<SNIP - and other replies)
Oh Dear Roy!I will reply to this and the previous ones in one go.
I have in excess of 15 PCs running 24/7 ranging from Duron 1800s through Athlons, and several AMD64 bit machines, this is an MSI K8T Neo2 939 pin AMD64 3500+ Winchester 90nm, carrying 4 SATA HDDs = 400GB.etc, etc. All these machines run 24/7 CPU useage is 100%, folding for medical research., the MAC G4 has been replaced recently - packed in. The Intel machines are history burnt out, and could not take it long ago. - all on local refuse tip. The last P4 here lasted less than a year, AMD are far better, faster, more stable. And with SATA drives and 64 bit chips, the only way to go. IMHO, no axe to grind.- I do a lot of tech help to users worldwide with MSI and other machines. The top rigs and performance are all AMD64s.
Most of my distaste for AMD is post K6-2 although they had their failings. You may have fifteen AMD PCs but we sell around 25 CPUs a week. We used to sell AMDs but stopped because of the very high return rate This was, admittedly at the start of the Athlon period when they were very sensitive to cooling and had zero protection from overheating. Flash, gone and the motherboard with it. Even the second generation of Athlons which had heat sensors built in had to use the motherboards to sense it and they were often to fast enough to catch a drastic failure. In the five years I have worked for this company we sold AMD chips for about six months. In that period I returned too many to count. Then we stopped. In the whole five years I have returned four Intel processors. Two of those had bent pins (by the users) so only two in several hundred failed. We also sell a lot of replacement power supplies (around fifty a week). Our policy, if someone calls to order one is to ask them to test it with another PSU to see if the system has survived the PSU failure. A significant number of the AMD system have died whereas only one or two of the Intel ones had. Can't give exact figures here. We also talk a lot to other companies building and supplying systems on various levels many of those have also given up using AMD for the same reasons. AMD chips have a 1 year warranty. On the supplier level it costs us to ship each defective AMD CPU back to the distributor and then we have to wait for it to be checked before a replacement or refund is issued. Intel, on the other hand, offer a three year warranty. They give us a freephone number to call for any defective product and they immediately ship a replacement (usually there next day) to us. The replacement comes with packaging and return label. Since we got to 2Ghz CPU speed has begun to matter less and less and the biggest bottlenecks have been hard drive access, graphics and the user. I agree that AMD chip do outperform Intel chips in the speed market although the 64 bit CPU has had precious little software written to take advantage of it yet and may not have unless Intel do decide to go down that route. One final point here is that one of our biggest customers has bought several dual Xeon servers from us. Their tech team is on the case and very knowledgeable. They recently bought a high end Tyan motherboard and Dual Opteron system from us (Opterons are the only AMD CPUs we will stock) They did this partly because they do perform very well in tests and partly because each Opteron function as a dual processors and gives that performance but are still seen by the system as a single processor. Oracle charge a licence fee per CPU so this is a cheaper option (believe me an Oracle licence is not a cheap item). They moved one of their older systems from a Xeon onto this new platform and have had all sorts of errors and problems. Not big ones just niggly little one which the Intel CPUs did not give. Maybe it is the speed they run at I don't know but they are still trying to tie it down and will not buy another Opteron system until they have
I have no axe to grind here either. Personally I don't care either way but I see a lot of systems and talk to a lot of people in the business (most of our clients are business not end users, gamers and overclockers) and I can only report what I have found.
I have wasted far to much time and bandwidth on this silly discussion. I must finish my article for QL Today or you won't get it for Christmas.
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Roy Wood
Q Branch. 20 Locks Hill, Portslade, Sussex.BN41 2LB
Tel: +44 (0) 1273 386030 fax: +44 (0) 1273 430501
web : www.qbranch.demon.co.uk
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