What kind of CPU do you guys prefer?

AMD Thunderbird or Intel Pentium III ?

Also, don't forget to mention WHY

I have no problems with either but I voted for Intel as they look better on the sales pitch (Its about perception):D

ps. why did you not include Pentium4? - They rock!:confused:

Well the question is AMD or Intel... Just put III up there for 4 seems to have problems or whatever... :D

aloha
P4 are not worth it for hosting ya would not really get gains

would want to run dual pIII anyway rather than a single p4

AMD can have heat probs and are kinda hardware fussy (due to intel monopoly)

Originally posted by Eagle
What kind of CPU do you guys prefer?

AMD Thunderbird or Intel Pentium III ?

Also, don't forget to mention WHY

Give the two choices, I would go with AMD. For two reasons: lower cost, better performance.

To be a true poll though you should include Celeron, Duron, and P4 chips as well. For the most part today's Celeron chips are P3's with less cache.

Take care,

Brian

I have talked to a few network/hardware people about this in the past, and they have all recommended me to use Intel for servers since reliability is very important. They have also pointed out that most companies (at least those that are not looking to save a few dollars) are using Intel processors. Don't get me wrong, I love AMD! I use it at home on my desktop and am very happy with it and would recommend it to anyone for a home/office computer. But I would recommend Intel for servers.

Eagle, you have not mentioned for what purpose...
Client: AMD
Server: Intel

Well, the header says TO HOST,
so wadda ya think? :D

You need to add Cyrix 250 to that list :D.

:D

Originally posted by bteeter


Give the two choices, I would go with AMD. For two reasons: lower cost, better performance.



Wrong - on both counts. Not to get into a pissing match, but you NEVER sacrifice cost for performance.

As far as better performance goes, Intel PIII is far superior than AMD for servers. In the home market, I would definately go with AMD.

The biggest problem with AMD is the heat issue. Also, they have just now been able to do SMP while the PIII has had it going for some time now.

But last to mention, I would go with the Intel Xeon processor (multi) at providing the best performance.

Originally posted by WeinBar Jack


Wrong - on both counts. Not to get into a pissing match, but you NEVER sacrifice cost for performance.





I think it is too late for that now. :)

I disagree, and so do the pricing and performance statistics. AMD processors are far less expensive than Intel processors.

For performance specs see these links:

http://members.aol.com/dcinahcem/html/p4_testreport.html
http://www.arstechnica.com
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/index.html

For pricing see Pricewatch.com. I'll save you the trouble and quote their prices:

$160 AMD 1.4GHz Athlon 266 FSB

$172 - Pentium III 1GHz
$156 - Pentium III 933

$323 - Pentium 4 1.7GHz
$227 - Pentium 4 1.5GHz





As far as better performance goes, Intel PIII is far superior than AMD for servers. In the home market, I would definately go with AMD.

The biggest problem with AMD is the heat issue. Also, they have just now been able to do SMP while the PIII has had it going for some time now.

But last to mention, I would go with the Intel Xeon processor (multi) at providing the best performance.

That depends on the server and the application. If you want a multi-cpu server, the P3 is probably a better choice because you can go 4-way rather than 2-way with AMD chips.

But how many web servers are 4-way? Web serving is NOT a CPU bound process. It is an I/O bound process. You will see better performace increases by adding faster SCSI or SCSI RAID drives than more processors. For that matter 2 seperate 1 processor systems will always be faster than a single 2 processor system.

Yes, AMD processors are hot runners, but so are Pentiums. It will be a long time before you see P4's in laptops because they would burn your lap and melt the case. Even my 700mhz laptop gets extremely hot. It has actually shut itself down on a number of occasions.

Take care,

Brian

Looks like opinions are flaring!

OK, you are not talking about a lot of $$ here.. $100-$200 in the scheme of a server is not worth saving when it comes to better performance. If that was the case, why not use a Celeron or a Cyrix?

