[boris]

"AMD processors, and even more so - Motorola G4 processors have shorter pipelines and therefore don't have the same restriction on amount of data/instructions processed per clock cycle. Because of this, more work is done each clock cycle. It's basically an efficiency issue."

I have never trusted AMD chips due to concerns about compatibility. Since the days of DOS and Win 3.1. I used to write and sell graphics software and a user reported a bug I could not reproduce. Fortunately he was located close to me. On a hunch, I looked inside his PC and found a non-Intel chip. Replaced it with a "genuine Intel" and the problem went away. A big piece of my software was in assembly; talked directly to the hardware. I still have such concerns, but perhaps they are now unwarranted. Any advice?

--Boris

[ffrancone]

My company's software actually relies extensively on runtime manipulation of binary machine code. It runs as reliably on the AMD chips as on Intel--we have never seen a chip based bug. And, since the computationally intensive part of our code is all FPU based, the best AMD chips run our software much faster than the top of the line Intels.