What do you think of AMD processors?

...which played very well to one of Netburst's weaknesses.

Increased clock frequency didn't increase performance? That doesn't make any sense and is not true at all. No, the problem with Netburst was that it was not as scalable as Intel had once hoped. They hit a wall with how high they were able to get the clock speed, and the processors were putting out more than their fair share of heat. Also Intel kept coming out with new Netburst processors for 3 years after they came out with the Pentium M, so I'm not sure if you can so quickly close the history book. Although more efficient on a per-watt basis, Banias was no match for Northwood. It wasn't until Merom came out several years later that Intel had a processor that was more powerful than their latest Netburst processors, Cedar Mill/Presler.

Regardless of any "Netburst will scale to 10Ghz" you may have heard, when Intel first introduced Netburst in 2000 they estimated that it would be around for 3-5 years. It outlived their initial expectations and went from 180nm to 65nm from 2000 to 2006. There was nothing inherently wrong about the architecture if they could keep the clock frequencies up. They got overconfident with initial successes but were not able to keep bumping up the clock frequency as they had hoped

 

It increases performance but no longer scales up, plus the power consumption and heat is horrible when you push the clocks.
IIRC there was even a prescott sudden death.

 

I haven't used AMD CPU since Athlon XP. It was a win CPU until Core Duo release as the most major improvement, i then stuck with Intel ever since till now. During the use, i finds Intel platform is easier to manage. Felts like Windows is built just for it. AMD system on another hand need to install more drivers to run properly. Those drivers aren't included for reason (legal issue?). As well i concerned that AMD don't develop their own chipset but have nVidia, VIA and other corporation groups to do the job. Even AMD did develop the chipset, it not widely used. And too hated they added comparasion to the HyperTransport.

Anyway the only thing with Phenom is about tri-cores that got my attention, which is my usage preference, since i don't go get 4 cores CPU and only use couple few. But after some personal analysis, as a personal choice, i like Intel better these days.

Overall, AMD CPU is well known for consumers that are looking for budget. Gaming or general use it works great. By only a little performance difference with Intel CPU and lower price tag. Is up to the wallet to decide, really.

CPU Wars never ends, we know that so just ignore and wait for the evolution to come.

 

Can you PM me the links if you find them.

I found this link. It shows few benchmarks on apentium 4 with and without hyperthreading. En video encoding the one with the hyperthreading on is slightly faster. I did some video recoding with VirtualDub litely on a laptop with a pentium dual core. My max CPU load never went above 85%. If my CPU supported hyperthreading the extra %15 would have been used to emulate one or two extra virtual cores .

This link shows what happen in rendering. In most cases there is no diffrence between having and not having hyperthreading. In one instance when the hyperthreading was on the cpu was slower. With rendering CPU seems to be loaded at %100 most if not all the time

 

It depends on the renderer. Some are amenable to hyperthreading's improvements, others aren't or even lose performance when HT is enabled:
rendering - Hyper-threading... made my renderer 10 times slower! - Stack Overflow

But that's because he coded it stupidly and had thread interrelations that held the whole thing up.

Hyperthreading is not magic, but it can be a very real improvement if it's properly used. I know that x264 gets something like a 20-25% improvement with HT.

 

Found the old thread here. They're not my links, by the way, but IntelUser's. I don't think we really disagreed significantly, we were just confusing each other because we were using different terminologies.

The links are actually to the same site as your P4 in rendering benchmarks, so I guess it just shows how much Intel advanced the technology of hyperthreading between the P4 and Nehalem.

 

For an average consumer AMD processors are just fine. Most just want to keep the price down and most likely don't know the difference between CPU's.

Most of us are more knowledgeable here and know what we are getting and know what to expect from a certain CPU.

AMD is great at being cheap but still lack in just about every other category IMO. Can't have everything.