hUMANbEATbOX said:
the difference is AMD doesn't tell anyone what's going on. they would never issue a list of known bugs, let alone even aknowledge there are any bugs.
who knows if they fix bugs behind the scenes.
with the core duo, intel has a major head start in knowing what potential bugs are, as it is based heavily off of Dothan.
Please don't shine some sort of false light on Intel...they are no better than AMD in this area...
Anyhow, it seems like there are a lot of misconceptions in this thread, especially from people who have tried one brand of processor but not both:
(1) To some extent, Intel's earliest dual cores were a rush attempt. Even the low-level X2's outperformed Intel's higher-binned offerings when you factored overall multi & single-threaded performance.
(2) Anyone who thinks that AMD dual cores were priced higher b/c of build quality is just plain wrong; on the contrary, AMD's initial target for dual cores was (and largely still is) the server market. AMD honestly believes that their vanilla A64 offerings are more than sufficient to hold over the desktop market for quite some time. Intel, on the other hand, wanted to push their dual cores into the mainstream. It is because of this reason why AMD's chips were priced higher - they targeted industrial sales while Intel looked toward the end-user.
(3) Believe it or not, I have nothing but praise for Intel's 9xx dual cores. Not only are they cheaper than AMD's offerings, but they have closed the once-large performance gap in many areas. Sure, Opterons and X2's will have the edge in some apps (gaming to this day), but the performance delta is marginal to some and a welcome tradeoff given the stability of Intel's chipsets and the fact that, in some cases, DDR2 is actually cheaper than DDR1 (note PQI's PC5400 2GB kit for $165). All things considered, Intel has actually come up with a dual core solution that is literally more bang for the buck than AMD's offering - something that has not happened in the long run.
In conclusion - no company is perfect, and no brand has the superior product here. Both the X2 and Core Duo have their merits, but many people are high on the 9xx chips (myself included) b/c of the price-to-performance that they offer. Personally, I am going to give Intel another stab (just for the hell of it), and this is coming from someone that had a Opteron 146 (single-core) running @ 3 GHZ 34/7 and an Opteron 165 @ 2.85 GHZ.
deception``