Eric,
Great site. Nice to see honest opinions without media bias.
Regarding "Corporations slow to adopt the Athlon", we have given AMD based systems three opportunities to penetrate our environment in the ten years I have been with this company.
First was AMD's equivalent to Intel's DX4/100. We distributed twenty-five of these systems to various departments in our organization (All our pilot users are experienced PC users). Without exception the AMD based systems logged 25%-40% more help desk calls than similarly equipped Intel systems. The AMD systems were then relegated to DOS bases data collection duties (which they are still doing today).
A few years later we decided to give AMD a second chance. This time ten K5 based systems were deployed again we noted a similar increase in support calls. We called in our reseller (an AMD advocate) to troubles shoot our systems. Our reseller could not explain the lockups or mysterious reboots. All ten AMD systems were replaced with Intel systems at no charge from our reseller.
Years later at the request of our reseller we gave the K6 a try, only five systems were purchased this time with the option to trade them for Intel based systems if we were not completely satisfied. When the K6's were purchased they were the most powerful systems we had so we gave one to our Graphics department, two to our Engineering department and two to our CAD department.
Right out of the gates the AMD based systems had a hardware conflict with the Elsa video cards our CAD people use. After hours of troubleshooting and technical support calls the motherboard manufacturer stated that they do not support the Elsa card. Our engineers use various assembler programming tools for the various chips that we use in our products. In particular the software used for the Zilog chip set always caused the AMD systems to hang.
The only system to behave was the one in the Graphics department (they primarily use Photoshop). One in five was not worth investing any more effort in the platform. Since that day we have been an Intel shop (except for our UNIX servers - Sun and HP). Given AMD's track record with us I doubt that we will consider any more pilot projects. I wish AMD all the best in their endeavours, I really do! The competition is getting us better pricing on our Intel systems.
Ivon A. Murishwar
Ivon, Thanks for writing and thanks for your kudos. Let me hit the media bias thing you brought up. I do have a bias and will try to stick to it always. My bias is to provide honest recommendations, suggestions and evaluations....and to talk about the things that trouble folks in IT. I hope that you and the rest of the IThell.com readers are OK with that kind of bias :) I was very interested in your history with AMD systems. I certainly can’t fault your hesitating on trying out a Duron or Athlon based system. If I had your negative experiences, I’m not sure I would have ever given an Athlon system a try. Prior to my experiences with the AMD Duron and Athlon processors, my sole experience was an AMD 386/40DX processor running a DOS based BBS (Galacticomm’s Major BBS if anyone is wondering). Until this past year I couldn’t see a compelling reason to choose AMD over Intel on the high-end and Cyrix and Intel on the low end. For me, the Duron and Athlon has changed all of that. Systems from reputable dealers built on high-quality Via KT-133 Socket A motherboards make a lot of sense for companies interested in Price, Performance, Stability and Availability. I am now convinced that Performance, Stability and Availability are at least equal (if you were burned on the Intel i820 MTH motherboard recall, you might not agree). What it really comes down to is price (well, and the fact that the Duron is much faster than a Celeron and that you can get 1.1 and soon 1.2 GHz Athlons). Try buying an Intel system with similar specs to this Duron based system below for $799. (Pricing from Monarch Computer Systems):For more news and information about AMD products, visit our partners at AMDWORLD.