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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."
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.
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.
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
Games almost never require high end systems. There are a few that come along that won't run on anything less than the latest greatest but it is extremely rare. Most games will run on mid rangish hardware, and not have a problem with things a couple generations out of date. They won't let you max all the detail in that case, but they'll run just fine.
Most people do not have high end systems. Many systems are older, after all not everyone upgrades all the time, and even when they do they often don't buy the high end parts. As such game makers support that. They usually also have higher detail settings for people with higher end systems, since those people often also spend more money, but they don't usually cut out the more mid range market.
Right now most games run quite well on a dual core in the 2GHz+ range with a $100ish current graphics card or a $200ish older graphics card. By well I mean with details turned up a reasonable amount and smooth gameplay.