[ale] Do people still roll their own Linux desktops?

[Jim Kinney]

Granted nearly all of my amd systems are Opterons and not their consumer CPU
stuff. The diff between opteron and xeon was quite large until about 2 years
ago when Intel put memory control in the CPU like the Opterons.
Opteron still wins in flops per watt. Dual core in the same power envelope
as the same speed single core. Then again with the quads. Not sure on the
6's yet. I think there is a bit of a power bump there.
Intel's power is nowhere near as flat across GHz-cores. Each core adds a bit
more power draw.

On Mar 17, 2010 11:15 PM, "Michael B. Trausch" <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

On 03/17/2010 01:11 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> Up until the most recent Intel CPU's (i5, i7, etc) AMD c...
They go back and forth over time; one family will do better than the
other in one thing, and then the other will catch up on that and surpass
in something else.  I honestly stopped caring about the split hairs WRT
CPU performance a long time ago.  If the CPU supports the instructions
that the software I am running uses, and if the CPU has 2 or more cores,
and the CPU is something that I can afford, then it's good.

That said, I've long been a fan of the AMD CPUs.  They have always had a
price advantage.  My first AMD CPU was an "overdrive" chip; a "5x86"
that went into a 486 motherboard's OverDrive socket.  I used that thing
for a long time.  I remember looking at OverDrive chips and then I found
the 5x86, which was significantly less expensive and was a 100 MHz chip
instead of the 66 MHz chips that I was looking at.  I never was able to
do a comparison with an Intel OverDrive, but I know this: that system
kicked a lot more ass after adding that then it did before it.

Of course, AMD back then was worse generally at floating point ops, and
there was all the discussion of "real computers use Intel chips", but
honestly, I don't care.  I like to keep giving AMD money because I like
their stuff and for what their processors cost, I can often buy two of
their CPUs compared to a single Intel CPU.  Regardless of which one does
slightly worse in a given benchmark category, two AMD CPUs will always
provide more processing power than a single Intel CPU.

(Of course, it's been a long time since I've even considered having two
full CPUs on a motherboard.)

       --- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch                                    ☎ (404) 492-6475

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