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Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

Aside from my vic20 and c64 I’ve only ever owned intel CPUs, and those two may have been intel as well, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never made a decision to chose Intel based on benchmark, I’ve bought them because they’ve always been great for me.

So it’ll be ironic when I buy an AMD processor when I upgrade for cyberpunk 2077, because of benchmarks. Not because AMD is faster, they may be but I wouldn’t know, no, it’ll be because intel are douches.

I didn’t like how they handled their vulnerabilities, or how they still released chips with the errors long after it was discovered because they had production planned, and now they are pulling stuff like this?

Heh.

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Of course, this license is a virtual benchmark: Intel spares you the work of running tests with their implicit claim that their performance is worse than anyone's lowest expectations.

> Aside from my vic20 and c64 I’ve only ever owned intel CPUs, and those two may have been intel as well, I wouldn’t know.

At that time, few home computers were based on Intel processors because they were too expensive. Commodore's early computers, like Atari's, were based on the MOS Technology 6502 (made by ex-Motorola engineers as a cheaper and easier-to-integrate alternative to the Motorola 6800; the corresponding Intel-killer was the Zilog Z80 notably used in various CP/M and MSX computers). Commodore eventually acquired the company, rebranding it Commodore Semiconductor Group. A CMOS version of the 6502 is still sold by the Western Design Center [1].

[1] http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/w65c02s-chip.cfm

One click-chain of curiosity later, and I learned that they sell a little educational SBC based on the 6502.

http://wdc65xx.com/boards/w65c02sxb-engineering-development-...

Pro: it looks like an AT motherboard from 1985

Con: it's $189 :s

They do have some cheaper ones ($29 & $99) problem is I can't quite figure out why I need one.

https://www.tindie.com/stores/dcwdc/

TIL.

I understand what you mean though. Architecture itself isn't _that_ critical; peripherals and batteries-included capabilities are.

In this case, when I read "for developing educational and industrial strength microcontrollers." in the product description I immediately concluded that the "educational" is quite possibly part of a product pitch to companies making 6502-based control equipment, along of course with educational institutions still using the 6502 as a teaching aid.

As for devkits I do want, the Forth GA144 is definitely up there near the top, and the KISS-68030 (https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:ecb:ki...) is floating around in there as a very unsure "maybe".

Zilog was of course famously founded by ex-Intel people to provide a cheaper alternative to the 8080.

The UK's Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC were famously Z80-based, as well as the MSX spec (as you've mentioned) which was huge in Japan. It was also used in a lot of arcade machines either as a main CPU or as a sound chip.

The Sinclair ZX80 (predecessor of the Spectrum) was Z80 based. I know, because it was my very first computer.

Not really ideal for word processing and somewhat limited with 1KB (yes as in one kilobyte) of RAM.

You could get a rather expensive 16KB memory extension. Alas ,this had the problem of disconecting every 30 minutes or so, due to thermal issues. So you had to be really sure to save your work to datasette (don't ask!) in very regular intervals.

Fun times!

How can INTEL tell people what to do with their CPU, I own it so I think I can do with it what I want or not? Only because the microcode update is considered software? I wouldn't be scared to benchmark it and publish the results in the EU. I wonder if this is binding in the US.

It's kind of funny because people don't even know what the microcode does. They're demanding that we don't benchmark any software running on their processors. Well, they insisted performance was important for decades but now they don't want people to measure it. What that means should be obvious. They suck.

I've been on both Intel and AMD for my self-built desktops, originally a K6-II, then a Pentium III, then a Pentium 4, and since 2011 a Phenom II (first a dual-core 3.2GHz, upgraded to a 6-core 3.3GHz a couple of years ago).

Both have generally been good to me (the P4 was a bit crap), but I'm very likely to choose AMD again next time I do a full upgrade. Now that their GPUs are also working great in Linux on open source drivers, they're a much better choice than Nvidia for me, I just replaced my GTX 460 with an RX 560.

It's a shame Intel has the high-end laptop market locked up so tight. Good luck getting a modern Thinkpad with an AMD processor.

Similar to my story. Apart from an Athlon 650 around 2000-era we've always been an Intel household. I recently upgraded my gaming PC and went with the Ryzen 7 2700X, partly due to the way Intel have been treating their customers like idiots lately. I'm seriously considering AMD for the graphics card too (currently running a GTX 970) as I may well be moving my main gaming PC over to Linux in the near future.

I replaced my GTX 460 with an RX 560, no regrets at all. It uses the AMDGPU open source kernel driver and MESA on the userspace side, so it's supported outright on rolling release distros with no additional steps, and trivially easy to install on any recent normal release distro.

For Linux Mint 19 (based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS), I had to add a PPA with the newest MESA drivers, other than that no issues at all.

> I'm seriously considering AMD for the graphics card too (currently running a GTX 970)

Me too. I was running Intel+Nvidia rigs for about ten years, up until last year, when I got a Ryzen 1800X and (this year) a Radeon 7970. Nvidia hasn't been the most ethically behaved as of late (whether it's more or less than Intel, I haven't figured out). Intel will be releasing a discrete GPU in a year or two; who knows how fast it will be, or if they will allow people to benchmark it.

Same, I had bad experiences with the early Athlons and bought Intels after that, never had any stability problems. But now I'm seeing douchey behaviour from both Intel and nVidia. I've been a big fanboy because of the performance, but the business practises are becoming polarising, and AMD seems to have caught up or surpassed in performance terms. Plus, they handled the vulnerabilities disclosure much better (even a smug 'AMD processors are not affected' on more than one).

I always used to root for Intel because AMD made their entire business model off copying (later licensing) Intel's x86 designs (including the model numbers), but that's becoming a lot less relevant now.

I upgraded my desktop's Geforce 550Ti with a Radeon HD 7850, and though it's gotten off to a slightly rocky start (Windows logins are noticeably slower, seems to be a known issue), performance is great, benchmarks showing it on par with the 970m in my laptop. When the Haswell i7 needs to be upgraded, I may start looking at a Ryzen. Never thought I'd see the day.

> AMD made their entire business model off copying (later licensing)

Intel contracted AMD to second source their processors as a requirement for being in the IBM PC (requirement dictated by IBM).

AMD existed long before their version of the x86, producing the venerable http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/2901/ which was widely used in minicomputers of the time.

The amazing thing about the 2901 and family, was that the engineer could design a board level CPU and full freedom over register sizes, numbers, alus, etc.

Don't forget that the 64 bit x86 ISA was created by AMD and licensed to Intel.

Huh, I didn't know that. I thought AMD started competing with Intel by cloning the 286 and beyond. Had no idea it was for the IBM PC contract.

I knew about 64-bit (Athlon 64, anyone?), but I've always heard x86-64 described as a kludge and an awful hack, not a well-designed architecture. The greater RAM accessibility and native execution of 32-bit code are advantages, but shortly thereafter Intel went multi-core, which seems to have done drastically more for system performance than x64 did.

I'm running an RX 580 4GB for the GPU on my gaming rig, and it handles anything I throw at it really well. They do, however, tend to run hotter than the NVidia chips.

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