IT Professionals

AMD No More?

Posted by on Apr 17, 2008 | 6 Comments

I have been a staunch AMD fan for years. Not on notebooks mind you, but for my desktop, I just could never justify paying “Intel Tax” and throwing money away for something I could do for substantially cheaper with an AMD chip. Despite my loyalty to this hard luck company, they ‘brilliantly” opted to purchase ATI, which I think they were foolish for doing so. Not that I have anything against ATI on OS X or Windows, rather I simply could not see AMD as being healthy enough to absorb them as a company. To me, it felt like sidestepping the issue of truly competing with Intel.

These days, I am stilling running my old AMD Athlon 64 3700+ CPU to this day on my primary box – it has never missed a beat and has survived plenty of hardware upgrades. Older, sure, but a great CPU. But perhaps for the first time ever when it comes time for me to finally bothering to upgrade my CPU due to its age, not my need to keep up with any one OS, I may end up going with Intel.

I hate to make the switch, but I simply do not feel that AMD is serious about their desktop market any longer. It feels like it is all about their fight within the server market, thus leaving the desktop world to Intel. Considering my new notebook is powered by Intel (thanks to my friends at System76.com), it is beginning to make sense to switch out my motherboard/CPU/etc for something Intel based as well.

Obviously being a geek, I most certainly will build the PC myself as I have always done. However this time, I will not likely be with my once beloved AMD chip. No, I am afraid unless something drastic changes, I may move over to Intel for good. Am I nuts? Should I just bite the bullet and stick with AMD?

  • http://cowbelltech.blogspot.com/ Fred Naatz

    This may be the processor that saves them Matt. (Disregard the Computer company making the whole ball of wax and just read about the new AMD processor it sports!)

    http://www.alienware.com/product_detail_pages/Aurora/aurora_overview.aspx?sssdmh=dm11.106903&SysCode=PC-AURORA-R5&SubCode=SKU-DEFAULT&from=EMAIL:gen_20080417_NewAurora

    (I’m not pro or anti Alienware.. I just am saying that this new AMD CPU can be marketed pretty well!)

    -Fred

    Matt, Everybody, tell me your thoughts!

    I was an AMD loyalist who built my Athlon XP’s for years for my Wife, family and friends. I was always so excited to deliver such good performance at much lower prices than people anticipated. The Intel-Tax is a hard swallow for me. I have Intel Core 2 Dual on my Notebook. Frankly.. I’m not moved by it. I relate that to the need for more software to take advantage of the new architectures; but seeing as I’m not WOWed by it. I think AMD still has life in them!

  • Ashley

    Hi Matt

    Don’t do it man. I have a friend who has access to all the latest and greatest hardware, as he is a PC Wholesaler. To cut a long story short, he built himself an Intel E6800, I think, top of the line at the time mobo and the fastest Dual Processor out there with Vista as OS and lots of disk and 2 Dual Core Nvidia cards. He had endless problems, complaining about BSOD’s as much as 30 times per day.

    This, is from a guy who was running an AMD 64 as yourself, flawlessly. He then decided to switch back to AMD and got himself a 6000+ X2 Black Edition with the same hardware as above. It ran flawless, no reboots, it just did its work!!

    -Please reconsider, don’t do it!!! – Be an AMD MAN!!
    :)

  • Matt Skinner

    A balanced company is needed to provide competition, but remember Intel’s attitude before AMD became a household name – Ripoff Kings, even more so than Microsoft. It takes a responsible market to help keep healthy competition. Unfortunately there are too many “bunnies” out there who just leap in and ignorantly buy what the salesman says – Intel.
    I like AMD desktop chips, they aren’t better chips than Intel, but they are NOT worse either. I will buy AMD just to keep the market healthy. Monopolies are bad, so it takes IT savvy people to help make sure the market stays healthy.
    C’mon Matt,
    Go AMD, Go open source too.

  • Tony D

    Hey Matt; I too went that route. I was running a XP2500+ (since 2003) which still met and satisfied my Battlefield2 needs, but wanted to update to something multicore. AMD just didn’t sit right with me, and went with the Q6600. Let me tell you, it is one sweet chipset. You won’t be disappointed.
    Tony

  • Tim

    I’m feeling your pain as well, Matt.
    Since the XP processors came out I’ve built and used 100′s of AMD machines. Every month I beg and plee to the gods that AMD announce a processor that can truly compete again. It felt good to slap ol green in a machine, see ol green stay in the pocket, and have ol green smoke intel.

  • John

    Not sure what your beef with AMD really is. They have not abandoned the desktop market and do not require you to use ATI display adapters to use AMD CPUs or anything sinister like that. They continue to put out excellent hardware and there are many folks out there taking full advantage of how they treat floating point processing that makes them an even better choice depending on your goals.

    Also, the Opteron procs are available in workstation models and kick ass for every application I’ve seen them put to. Game production, audio work, visual effects, video editing, raw number crunching…..

    I’m pretty agnostic about the hardware I use, going for the best bang for the buck etc. Been AMD/nVIDIA for a long time, but have used intel and ATI along the way when they were the sweet spot for what I was addressing at the time. Currently very much behind what AMD is doing and that doesn’t look to change for quite some time now that they have worked out the kinks in the Barcelona chip.

    So, switch if you like, but you may want to examine why you’re switching a bit more thoroughly.