Author: Matt Taylor
Date: 12:16:50 02/20/03
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On February 20, 2003 at 14:03:50, Charles Worthington wrote: >Are you referring to the fritz server quotes? Actually my figures were not >quoted as a comparison of AMD and Intel. I am sure that the 2600 is close to >being the equal of the P4 3.06. The figures posted there were actually to >compare the outrageous benchmarks I have seen posted here to the actual >benchmarks that are being posted in the field...Many of the people posting these >benchmarks play on the fritz server and I have seen their machines run >personally. All I am saying is....it just ain't so. They are not getting near >that speed. I have 120,000 playchess games in my db with the avg. kNs per game >of each machine posted in the analysis. Thats about the largest db of anyone >there and you wont find a posting over 2400 kNs in that whole db. The purpose of >this formus is so that we can all learn what configurations perform well and >which ones don't so we can improve our own performance. It is hard to achieve >that goal if inflated figures are being posted. Many people like myself who are >not computer experts come here for advice on configurations. It is quite >confusing when you start seeing vastly diverse figures on what is supposedly the >same cpu. Yes, I think it is obvious that I prefer Intel systems myself. >But....I also like the AMD systems and am looking to purchase a 2600MP myself. I >think the 2300 kNs that i have seen posted from the 2400MP is outstanding >performance and in line with what I would expect from 2.6 to 2.8 Xeons. My only >question in regard to AMD products is I think not unreasonable: Are they of >equal quality to Intel's products? In a society where "you get what you pay for" >price is the way most people tend to judge quality. Since I am no expert on >processor design I look to the next thing: what does it cost? Now once I have >the 2600MP in hand I may fall in love with the system...who knows? I don't have >a bias against AMD...I am just ignorant of their products. I have never owned >one nor operated one. i have stuck with intel because that is what I have always >owned (like many people). I am willing to give the AMD a spin and see how she >performs. Eventually I plan to purchase a quad system. I am still testing the >waters with the duals though to see which platform to go with. Cost aside I will >always go with whichever one performs best. If AMD comes out with a quad that >will dust the Xeons then I will bye it and hapilly save myself some money in the >process. But...Every independant study I have seen recently has ranked the 2.8 >Xeon ahead of the 2400MP in most areas. That is the bottom line to date. That is >why I purchased Intel. Perhaps one day that will change...but not today > >Charles I used to believe the "you get what you pay for" idiom applied to computing as well. At that time I was a fan of Intel, myself. I had friends who bought AMD K6s and talked about how great they were. I was a skeptic for a long time. I think what convinced me was seeing the Athlon narrowly lead the Pentium 3 clock-for-clock in optimized code and simply dominate in legacy code. Eventually I replaced my Pentium 120 with a K6-266. After running the K6 for years, I can say that I have had nothing but good experiences working with that chip. My experiences with Athlon have been equally good. The Athlon itself has borrowed many things from the DEC Alpha. (My own conspiracy theory is that the Athlon -is- a modified DEC Alpha 21264.) Nobody questions the quality of the Alphas. By the way, if you are interested in a quad-processor machine, you might turn your gaze toward Opteron. Within 2 short months (sometime in April), it will be releasing eight-CPU systems between 1.6 and 2.0 GHz. AMD makes claims of 25% performance increase over the Athlon in 32-bit software, and the Opteron supports 64-bit computing which will also be somewhat beneficial to Chess. The Opteron has support from Linus Torvalds, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Microsoft, and a number of other big names. I can't say how expensive an eight-CPU Opteron system will be, but I know it will be fast. -Matt
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