P4 over Opteron, That's like saying G4 over G5 in my mind
Manit... you are talking performance in specific areas, I am referring to compatibility and reliability. As a general rule, I have found AMDs ( since the K-6 series ) to have pockets of bad performance, or in the worst cases, incompatibility with applications and hardware. After years of research, I found that it comes down to primarily one thing...optimization.
Many of the apps out there are code optimized specifically for the Intel Procs. If the world were different, AMD could be on top, as apps would be tuned for the AMDs.
A big area where AMD falls short is SSE/SSE2. These are the Altivec equivalents for Intel. The Athlon does not have SSE2, and the Opteron has a much slower SSE2 engine than the P4 simply due to the fact that it is clocked so much slower. For gamers and Video enthusiast on the PC platform, again, the INTEL would still be the way to go. You might say that comparing an Athlon to a P4, when it comes to games and video, would be like comparing a G3 to a G4 or G5. Athlons arent up to it for some code like DIVX.
The final reason, I cannot choose AMD as the better chip, is simply the major cooling issue people have had with it. AMDs have in the past almost always been hard to cool, as they put out tons of heat, which directly relates to other components inside the box dying of long-term heat failure. In Apples defense, I have found my PowerMac to excel in reliability simply due to this last issue alone. Intels enjoy a higher amount of engineering in this areas, as most of the big box manufacturers are putting some thought into keeping their boxes cool. Oddly enough, even in the boxes I have seen with the AMD processors in them ( HP and Micron ), there is nowhere the effort put into those machines to keep them cool.
Long and short of this message is that in real world tests, despite all of the hype, AMD has not been able to take over the INTEL world, and many people have found these reasons to be why. AMD does make a decent processor, but like APPLE, there are issues that need to be worked through to get them where they can take over the world. Apple suffers from a feasibility perception, and AMD suffers from some hardware snafus.
I am not a diehard fan of any specific platform for all things, so I try to look at the whole picture, and try to see both the strengths and weaknesses. In reality, there is no perfect platform that will serve absolutely everyone's needs, although Microsoft might tell you otherwise.
Now, back to the point of the thread... With FW800 on the PC platform, look forward to more devices, such as video recorders (maybe TIVOs), and computer peripherals to have this great new(er) interface.
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Max