>1) Are AMD's REALLY just as (par for par) stable as Intel.
I've run mine for days at a time with number-crunching apps maxing out the CPU with no problems. I haven't had it long enough (about 2 months) and I've been mucking around to much with it to make any real stability comparison though. If your uptime isn't measured in months, it's unstable
>2) Is the price difference (~200) worth the duel P3-1ghz
>over the AMD?
>
>2a) How much faster would the P3 be?
I can only suggest that you try to find benchmarks for each processor. Also understand that, even for apps that can use SMP, you are not going to see 100% scaling.
That said, here is a <i>very</i> crude comparison...
Here is a <A HREF="http://www.linuxhardware.org/features/01/05/03/167228.shtml" target="_new">link</A> to a comparison of a 1GHz PIII and a 1GHz TBird on <A HREF="http://www.povray.org/" target="_new">POV-Ray</A>.
The scores are:
PIII: 21
TBird: 28
Now come some HUGE assumptions/simplifications:
Assume the PIII scales perfectly:
Dual PIII: 42
Assume the TBird scales linearly with clockspeed:
1.33 GHz TBird: 37.2
This shows about an 11% advantage to the dual PIII.
But as I said, there is some huge speculation involved in both numbers.
My guess is that the perfect SMP scaling assumption on the dual PIII is a worse assumption then the perfect clockspeed scaling assumption on the TBird. Would it amount to the 11% difference? I have no idea.
Some other notes:
The benchmark was performed with CAS 2 SDRAM. Getting a DDR based TBird board might help a little.
If an upgrade path is important to you, the PIII has none. The AMD solution does.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.