The earlier AMD stuff was not good at all IMO. Truthfully, it wasn't AMDs fault, it was the chipsets that the motherboards used. (VIA is mainly to blame here.)
All I can say is my AMD boxes are FAR more stable than my Intel rigs. (Unlike Intel, there are newer motherboard drivers available constantly to fix issues on VIA stuff.)
Both companies now make VERY GOOD processors. Intel used to be the leader for sure until AMD came out with the Athlon. Intel's p3 is totally outclassed by the Athlon. Basically AMD took everything that was right about the p6 core (pentium pro, p2, p3, celeron, celeron 2, etc) and fixed most of what was not so great. (Improved branch prediction, lots more cache memory, far superior FPU [this was historically the main weakness of AMD stuff], better bus interface, and better overall layout).
Given a choice between a p3 and Athlon no educated consumer would pick the P3. (The Athlon is faster and cheaper.) Currently the Athlon also holds the edge over the P4.
Something you guys should understand is that the processor itself is not the main reason for system stability (or lack of)
. The chipset, which is the interface between all components in the system, and part of the motherboard is largely to blame. The main reason for Intel's stability was that for the most part it made it's own chipsets. AMD until recently has not done so, they depend on companies like ALI and VIA to make them. This inevitably results in some issues. (It's like trying to build an engine for a car that you didn't design. ) Beyond that there is the truth that in the past most AMD systems were the absolute cheapest computers you could buy. As a result companies putting motherboards together often cut corners that could often result in stability problems. (Less filtering capacitors, cheap voltage regulators, etc.) With the coming of the Athlon this all changed. All of the sudden the Athlon became a mid-high end system. Major manufacturers like Asus and Abit made quality boards and VIA finally turned out a decent chipset in the kx133. This was followed upon by the current generation Thunderbirds and Durons and VIA's kt133 and kt133a chipsets. In the ultimate in irony Intel produced of the worst chipsets in the history of the PC, the i820. (Remember the great MTH recall where Intel was forced to give everybody super expensive Rambus ram because their "memory translator hub" - ie MTH contained major defects that prevented it from working with SDRAM as advertised? )
AMD, failing to learn from past mistakes, still refuses to produce their own chipsets in quantity. (They make a great one called the AMD 760, but it is limited production.) This one, however, may not be a fatal mistake.
Yesterday Nvidia (the company that makes the Geforce graphics chip), announced a motherboard chipset to be known as nForce. This chipset borrows heavily from the $100 Million in research money that Microsoft provided to them to develop the Xbox. I was reading some articles yesterday about this chipset and was nearly blown away! This chipset will easily boost performance on fast Athlon chips by at least 20% across the board! (One really impressive test showed that copying a file that took 200 seconds on a motherboard using the AMD 760 chipset, takes only 90 seconds on the reference board with the nForce! Remember, this chipset isn't even released yet!!!
) I posted a link to some news about it in the hardware and software forum. Intel, in probably the stupidest move in their history, has refused to allow nVidia to adapt the chipset to use p3 and p4s. (This is even though the Xbox uses a p3 733 as its CPU! )
It seems to me that things are only getting better for AMD, and Intel is taking a real beating these days. Intel, though capable of making truely great processors, has made some truely idiotic decisions recently: Ads that do nothing but show the logo, producing a flawed CPU in the P4, recall of the p3 1133, massive layoffs, refusing 3rd parties to produce chipsets for Intel processors, pouring buckets of money into the development of Itanium, deal with Rambus [the most hated computer company in the world today], MTH issue, delays in getting .13 micron process online, "netburst" marketing scam, etc.
I do think that Intel will probably survive this, but they need to pull their head out of their
and wake up. P4's sales figures are proving that consumers are more educated than Intel thinks and that logo identification alone doesn't sell processors that are fundamentally flawed. If their stock prices continue to fall they will come around sooner or later...
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bloom25
-MAW-
(Formerly of the)
THUNDERBIRDS
