Yet another
crippling bombshell hit already beleaguered Intel microprocessor
community today when Ars
Technica [arstechnica.com] (and Netcraft) confirmed that AMD sold more processors
than Intel for the week ending April 24th.  Coming on the heels of a
recent survey which indicated people like saving money when buying a
computer this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along:
Intel is collapsing in complete disarray. 

You don't need to
be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict
Intel's future.  The hand writing is on the wall: Intel faces a bleak
future.  In fact there won't be any future at all for Intel because
Intel is dying. Things are looking very bad for Intel.  Their offices
are dark, the tomb-like sepulchral atmosphere is all that remains. 
Intel continues to lose market share, red ink flows like a river of
blood. 

The Intel development team is also dead, its corpse turned over to
yet another charnel house.  All major surveys show that Intel has
steadily declined in market share.  Intel is very sick and its long
term survival prospects are very dim.  If Intel is to survive at all
it will be among OS dilettante dabblers and hangers-on.  Intel
continues to decay.  Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this
point in time.  For all practical purposes, Intel is dead. 

Oh please.  You just proved the point!  They beat Intel in retail sales.  That means Joe Consumer who is putting together/upgrading his box is now choosing AMD over Intel.  That means that the marketing AMD is using is WORKING.  And we all know that whatever a person uses at home is what they talk about at work (or indeed, what they use at work.  Its the geeks who build/upgrade their own systems, and its the geeks who purchase/lobby at work).  SO, the Dell's of the world are going to have to reexamine their exclusivity contracts..

If by "marketing" you mean "bearing prices significantly lower."  I'm not trying to say that more expensive means "better," but I will venture to say that different people like Intel or AMD for different reasons.  Why do people in the retail market like AMD?  Because it's cheaper, and when they ask sales people who are desperate to make a sale if there's any difference, the sales people (who are also AMD fanboys, when they're not being Mac fanboys) tell them no. 

I'm not going to take a side in the Intel/AMD war.  My desktop is a P4 and I love it.  My server is an AMD Athlon, and I love it too.  All I'm saying is that in the retail market-- and yeah, I've worked there-- people "like" AMD because it's cheaper, not because they have any clue about quality. 

That being said, I'll also add that as far as the actual cpu goes, I have never, ever seen a faulty cpu.  I work in IT, and have installed hundreds of Athlons, K6s, Pentiums (I, II, III, IV, Pro, Zeon), Cyrix, etc.  Never seen a faulty one.  I have however seen bad fans on heatsinks fry cpus and I have seen crappy chipsets make systems unstable.  Power supplies also play a major role in system stability and durability, probably the largest role actually.  My point is, when people say they go with Intel over AMD for quality, they have no idea - they simply equate a higher price with higher quality, which is wrong in my opinion.  I expect that no matter what company you buy a CPU from, it will work as long as you don't overclock it.  When it comes to the motherboards, power supplies, heatsinks, quality is extremely important.  For example, based what I have seen, a motherboard that has an Intel chipset on it will last 10x longer than on with a via chipset on it.  Same applies to AMD vs Via.  I love nvidia chipets as well - but I have seem some nvidia based boards die after a single year of use - and I'm not talking about a single board, I'm talking a batch of 10 all die within 2 months of each other.  These were using Antec True Power supplies, so faulty power was not a problem, and no overclocking was going on.  Just a bad batch of boards - but I think that has more to do with the board manufacturer, not the chipset. 

True, the actual CPU is rarely defective.  I'll attest to that.  However, as you said, the motherboard's chipset is often the root cause of severe stability and performance problems.  Intel has historically made the most reliable chipsets and motherboards, which of course only take Intel chips, which is why (whether people realize it or not) Intel has the reputation as the higher quality vendor. 

If by "marketing" you mean "bearing prices significantly lower."  I'm not trying to say that more expensive means "better," but I will venture to say that different people like Intel or AMD for different reasons.  Why do people in the retail market like AMD?  Because it's cheaper, and when they ask sales people who are desperate to make a sale if there's any difference, the sales people (who are also AMD fanboys, when they're not being Mac fanboys) tell them no. 

When you are talking about something as finite in it's intended function as a CPU then the requirements can be easily quantified and separated. 

While they are numbered for clarity the order of importance depends on the user and the system being built. 

