bit of a stretch. So I don't quite understand your assertion that AMD graphics are superior for this situation, especially since performance is all but irrelevant for media playback (assuming it meets the minimum required).
That is not a big problem for us enthusiasts who get and understand every information about that CPU. But to less tech savy people I will always suggest AMD.
It's irrelevant to "less tech savvy people" because these sort of details simply don't matter to them.
I blame it on the Linux and Windows kernels' poor support for multi-processing and seedy memory management.
Compared to what ?
If nothing else AMD serves to counterpoint Intel from being a monopoly. Further they actually make some pretty good chips.
I support AMD because they keep Intel in check. And as a bonus their chips aren't that bad.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
because the equivalent intel proc is maybe only 30 percent faster but costs three times as much.
amd is much more cost effective
that and amd's IGPs dont get beat in performance by gpus made half a decade ago
I would add that many of us here, including myself have repeated asked WHAT exactly was "wrong" with the AMD CPUs. As you say there are many factors: Were they the same rev? were the chips used in the same board? what kind of work were they doing? What were the problems you encountered?
All of these are legitimate questions, which have been asked politely repeatedly only to get "It is MY opinion which is all that counts!" to which I say bullshit. If you post to /., you expect to be in a conversation-that is how this place works after all. Just saying "IT SUX!" is worth less than nothing, as it tells us diddly squat about WHY it sux for him. Maybe he was doing the wrong job with the wrong CPU? (DP floating point is better on Intel than AMD) Maybe he had a bad board? Maybe he got a couple of bad chips? (I build both Intel and AMD PCs and this happens more than most folks know) Maybe he was trying to OC and went too high for his system?
As you can see there are a myriad (I so rarely get to use that word in a sentence) of questions that those of us here that work with CPUs all day would like to know, and his "nya nya, they suk!" tell us exactly jack shit and is less than useless. To use a standard /. car analogy, if I came on here and said "The new Chevy trucks suck!" I would fully expect to get asked what exactly was wrong with them, what my experiences were with them, what my attempts at resolution were, etc. These should NOT be difficult questions, unless of course he is just trolling. But giving him the benefit of the doubt he should be able to answer these questions quite simply and easily, and refusing to answer simple questions such as this merely makes him look like a troll or an asshat, neither of which we need more of here, thanks anyway.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
TDP is thermal design power. It is the number that CPU vendors give to system builders to let them know the max power consumption of the processor so that thermal solutions can be properly designed. If the CPU goes beyond the TDP the system will power off unless there is lots of headroom in the thermal solution.
Having worked on these processors at the circuit level(*) I can tell you that your '100W over TDP' number is rubbish.
If you'd like to know more about what happens when chip vendors fudge on this "invalid metric" search for "nvidia bumpgate". If our chips were running at 100W over spec'd TDP we'd have a lot of very unhappy customers.
* yes, I'm an engineer at AMD and I designed major components on the parts discussed ITFA. I did my time at Intel as well.
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
If you don't want to be modded down, then why won't you answer even the simplest of questions? The WHOLE POINT of /. and why many of us come here is for the discussions, and while you are surely entitled to your opinion simply saying "IT SUX!" over and over is less than useless and makes you sound like a troll.
Now I am giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming your are NOT a troll, but if that is the case then these questions should only take you a few moments to answer: What make/model (if you remember) CPUs were they? Were they used in the same board? With the same RAM,HDD,etc? What kind of jobs were these CPUs expected to perform? Did you OC them, or crank up the voltage? What type of machine? Gamer? Business? Server? What OS? Windows XP? WinServer? Linux? What were the problems you encountered, and what made the Intel solution better for the job?
Looking at my clock that took me all of 4 minutes to type, and I am a two fingered typist. If you have even the tiniest amount of typing skills it should take you less than 5 minutes, 10 if you go into detail, to answer these simple questions. If you want to participate here at /. and not have mods drive your posts into the basement, a little courtesy is all that is required. You stated you had a bad problem with AMD chips that caused you to switch, many of us (including myself who builds both Intel and AMD boxes for a living) have not had any problems and wish to know more. That is Not "being a fan troll" (WTF is a fan troll?) or anyone picking on you, that is simply how it works here, and with an under 1 million UserID you should know this by now. show a little courtesy and courtesy will be shown to you.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Their benchmarks seem decent. The Athlon II X4 620 is a solid performer.
And the Athlon II X4 630 2.8Ghz 4-core processor is getting great reviews at newegg with good potential for overclocking, even with the stock cooler.
br> There's a few great motherboard/CPU combo deals going on right now at newegg. QuadCore for $170 and dual-core for $90.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Uhhhh dude, or dudette as the case may be? The chips in the article were both under 100w, and most AMD chips except the ones that are built for OCing, are less than 100w. The most power hungry IIRC are 125w for the current lineup, and I can say from experience that my 925 after 8 hours of transcoding at 100% load was only running at 109f on the stock cooler, so I'm afraid you are quite off on your estimates.
