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Continued from page1 By the mid-1990s, they were #1 or #2 in every market they served, including the IBM Compatible PC component market. In 1999, with the introduction of the AMD Athlon processors, AMD became a viable contender for Intel's comfortable #1 spot for PC CPUs. In the past few years, they launched the first commercially available 64 bit processor line, and their very successful dual-core X2 line. In June, 2005, they felt compelled to file anti-trust litigation against Intel, due to what AMD felt were monopolistic practices holding back the growth of the PC component industry, such as forcing Dell to use Intel processors exclusively. Intel settled the anti-trust and other pending litigation with AMD out of court in late 2005. Though you are very likely to walk into a department or electronics store and find computers sporting AMD processors, as likely as not, you have never heard of them, or if you have, you consider them an "off-brand". I feel that I need to mention some of the reasons why AMD has been the choice of most computer enthusiasts for the past several years. Intel designs both their processors and motherboard chipsets. They pretty much build "for the masses", and though there is some room for tweaking, it falls short of the desires of many computer "hot rodders". AMD designs only their processors, and work very closely with nVidia and Via, who design the motherboard chipsets for AMD CPUs. nVidia is well known for their high performance components, and tweakability is a very important part of the nForce line of AMD compatible motherboards. Multiple companies working together towards a common goal for radical performance has been a very good deal for computer enthusiasts. Beginning with the Athlon line, AMD's processors have provided equal or superior performance to comparable Pentium processors...for 2/3 the price or less. AMD processors coupled with nForce chipsets are very overclockable by design. (Overclocking a processor is very much like a hot-rodder "souping up" an engine...changing settings and adding parts to get more horsepower from a standard engine...and is an extremely important part of the computer enthusiasts' world.) I point this out because if a rig can run reliably overclocked...just think how reliable it will be at stock settings. Processor Product Lines Basically, there are 5 product lines of CPUs between the two companies that deserve your attention. Each product line has several "speeds" or sizes of processors to fit different needs and budgets. Your recording PC would do well with any of these processors. Before I go into the CPUs, I guess I should mention obsolescence. Many of you probably don't realize it, but the past two years has shown a huge leap in microprocessor technology, and this trend will continue for at least another year or two. Whatever you buy today, though it will serve you well for at least a couple of years, will very likely be obsolete in less than a year. You likely have only recently heard of dual-core processors, though they've been around for well over a year. In less than a year, we will see quad-core processors. In a dual-core processor, there are actually two separate CPUs on the same chip. One of the huge improvements in microprocessor technology is size. Intel and AMD are able to fit two separate processors, each with the processing power of high end processors from a few years ago, in the same area that formerly held only one. Two processors allow for more separate functions and applications to work efficiently at the same time...multitasking. Each company has done things a little differently, but the concept is basically the same....twice the work from one CPU. I'm going to start at the top, and work my way down the list. These are all processors marketed towards the retail market. You may have heard names like "Xeon" and "Opteron"...these are processors marketed for servers and commercial workstations. Though some enthusiasts do put them into PCs, I will not be looking at them. I also will not be looking at Intel's Celeron line, or AMD's Sempron line. Though these are ok processors for the seriously budget minded, they don't have all of the features of the mainstream versions of each company's processors, and I really don't think that I would recommend them for a recording PC.
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