1.  Compatibility.  Will it run the code I want it to run? 
2.  Speed.  How long dose it take to complete task X ? 
3.  Temperature.  Do I need a dedicated AC, a heat sink or something in between? 
4.  Price.  How many dollars do I need to spend for this chip and it's "support infrastructure" (RAM, Motherboard etc..) ? 
5.  Power consumption. 

For most users, All current AMD and iNTEL desktop chips are equal on points 1, 3 and 5. ( Not that there aren't differences.  They just don't matter). 

With items 2 and 4 being the entire basis of choosing a chip the equation comes down to "How fast can my system run if I spend $250 on the CPU?" 

PS: If it was up to me reviewers would abandon the "AMD's 3GH chip vs iNTEL's 3GH chip" comparisons and adopt "AMD's $900 chip vs iNTEL's $900 chip" matchup.  It's how _I_ Shop for CPUs and until someone convinces me of a problem in this approach I will continue to use it. 

I agree with your point but I wouldn't want to let someone walk away from slashdot thinking that AMD was now the number one desktop processor supplier.  That'd make them look REAL stupid. 

But I am happy to see this.  I've never used anything but AMD and Cyrix in my own home systems.  Intel really has a problem with the 64-bit Pandora's box: they could write off Itanic, creating tens of billions in losses... or they could stick with x86-32 on the desktop (which is what they are planning) and risk losing Dell

As a hardware engineer, I stopped specifying or using Intel when I realized they were gouging their customers.  With much higher volume in X86 processors, Intel should have been able to sell each for less than the other companies could, yet the other sources were less costly than Intel.  Intel's manufacturing costs should have been much less than other companies, yet, until just recently, they have sold their processors for a higher price.  I only specify Intel when there is no other choice. 

Personally (and probably a lot of/.ers are like me) I bought my last 2 systems as case, motherboard, CPU/heatsink, hard drive, CDROM or DVDROM and assembled them.  The advantages for me were (1) I could pick Linux-friendly components, (2) I avoided the Microsoft tax, (3) I could pick AMD processors, which are simply better value than Intel processors.  I'd assume that almost everybody who does this chooses AMD.  Intel costs more because they can charge more for being the "safe" choice for people who don't know what they're doing, a perception they have built over the years with expensive advertising.  There's nothing wrong with Intel doing that, but a savvy buyer can get more for the $$. 

Yes, and lots of corporations and government entities buy Dell as a matter of course.  Nonetheless, the fact is that AMD now has better technology in many ways (especially multiway Opteron boxes, which aren't retail either;).  AMD is gathering momentum, and Dell would do well to not ignore it...or it will finally start to lose some marketshare over time. 

Remember, Dell wasn't always #1...and another entity will be sometime down the road. 

It's also quite telling that Intel was forced to adopt the AMD64 instruction set (even if it's calling it something else).;-)

One week with 2% over in sales than Intel and you think Intel's finished?  This is laughable. 
Once AMD beats Intel out over many months, even years, perhaps.  Healthy competition is GOOD for consumers.  Intel being dead would be very bad for consumers. 

As far as all of you bashing AMDs chipsets and processor quality, aside from the fact you're probably not able to fully substantiate your claims.... you're again missing the point.  If there was no AMD, a 3.06 GHz CPU would prob still be $1000, like things were 6 years ago (price for bleeding edge CPUs, not 3.06GHz 3 years ago). 

If there was no AMD as we know it, Intel may have not ever been pushed enough to get to the 3.06 GHz by this point in time.  Although its likely there would be another competitor, that they would have inspired Intel to get into the clock war like it has with AMD is anyones guess.  I think just AMD being a good competitor has improved not only AMD's chips, but also the quality of the Intel chips. 

...if you had been surfing at a low treshold here, you would see the exact same text used about BSD, Apple or any of the other candidates for "$FOO is dying".  To use it with a very successful company at the first hint of some bad news, is a parody on that troll.  That's what makes it funny, not its actual contents.  Had it been serious, it would deserve a "-1, Braindead" moderation. 

According to AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, it's only a matter of time until Dell puts Opteron in their servers [forbes.com].  Of course, that's news to Dell, who are currently an exclusive Intel shop and haven't announced any change in that policy. 

