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Author Topic: AMD or Intel  (Read 23694 times)

mawd

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AMD or Intel
« on: April 11, 2006, 08:38:48 AM »

Hi....will ALL current programmes run properly on the new 64 bit AMD/Intel  processors, providing I use the current 32 bit Operating System....IOW...are the new chips 100% backward compatible? Also....I've read that top end audio programmes are written around the Intel specifications....is there any evidence that AMD's aren't? I currently use AMD with my old machine and I love it, but I'm planning on ordering a new PC for music only and I'd like to get a definitive answer on this....AMD or Intel.
Regards.....MAWD
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danickstr

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #1 on: April 12, 2006, 01:06:39 AM »

the best answer for you is to go to the site forum of the program you intend to use....be it protools DP, Cubase, etc.  and get the answer for that piece of software specifically.   there is no "catch-all" computer for running all music programs.  DP for example only runs on Mac.  good luck.
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Nick Dellos - MCPE  

Food for thought for the future:              http://http://www.kurzweilai.net/" target="_blank">http://www.kurzweilai.net/www.physorg.com

Peter

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #2 on: April 13, 2006, 09:13:00 AM »

Paid about $750 for both chip and board a few years ago for my AMD64. Don't bother with the 'duel core' stuff. Friend got the newest and fastest AMD DC chip for about $1200 total, and mine is only 10% slower. I think the whole duel core stuff is a load of crap, maybe I'm wrong but its what I've seen in real world working environements.

He's also got a duel Xeon p4 which pretty much smokes anything I've used. Duel intel chips seems the best way to go if you have the money. Though steinberg stuff doesn't work with Hyperthreading.


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crm0922

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #3 on: April 21, 2006, 08:22:16 PM »

Steinberg says since Cubase SX2 and Nuendo 2.0 they have supported multiprocessor machines.  Hyperthreaded processors appear to the OS as 2 separate processors, so there should be a
benefit.  

Either way, the claim support for hyperthreading unless you are using multiple physical processors, each with hyperthreading.  In that case HT should be turned off.  My assumption is that the processor allocation algorithm is optimized for 2 processors total.

Please don't ignore dual-core processors.  They can offer nearly the performance of dual-processor systems.

Thus, most of what Peter says is incorrect (no offense Pete) if you are dealing with Intel stuff.  I have little or no experience with AMD lately, having years ago had 2 Athlon CPU's die for no apparent reason.

I've sold upwards of 50 Intel CPU's with one DOA in the past 5 years.

See below:

http://www.steinberg.net/fileadmin/redaktion/PDF/multiproces sing/Multiprocessing_Tech_Info.pdf

Chris
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UnderTow

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #4 on: April 28, 2006, 05:43:14 PM »


At the moment, AMD is faster than Intel and that is the bottom line. There is absolutely no compatibility issues either.

Dual-core AMD processors actually give a bigger gain than dual processors in one sense because the two cores communicate directly with each other over the crossbar switch. This is not the case with dual-core Intel chips which are basicly just two chips on the same dye.

And there certainly is a general advantage to dual-core and dual processor systems: It makes the system more responsive. The processor in a single processor/core machines can be fully occupied by a particular task making the mouse and GUI less responsive. This doesn't happen with dual-core or dual processor machines. On my system, I can have my DAW running at 90% CPU and everything is still perfectly quick and responsive.

And there is another advantage to going dual processor if you are willing to pay for a server type setup: With Windows XP SP2, which has NUMA support, each CPU (with the right type of motherboard) can access all memory banks at the same time giving very high memory bandwidth. In my dual Opteron system I get 10Gb/s memory speeds.

You could look at these benchmarks: http://adkproaudio.com/benchmarks.cfm

Right now every AMD solution beats any equivalent Intel solution.

As soon as the new Intel chips come out (and can be tested in the real world) things will probably change.

Alistair
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crm0922

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #5 on: April 28, 2006, 06:00:07 PM »

Alistair:

I am not surprised to see AMD #'s besting Intel for this type of work.  My fear of AMD stems from having multiple failures of AMD CPU's over the years.  

Perhaps not now, but in the past they were pushing their chips as hard as they could be pushed to get maximum performance and I think that took a toll in the form of heat damage.

Full PC system sales is a very small component of my business, so I don't have huge failure stat numbers to work from.  Do you think the reliability of these faster AMD chips is equivalent to that of Intel stuff from the past 3-4 years?

The Intel stuff I've sold and dealt with over the years has been overwhealmingly reliable, which I actually find kind of amazing given how cruddy a lot of PC hardware is.

Chris
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danlavry

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #6 on: April 28, 2006, 07:37:03 PM »

crm0922 wrote on Fri, 28 April 2006 23:00

Alistair:

I am not surprised to see AMD #'s besting Intel for this type of work.  My fear of AMD stems from having multiple failures of AMD CPU's over the years.  

Perhaps not now, but in the past they were pushing their chips as hard as they could be pushed to get maximum performance and I think that took a toll in the form of heat damage.

