[Gllug] Dual socket AM2 motherboards?

[Martin A. Brooks]

Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> Out of curiosity, why? Not that I've got anything against AMD - the
> Opteron chips are great, but what's wrong with Intel that you'd feel the
> need to avoid them. 

Appalling marketing, mostly.  That is, for example, pushing all of the 
advantages of HT (the worst single processor invention of the last 5 
years imo) without giving the required list of conditions to be met 
should you wish for your code to actually take advantage of the sibling 
cores rather than, as was more often the case, giving marginal 
improvements in general and in specific cases actually being slower.

> AFAICT they're one of the better citizens as regards
> Linux. We have free drivers for their chipsets, Centrino wireless,
> integrated graphics chips, ethernet controllers, and ICH chips - all
> supported by documentation from within Intel, and often written by their
> engineers.
>   

It took a long time for Centrino to be opened up.

> AMD have excellent server chips, and I think the competition benefits us
> all - monopolies are demonstrably bad things for consumers. However I
> still see no reason to avoid Intel at the moment.
>   

Just because they're not being evil right now doesn't excuse them from 
the past few years where they've systematically produced hotter, more 
power hungry silicon instead of actually producing a better architecture 
and told us that this is innovative.  What AMD did with k8 _was_ truely 
innovative though.  They produced a product that was faster, better and 
cheaper than anything Intel had and bought themselves good will and 
market share.

> Dell however - now there's a company I wouldn't buy from in a hurry.
> Appalling tech support, no interest in Linux at all, as much as possible
> outsourced to the cheapest bidder....
>   

My recent shopping trip for a 2u server has perhaps weakened my resolve 
to avoid them :)

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