If I were the CEO of a chip company looking to court one of the most successful PC makers to use my processors, I probably wouldn't do so with a comment like this:

"I've always thought that Dell does not like to be a leader in technology, that they were a strong follower...But I didn't realize they were going to be dead last"

Which probably indicates that AMD has resigned itself to ! Dell for a decent period into the future. Note: Dell only exists where it does in the market, because they cut their costs by going all-Intel.  I doubt Dell will kill their profits just to cater to a second source.  Dell's agreement with Intel is kind of like Intel's agreement with Microsoft, a sort of mini-wintel, if you were.  I doubt they'd do anything to sabotage that until and unless Intel either goes down in flames, or sets them up the bomb. 

I assume Dell gets better prices on intel processors than their competiters, I assume this is a function of the size and loyalty of Dell.  IBM,Compaq/Dec,HP etc were all large players but they competed directly with intel in some way, shape or form (i.e. Power,Alpha,PA-RISC, setting bus standards, form factors etc).  I assume this has been a symbiotic relationship for both.  Intel locks competition out of the largest box mover without giving up margins for anyone else, this helps with maintaning that formidable manufacturing economey of scale advantage.  Dell gets to eliminate R&D as a cost plus gets a big pricing advantage.  I think if this vertical monopoly cracks it will mean a great deal.  I don't think it will happen, to the degree it does I suspect it will be intel saying to dell "yank them around for us". 
Ruiz tweaking Dell is not as foolish as it may seem, they are a long shot no matter how good the AMD product is.  Intel can legally copy AMD due to the the results of previous law suits.  If Intel has to copy it will and still compete on economey of scale. 
I suspect Ruiz, who knows all of this far better than I, is playing enemy of my enemy for Dells competiters. 

I am suspicious too.  For Q4 2003 they had 80% of the overall CPU market, AMD had most of the remainder, and that was a slight (1%) growth on Intel's part from previous periods and previous years. 

As much as I like AMD, I doubt they'd more than double market share in a single quarter because Athlon 64 barely made a dent in Q4 2003 (I thought it was released late Q3 2003), so its introduction wouldn't quite seem to account for this. 

Also, it says "desktop" but there's still "mobile" and "server" markets. 

Read the original PCWeek article.  It is retail only, and retail appears to be a relative small amount of the total market.  At the bottom it says Intel had 83.6% of the x86 desktop, server and notebooks, and AMD shipped 14.9%.  Assuming all of AMD's shipments were for retail desktops (they are not), that would mean retail desktops at maximum could be 28.8% of the market.  Reality is probably down near 20%. 

I think the point for AMD is that for the first time as far as we know they have actually surpassed Intel in sales in any significant portion of the x86 CPU market. 

"Desktop PCs with processors from Advanced Micro Devices outsold desktops based on processors from Intel in U.S. retail channels for the week ending April 24, according to research released late last week from Current Analysis. " 

Do you think a lot of this is due to a new name?  Lets face it, Pentium 4 has been around for years now.  If people associate performance with a name, Athlon 64 is brand new, and not heard of so it must be a new and better thing as opposed to the perceived old Pentium 4.  As a former computer salesman, I wouldn't be surprised if this would be a driving factor behind AMDs push. 

I think you're being sarcastic since Intel is one of the undisputed kings of marketing brand monikers (486, OverDrive, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium MMX, Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron, Xeon, Pentium 4, Itanium).  Intel has already anticipated your suggestion, that's why their 64bit offering is called "Itanium" but I wonder if internally it is labelled as a "x786".  Itanium sells for around $1800 (for Intel-type motherboards, each $9000 for HP-RX variety) and Itanium rackmount servers can be bought for around $3500, all you need is a 64-bit OS. 

Intel's strength has always been its ability to drop prices for large customers to levels below that of its competitors.  For AMD to become a Dell supplier, it would have to lower its prices to the point where they were not only unprofitable but probably bleeding money from an opened artery. 

Intel might not want anything more than AMD to make an offer to Dell that they can't match.  Even if it didn't kill AMD, it would put AMD in the place where Inte

I think you underestimate AMD's margins, and underestimate Dell's margins.  Dell likes it's cushy deal with Intel because the discounts help their model, but at some point if the price/performance gap remains open for long enough Dell has to make the leap or risk losing volume. 

