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

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 03/17/2010 01:11 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> Up until the most recent Intel CPU's (i5, i7, etc) AMD cpu made
> better number crunchers than Intels offerings due to primarily to the
> intrinsic memory access capabilities of the Opterons. It chopped 3-6
> clock ticks off a memory fetch operation and made a HUGE improvement
> in recovery from incorrect pre-fetch operations.

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