The server/workstation people will sing Intel's praises until Judgement Day, purely because for most of the history of CPU/chipset production, Intel have had the market to themselves based on their technical superiority. They were the best at what they did and they earned their rightful position.
When AMD arrived, their initial chipset support - both homegrown and predominantly from VIA - was shocking. Instabilities and general poo-ness meant a lot of OEM integrators veered well away from them.
Recently, however, AMD's chipset support has become a lot more comprehensive in terms of feature set and reliability for the average user and it's almost a non-question for the AMD64 line of CPUs. Some blinding server-class hardware has meant that their enterprise-level stuff outperforms Intel's in a lot of areas, too. However, Intel will always have the better marketing department and ensure that the people who spend the money in big corporations buy Intel. My older brother has a massive IT budget to play with in the company he works for but they won't but AMD because there aren't any big vendors offering AMD with any type of support network in place - all the biggies use Intel. Even though they know that - at server level- Opterons can deal with a lot more than Xeons.
To the average user that builds their own computer, there will always be issues because of forgotten drivers, poor configurations and conflicts that remain unresolved, leaving the chipset to take the blame for the owner's incmopetance/forgetfulness. As most poor enthusiasts of a few years ago tended to buy Athlons because of their price
verclocking potential, we had to make do with hardware that wasn't as well integrated as our Intel counterparts.
And by the way - not so long ago, Tom's Hardware used to be Intel's plaything up until a few months after AMD brought out A64 - the boys in green couldn't do anything right up until that point. It's all swings and roundabouts - I think any website/magazine would be hard pressed to prove complete objectivity, especially with all the free samples, beta-hardware, corporate lunches and whatnot flying around.
Just as all the jokes about ATi's substandard graphics cards were silences with the 9700 series only to be replaced by poor driver support jibes, just as Nvidia were laughed off the stage for their Geforce5800 offering and then made us all eat our underwear gussets with the 6800/7800 series', it's irrelevant now.
We as consumers are in a very good position at the moment (if not financially - I've just taken a look at the middle-end graphics card market and had a heart attack just doing so) in terms of quality - we've never had reliability and performance in such spadefuls and we can buy what performs best for what we want. Just don't go thinking that - if you want to make your own videos or music, you need a Mac - PCs are just as good, if not a lot better than them... if not as pretty.
When AMD arrived, their initial chipset support - both homegrown and predominantly from VIA - was shocking. Instabilities and general poo-ness meant a lot of OEM integrators veered well away from them.
Recently, however, AMD's chipset support has become a lot more comprehensive in terms of feature set and reliability for the average user and it's almost a non-question for the AMD64 line of CPUs. Some blinding server-class hardware has meant that their enterprise-level stuff outperforms Intel's in a lot of areas, too. However, Intel will always have the better marketing department and ensure that the people who spend the money in big corporations buy Intel. My older brother has a massive IT budget to play with in the company he works for but they won't but AMD because there aren't any big vendors offering AMD with any type of support network in place - all the biggies use Intel. Even though they know that - at server level- Opterons can deal with a lot more than Xeons.
To the average user that builds their own computer, there will always be issues because of forgotten drivers, poor configurations and conflicts that remain unresolved, leaving the chipset to take the blame for the owner's incmopetance/forgetfulness. As most poor enthusiasts of a few years ago tended to buy Athlons because of their price
verclocking potential, we had to make do with hardware that wasn't as well integrated as our Intel counterparts.And by the way - not so long ago, Tom's Hardware used to be Intel's plaything up until a few months after AMD brought out A64 - the boys in green couldn't do anything right up until that point. It's all swings and roundabouts - I think any website/magazine would be hard pressed to prove complete objectivity, especially with all the free samples, beta-hardware, corporate lunches and whatnot flying around.
Just as all the jokes about ATi's substandard graphics cards were silences with the 9700 series only to be replaced by poor driver support jibes, just as Nvidia were laughed off the stage for their Geforce5800 offering and then made us all eat our underwear gussets with the 6800/7800 series', it's irrelevant now.
We as consumers are in a very good position at the moment (if not financially - I've just taken a look at the middle-end graphics card market and had a heart attack just doing so) in terms of quality - we've never had reliability and performance in such spadefuls and we can buy what performs best for what we want. Just don't go thinking that - if you want to make your own videos or music, you need a Mac - PCs are just as good, if not a lot better than them... if not as pretty.