Right... if you have the proper hardware a nice $75 dollar cpu will easily outperform a p4 of twice the cost. 

You can get a nice athlon xp barton 2500+ (1830 mhz) running to 3200+ almost easily with nvidia's nfoorce line of motherboards.  Thats a $75 dollar cpu... Also shuttle makes a solid mobo an-35n ultra that has all the little bells and whistles of a standard mobo thanks once a gain to nvidia putting multiple features (lan, 5.1channel sound, ide controllers) in once chip and making it cheap ($55 at ne

It depends on the benchmarks you run... The architectures and the pluses and minuses of both processors are quite different.  It really depends on what you need. 

There are many things that the xp3000+ would be faster in and others it'd be slow in.  For an overclocker like me i haven't bother looking at it because the 2500 will typically go beyond it anyway.  Cost is similar to a celeron which be tons slower. 

According to the article Intel still outsold AMD in the PC market with a 61% share.  Of course this is helped by their 81% share in notebook sales a market that AMD has been unable to succeed.  This is crucial because according to the article this market is the fastest growing segment of the PC market.  It makes sense that desktops would be a better market for AMD's because user's can pick and choose more easily. 

But critics point out that:

On the other hand, AMD may be seeing strong sales on account of Intel's own customers.  With Grantsdale just around the corner this quarter, some have argued that Intel is currently experiencing a lull in product demand as customers wait for the juice to be let loose in the form of PCI-Express, DDR2, and improved wireless support. 

Will someone please tell me what the hell a chipset has to do with wireless?  It's bad enough when Intel bullshits through their teeth about the whole Centrino thing(namely that you've gotta have a special CPU to take advantage of wireless), but it's even worse when analysts and reporters start actually perpetuating the same crap.  Wireless is slow enough that you don't need anything even remotely special to "take full advantage"; 33mhz PCI is plenty damn fast enough to handle 8MB/sec or so. 

This harks back to the MMX bunny-suit guys claiming that MMX/P2 make the internet work better/faster...

That's still wrong.  The so-called "Centrino wireless card" is just a Mini PCI Wi-fi adapter made by Intel with no Linux support.  No fancy high-speed integration with the motherboard.  Power consumption?  Who knows...

For the Money AMD is a good buy.  Power+Performance at a low cost.  However Intels chips are much better manufactured and designed IMHO.  Had I had the Extra money I would have sprang for the Pentium but I was able to get better video card and more memory for the price diff with the AMD. 

When will people stop asking about when Dell will start using AMD CPUs? 

If you want a machine with an AMD CPU, go to someone else.  Dell is hardly the end-all-be-all of desktop computers.  Yes, they're huge.  No, that doesn't mean they're the best, are the least-expensive or have the best service.  They're merely the most-popular. 

If you are in need of BIG names and support some nice AMD dual Operton 1U's can be had from the likes of HP [hp.com], IBM [ibm.com] or Sun [sun.com]. 

Need more horsepower... the Opteron 4-way boxes (HP 4-way [hp.com]), crush the Intel Xeon's [anandtech.com] (as do the two ways [anandtech.com]) in most web and DB benchmarks.  Oh yeah, they are usually priced comparably or cheaper than the Intels as well. 

Selling products that happen to offer a cost based advantage compared to their competition is one thing, but how long will it take for AMD to develop a loyal consumer base in the general market?  I love AMD, but if another chip manufacturer undercut them, they would be gone. 

Some are seeking pure performance with Linux servers running AMD-64 natively, but even the broader market of Windows users for server and desktop seems to find AMD price/performance compelling even if they're restricted to running full time in 32 bit compatability mode. 

Are consumers choosing AMDs on purpose or are they simply going with what seems to be the least inexpensive pc?  Do finicky consumers(who may or may not be tech savvy) still see the intel bong at the end of a television commercial as a sign of quality(and thus worth the extra price?)  Intel has had a name for a while that seemed worth the extra price.  It may be a combination of AMD improving their image, superior CPU's and a decline in cpu brand importance that lead up to this surge. 

... what the past 13 or so weeks looks like.  Is it a bonifide TREND (33%, 34%, 40%... 45%, 52%) or is it something like (25%, 25%, 25%, 25%,... 26%, 52%).  Since the site just got/.ed, I don't know... illuminate me whoever got on! 

