The Great Processor Debate - It's amazing no one did this...

Well, here at Astahost, it's a no-brainer that most of us are in the know-how of electronic equipment or just professional in the electronics, computers or design field (for all you artists out there). However, one debate is surprisingly never debated in these forums... Now we can! Cast your vote who you think is better and what you use. Also, remember to post to back your reasons! I vote POWER/PowerPC because they have been traditionally the processor architecture for high performance chips like BlueGene/L and is the basis for the Cell processor. However, since there are no longer any PowerPC processors in the desktop market (screw you Apple for going Intel). Most machines in my house uses AMD because they are the ones who can balance performance, price and low heat output. We are in the process of phasing out Intel because they don't meet our price/performance/heat ratio. xboxrulz

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I agree that most of the desktops now are x86, but for a lot of people when the speeds of cpus are like that, noone really cares to much.. even though x86 offers really bad assembler construction, everyone is using it, as I know on some portable devices and different other devices, Z80 is still being used as it's cheap, much better while writing assembly and so on, even though it's I think over 20-30 years old.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z80

PPC are great, G4.. G5 had some bad aspects, even though PPC is much better than x86, it's just that it's not used like x86 and I guess it's what it makes hard for most developers and production.. But there are computers/boards which still were developed and used for different purposes after Apple moved to x86, even though they aren't so popular, but usually small, can run Linux PPC and other stuff.. But as I know PPC are off with desktop market, so for Operating systems which still is using PPC it's hard times, due to it's hard to find components for new boards, northbridges and so on..

Also lets don't forget the dying market of Amiga OS, OS4 and MorphOS which are using newly developed (but what I've read having bugs, I guess because of low budget) PPC boards to run the OS as it's only PPC, where classic Amiga boards are using m68k (Motorolla 68k) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68k which also had really well developed assembly instructions..

I myself have a PPC Board called Efika from Freescale, which can run MorphOS, Linux PPC, but I don't really have much time to play with it now.. It's so quiet, because it doesn't need a cooler, but todays better laptops are also really quiet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efika

PPC processors are good, but the logic they used marketing it was stupid, as usually good things vanishes leaving the bad? I guess everyone who still is using PPC should find a path and move to x86 if they want to survive, I mean developers, opearating systems which are in the desktop market :|

 

 

 

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I would want an EFIKA if the system was faster, 400 MHz can't even deal with most tasks now-a-days as technology zooms madly. I don't think anyone would bother any processor under 1 GHz.

xboxrulz

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Yeah, it depends what you want to do with it, it was some time ago, several years even.. can't remember.. but it's definitely over 3-4 years

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I also vote for PPC for professional use, for all servers like database servers or web servers.
Small blade PPC AIX systems for small applications, rack-mounted high-end AIX servers.
Remember that AIX PPC systems are the only computers having up to 64 processors on the same motherboard, accessing the same disks and memory. For Oracle databases this is priceless, sharing data between processes is a memory-to-memory interchange. These system are the biggest in the world today, and they use exactly the same operating system as the small desktops the developers use.

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Every architecture has it's postive and negative sides, it depends on where you want to use them.

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So far we have unianimously agree PowerPC is better lol.

xboxrulz

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I prefer the x86 architecture since all the CPUs I have bought have run on the x86 architecture. However, there isn't really a 'best' processor architecture as different processor architecture are used on different platforms that have different overall uses (e.g. specialised server CPUs on blade servers, supercomputer processing).

I am currently using a computer fitted with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 CPU. There wasn't really a choice for processor architecture, since most desktop motherboards are only designed for x86 processors, though I did prefer an Intel CPU over an AMD CPU. I generally tended to avoid buying an AMD processor or an ATI graphics card, since I preferred a mainstream and better supported brands of Intel and Nvidia.

I suppose PowerPC processor were quite popular because Apple notebooks and desktops were using processors that ran on the PowerPC architecture. However, since Apple switched to the x86 processor architecture with Intel CPUs as the only option, there has been a large decline in the proportion of PowerPC users.

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I stick with AMD: cheap, good and fast. Hard to find those three qualities with Intel, unless you perhaps wait out the prices. I also like the triple core idea, since i find anything greater than three cores a bit exaggerated, at least for desktop—especially for laptop—computers. Unless i'm mistaken, i believe AMD was the first to come out with 64-bit processing, where Intel took from AMD to achieve 64 bit processing. But i heard Intel is working on a processor that'll be really cheap and really fast, but that was through word of mouth and i haven't done any research on it myself. If it's true and it comes out, i'll probably switch to it.

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Take a look at my PC. I carefully choose before I buy. Most hardware are expensive but not worth performing. Share yours too. Currently this machine is Hex-booting (6 OS's installed in 1 80Gb HD). I love AMD. We love AMD.



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