Hey,
Intel is the best choice now. I am saying so, inspite of owning an AMD
processor becoz of the heavy superiority of Intel's Core 2 Microarchitecture
over AMD's aging K8 (Athlon 64 series).
AMD still has quite a
few innovations up its sleeve like Direct point
to point interconnect (Hypertransport) as compared to Intel which still uses
FSB (Front side bus) and dosnt have an Integrated on-die memory controller.
Core 2 wins due to intelligent Cache, better pipelining and better power
management (you may consider this if you are going for a small
form-factor/HTPC).
if you are not so much in a hurry, do wait for
Penryn (45 nm) Intel
processors, scheduled to ship in January-February(the normal ones, extreme is
gonna be launched in November in the US). they contain further innovations
like Radix-16 divider and support for SSE4, which will surely improve
performance over existing Core 2 (preliminary benchmarks show 5-10%
improvement). Another big pro for linux users to stick with Intel processors
and chipsets is that ALL intel chipsets have open source drivers for
components like integrated Graphics(xf86-video-intel / xf86-video-i810),
Sound (snd-hda-intel or AC97 drivers), as well as Network and wireless cards
(with ipw-3945 project). On the other hand, while AMD processors pose no
problems by themselves with Linux, the accompanying chipset sometimes creates
havoc. This is true especially if stuck with ATI/Via/Sis. ATI's linux support
as of now is pathetic for newer chipsets (Though improvements are being made
now, and soon an OSS driver will support 2D/3D on the new R500/600 cards as
ATI has now released GPU specs). VIA and SIS linux support is too bad out of
the box. So if you are looking at using things like Compiz fusion/Beryl
consider sticking with Intel or go for Nvidia chipsets if you are going for
AMD.
You can also consider AMD's new K8L (Barcelona) based
native-quad core
Phenom processors, scheduled to launch at the end of this year, depending
upon their performance wrt core 2 when they become available.
Regards,
Karthik Ramgopal
BITS Pilani
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