Hey, Intel is the best choice now. I am saying so, inspite of owning an AMD processor becoz of the heavy superiority of Intel's Core 2 Microarchitecture over AMD's aging K8 (Athlon 64 series). AMD still has quite a few innovations up its sleeve like Direct point to point interconnect (Hypertransport) as compared to Intel which still uses FSB (Front side bus) and dosnt have an Integrated on-die memory controller. Core 2 wins due to intelligent Cache, better pipelining and better power management (you may consider this if you are going for a small form-factor/HTPC). if you are not so much in a hurry, do wait for Penryn (45 nm) Intel processors, scheduled to ship in January-February(the normal ones, extreme is gonna be launched in November in the US). they contain further innovations like Radix-16 divider and support for SSE4, which will surely improve performance over existing Core 2 (preliminary benchmarks show 5-10% improvement). Another big pro for linux users to stick with Intel processors and chipsets is that ALL intel chipsets have open source drivers for components like integrated Graphics(xf86-video-intel / xf86-video-i810), Sound (snd-hda-intel or AC97 drivers), as well as Network and wireless cards (with ipw-3945 project). On the other hand, while AMD processors pose no problems by themselves with Linux, the accompanying chipset sometimes creates havoc. This is true especially if stuck with ATI/Via/Sis. ATI's linux support as of now is pathetic for newer chipsets (Though improvements are being made now, and soon an OSS driver will support 2D/3D on the new R500/600 cards as ATI has now released GPU specs). VIA and SIS linux support is too bad out of the box. So if you are looking at using things like Compiz fusion/Beryl consider sticking with Intel or go for Nvidia chipsets if you are going for AMD. You can also consider AMD's new K8L (Barcelona) based native-quad core Phenom processors, scheduled to launch at the end of this year, depending upon their performance wrt core 2 when they become available.
Regards, Karthik Ramgopal BITS Pilani _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Next Event: http://freed.in - September 28-29, 2007 Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/