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Balance, and “if it works for you”

This is probably going to be a rant, so you may want to continue scrolling.
Balance is important. It’s important for deciding what you eat, it’s important when designing things, it’s important when building games, when playing games, and it’s also important when building computers. It has to have balanced specs, you need a balance between performance and price… Off-the-shelf boxes are usually unbalanced, and boxen for specific purposes are unbalanced for a reason. Other times, a computer seems under-powered, or even simply is under-powered, due to the price/performance balance. Now, I’m sorta annoyed about all of this at the moment, and my main point relates to this.
Intel processors tend to have better instruction-per-cycle counts compared to AMD processors. AMDs tend to have more cores and are often clocked higher.
I have a number of friends with AMD boxen. Those boxen do what their users need - mostly gaming, which is somewhere AMD processors are quite solid. These boxen usually have good graphics and a reasonable amount of RAM.
I, on the other hand, have an Intel processor. i3 4160, and it does what I need, though I’m looking at upgrading to a Xeon after I get a new phone. The reason for this is that I need more IPC and less single-core performance. The Xeon has an even lower clock speed than my current i3, but it has more cores and more cache, despite not costing a huge amount. I do a lot of virtualization, and I like to run a lot of programs at once. In contrast to this, my video hardware is midrange, a 750Ti. I don’t do much gaming, so this doesn’t bother me.

Now, this is all well and good, but what am I even ranting about?
Well, as it turns out, some people refuse to understand the whole “if it works for you” thing - anything that isn’t as good as their box isn’t good enough. These people also have a tendancy to be wealthy and have rather powerful machines. As such, I’ve heard a lot of “AMD sucks” - and while yes, AMD stuff does have a lower IPC, for the price, it’s often better value than Intel processors.
If it does what the user needs, there’s nothing wrong with the choice. Some people choose to be… unsavoury and ignore that.
It just annoys me. Not like I can do anything about it, but it annoys me.

This effect in action: Plenty of people I know use AMD graphics cards, while I choose not to because NVIDIA cards have better Linux support. As Windows users, this does not bother those people.

That is all.

By Izaya

Tags: society

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