As far as you are saying about web serving is not CPU bound, you have to be joking. Have you ever run scripts? Or had 100 clients on a server running scripts at the same time?

Last point - Pentium III run cooler than an AMD. We are not talking about laptops, and I think it is agreed that the P4 is not a viable solution for hosting.

Aloha

hmmm this is getting hot just like a amd
hehehe
I am comparing AMD vs PIII
not P4 these are not good server chips

ok nothing wrong for amd in home servers
answer these questions with no explanation just yes or no
==================================
does the AMD run hotter than a pIII ?

is the AMD more finiky on hardware than a PIII ?

has the AMD SMP been around a long time to prove its stability ?

================================

now if you answered honest I would tend to lean toward the safer more stable bet which in most cases are pIII

Originally posted by WeinBar Jack
Looks like opinions are flaring!

OK, you are not talking about a lot of $$ here.. $100-$200 in the scheme of a server is not worth saving when it comes to better performance. If that was the case, why not use a Celeron or a Cyrix?

As far as you are saying about web serving is not CPU bound, you have to be joking. Have you ever run scripts? Or had 100 clients on a server running scripts at the same time?

Last point - Pentium III run cooler than an AMD. We are not talking about laptops, and I think it is agreed that the P4 is not a viable solution for hosting.

Lets step outside and settle this right now. :D

Web servers ARE NOT CPU bound. How many web servers do you see that are pegged at 100% cpu usage for more than a second or two? None. If you do see one that high, it is way, way, way overloaded. If you run linux check your /proc/interrupts, and you will see the source of system waits is almost always disk IO. For instance:

CPU0 CPU1
0: 42962921 43180690 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 8 0 IO-APIC-edge keyboard
2: 0 0 XT-PIC cascade
8: 0 1 IO-APIC-edge rtc
13: 1 0 XT-PIC fpu
14: 642514 665666 IO-APIC-edge ide0
17: 8003742 8018660 IO-APIC-level eth0
NMI: 0
ERR: 0


As you can see in one of our systems, all of the waits are IO waits.

Clearly I think you misunderstand CPU vs IO bound. CPU bound applications are things like scientific processing, encryption breaking (like distributed.net), financial calculating, etc. Applications that process high volumes of information are CPU bound - things that push data and the limit of that is how big the IO pipe is are IO bound. Web servers are limited by the network, memory and disk bandwidth, not the CPU.

Sure you can have a web server running 100 scripts at a time. No sweat, and maybe the CPU usage is high, but chances are the system is more burdened by those scripts hitting disks, databases or other systems on the network than it is by processing the scripts.

Take care,

Brian

My vote goes to AMD, even more so in an SMP configuration.

They do provide more raw power than a PIII, that has been proven in benchmarks. Though I do agree that that isn't the most important element for a webhost, no-one can deny that CPU power is important.

AMD are in a way ahead of Intel in the SMP market alredy. While Intel have the market now, and are trusted and respected in the market more than AMD, that doesn't mean they are better. Intel's P4 can't do SMP at the moment if I understand correctly. That means Intel SMP systems are limited to under 1GHz (or whatever PIII goes up to, I can't quite remember) but AMD SMP systems can go well above that (and getting higher all the time).

I run an AMD web server here on my intranet. It's being used slightly differently to most web servers - it is running Windows 2000. But it makes an excellent server as far as I'm concerned. It is an Athlon 800, 512Mb RAM.

While we mainly hear of dedicated servers and popular sites being run by Intel, that isn't always out of choice (my dedicated box is a PIII 750, but only because the provider doesn't do AMD). Many of you will have heard of AnandTech (http://www.anandtech.com), a huge hardware site. They run many AMD servers (and some Intel ones too), but all the newer ones are AMD. They wrote an article about why they chose to use AMD servers (it's a little outdated because the PIV wasn't around then but much of it is still valid):
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1305&p=5


I'm sorry for the long post but this is one issue I feel strongly about :D