Diablo III

[Rackhir]

Desktop duals are going to have better price/performance than quads for most apps at least until late next year. Maybe longer; it depends how the dual-core Core 3s (or whatever Intel ends up calling Nehalem) look and how aggresive AMD is on Phenom pricing.

Nehalem is what you really want to be waiting for. It and the associated chipsets are going to be introducing a number of features that Intel should have added years ago. The Front Side Bus, is going away to be replaced with a Hypertransport knockoff called Quick Path Interconnect. This gets you much higher bandwidth and lower latency, plus much better support for multiple processors. Then there's the integrated memory controller, which again will lower the latency for memory access and substantially increase the maximum throughput for memory access.

 

[drothgery]

Nehalem is what you really want to be waiting for.

Depends on how long you're willing to wait and how much you're willing to spend. If you want a laptop or a sub-$1800 desktop, you won't see Nehalem before the second half of 2009. I wouldn't sit on anything older than a Core 2 Duo / Athlon 64 X2 (and a 4800+ or better at that) that long.

 

[Ranger REG]

Desktop duals are going to have better price/performance than quads for most apps at least until late next year. Maybe longer; it depends how the dual-core Core 3s (or whatever Intel ends up calling Nehalem) look and how aggresive AMD is on Phenom pricing.

My next desktop PC will most likely be AMD-based.

 

[drothgery]

My next desktop PC will most likely be AMD-based.

Err... why? Intel has better price/performance pretty much across the entire desktop (except the extreme low-end) and laptop space right now (and the single and dual-socket server space), and this is likely to last for the forseeable future (which is to say from now to the end of 2009; beyond that you get into the very speculative portion of roadmaps).

 

[Ranger REG]

Err... why?

AMD's cheaper.

 

[drothgery]

AMD's cheaper.

Not for equivalent performance (or, actually, for anything above low-midrange, you can't actually get equivalent performance).

 

[Ranger REG]

Not for equivalent performance (or, actually, for anything above low-midrange, you can't actually get equivalent performance).

So you believe AMD sucks?

 

[drothgery]

So you believe AMD sucks?

No, they just don't have competitive CPUs outside of low-end desktops and multi-socket servers right now. Intel was in a similar situation a few years ago when the Athlon 64 (and especially the Athlon 64 X2) came out and started stomping all over Pentium 4 derivatives (the only place where Intel was clearly better was in notebook chips, where they used the Pentium M family rather than the Pentium 4 family), except that AMD couldn't come close to meeting all the CPU demand out there so Intel sold tons of desktop and server CPUs anyway (not enough manufacturing capacity, and building it up took too long).

I mean, if you're going to spend $100-$150 on a CPU, what makes sense to buy right now? From Intel, it's a Core 2 Duo E7200 for $130 (they have a few other things in the price range, but they're all worse). From AMD, it's either an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ for $115 (a 6400+ is $150, and 200 MHz is not worth $35 on the margins) or a Phenom X3 8450 for $125 (same deal, an 8650 is $145). The E7200 is going to win pretty much every benchmark against either (even the highly multithreaded ones vs. the tri-core, because it's a better architecture).

For $150-$200 on the Intel side, you're clearly looking at an Core 2 Duo E8400 for $180 (a Core 2 Quad Q6600 for $185 is sort of interesting, but not worth giving up 600 MHz and the advantages of Intel's 45nm chips over their 65nm versions). And the E8400 is faster than any dual-core or tri-core AMD makes. Except where multi-threading helps a lot, it's faster than any quad-core AMD makes -- and there the Q6600 is almost always better. And beyond that you're comparing Q9xxx quads with the top-end Phenoms, and that just doesn't look good for AMD.

Now, if you're spending under $100, then AMD's CPUs look pretty good (unless you're one of those crazy overclockers; Intel's current low-end chips overclock quite well), though the Pentium and Celeron dual-cores aren't bad at all (and the E5xxx Pentiums coming in the next few months may pretty much end the budget case for AMD).

 

[Logos7]

just for the record

My recollections of Diablo is thus: Made up a warrior, killed one glowing red skeleton after another, eventually encountered a boss called "The Butcher", couldn't beat him as he did way too much damage with his meat cleaver. Asked friend who loaned me the game how he did it, he explained the trick was to play a ranged attacker and kite The Butcher between barriers of hanging chains that The Butcher wasn't smart enough to move around. Was pretty much done with the game after that. Very shallow and repetitive IMO.

repeat after me, the game did not fail me, I failed the game.

some of my favorite moments of diablo I is going toe to toe with the butcher while firewalling him from scrolls and hopping he dropped first.

that or once looking for him, and finding the stone golem that i summoned from scroll had inadvertantly finished him off before I got their

Lots of great stuff in Diablo I but diablo II really ruined it for me (RUN DAMMIT RUN)

Right now im working to set my clocks to awesome standard time

also if intel is so supperior to amd at anything above the high end, why is amd still making those chips... Now i can either believe that many the people who buy higher end amd chips are idiots or that you are and i gotta say the odds aint looking good for u

 

[drothgery]

also if intel is so supperior to amd at anything above the high end, why is amd still making those chips... Now i can either believe that many the people who buy higher end amd chips are idiots or that you are and i gotta say the odds aint looking good for u

AMD doesn't have any high-end desktop chips right now. Their top-of-the-line desktop chips are priced the same as Intel's upper mid-range for a reason (every quad-core Phenom is chepaer than every Q9xxx , and every tri-core Phenom is cheaper than an E8500).

But there are lots of reasons why limitted quantities of the top-end AMD parts sell. Fanboys. Upgrades of existing systems. People who want the cheapest quad-core system they can get (even if spending just a little more for Intel would get better performance). People buying systems at retail who don't look at CPUs closely, or remember when their geek friend told them three years ago that AMD was better. On the other hand, unless you're getting an amazing deal, there's no reason you should be one of those people.

When AMD clearly had the better desktop CPUs and Intel was reduced to competing on price, a lot of people didn't have much choice but to buy Intel because AMD simply didn't have the capacity to make anywhere near enough CPUs for everybody. Intel, on the other hand, does.