Internet Business Daily

1) Sony Lithium-Ion Batteries: Computer manufactuers have recalled 9.6 million Sony made notebook battiers so far this year. The recall to date has cost sony about $433 million, bur reputation costs were much higher.

2) Amazon.com Unbox: Amazon’s movie download service was a complete flop. It is slower than driving yourself to Blockbuster. Its restrictive on how the purchaser uses the movie they paid for. It has lower resolution than a DVD. It requires a cable from your PC to TV. Horrible.

3) Vonage VoIP: With little to no reliable customer service and the constant question of clarity and receiving voice mail in a timely fashion, Vonage’s Voice Over Internet Protocol telephone may be cheaper, but is it anything but efficient.

4) Hewlett Packard: HP was a legend in Silicon Valley making a good product and doing good philanthropic work. What’s all that worth when executives violate the privacy of employees, journalists, and even board members? Planting spies in newsroom janitor staffs? Yes, I’m sure HP will not put any spyware or other questionable features in their computers. I can trust HP. Can’t I?

5) Microsoft Vista: Initially Microsoft will not be giving access to the Vista Kernal or core code to any of its third-party security software vendors until Service Pack 1 is released. So until SP1 you will be depending soley on Microsoft to protect your computer. I wish I was lying, but I’m not. Microsoft screws up again. Maybe we can spin this into a new antitrust lawsuit =).

6) Recording Industry Association of America: This year the RIAA released a film called “Campus Downloading” warning students that they could be kicked out of school and arrested for downloading music without permission or paying a fee for all digital music. So much for fair use. With all the complaining that consumers don’t really buy and own digital music, I guess I wasn’t really paying Apple who pays you for music now was I? The RIAA needs to learn what the word “distinction” means.

7) Blu-Ray v. HD-DVD: Initialy this was just going to be a gigantic headache as the movie standards war of the 1980s (VHS v. Betamax) reared its ugly head once again. With consumers not knowing if Blu-Ray or HD was going to prevail and having to spend $1000-$2000 on a player that could be obsolete in a year, how could this not frighten anyone looking to trade up. Luckily Toshiba came out with a controller chip that will allow players to read both formats.

Paperless Voting Machines: After the 2000 Presidential Elections, it was realized that a better system for counting votes was needed. The answer was The Direct Recording Electronic Voting Machine which provided no paper trail, no reliable way to audit results, and refusal of third party security assessments, The DRE caused people to lose more faith in the electoral system than to have more in it.

9) Ultra-Mobile PCs: Not small enough to fit in your pocket, not large enough to be practical for constant work. Enough Said.

If you walk into any computer retailer to pick up a new desktop or laptop, one of the first questions you should be asking yourself is “Do I get a computer with an AMD processor or one with an Intel processor?”

But even before you can even ask yourself that question, you would need to know the benefits to siding with one processor over another given your specific computing needs. Some people are going to tell you it doesn’t matter, and others might say Intel is better because they are number one in sales and have been around the longest (assuming that’s a viable answer). Neither of those however even resembles a thought out decision.

Let us compare AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 4800+ to Intel’s Pentium Extreme Edition 840 Dual Core in five different benchmark categories; Gaming, Photo Editing, MP3 Encoding, Multitasking, and Day-to-Day tasking.

Gaming: In testing Half Life 2 on a screen resolution of 1024×768, it was found that the AMD was performing at 140.6 frames per second while the Pentium was only clocking in at 106.3 fps. This is unfortunately a 10% difference that Intel needs to play catch up on.

Photo Editing: For this one of the most common tasks done was tested, Cropping. For this Photoshop was used and was tested to crop a relatively large image file down to a size appropriate for websites. Once again AMD took the prize finishing its task in 146 seconds leaving Intel to come in ten seconds later. Now a lot of us might think 10 seconds isn’t that big of an issue, but it will matter to the person who is making a living out of it.

MP3 Encoding: This is another common task that is possibly even more common these days than photo editing. For this test Apple’s iTunes was used because it is a multithread application programmed to utilize multiple processor threads. This could be a little embarrassing for Intel given their chip is ripping an album in 2 minutes and 12 seconds while AMD had already finished in 1 minute and 50 seconds, a good 20% faster than its competitor.

Multitasking: For this test two relatively rigorous processes were used. First McAfee was set to do a virus scan on 40 gigabytes of data. At the same time (of course) the computer was told to encode 85 megabytes of video to DIVX. Much not to my surprise AMD finished up in 3 minutes and 15 seconds while Intel dragged its proverbial fat ass at 3 minutes and 31 seconds. Not the biggest victory for AMD, but things are starting to look clearer.

Day-to-Day Tasking: Last but nowhere close to least is the run of the mill Microsoft Office and web browsing that every Dick and Jane is going to do. I’m actually sorry to say AMD takes this test as well. I would have liked Intel to have something to show for itself. But according to BAPCo SysMark ratings just gets things done a little bit faster than the Pentium.

Now there are a lot more selections the Athlon 64 and Dual Core families have to offer, but if you were going to be choosing between these two processors, you read something like this and then you see the price tags: AMD $725 and Intel $1175, what would you choose?

The bottom line is there are going to be minor differences here and there with any competing chips, unfortunately all the differences here are in favor of AMD which leads me back to believe what I always have, Intel is overpriced because they have the top spot. There’s no other real way to justify a $450 dollar difference for chips that do the same thing. This could be the reason why you now hear rumors of Apple in talks with AMD so quickly after putting Dual Cores in their machines. But until that’s official its mere speculation, but it would be a logical move given the stats. So whether you are buying a new computer or building one from scratch, I’d suggest going with AMD. It’s going to perform better and cost you a lot less. Win-Win.

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