For the two seconds ending 3:22:05 04 May 2004, AMD sold one processor and Intel sold none, giving AMD 100% market share and Intel 0%.  Sure it's only two seconds, but perhaps this indicates that AMD is really building momentum! 

This one-week stat means little or nothing since: a) it discounts all notebooks which are primarily Intel, and b) it's only talking about the US retail channel.  So it ignores the fact that the #1 PC maker in the US (Dell) only sells Intel, and it ignores the massive number of corporate purchases that are mostly Intel.  Besides, maybe this wasn't an average week for the industry.  Maybe Best Buy was back-ordered on their best-selling Intel part and it skewed the stats. 

This is analagous to Tom's Hardware reporting that ATI beats the new NVidia chip in Battlefield 1942 at 640x480 with FSAA disabled and it "could indicate a growing trend!" 

*Used* to be primarily Intel!  Have you checked Best Buy, Circuit City, or any other big chain that sells computers lately?  You'll have just as many, if not more, AMD than Intel. 

I noticed this when I went to purchase my laptop last year and saw that they were pretty much ALL AMD.  When I checked with other stores to compare prices, I noticed the same thing.  Best Buy actually had more AMD than Intel, but the others had the same amount of both. 

This is a big deal, at least as far as headlines go.  But remember that CPU sales is only one part of many areas where Intel makes money. 

Also, AMD doesn't begin to have the same quality balance sheet that INTC does.  AMD is impressive for being able to compete in CPU performance and sales, but it has a very long way to go to really challenge Intel as a business. 

Back when AMD announced the K7 and I was in high school, I decided to invest in them.  I saw this was a company that was going to take it to Intel by lowering prices and having faster, more reliable processors. 

Intel ruined my parade a bit as they undercut and lowered prices.  AMD, however, is still taking it to Intel, and things look good in the 64-bit market. 

Were I to sell that stock now, I would lose money.  However, I'm hanging onto it because I'm confident in AMD as a company, both marketing wise and technology wise.  You don't take on Intel in one year, just like nobody will take out Harley Davidson, Victoria's Secret, or Microsoft quickly.  It took Wal-Mart a LONG time to take over, and now look at K-Mart. 

My point is that I think AMD is doing things right.  I see value in this company still.  I'm still using my Athlon 550 as my main processor, about 4.5 years old and still doing everything I need.  Go AMD!  Can't complain about competition in a standards-based environment

Actually, the stock performance of the two companies over the past 5 years is VERY VERY similar, though AMD didn't see a huge surge in their stock prices until the dot-com boom was nearly over (which is irrelevant,as that was over 5 years ago). 

I participate in Distributed.net [distributed.net] and if you look at the CPU speeds [distributed.net] you'll see that AMD currently has the fastest CPUs for that project.  My next processor may be an AMD. 

I've been using AMD processors (almost exclusively) for a long time now, and as much as I am impressed, I still have one serious complaint...

Power Management. 

Yes, AMD's chips have a lower MAXIMUM than Intel, but AMD has a problem, when their CPUs are idle, they still use up just as much power, and put out just as much heat.  This is because a HALT won't do anything on an AMD (not without the FSB hack). 

There is a hack for this though... Programs like FVCool can idle a chip (the electricity and temp savings are tremendous) but it's a hack that should not be required... It also does not work on most AMD motherboards, and has serious side-effects on some (network being disabled, sound distortion, other PCI cards failing, etc.). 

It would seem AMD solved the problem in their AMD64 line with MHz throttling, but I don't have first-hand experience, so I can't say if it too will require odd hacks.  I certainly hope not. 

In any case, the 32-bit AMD is seriously lacking in power management, and I continue to consider using Intel chips for that reason alone... A few dollars more is no big deal when it will average half the power usage...

It would seem AMD solved the problem in their AMD64 line with MHz throttling, but I don't have first-hand experience, so I can't say if it too will require odd hacks.  I certainly hope not. 

