AMD Launches Budget Processor Refresh 209
MojoKid writes "AMD has again launched a bevy of new processors targeted squarely at budget-conscious consumers. Though Intel may be leading the market handily in the high-performance arena, AMD still provides a competitive offering from a price/performance perspective for the mainstream. HotHardware has a performance quick-take of the new 3.2GHz Phenom II X2 555 and 2.9GHz Athlon II X4 635. For $100 or less, bang for the buck with AMD is still relatively high."
And this is where the money in processors is (Score:3, Insightful)
The standard pleb doesn't really give a damn whether it can crunch a billion petaflops in under a nanosecond, or heat a cup of water standing on the desk by its sheer awesomeness.
All they care about is whether they can chat to their friends, write a letter, browse the intert00bs and lose the last bit of their privacy by posting everything on facebook.
Re:It's been a while since I considered AMD (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's been a while since I considered AMD (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel processors in lower-end price brackets might often score a win, but only if you consider the price of CPU alone. Intel GFX is crappy. There's Nvidia integrated GFX available...but for some reason the motherboards with them are usually quite a bit more expensive than AMD ones. Cheap AMD CPU with cheap integrated GFX offers best all-around performance - as good as any other setup for "daily" tasks, definatelly more 3D oomph than comparatively priced alternatives.
Re:Why do you feel I owe you an explanation? I don (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, of course you are entitles to your opinion. However, if you want to air your opinion in the public square and are not willing to share any details to back it up, you're no better then the crazy dude on the corner talking about the faeries that visit him at night..
Re:AMD=Awful Macro Devices For A reason (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Don't be so cautious with describing video (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, if the majority of the public has these slower CPUs, what sane game maker is going to make games that do not at least run on these machines? That sounds like a good way to lose 90% of your profit.
Re:Why do you feel I owe you an explanation? I don (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to join in the fun; if you post your opinions on a public forum you are expected to back up your claims with examples and logic. If you cannot do so, either because of personal beliefs, or other restrictions such as NDAs, then do not post them.
Of course, while you are certainly entitled to your opinion, that alone worth little on a discussion board. The merit of this system comes from the fact that others may examine your arguments, and either adjust their own beliefs, or reply to your data with their own data. Saying you believe something and not backing it up adds little to the discussion; none of us know you, so we cannot judge if your opinion really has merit. And do not be too surprised when people start trying to interpret your post and "putting words in your mouth." That just means you didn't explain things well enough, so they had to draw their own conclusions.
While I do not believe you are trolling, I do think you completely missed the point of the comment system, at least for this topic.
Re:Don't be so cautious with describing video (Score:4, Insightful)
I would also be glad to see the term "console port" go away. It's nonsensical, implies there was some amount of "porting" being done...while that's not really true nowadays, not after efforts of MS. Same dev tools, same team, same engine, similar art assets; there's no porting taking place, only two parallel and largely common efforts. Not exploiting the strenghts of both platforms (do you think console side of such game is really optimised for hardware?)
But the term must be convenient for publishers, with players pointing fingers at those "evil consoles" instead of pointing them at...publishers.
Re:Speaking of"readers" and "due diligence" (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you honestly arguing that a poster's choice of "an" vs "some" disqualifies his entire argument? Getting into semantics much? The point still stands that he tried a very small number of CPUs, and by virtue of that small number, his opinion is not likely to be worth much.
Perhaps if the original poster said he ran a cluster of a thousand AMD CPUs, or even just tried several different generations of AMD CPUs your point would have merit. However, a person is not a fanboi for pointing out obvious inconsistencies, regardless if he mis-remembered a not particularly significant number.
Re:Why do you feel I owe you an explanation? I don (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't *have* to justify your opinion, but no one *has* to listen to it or give it any relevance.
By posting here it can be assumed that you want your opinion to be heard and considered and thus probably do care about people listening to it. Thus it would be assumed that you would justify your opinion and not respond in like a flaming mule.
Re:Why do you feel I owe you an explanation? I don (Score:2, Insightful)
And the person who asked for more information said please! Imagine that. He was pleasant, and Blappo or whatever was rude in response.
Re:Why do you feel I owe you an explanation? I don (Score:5, Insightful)
Less Garbage From AMD (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't be so cautious with describing video (Score:5, Insightful)
Console ports require more thought than "recompile with a different target".
AMD (Score:5, Insightful)
If nothing else AMD serves to counterpoint Intel from being a monopoly. Further they actually make some pretty good chips.
