AMD <> Intel

[BBjam]

I am wondering, what prossesor do you pros recomend for indigo?
I'm talking a cost-benifit analisis, because the newer prosesors can go several to a motherboard, so if $1500 gets me one intel quad at 3.2Ghz (just a guess) or two AMD quads at 1.9 Ghz, I would think I should go with AMD's

b.t.w. I am not going to buy anytime soon(need... money...)

NO FLAME WARS

[zsouthboy]

BBJam:

Just pick one.

The Core 2 Quads are monsters, and Phenoms are not quite as great due the clock speed deficit against them, but they're cheaper. (As in, up to a point, less money for the Phenom is more speed. Then quickly it switches around.)

[OnoSendai]

I'd go for a cheaper and lower clock speed intel quad core.

[BBjam]

Iv heard the there are diferences in the way they do cache, but I'm affrade that I don't understand them, could someone explane

[alex22]

The Phenom has seperate L2 caches for every core + a big L3 core which all cores share.
The Intel quadcores (at least the older 65nm ones, but afaik they didn't change this for the newer 45nm chips) consist of two dualcores. Each Dualcore has a shared L2 cache.
But this isn't that important, because its hard to compare the two architectures. The Phenom can access the RAM directly from the builtin Memorycontroller, and is therefor a bit less dependent on cache.
But aside from RAM access, the Intel CPUs are faster most of the time.

[zsouthboy]

Because of the cache hierchy of the Phenom, there are indeed workloads where it is quicker than the intel quads (as they have to go through FSB to access data outside their "package") per clock. [The cache is exclusive on the Phenom, as well - which incurs a performance hit because each cache is constantly snooping the others to see if data is duplicated - usually there is a performance benefit overall though]

However, for the most part the Intel quads will be faster at the same clock speed (which is disappointing for us rooting for AMD - they're the only ones keeping prices resonable). Doubly so because you can get an Intel quad at 3.4 ghz, which can't be matched by the Phenom clocks.