My (ugly) Shuttle SN85G4 uses an AMD64 3200+.  I use it mostly for working on and running my chess program.  When I first bought it I was freaked out when I did: cat/proc/cpuinfo and saw that it was running at "796MHz".  WTF?!  205GBP for an 800MHz CPU??  Then I remembered the "Cool and Quiet" feature.  When I ran my chess program it immediately jumped up to 2000MHz.  I was very surprised to find that it worked "out of the box" on Linux, but I think it's not an OS thing, but a BIOS thing.  I may well be wrong about that, however...

> Yes, AMD's chips have a lower MAXIMUM than Intel, but AMD has a problem,> when their CPUs are idle, they still use up just as much power, and put> out just as much heat.  This is because a HALT won't do anything on an> AMD (not without the FSB hack). 

Bullshit. 

This was fixed on Barton a year ago. 

And all the Athlon 64's have Cool and Quiet which really drops processor use down.  THIS IS NOT THROTTLING, as throttling cuts the processor speed when the processor gets too hot for the cooling solution (a problem with Intel P4s) and cuts the speed to compensate just when you most require the speed.  Cool and Quiet cuts the speed when you don't require it, so general operation will be at 800MHz on a current generation A64 because most people don't use the extra power. 

Once upon a time, you were told not to buy AMD chips because of the bugaboo about them not being "100% Intel compatible" or somesuch. 

Since then, I've owned at least three, if not more, AMD chip based machines, from an early K5, to two current machines, an Athlon 1600 and a 2000+ in my wife's laptop.  I've never, ever, seen a reason not to trust an AMD chip.  Granted, we don't do that much with them, but all of the things that we have done have worked pretty well. 

The benchmarks seem to make them an excellent choice in terms of price/performance.  I'm curious: is there really any reason, anymore, to avoid an AMD chip? 

Once upon a time AMD chips were known to have power/heat issues, heatsink problems, etc.  I know my K6-2 seemed to crash a lot more than my roomate's equivalent Pentium (although it certainly didn't have to be the processor). 

These days AMD has no such problems.  Most people choose a processor for a variety of reasons :

Availability - if you are buying from Dell you probably aren't getting AMD. 

I've always bought intel, not because of the CPUs (I think AMD makes really nice hardware) but because of the chipsets. 

I've heard way too many horror stories (incompatibilities galore and other bogus things) from friends and acquaintances fighting to get things stable: personally I've always bought and recommended the best asus boards I knew about (P2B, CUSL2-C, P4T, P4C800-E) and never ever had a problem. 

The day AMD decides to enter the chipset business and proves that they can deliver a rock solid solution is the day I'll consider their CPU, until then I'll take the $ penalty and buy Intel because, after all, a few hundred extra $$$ are worth my peace of mind many times over (I tend to keep my computers for a long time and I'm past the age where fiddling to get things working is interesting). 

I was going to post the exact same thing.  I have a Pentium 3 now but with a via chipset motherboard and I have experienced incompatibilities because of the via chipset that I've had to work around.  Some have been just an annoyance, others have been a pain in the butt.  But because of my experience I've told myself that I won't be buying anything put a mb with an intel chipset in it.  This means only intel CPUs. 

I would love to buy an AMD processor, if only it would work with intel chipset based motherboar

The day AMD decides to enter the chipset business and proves that they can deliver a rock solid solution is the day I'll consider their CPU, until then I'll take the $ penalty and buy Intel. 

You know, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (say, a little over a decade ago), Intel was not a chipset house.  Yes, I know you find it hard to believe, but Intel chips ran perfectly stable on non-Intel chipsets for quite some time.  The only reason Intel started getting serious with their chipset marketing was because they had the momentum, and saw the opportunity for growth.  They banked on selling "reliability," and made a killing. 

As for AMD, I suppose you didn't notice that they released TWO chipsets for their Athlon line?  There was the AMD 750 "Irongate," the first chipset available for the Athlon.  There was also the AMD 760, which besides being rock-solid, was also one of the earliest DDR platforms available for the Athlon, and supported dual processors. 

There's only one thing wrong with AMD making chipsets: unlike Intel in the mid 90s, they lack the momentum to maintain both businesses.  AMD only made the 750 and 760 lines to give their new platform legitimacy, and to attract other chipset makers. 

To keep the 3rd-party chipset makers on board, they have ceased to compete (to avoid, say, the 3rd-party discontent like that seen on the Nintendo Gamecube).  AMD's CPU market is so much smaller than Intel's that, if they made a serious effort to compete in chipsets, they would drive away competitors...and that is not good for AMD's long-term. 

