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Comment by dlevine | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how AMD kills Intel on Performance/Price, but Intel's raw performance is much higher. Still, the highest-end Phenoms are pretty quick and still a reasonably good value.

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You need to factor in the other costs too. If you buy a computer you need more than just a processor. If the rest costs $200 you have an extra cost of $400 + processor costs for two AMD's against $200 + processor costs with Intel (assuming two AMD's are equivalent to 1 Intel).

Most gamers, I know pick the best 100$ CPU they can on price performance because CPU's are just not that important. Granted if your building a 3,000$ system you might want to look at the CPU, but why pay more so you can have extra cores doing nothing all day.

The top listed performance/price AMD processor is known to be buggy, which is why it's so cheap.

People that are buying the high-end systems are usually people who play PC games competitively. Intel is also making compilers that are optimized for their processors. In addition they are creating tools for optimizing parallel processing. I don't see AMD doing that. If they don't they won't be able to compete in the high-end desktop market.

Really, are you talking about the B2 version, something wrong with the cache? Because I bought my 9750 a year ago August (it had the lowest power consumption at an acceptable speed) and it was a B3 even then. So, if that's what you're referring to, I doubt those are still in the channel.

Come to think of it I think they renamed the fixed ones (the ..50) so that there was no risk of confusion.

I'd say that's the obvious result, actually. Where there is competition (in the low to mid range), the smaller vendor generally has to pick the lower price point as a growth bet (because they're not the "default" choice). Where there is no competition (at the high end), Intel gets to set whatever price the market will bear without worrying about what AMD does.

I've never had problems with Intel (and I have with AMD) so I am almost certainly biased. That said, if [1] the best AMD can do in a performance test is half of Intel (at any price), I would say AMD has a big problem and needs to improve badly.

For normal users, unless you are doing video-processing or any equivalently CPU intensive work, pretty much anything will do these days and the low-cost, whatever-performance-will-do market is highly saturated. If you want to make money and stay in the game, you need to appeal to the big spenders and they want more power.

[1] I hereby acknowledge that the test might be flawed or not representative for actual use.

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