LOL....yeah I leave system monitor run a lot to watch the utilization the picture I posted yesterday was with the game running but idling if you follow me, what really impresses me is to watch a movie in Linux while playing a game in Win 7 in the KVM and watching all those cores hit 75-100 % and hearing the fans on the GPUs and H100 ramp up, you know your really working the system to it's full potential.
I did a little test the other day running handbrake on Win7 in the KVM trans coding a couple movies into .mkv files it popped all 6 cores to 100% and held them till the process was finished...worked great.
I have to say I am truly impressed with Linux and virtualization it is a very cool and interesting way to accomplish tasks.
Intel 4770k 100 GFLOPS at 4.6GHz AMD 8350 256 GFLOPS at 4GHz (both single precision) Going by numbers, your "simple question" stays simple. However it is not the whole story.
What to use when you do: From my experience, Intel really "sucks" at raw number crunching. The software used makes good use of all the cores and because the "cooperation" between the cores is improved with shared Lvl2 cache, you would choose AMD. Software like Sony MovieStudio/Vegas out run Intel in most cases. Cheaper software (Games) is writen in an easier way resulting in the software only using one or two cores. Because Intel has strong single core performance, you would choose Intel.
Power consumption and heat output: AMD does not melt your mobo, Intel does not melt your mobo. Most heat issues in computers that lead to hardware failure (and smoke) are caused by power delivery. So bad PSUs and bad power design on a mainboard are more likely to kill your machine.
Just some thaughts and experience I found worth sharing. I hope nobody will be offended by mistakes of any sort found in this piece of text.
I can only give facts from my understanding and opinion so here goes.
In recent years I have had a pentium 4 desktop and a pentium M laptop. Until I bought a new laptop and built a desktop for myself, I think I had those machines for about 4 years and even then they were past their prime. Before-hand I had dos and windows 98 in middle and elementary school. Thats my history in it all.
In the most recent (this year) I have had a machine with an i7 870 and my current machine has an AMD phenom Ii 955 BE. Between the two the AMD rocks everything I do. Gaming, video editing, streaming. All of it. I had a lot of hiccups on the intel side and that may have just been the machine itself.
Through and through I have mostly had AMD/ATi machines and I won't be using intel as a main any time soon.
The main difference is in the build of the chips. You have to look at PCi lanes, threads, core use and efficiency, and overclocking capability. I had to use an older CPU because of the board I kind of ended up with, but soon I will be getting an FX board and the newest FX chip I can get. It fits my needs and then some.
AMD and Intel have a different way of doing things and it's kind of sad as to how it works out. AMD believes that you should have more cores even if that means having a slightly weaker single core performance. The problem is that games are optimized for the Intel way of things. Intel believes in less cores but stronger single core performance which works great for games because there optimized that way. However from a productivity standpoint a 8350 is much cheaper than a Xeon while still providing good performance.
Although there's more to it than just the way the CPU's are made. You have to consider the way motherboards are made as well as what technologies the CPU's support. AMD does all of it's pins on the CPU itself which makes motherboards cheaper. Intel does the opposite by putting the pins on the motherboard itself raising the costs of the boards. There is an upside to this though because this means motherboard manufactures can add more pins to the motherboard which can make for better overclocking as we've seen with the Gigabyte SOC series. Granted that does mean your going to pay more for an unlocked Intel CPU.
Technology wise is really someplace that you'll have to decide what benefits you best. Intel's latest Skylake CPU architecture support things like DDR4 and M.2 which are both really great technologies. However your current AMD CPU's do not support these things, the exclusion being M.2 if you buy an adapter. There are other technologies that are exclusive to both CPU manufacturers but those you will have to research for yourself.
Overall at the end of the day if you're looking at gaming on a budget the the Athlon 860K or the FX 6300 are a great choice. If you want to go for a bit more I would suggest picking up an i5 4460 or 4690K if you can afford it and you have an interest in overclocking. For productivity the 8350 or 8370 are both a fine CPU for the job meaning they should handle things nicely. One the other hand if you have a really nice budget you can pick up a Xeon 1231v3 or even X99 if your into that. If you have any questions and or concerns feel free to ask, but either way you'll grab a fine CPU.
And this is what I was alluding to in my post above about optimization, you can have the latest and greatest CPU but if the MB is a poor design or uses an almost out of date chip-set then you will suffer a performance hit that carries through to the total system performance, there are people who live and die by benchmarks but the problem is that most benchmarks don't reflect real world usage with the hardware/software combination you might build with, they are like a test-tube of perfect circumstances that are hard to recreate in the real world. Yeah you can build a new machine with all the parts they used and get close to their performance but it will degrade quickly over time from usage and bloat.
You really use to see this a lot when several generations of CPUs used the same socket and it was touted as a upgrade option or path, problem being that to fully utilize the newer gen CPU you needed the northbridge chipset to go with it to get necessary support from newer generation memory, and/or the southbridge chipset to get the advantages of improved I/O functions without these bits which essentially make a new motherboard you would never see the true potential of just a CPU upgrade.
Today that isn't as big of a issue since most new generations of CPUs change the socket in one way or another to insure you receive the proper chip-sets to complement that new CPU and it's feature set, all the manufactures want to keep "moores law" rolling and everyone upgrading their hardware every cycle (18 months) but as I also stated above other than a handful of programs and a handful of applications (computer usage) the hardware we are already using is over powered for the software we run on it, there should be broad scale-ability in core utilization where the OS can use all cores/threads equally and all software running on that OS should scale also, until we have that functionality we are all just chasing our tails looking for the holy grail of PC performance.
A brief analogy then I'll shut up....lol
Back in the day Cadillac introduced a motor in some of their cars that selective shut off cylinders to save fuel, so you would start out using all 8 cylinders as you progresses to highway speed it would shut off two cylinders and you would have a 6 cylinder motor, once you got to highway speed it would shut off two more cylinders and you were cruising along with a 4 cylinder motor, need to accelerate and it would bring cylinders back on line till you were cruising again then shut them back off....it was a major flop. I look at CPUs just like a car engine and cores the same as cylinders, what we have today is operating systems and software that work kinda' like that Cadillac motor they work the hell out of 2 or 4 cores but the rest is just along for the ride and until we get a OS/software that will use all the cylinders all the time we are just like the Caddy trying to make a major flop marketable.....by selling more new and improved hardware that can't be fully utilized.
I take my hat off to you, for excellent summary of the cost/performance factors of the Intel vs AMD debate. I took the same route as you, for the same reasons.
Thanks for that. I am doing the research. I am just curious as what you guys, the community, thinks. What is written on paper isn't necessarily true to real world use. I was wondering what guys have heard about it and what you guys use, if you used both or one or the other for.
Thanks for the informative reply. Well, I guess I am generalizing it. I am just wondering what your guy's opinions are. Numbers do not mean much to me. It is how people use the technology and view it for what it is. Again though, thank you.
Wow. That is a good analogy. Also, never knew Cadillac did that. And that does make a lot of sense. Having one upgraded state of the art piece of equipment while others are outdated.