As for The Athlon 64, what's wrong with VIA and NVidia?  Just as the release of the K7 brought legitimacy to AMD, time has brought legitimacy to VIA.  And as for NVidia, if their chipsets aren't stable enough for you, then nothing is.  The NForce series is rock-solid, and high-performance. 

When Grand Prix Legends was released, it only supported RRedline and Glide APIs (Rendition and 3DFX cards) for hardware acceleration.  I should know, I played Grand Prix Legends on my Hercules Thriller 3D, and it was outstanding. 

Three years after release, Papyrus released an unofficial Direct3D "beta" patch.  I would not be surprised at all if this was only tested on a small segment of hardware, and possibly uses extensions or tricks proprietary to nVidia cards, as they were "the" card company without peer when this patch was released.  Times have since changed. 

Don't blame ATI for an unsupported patch for a game released 6 years ago.  That's just wishful thinking.  Do you expect your ATI card to magically run Glide games as well? 

Let me give you an example of something you COULD rightfully get pissed off at ATI about.  Let's say your ATI card couldn't play GLQuake, which was designed to be card-agnostic, so long as the card supported OpenGL properly.  That would be unforgivable, even if it was some almost completely abandoned extension that Quake required...because it's a STANDARD, and the GL Quake renderer was well designed. 

Unfortunately, you won't get an opportunity to rip on ATI's drivers in that case.  My Radeon 8500 still playes GLQuake fine with zero glitches, 8 years after it was originally released.  This is something that Matrox certainly couldn't do.  Now THAT's what you expect from good drivers. 

I think this is probably an accurate reflection of Intel's current strategy.  The Desktop CPU market isn't showing much more growth (nothing like the boom years before the internet bubble burst) and Intel is looking for new markets. 

Their new market, and I think they are right, is Mobile.  Ever heard of Centrino?  People are starting to want more than just clock speed.  Portability, Battery Life, Hyperthreading and other new features will distingush processors (Intel will soon switch to processor numbers instead of clock speed).  The majority of Slashdot readers might not fall into this category, but I think many users want a light, portable, and dynamic laptop instead of a desktop. 

I would just be happy if all my computers could bootup or shutdown in under 5 seconds:)

I interact with lots of IT managers who are testing Opteron to replace many SUN products.  The managers i've talked to still hesitate to go full-bore on opteron.  Many are waiting for Intel's Nocona CPU (Xeon with 64-bit extensions).  There seems to be this belief that Intel has better experience in the enterprise with CPUs and chipsets. 

AMDs run with opteron (and athlon 64) may end when Intel releases their 64-bit chips (assuming they don't suck). 

It's unfair that AMD is always compared to Intel using processors that are generally the same speed.  Like, Intel has a 3.2ghz P4 so the article compares a 3200+ AMD to it.  Then, the 3.2ghz P4 beats the AMD in a few benchmarks...

But what the hell is the real benchmark?  PRICE.  PRICE.  PRICE. 

When you can get a 3.2ghz P4 for $410 and an Athlon XP 3200+ for $200, AMD is a better deal.  The +/- 5% performance is nothing.  AMD will always beat Intel in terms of price/performance - except for the few instances where an Intel chip would overclock well. 

Review sites should compare Intel and AMD in terms of price for processor.  Like, they review the top processors for each company, then the $400 range, then the $200 range, then the $100 range, etc.. It's not like someone says 'I need either a 2.8ghz P4 or a 2800+ Athlon.  A 3.2ghz will not do.' 

I am so sick of seeing Anandtech, Ars Technica, Tom's, etc, etc reviewing processors and then saying something to the effect of, "After exhausting review of the two processors, it seems Intel pulls out ahead in 57% of the benchmarks.  Therefore, in this case, we recommend Intel."  But, the Intel CPU is twice the price.  The way CPUs are reviewed is kind of like a car review magazine reviewing cars solely on engine displacement while the $30,000 difference between random GM and random Mercedes is ignored..

We've been exclusively Dell SOHO customers for the last 8 years, and every system we've gotten from them starting with a pair of PII-223MHz Dimensions through our current systems are still running daily in the business. 

However...