I have been building both Intel and AMD boxes for many years now, and I can say thanks to the new Cool & Quiet that AMD chips stay quiet and really don't suck much in the way of juice, even on stock cooling. I have been running this machine since I came in at 3PM (it is currently midnight here) with dozens of tabs open, lots of video watching, two transcodes, and many file transfers, and I haven't see CoreTemp (great free tool BTW, with 64bit support and an easy to use tutorial on setting autostart under Windows 7) get above 90f the entire night, with 83f being the temp for 99.995% of the time. So while the older AMD chips did run pretty hot (burned a few TBirds in my day) the new chips are quite cool and efficient.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Something can be poor without there being a high quality alternative in existence (yet). Just because everyone in a class got an "F", doesn't mean it's a good grade (even though almost everyone else got the same, except one student got a C and another got an B.. the one who got the C gets to be president, the one who gets the B never gets told about their grade, while their employer patents the invention and sells it for billions as uber-expensive product for "Enterprises" only).
I am comparing as in having 4 computers, each with 1 CPU and their own OS image and 16gb of RAM, assigned 25 ip addresses, each serving web page requests (received from a load balancer); versus 1 computer with 4 cores and 64gb of RAM, assigned 100 ip addresses, say having a single Dell PowerEdge R510. versus Multi-proc setup clusters, HTPC, etc.
Compared to other Unices... Solaris, FreeBSD, z/OS, compared to running multiple OS instances on the same hardware, each in its own Xen VM.
It's surprising, but scaling out several Linux virtual machines on the same piece of metal, oddly, seems to get more than triple throughput (server-wide) for serving large static web pages, particularly with maximal numbers of simultaneous connections.
If you equally divide the physical server into 4 virtual machines, each would have only 15.3gb of memory to work with (after subtracting ~3gb overhead due to virtualization), intuitively one would expect less total http throughput from the server, but it's not what happens. Instead each instance gets pretty close to full performance..
Windows requires excessive tuning and IIS still a little bit slower.
Plenty of RAM and aggressive read caching, so there should no I/O bottleneck.
My only conclusion at this point (which might be wrong), is that it's a great advdantage to have 2 cores, but the third and fourth cores go underused, for some reason, my best guess is some sort of kernel-related lock contention or issue in the network stack that impacts web performance benchmarks with large number of clients.
Redhat's page on KVM performance seems to confirm this too: LAMP: For Apache webserver workloads, up to 139 percent of bare metal performance with great scalability.
A minor nit, but AMD64 is a very minor extension to x86 and leverages SSE. Its not really an invention in terms of being innovated, but it was created by AMD. Intel had a 64-bit extension in the 90s but due to poor feedback from server venders that disliked x86 in the enterprise, they adopted HP's proposal for EPIC (Itanium). I wouldn't give AMD much engineering credit, but rather blame the piss poor management at Intel.
I'm thinking in upgrading.. Should I wait for the top end (bulldozer) of AMD in 2011? is it worth it? Not trolling I'm a huge fan of AMD but I want to know about future performance.
Anyway please say thanks to the people in AMD for not giving up and making possible to build cheap and capable PCs for the common Joe.
This comment needs to be modded insightful and troll.
Again this silly fight between AMD vs Intel.
When people are going to learn performance _depends_ on what you're going to process?
I remember, few years ago, having a server we had with an Athlon XP 2600 (its real clock was 2.1GHz AFAIR). A perfectly speedy machine for desktop usage, but as a server (pure CPU-load in that case, no I/O bottleneck) it was having a real hard time. We eventually replaced that machine and old 4x Xeon (P3-based, 500MHz), and things went to normal.
I already suspected what the problem could be, so I've decided to make a test replacing - temporarily - the Xeon-based server with a Sun Ultra 30 (1xUltrasparc II @ 300MHz).
Well, the Sparc not only survived the test, but also kicked hard the Athlon's ass. Still, as a desktop machine, the Sparc was mediocre.
The difference was that the Sparc had 2MB L2 cache, while the Athlon had only 256kB (even with 2x bandwidth and lower-latency RAM). In _that_ case the L2 cache made all the difference. Per MHz, the Sparc also won, by large margin, the Xeon machine (1MB L2 for each processor).
Athlon's (pre-64) performance compared to P4 (sorry, I don't have an i7 to compare against a X4) varies. For desktop usage the Athlons felt snappier in general, but with some performance "hiccups" when you started to tax the machine more. The P4s felt slower overall, but the performance seemed to be more homogeneous.
Which one was better then? Well, that's a good question. I personally preferred the "slower but smoother" P4, but Athlons were fine and I could recommend both processors for home usage,
You know what really, really suck?