Full PC system sales is a very small component of my business, so I don't have huge failure stat numbers to work from.  Do you think the reliability of these faster AMD chips is equivalent to that of Intel stuff from the past 3-4 years?

The Intel stuff I've sold and dealt with over the years has been overwhealmingly reliable, which I actually find kind of amazing given how cruddy a lot of PC hardware is.

Chris


I do not have much of a preference, perhaps because I am not too deeply into understanding of PC processing. I did find myself very surprised in one area regarding processing:

My personal Laptop is an IBM thinkpad, it is about 3 years old. It has a processor clock rate of 1.8GHz. Yes, I know, that does not tell the whole story about computation speed. Also, while I got a very fast machine (at the time) it was not the fastest available.

I looked around to see what is available now. I expected to see some significant clock speed increase. I was hoping for some 3-5GHz clock speed, at least some X2 improvement. What happened to Moor's law? I guess it broke. I see many laptop machines with clock speeds around 2GHz, and not much higher.

Yes I know, there is dual-core architecture, and that is great for multitasking and more. But I need a fast single task machine for tasks such as compiling code, math analysis... where multitasking does not help a bit.

Yes, for the same cost, one gets wireless and all sorts of other things (more HD, more memory...) But I do not see much advancement in the basic computer performance itself.

Am I missing something?

Regards
Dan Lavry
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kraster

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #7 on: April 28, 2006, 11:37:56 PM »

danlavry wrote on Sat, 29 April 2006 00:37


Am I missing something?

Regards
Dan Lavry


Hi Dan,

I'd say big improvements in systems over the last ten years include: Front side Buss speed, Memory speed, serial ATA, PCI-Express, Pci-X, 64 bit systems (more Ram), more efficient memory management, extended instruction sets for APIs, smaller physical size of chips etc. etc.

I know that this discussion is centred on the actual CPU speed but improvements in computer systems as a whole should be taken into account if overall speed is the salient factor.

As with all computer systems YMMV as regards the application of these improvements on your software's performance. Some older programs may not be optimised to take advantage of the system's improvements so you may see little gain.

Moore's law states "the complexity of an integrated circuit, with respect to minimum component cost, will double in about 18 months.". Processor Speed should be determined not in clock speed but in ips (instructions per second) and flops (floating operations per second).  Consider this regarding cost in Moore's Law: in 1997 it cost $30,000 dollars per GFLOP (Giga flop)  with two 16-Pentium-Pro–processor Beowulf-class computers. In 2006 it costs 1$ per GFLOP with an ATI PC add-in graphics card (X1900 architecture).


Currently, the second fastest computer in the world is the  IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer at 280 GFLOPS but the fastest is still the Human being at an estimated 10 quadrillion FLOPS.
So we're safe for the moment!

Regards,

Karl



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crm0922

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #8 on: April 29, 2006, 01:46:06 AM »

danlavry wrote on Fri, 28 April 2006 19:37

 

Am I missing something?

Regards
Dan Lavry


I'm surprised you have to ask.  The heat and power consumption issues vs. what people actually want in CPU speed for a laptop result less than X2 speeds on newer laptops.

3.6Ghz is commonly available for desktops, and probably available on a laptop if you want it.

The real bottleneck in the OS with "apparent" speed is the hard drive speed, which is significantly slower in a laptop form factor.  Therefore increasing CPU speed on a laptop is generally detrimental to overall performance if you include battery life and reliability factors.

There is also the speed of light and a fundamental molecular compact-ness, both of which are limits the industry is rapdily approaching.

And don't forget that a dual-core CPU can give you virtually X2 performance without the need for X2 clock speed.  Since all our software is highly multithreaded, it actually makes quite a bit of sense to start parallelizing operations across different CPU cores rather than try to make everying smaller and faster.

Chris
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crm0922

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #9 on: April 29, 2006, 01:48:13 AM »

kraster wrote on Fri, 28 April 2006 23:37


Currently, the second fastest computer in the world is the  IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer at 280 GFLOPS but the fastest is still the Human being at an estimated 10 quadrillion FLOPS.
So we're safe for the moment!

Regards,

Karl



There are more than a few Floating Point Operations that would take my human brain about 1/2 hour to compute...

Do I need a dual-core brain?

C
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UnderTow

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #10 on: April 29, 2006, 08:05:07 AM »

crm0922 wrote on Fri, 28 April 2006 23:00

Alistair:

I am not surprised to see AMD #'s besting Intel for this type of work.  My fear of AMD stems from having multiple failures of AMD CPU's over the years.  

Perhaps not now, but in the past they were pushing their chips as hard as they could be pushed to get maximum performance and I think that took a toll in the form of heat damage.

Full PC system sales is a very small component of my business, so I don't have huge failure stat numbers to work from.  Do you think the reliability of these faster AMD chips is equivalent to that of Intel stuff from the past 3-4 years?

The Intel stuff I've sold and dealt with over the years has been overwhealmingly reliable, which I actually find kind of amazing given how cruddy a lot of PC hardware is.

Chris



Chris,

There have been issues with AMD processors (and some chipsets) in the past but they do not seem to apply today. AMD is just as reliable as Intel.