The next system I intend to buy will be an Athlon64 from somebody.  Are you really listening, Dell? 

if a member of your family said they wanted a new pc, what name are they going to associate with a new computer?  chances are if they don't say hp, they'll be saying dell.  dell may not be the entire pc industry to geeks, but for "average users" they represent one of the main places to get a fully loaded pc over the internet alongisde hp/compaq.  the ceo of amd needs to have the foresight to see that while the server business is nice with the opterons, it would be foolish to just insult one of if not the ma

Although the parent may be modded as a troll.  There is a point there.  I have never had a real positive experience with AMDs They always seem to run quickly pause run quickly.  Compared to Genuine Intel which seems to run a little smoother.  This is both in Linux and in Windows.  Perhaps it is because the ones I have used were on budget PC's and the processor is fine but combined with a bunch of crappy hardware it causes the problem.  But I have never seen a smooth running AMD Box. 

For starters, I recently graduated from UC Berkeley.  My last class was CS152 where the students form their own groups and design a CPU of their own.  http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs152

I like good designs.  I like tech where people put a lot of work into making it work better and more elegantly than is actually necessary.  I admire it when a design just speaks about it's designers and says "we know our shit and we know how to do it good."  And to top it off, I'm willing to pay for it....but I can't complain when it's cheap:)

In short, my problem with Intel is that they're no longer using good engineering to sell.  They've switched to marketing bullshit. 

The Pentium 4, from an architecture standpoint, is a brute force method of pushing the clock speed for no reason other than to let the marketing guys say "ooh, 3 ghz."  The long pipeline is what gives it that ability.  The power consumption from the extra flipflops needed to form each pipelining stage and from fliping them so fast makes those huge ass heat sinks necessary.  An Intel P4 uses up more physical resources to run simply so they can try to sell more for less performance. 

Take a look at the PowerPC and the Athlons.  AMD's marketing-speak numbers actually reflect a generally equivalent (yeah yeah, there are always variations, but it's still generally close enough) to the P4's computation power.  Sure the Athlons give out ALMOST as much heat, but they're still less than the P4.  The lower clock rate helps too in making the system stable since it's easier to have gates that latch/hold correctly at slower speeds (duh.)  Less radio interference.  You don't need to overclock everything on the board or rely on perfectly placed wires to avoid interference.  Heck, it's easier and cheaper to design almost everything else on the board and chipset because of this AND STILL GET THE SAME OR BETTER PERFORMANCE.  And the PowerPCs?  Looking at Apple's machines, most of them still don't have direct CPU fans.  They can use the same chips in the laptops and the desktops.  No "mobile" version necessary.  Heck, in certain cases, a 500Mhz G4 will actually beat out a 3Ghz P4, although those cases are specialized. ( like distributed.net)

All of their "innovations" which they advertise don't really mean anything.  MMX was a joke even as far back as the P200s.  To execute a MMX instruction, you have to do a bunch of stuff to clear out your registers before you can use the instruction.  Unless you had a lot to do, you might have just wasted the gains of the instruction on the prep time since you'll probably have to commit a bunch of stuff to memory which takes a while.  NetBurst (the super duper long pipeline) doesn't make your internet experience better, it just increases your instruction latency (which I admit doesn't matter much when you're clocking 3ghz) and cause your CPU to croak on a branch prediction oopsies. 

There's a good reason why the current Centrino/PentiumM chipsets are based off a P3.  It's because it was a more respectable design than the P4 in almost every way except marketing speak.  It was more power efficient.  It also had a higher IPC count. ( instruction per cycle) The 1ghz P3 beat out all the 1.6-1.8ghz P4s on introduction and so they just scrapped the P3s soon after because it didn't help their marketing.  What kind of company scraps the better product? 

The P3, by the way, should have been named the P2a or something since all that was changed was a few instructions and the cache size.  But hey, 3 sounds better than 2. 

Finally, the majority of developers no longer do optimizations by hand.  So the "slight processor/OS incompatibility" shouldn't ever happen since almost every compiler for x86 is aware of both processors.  The instruction set is the same.  If the output is the same, it doesn't matter who's processor did it as long as 1+1=2 and 0xffffffff + 0x00000001 = (either 0 or an exception or whatever was specified by the ISA) Though,