One of the problems with AMD boxes is that customers aren't familiar with
all the ways in which they may be configured wrongly by white box vendors,
and the number of weeks it takes to set this right. We lost a week finding
out that AthlonMP won't work without registered DDR (yes, it runs about 80%
speed with 1 stick of non-registered DDR, not 2), and the vendor has yet to
make good on it after 3 weeks. Not easy to find registered DDR in western
USA. Not to mention the BIOS which frequently disables control keys and
mouse. Why do the new boxes (with both Intel and AMD CPU's) have so many
BIOS bugs? Who would buy an AthlonMP simply to run as set up by the vendor
(Win98)? Who would knowingly wish to spend 40% of the time in the OS
kernel, rather than in their own applications, simply to prove that the OS
kernel doesn't run any better on Intel's finest than on AMD? Does anyone
have good tools to measure this on an AMD linux box? Yes, the OS kernel
time rises on WinXP over what it is with linux or Win2K, when using SCSI
drives. Plenty of reasons for sales resistance, no matter which brand you
consider.
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From:
I thought this might interest someone that is about ready to get a new system. It seems, that even AMD's low end is better than Intel's high end stuff. :-)
It's fairly common knowledge around here. The only problem is convincing customers that they don't need an Intel chip. One of mine was about to buy 10 £2000 Pentium machines to update his drawing office, until I showed him the same application on a £1000 Athlon machine. Much faster, and things improved even more with 1Gb of DDR ram - try buying that in RIMM <g>
-- Lester Caine ----------------------------- L.S.Caine Electronic Services