The only area where there are issues today (for audio) are with the supporting chipsets. These issues affect both AMD and Intel setups.

As for heat issues (and possible failures if there are cooling issues) AFAIK, Intel processors are hotter for equivalent performance. (Or rather, slightly less performance).

Now I must precise that I am talking about desktop and server solutions as I have not done any research on laptop solutions recently.

Alistair
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UnderTow

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #11 on: April 29, 2006, 08:12:12 AM »

danlavry wrote on Sat, 29 April 2006 00:37



I do not have much of a preference, perhaps because I am not too deeply into understanding of PC processing. I did find myself very surprised in one area regarding processing:

My personal Laptop is an IBM thinkpad, it is about 3 years old. It has a processor clock rate of 1.8GHz. Yes, I know, that does not tell the whole story about computation speed. Also, while I got a very fast machine (at the time) it was not the fastest available.

I looked around to see what is available now. I expected to see some significant clock speed increase. I was hoping for some 3-5GHz clock speed, at least some X2 improvement. What happened to Moor's law? I guess it broke. I see many laptop machines with clock speeds around 2GHz, and not much higher.

Yes I know, there is dual-core architecture, and that is great for multitasking and more. But I need a fast single task machine for tasks such as compiling code, math analysis... where multitasking does not help a bit.

Yes, for the same cost, one gets wireless and all sorts of other things (more HD, more memory...) But I do not see much advancement in the basic computer performance itself.

Am I missing something?

Regards
Dan Lavry


Dan,

Karl has allready answerd about Moor's law. Suffice to say, CPUs are faster and cheaper and Moor's law is still in effect.

About compiling code, when I was still in IT we used to regurlarly compile code in parallel on multi-processor Sun Micro systems. It was just a compiler option flag. I don't know which compiler you are using on which platform in which programming language but you might find that there is an option to compile in parallel.

Also, many single task applications are multithreaded to distribute the computing load over two or more processors (or cores). I don't know which applications you use (Or maybe they are your own applications) so I can't comment on them specificaly.

Alistair



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kraster

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #12 on: April 29, 2006, 12:57:58 PM »

crm0922 wrote on Sat, 29 April 2006 06:48




Do I need a dual-core brain?

C



No. When you boot up in the morning just go into your Bios and enable hyperthreading by drinking 5 cups of coffee. You can overclock yourself by substituting coffee with espresso. But you may become unstable and prone to errors.

Hope this helps,

Karl
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Patrik T

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #13 on: April 29, 2006, 02:46:00 PM »

danlavry wrote on Sat, 29 April 2006 00:37



I looked around to see what is available now. I expected to see some significant clock speed increase. I was hoping for some 3-5GHz clock speed, at least some X2 improvement. What happened to Moor's law? I guess it broke. I see many laptop machines with clock speeds around 2GHz, and not much higher.




I'm using my old P4 2.53 from 2003 for audio recording and processing. The funny thing is I still only have 512 MB's of RAM in it. I'm such a moron...

I think the step to, say, a 3.2 gHz processor would be quite small. The biggest step in power would be more RAM and perhaps separate DSP processors dedicated for certain data routines.

The 64 bit architectures might be a step forward though. But theres only three devilholes:

1. New data hardware.
2. New Windows system.
3. New Software systems.

So I might rest that case for some three years until bugs in all those chains are discovered. Wouldn't with joy join the worlds largest beta test team as things look today.

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danlavry

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Re: AMD or Intel
« Reply #14 on: May 01, 2006, 12:36:23 PM »

kraster wrote on Sat, 29 April 2006 04:37

danlavry wrote on Sat, 29 April 2006 00:37


Am I missing something?

Regards
Dan Lavry


Hi Dan,

....Consider this regarding cost in Moore's Law: in 1997 it cost $30,000 dollars per GFLOP (Giga flop)  with two 16-Pentium-Pro–processor Beowulf-class computers. In 2006 it costs 1$ per GFLOP with an ATI PC add-in graphics card (X1900 architecture).

Currently, the second fastest computer in the world is the  IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer at 280 GFLOPS but the fastest is still the Human being at an estimated 10 quadrillion FLOPS.
So we're safe for the moment!

Regards,
Karl



Hi Karl,

I am well aware of the fact that computers have come a long way. When I started electronics, we were using slide rules! Then came calculators. Then came programmable calculators. Then came the first IC processors... My first computer was a PET... I saw the amazing developments in computers and software...

I am not talking about Moore's law over the last 30 years. That was not my question at all.

I am talking about it in the context of the LAST 3 YEARS.

And yes, I know about bus speed, and video graphics, and hard drives... And by the way, some comments from others seem to be too application specific. Someone said that the speed bottle neck is the hard drive, but that is an APPLICATION DRIVEN issue.

I was talking specifically about clock speed. I see great speed improvements in FPGA's and in data communication. I understand very well the difficulties associated with speed, and why most of that speed is INSIDE the IC, with a slower speed when interfacing to the outside.  

Again, if you plot a curve of clock speed improvements in the last, say 25 years, the last 3 years seem "flat" to me.

Regards
Dan Lavry
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