Whats Better In Your Opinion, AMD Or Intel

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10 Years a go with the release of the AMD K6 the market all went in Intels direction for the minor exception of Value PC Manufactures and Gamers due to cheap price.[Gamers in the Mid-Late 90`s didn`t need processors with large Cache Speeds or MMX Support.] 7 Years ago AMD got a lead on Intel w/ the Athlon, Athlon XP, And Athlon 64.[Mainly due to the fact that AMD`s didn`t overheat that badly as Intel P4`s and could be easily OverClocked and the fact that at least the AMD Duron had a full FSB Speed unlike the Celeron. However Intel Released the Dual- Core and Quad-Cores as why as AMD`s Release of the Athlon 64 X2 AND 64 Quad-Core. Now what due you think is better when it comes to Performence, Overheating, and Overclocking.

I like AMD. They have a slightly higher benchmark than the Pentiums in some aspects. Pentium is better with some things but overall, I prefer AMD.

AMD for me. I installed a quiet laptop harddrive in my pc. I have a whisper quiet computer

Intel, easily. Any recent benchmark of Intel's most recent chips with AMD's most recent chips will show that AMD is getting trounced by Intel's Core 2 platform, even when comparing the oldest Core 2 processors to the more recent Phenom processors. Plus, AMD has had some serious problems with their quad core chips which had to be patched with a workaround, causing a significant drop in performance in their top line of chips.

The new Intel Core 2 chips being manufactured using the 45nm process (Penryn) are excellent for overclocking, given the new high-K metal gate technology they're using which significantly reduces power consumption and causes the chip to run cooler. Power consumption-wise, they make current AMD processors seem like Pentium 4s in comparison. They are also excellent value, particularly the E8400 which is going at $AUS288 which runs at 3GHz at stock. According to benchmarks it can reach up to 4GHz on air.

Last edited by Enigmatic_Oddity on 17 Mar 2008, 8:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Right now AMD is basically crap so Intel.

We're in 2008 not 2005, Pentium is dead.

Technically, the Pentium name has been folded into the P4 (the only reason they weren't 586 was that [I think it was] AMD that came up with it's '486' chip, Intel sued, but the judge ruled you couldn't trademark a number...

I dunno. I have a unit of time called the Comdec (about 6 months, between the Las Vegas and the other Comdex), which is the average life cycle of some components.

If you ask this week, I've been using AMD chips for about 7 years. They're certainly cheaper than Intel... Thing is, components have gotten so good and so cheap, that you'll probably find whatever you get works just fine.

From X-Bit Labs benchmark:

Power consumption comparison



As you can see, the Athlon 64 X2 processor uses almost as much power at idle as the most powerful E8XXX processor at 100% workload. This, despite the lower clocked Core 2s being able to run circles around the Athlon processor.

AMD used to be better for a long time, but they cannot compete with C2D. I never thought I would be behind Intel but hey, you can't argue with C2D. I have 1.8ghz low voltage C2D on my laptop and it rocks. Low heat/energy consumption, awesome performance.

The core 2 actually has a fairly decent microarchitecture, going back to the original P6 core (where the pentium 3 came from), unlike most of Intel's more recent poor performers with the pentium 4 and prescott and the like.

Add on to the fact that over the past 8 years, Intel has invested billions of dollars in fabrication technology. No one else can possibly compete with Intel purely on fab quality alone, and it's this fab tech that allows Intel to shove 4 cores along with megabytes of cache on a single die and still stay within cost and power constraints. Since so few applications are CPU-dependent anymore, it's the cache that allows a processor to blow away another that's clocked 1 GHz higher.

AMD has smart people, though, and with their recent merger with ATI, an intriguing portfolio of stuff that could let them carve out an interesting niche.

For whatever reason, AMD doesn't go below 1.1V on the X2 chips, which is why their power consumption is relatively high compared to the C2D chips that drop to .85V IIRC, with power consumption being related to the square of voltage and all that's nearly a 70% reduction in power, compounded by, as others have mentioned, the differences between 90nm and 45nm chips. It's kinda odd that AMD wouldn't drop down to at least .9V with the X2s since that would result in a significant reduction in power consumption in that P-state. I have an old Sempron 64 that likely uses a little less energy than my Via C7 at .9V/1ghz, so AMD chips are certainly capable of lower voltages at 90nm IME.

I would have to go with AMD because they have less marketshare and I like to support the underdogs so they don't get driven out of business. If that happens than Intel would become a monopoly, and that's not cool.

If AMD Wants to compete like they did back in the Athlon XP and 64 they need to make a good Quad-Core chip that has high cache, no overheating instablities, and that will work on cheaper MOBO`s alright.

The reason I would guess why AMD doesn't go lower is because there is a clear connection between threshold voltage (i.e., the voltages at which transistors turn on and off) and capacitance, and a connection between capacitance and clock (in that each clock needs to allow enough time for the "capacitances to charge up," in some sense)

Decreasing the core voltage requires you to at the same time lower the threshold voltage, which requires (given any particular fabrication process) higher capacitance on the gates, which means longer time to charge and thus lower clock speeds and usually lower performance.

You can somewhat account for these tradeoffs in the microarchitecture (squeezing some extra clock speed from lower-voltage circuits) but more fundamentally, Intel is taking advantage here of their much-improved fab process technology to build transistors that have better overall performance characteristics, allowing them to lower threshold voltage without slowing down clock too much.

OIC! Thanks for the info. Offhand, any idea how much variation in manufacturing could influence this? For instance could some of the same type of chips stay stable running a lower voltage at a higher clock speed compared to others that would lock up?

The Phenom is a step in that direction, but it's mediocre compared to the C2D/C2Q/C2X. AMD does have the only true quad core - the Intel C2Q is basically 2 Core 2 Duos siamesed together.

I don't know about the specifics, but I would think there's some process variation going on. I'd imagine it would be more along the lines of a single die being used to make differently clocked versions of the same chip or else with different numbers of cores or amount of cache, instead of the same die being used for desktop/laptop depending on the process variations.