I support AMD because they keep Intel in check. And as a bonus their chips aren't that bad.
Re:Would the quad cores work in a small case? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're modded up, so I'll just add a +1 comment to your observation on the case. For the last decade or so, the most expensive part of my systems has usually been the case. Of course, there were only about 3 of them in that decade. A good case is a must.
So far, I've been a loyal Antec fan. Roomy, rolled edges, rails for everything, good ventilation...I have no complaints about their cases. They are damn well built.
it _always_ depends (Score:5, Insightful)
When people are going to learn performance _depends_ on what you're going to process?
I remember, few years ago, having a server we had with an Athlon XP 2600 (its real clock was 2.1GHz AFAIR). A perfectly speedy machine for desktop usage, but as a server (pure CPU-load in that case, no I/O bottleneck) it was having a real hard time. We eventually replaced that machine and old 4x Xeon (P3-based, 500MHz), and things went to normal.
I already suspected what the problem could be, so I've decided to make a test replacing - temporarily - the Xeon-based server with a Sun Ultra 30 (1xUltrasparc II @ 300MHz).
Well, the Sparc not only survived the test, but also kicked hard the Athlon's ass. Still, as a desktop machine, the Sparc was mediocre.
The difference was that the Sparc had 2MB L2 cache, while the Athlon had only 256kB (even with 2x bandwidth and lower-latency RAM). In _that_ case the L2 cache made all the difference. Per MHz, the Sparc also won, by large margin, the Xeon machine (1MB L2 for each processor).
Athlon's (pre-64) performance compared to P4 (sorry, I don't have an i7 to compare against a X4) varies. For desktop usage the Athlons felt snappier in general, but with some performance "hiccups" when you started to tax the machine more. The P4s felt slower overall, but the performance seemed to be more homogeneous.
Which one was better then? Well, that's a good question. I personally preferred the "slower but smoother" P4, but Athlons were fine and I could recommend both processors for home usage,
You know what really, really suck?
Those benchmarks they publish around.
I mean "XYZ fps in Crysis"? mp3 lame encoding time? Synthetic benchmarks?
Those say nothing to me. Run some database benchmark, or measure the time it takes to compile the Linux kernel using all cores at once... Or move GBs of data in the memory N times etc. Then it might be interesting.
Re:And this is where the money in processors is (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, tell us more about the stupid sheeple, oh insightful one!
Re:And this is where the money in processors is (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't say anything about your comments on the use patterns of the "standard pleb" but I do quite a lot of structural engineering work, which involves extensively using commercial structural analysis software on a daily basis and even developing my own programs, and I do all that on a "cheap and disposable" Athlon X2 4000+ system which cost me around 250 euros three years ago.
The thing is, you may have far more powerful CPUs in the market but the truth is that, although they can cost huge amounts of money, the only benefit that they bring you is that instead of you having to wait 6 minutes for your stuff to finish instead it only takes about 4, and that is a sporadic workload. More to the point, today's "cheap and disposable" processors are pretty much on par with your top of the line gear from, say, 6 years ago. And you know what? Those processors from 6 years ago were already far more powerful than whatever you needed.
And besides that, nowadays if someone needs more power under their computing hood then that person won't spend thousands of dollars on an entire system. It will spend at most hundreds of euros on a brand new graphics card, which not only will fully take care of your recreation needs but also computation needs.
Re:It's been a while since I considered AMD (Score:3, Insightful)
but AMD64 is a very minor extension to x86 and leverages SSE.
Load of [wikipedia.org].
Intel had a 64-bit extension in the 90s ...
Do you mean PAE [wikipedia.org]? Then it's totally different story and btw it is still supported and used when 32 OS has to access more than 4GB RAM (in a limited way).
Interesting. To what then you would attribute Linux uprising then? It was precisely because enterprises got tired of *nix vendor lock-in into expensive hardware - which already in 90s was underperforming compared to x86. Linux allowed to move many legacy *nix applications to cheap OTS hardware and that actually how it (Linux) made the first inroads in enterprise.
I wouldn't give AMD much engineering credit, but rather blame the piss poor management at Intel.
If anything, credit should go to AMD for (1st) creating AMD64 and (2nd) properly communicating with vendors and users what/how they going to do in the new architecture.
Without AMD taking the initiative back then, many who need more than 4GB RAM would have to buy the $8K+ Itanic boxes now.