Those benchmarks they publish around.
I mean "XYZ fps in Crysis"? mp3 lame encoding time? Synthetic benchmarks?
Those say nothing to me. Run some database benchmark, or measure the time it takes to compile the Linux kernel using all cores at once... Or move GBs of data in the memory N times etc. Then it might be interesting.
Same here. I was just assuming you post that started the thread was poorly worded until I ran into you next - based on nested view not chronological although they may be the same in this case - post http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1525650&cid=30912408 Then it became clear you where a troll.
Not agreing with the troll of course (from what I see it's not worth it for me to even check what he specifically wrote), but Intel is still more open, in practice, in one important factor.
Fully usable free software GFX drivers on the Linux side. You can have a trouble-free experience not relying on binary blobs (well, excluding BIOS/etc.).
One that hath name thou can not otter
For everything else, AMD's price/performance ratio can't be beat, Intel's superior marketing notwithstanding. It would cost me twice as much money to get an Intel processor and a decent Intel chipset mobo for the desktop I'm running right now. Quite frankly, I think this price differential is much better spent on a 128GB solid state drive.
But,.. but,... Larabee will crush AMD any day now! Really! I read that, like, all over!
I thought Intel licenced AMD64 from AMD???
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
AMD/ATI also have fully open drivers available, although they are not complete by any means an older ATI card running open drivers still seems to outperform an up to date Intel card.
AMD are still releasing documentation for their latest cards, so hopefully the driver situation will keep improving.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The point is more that Intel drivers can be called "production ready", more or less, right now. AMD ones...not so much. I'm hearing "next year" a bit too long for my taste.
And that says somebody with old R200-based card lying around, which has rather decent OSS drivers (actually, only those are left supporting it)
One that hath name thou can not otter
which makes it even worse, you can buy a Q8300 both with, and without VT.
Some shop might have an old non-vt chip in stock, and sell it to you, some shops wont even know the difference...
AMD doesnt do any feature crippling, the only way a cheap AMD chip wont have the same functions as an expensive one is if it is an old model (like the amd64's still sold when phenom was out), and that is the right way to do things
as for your upgrade path.. s775 is rather limited, if you had gotten an AM2+/AM3 platform last year, you could have dropped a 6-core in there this year..
that only applies for certain values of intel graphics. The GMA 900/950 series has excellent driver support (save for some issues in ubuntu 9.04), but the GMA 500 family (user for atom systems, and built on a different base from the gma 950), has absolutely shitty drivers.
i have used two intel branded mini-itx boards so far, the d201gly2 and GCLF945-2 (dual core atom), the d201 uses a sis chipset with absolutely crappy driver support in linux (anything above 800*600 requires absolute driver-wizardry, including writing your own), the atom board uses a NIC which isnt supported correctly in current driver releases.. effectively making it rather hard to solve the problem (no internet connection... good luck!). Now both offending boards have problems because of non-intel chips, but especially on the d201, WTF intel? why use a SIS chip?
blah, want on a rant a bit, sorry for that
hahaha disregard that, I suck cocks
I state my honest opinion, and SAY IT'S MY OPINION, and the AMD fan trolls come in here and nuke me into oblivion.
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
You're a troll because your posts are self-contradictory. You first refuse (vehemently) to provide any facts, then demand that posts with factual errors be modded down. There isn't any "honest discussion" in your troll, there is only "Nuh-uh!!!" and "I know you are, but what am I?"
Clearly effective, though, judging from the replies, so nice win.
You've obviously never had an underpowered media center. HD video, especially compressed video, requires at least decent processing power. You get much more bang for your buck with AMD in that regard.
The Institute of Incomplete Research has determined that 9 of out 10
By pure lack of funds I was pushed in past to buy Athlon 64 X2. Before I was exclusively with Intel.
By seeing how my 5yo 4200+ (2x2200GHz) CPU works now, I really see no point buying e.g. i7 9xx - which I can easily afford now.
I have looked at past benchmarks to try to find how outdated my CPU really is. Difference is at ~50-60% I'd say. But it works fine for most of the workloads I use it for: development/compilation, video and games.
Keeping that in mind, I find it outrageous now to even think of spending $200+$150 on Intel's CPU and MB. With AMD's AM3 one can get a very good deal for under $200 (~$100 for CPU and ~$80 for MB). Better spend rest of money on a better video card: e.g. Radeon 5770 at $170 is simply unbelievable deal right now.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Apple chose Intel so they can charge you more for the hardware.
