- Joined
- Jul 22, 2005
- Messages
- 9,020
- Thread Author
-
- #1
To AMD or not to AMD? That is the question.
Many IT pros who remember AMD's past offerings continue to shy away from leaning towards the big A, while others have embraced their new, more affordable CPU designs. For instance, AMD was selling a three core processor some time ago. It was later found that many of these processors were extremely defective former quad core processor that were prone to massive floating point calculation errors, even when one core was disabled. Hence, the birth of the chip "Phenom"! Talk about a bad set of pipes!I'm not sure if this helped Circuit City go out of business in the US, but I was leery even before that.
Both myself and nearly all IT admins and ISP CEOs I have spoken to over the age of 40 are creeped out by buying AMD processors on their systems. A long time ISP owner and I both had a shared experience from the mid-to-late 1990s of our custom built AMD machines exploding on us. Except his were exploding on customers, and my computer almost set a house on fire. Even the website's former server ran on a single AMD Opteron that was out-benched by a Intel Quad Core Q6600. The monthly price also had some kind of 300% markup on equipment.
I do like AMD's graphics cards, although they were quite soundly created by ATI, and for whatever reason, AMD has chosen to preserve the ATI brand name. This could be due to some sort of company spinoff or merger that never happened which I haven't heard about yet. Some might not want to get too fired up about the graphics card comparisons: In 2008, both AMD/ATI and NVIDIA were sued for price fixing in a class action lawsuit. Its safe to say that has changed, however, as AMD seems to have dropped their prices while NVIDIA may still be looking to charge a lot for a Voodoo 5 card, if they can get their hands on one off eBay
Of course, this opinion has been all in good fun. So what are you guys when it comes to *most* of your equipment? AMD or Intel?
Many IT pros who remember AMD's past offerings continue to shy away from leaning towards the big A, while others have embraced their new, more affordable CPU designs. For instance, AMD was selling a three core processor some time ago. It was later found that many of these processors were extremely defective former quad core processor that were prone to massive floating point calculation errors, even when one core was disabled. Hence, the birth of the chip "Phenom"! Talk about a bad set of pipes!I'm not sure if this helped Circuit City go out of business in the US, but I was leery even before that.
Both myself and nearly all IT admins and ISP CEOs I have spoken to over the age of 40 are creeped out by buying AMD processors on their systems. A long time ISP owner and I both had a shared experience from the mid-to-late 1990s of our custom built AMD machines exploding on us. Except his were exploding on customers, and my computer almost set a house on fire. Even the website's former server ran on a single AMD Opteron that was out-benched by a Intel Quad Core Q6600. The monthly price also had some kind of 300% markup on equipment.
I do like AMD's graphics cards, although they were quite soundly created by ATI, and for whatever reason, AMD has chosen to preserve the ATI brand name. This could be due to some sort of company spinoff or merger that never happened which I haven't heard about yet. Some might not want to get too fired up about the graphics card comparisons: In 2008, both AMD/ATI and NVIDIA were sued for price fixing in a class action lawsuit. Its safe to say that has changed, however, as AMD seems to have dropped their prices while NVIDIA may still be looking to charge a lot for a Voodoo 5 card, if they can get their hands on one off eBay
Of course, this opinion has been all in good fun. So what are you guys when it comes to *most* of your equipment? AMD or Intel?