Well, I wouldn’t knock it if you actually haven’t tried it. AMD has always made quality products and recently, outside of the Pentium M’s success in the mobile sector, they have built products that are arguably superior to what Intel has designed. The AMD K8 architecture is superior in so many ways to the P4/Pro architecture. SSE2 optimized applications aside, Athlon 64s run raw integer and floating point dependent applications far better than Intel chips.
AMD’s initial problems were caused more by 3rd party chipset manufacturers who were trying to rush new products out without during the first generation. Right now, the platforms for both Athlon XP and Athlon 64/Opteron are extremely mature and run fast while staying much cooler than most of Intel’s products.
I’m a fan of both because the competition makes the world a better place for all of us. I currently have three Intel (Pentium M-based TR, Pentium 4- based workstation, and Dual Pentium III-based test server) and two AMD (Athlon XP-based server and Mobile Athlon XP-M-based PVR) systems and all are equally rock solid and perform as expected.
The Mobile Athlon XP-M 2500+ I have is particularly intriguing as it runs to incredibly cool at its stock speed of 1.83Ghz. It runs nearly 20C lower than my similarly spec’d Pentium 4 2.4GHz. The crazy thing is that the chip is easily overclockable to an actual 2.4Ghz (equivalent to a theoretical Athlon XP 3600+) while still running cooler than my Pentium 4 chip. That’s remarkable! What’s even more remarkable is this is a processor that costs $90.