The processor doesn't HAVE to be Intel. You can get patched kernels that will work with AMD processors. Plenty of people have done it. The real question though, is if you're BUYING the hardware for it now, why go with AMD? Intel Hackintoshes are easier to setup and tend to work better. That's not a fault of the AMD chip at all, but a simple reality of the system you're trying to use. I use an AMD chip in my Windows and Linux desktops. My Hackintosh runs Intel. It's just a matter of choosing what's best suited for the particular application.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
but AMD64 is a very minor extension to x86 and leverages SSE.
Load of.
Intel had a 64-bit extension in the 90s ...
Do you mean PAE? Then it's totally different story and btw it is still supported and used when 32 OS has to access more than 4GB RAM (in a limited way).
Interesting. To what then you would attribute Linux uprising then? It was precisely because enterprises got tired of *nix vendor lock-in into expensive hardware - which already in 90s was underperforming compared to x86. Linux allowed to move many legacy *nix applications to cheap OTS hardware and that actually how it (Linux) made the first inroads in enterprise.
I wouldn't give AMD much engineering credit, but rather blame the piss poor management at Intel.
If anything, credit should go to AMD for (1st) creating AMD64 and (2nd) properly communicating with vendors and users what/how they going to do in the new architecture.
Without AMD taking the initiative back then, many who need more than 4GB RAM would have to buy the $8K+ Itanic boxes now.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
IIRC, Intel used AMD's documentation to create ET64. AMD in their wisdom decided against patenting AMD64 (like Intel likes to do with new instruction sets) to spur its adoption.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I'm thinking in upgrading.. Should I wait for the top end (bulldozer) of AMD in 2011? is it worth it?
Independent advise: gather rumors about next socket from AMD and availability of next DDR standard (DDR4/DDR5).
Judging from past AMD practices, they would be making AM3 compatible CPUs for quite some time after introduction of AM4.
IMO it is safe to build AM3 system now, as down the road definitely there would be upgrade options. Considering that CPU design now heavily influenced by power consumption, new socket might be needed only to accommodate new DDR. (Power consumption was (is?) major driver behind new socket types as most CPU pins now are used to deliver current. More power needs CPU -> more pins has to be allocated for power -> new socket type needed.)
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
No sir, YOU made the assertions, now you're trying to avoid supporting them because you know you can't.
And furthermore:
I want youto support your assertions. YOU MADE THEM after all
But of course... What would one crazy guy on the internets know, right?
Ouch...
The content of your post kind of contradicts with the complaint of your sig, doesn't it? You can't have it both ways.
You have written one of the douchbaggiest comments I have ever read on /. not posted as an AC. If you don't want to explain what you are saying, try shutting the fuck up next time and save us the time.
But unless your a complete moron you realize that you are on a website and seemingly engaging in some kind of conversation.
Arguing on the Net is not a sign of intellect in the first place (myself included, yes).
Why? I don'thave to explain/justify anything, so why would I?
Well, you demanded the same thing from other people, to cite your own words:
"I want youto support your assertions. YOU MADE THEM after all" [sic]
So it's entirely reasonable to ask you of the same thing.
Your posting history clearly identifies you as a troll, so you don't get the benefit of doubt anymore. If it looks trollish, and it comes from you, then it will be considered one.
Using ALL CAPS and calling people idiots doesn't help, either.
Didn't you get the memo?
//memo
Almost all the lesbians are racist by nature, I don't know why but it's true. BTW Lesbians are cool, racists on the other hand are becoming an itch in some important people and are about to become pariahs, because they can.
There exists a cross-licensing deal between AMD and Intel whose exact terms are secret and unknown to the public.
AMD uses some Intel technologies (such as the X86 instruction set), and Intel uses some AMD technologies, such as X86_64.
Without these deals, PC microprocessor performance and capabilities of both AMD and Intel would probably not be nearly what it is today.
Also, the alternative is for the two companies to have sued each other into oblivion over patent infringement/IP cases, as in thermonuclear war -- each has a big enough patent arsenal against the other to provide assured destruction.
Well, Intel could probably design a new old-generation chip without using any AMD technologies.
But there'd be no buyers... The public might go back to using PowerPC/MIPs. (e.g. death of the X86 platform)
Instruction sets themselves aren't patentable.
Machines or processes (such as circuit designs) that efficiently implement CPU instructions are patentable.
So if Intel took AMD's instruction set, it is possible they could find a different way of implementing it (possibly as or more efficiently).
In other words, AMD couldn't patent the "x86_64 instruction set" to prevent Intel from making a CPU that 64-bit software would interoperate with, even if they wanted to.
But as for AMD's proprietary designs for their processors, of course, the actual CPU designs, and the AMD's specific processes and methods of implementing those instruction sets (to the extent they are novel, non-obvious) can be patented.
This is an aside from the fact there is a cross-licensing deal between Intel and AMD, and there have been Intellectual property disputes between the two companies in the past, that got settled out of court.
Eat shit motherfucker!
Am I right in thinking that you and Blappo are the same person?