Re: AMD vs. Intel
On Wednesday 07 April 2004 14:37, Christian Schnobrich wrote:
> > Recently, however, I have experienced random crashes on two machines
> > that run AMDs. The crashes seem to be related to IO and happen
>
> I have no first-hand experience, but from stories I heard it seems that
> Intel has some benefits over AMD. Stories like USB stuff going haywire
> after every two-dozen (dis)connects and other more or less obscure,
> hard-to-track-down issues that might well never turn up in home use.
> Your crash that is "somehow" related to heavy I/O nicely fits the
> picture.
/rant on
I should have said this in my first reply. It's common knowedge that AMD
based systems has, compared to Intel based systems, a reputation of sometimes
being unstable. No one ever bothers to explain why.
It has always been a trend that there tend to be cheap motherboards for
expensive processors. And there has always been a wide variety of
cheap&nasty motherboards for cheaper processors. There are a lot of horribly
unstable and troublesome Celeron machines out there - ask anyone who works
for an IT support company. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with
the Celeron processor, but more likely that a cheap motherboard or other low
quality components are giving trouble. The same goes for AMD processors.
How many Xeon based systems are giving stability issues (discounting cases
where something is obviously packing up)? Probably none - the Xeon is
rediculously expensive, and people buying Xeon based systems, tend to put it
on an expensive board, and build the system of similar quality components.
AMDs are cheap, not matter how you look at it. Therefore they are a popular
choice for companies selling "budget" machines. These machines ALWAYS have
at lease a few really crappy cheap&nasty components in, and mostly the
motherboard is one of them. And these machines almost always have one issue
or another. It's exactly the same thing we had with K6-II and Celeron
processors four or five years ago with motherboards like FIC, PC-Chips, and
similar brands. Even if the cheap board is based on a good chipset, like
the Intel based FIC board I had, it's still unstable as hell, simply because
the board is a poor implementation of the chip.
Stability has got little, if anything to do with the processor itself - it's
almost always about the rest of the box - what's in it.
/rant off
Kind regards
Hans du Plooy
Newington Consulting Services
hansdp at newingtoncs dot co dot za
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