At 2004-11-10T21:06:40+1300, Steve Holdoway wrote:
> The only problem that I've found with AMD stuff is that it is dead
> inside 3 years. Intel may be more expensive, but I just rebuilt a
> Pentium P200 MMX based machine. 7 years old, and going strong?
What "AMD stuff" is dead in these cases? The CPU (which is likely the
only AMD part), or something else? You can't blame AMD for the low
quality of the rest of the parts in the system.
What may be true is that systems using AMD CPUs that were assembled >3
years ago are generally build from cheap, low-quality parts. A large
part of AMD's general-purpose CPU market, at that time, ending up being
"economy" systems. This would make more sense as an explanation for the
high rate of failure you suggest.
And this is no longer the case--AMD have a larger market share, produce
parts with competitive performance, and have become very popular in
areas they were previously unable to reach, particularly with the
demanding "high performance" (and highly critical) gamer/tweaker
markets.
Motherboards and other CPU-specific parts are now, at the consumer
level, of very close if not exactly the same quality for either Intel or
AMD CPUs.
I wouldn't say the same for AMD's server-class offerings (as far as any
x86 stuff is "server"-class), since it's early days in that area, but
their parts are already being sold by IBM, Sun, and others in low-end
server offerings, and the likes of Cray (as much as you can call any
"Cray" company Cray without Seymour :-)) are building huge
supercomputers from the same parts. Don't forget that AMD's Opteron has
been outselling Intel's Itanium hand-over-fist since it has been
released.
So, what once may have been true about AMD gear is not true any longer,
and has not been for at least three years. Get with the times, old man,
and happy birthday too.
Cheers,
-mjg
--
Matthew Gregan |/
/| [EMAIL PROTECTED]
