Mr Rob looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 10:16:06 -0500, Xocyll
wrote:

Oh they were competitive long before that.
Dad had a Intel 386 DX 33, I had an AMD 386 DX 40, and mine was faster
(not the huge jumps that came later, but still faster.)

I'll never ever forget my first experience with an AMD processor. I
bought a system that had an AMD K5 100 CPU in it. It had a PR (Pentium
Rating) of 133 so it was technically one of the fastest chip on offer
at the time. It was an AST Advantage Home Multimedia machine. Very
well made and nice and smooth with Windows 95 on it.

Ahh yes, the famous "overdrive" chip, supposed to make a 486 system into
a pentium. I dodged that bullet thankfully.

I was really looking forward to playing MDK2 at last. Imagine my
horror when the game wouldn't install because it recognised my CPU as
486 DX- architecture. It wouldn't even install because it needed a
"Pentium Class CPU" to run on.

I thought MDK one wouldn't run except on a pentium?

Back then I think it was the FPU benchmarks that caused non Intel 5x86
class chips to be recognised as 4x86. I had the same problem with a
Cyrix 120 MHZ CPU.

I never did play MDK2 even though I did buy a Pentium based machine a
few months later.

Move up to the pentium, and a friend of mine who was not terribly
computer literate bought (without asking for advice) a pentium 200,
while I bought an AMD K6-233. For $100 less I got a processor that beat
his in all tests (the extra 33MHz canceled out Intel's better floating
point performance.)

This is when AMD really started giving Intel a run for their money if
I remember correctly. I had great service out of 1GHZ Thunderbird and
then an Athlon 2100+. I've had several Athlons since then too. I've
still got 3 working PC's in the house based on those chips.

Dittoish; k6 to a .7GHz Duron, then to a 1.4GHZ athlon, then up to an
athlon 64 2800, which is where I'm at now.

It's Intel for me at the moment though. They seem to offer the best
performance to cost ratio. I've had an ATi graphics card for the last
3 years but at the moment it looks like Nvidia is going to supply my
first ever DX-10 card.

Yeah all the benchmarking does seem to show Intel pretty solidly ahead
of AMD these days.

Some day soon I'll probably build another system, which is going to have
to be mostly new from the ground up since neither the ram nor the AGP
video will be usable in the new machine.

Then I'll have to find room for a 3rd machine on my desk.

I really hope that AMD's acquisition of ATi doesn't turn out for the
worse. We need them to keep the market place competitive. I don't have
any have any allegiance to any vendor, I just want whatever delivers
the best performance for the kind of money that I can afford. The idea
of a competitive market place seems to be completely lost on the
"fanboy" types that enjoy gloating when a rival vendor runs into
trouble.

Indeed, Intel's prices were pretty massive gouging until AMD got
competitive with them.
I don't fancy the price jump if Intel stays well ahead.

AMD's purchase of ATi is eerily familiar to 3DFX's purchase - I hope
they don't end up having the same fate.

Xocyll
--
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably,
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr