Is it strange?

Is it strange that I want to give AMD my money for the sake of competition? However, I have found their latest lineup of processors incredibly disappointing and therefore chose not to.

Maybe it's just me but I do like rooting for the little guy and back before core 2 duo processors you could say that AMD was compelling. Today though, for my needs, Intel has too much to offer to say no.

Sorry, just a random thought that wandered into my mind.

Nope not strange at all

http://psychcentral.com/news/2007/12...rdog/1699.html

Buy something with an ARM processor if you really want to stick it to Intel. x86 gaming is just such a small market (and shrinking) that it doesn't even matter. I'm surprised AMD still bothers.

AMD has always been second rate on the desktop. When it wasn't the processor it was the chipset.

You can still buy a 8120 and be satisfied with your purchase. I doubt you sit around and run cinebench or encode all the time anyway. A 8120 overclocked to 4.2Ghz is a fast little guy. Too bad power consumption is so high on those though.

AMD will be rolling out a revision later in the year. People are expecting a 20% improvement, so it will be more competitive. Supposedly Ivy Bridge is only bringing 5-10% improvement in performance, but a major decrease in power consumption.

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Originally Posted by Timman_24

You can still buy a 8120 and be satisfied with your purchase. I doubt you sit around and run cinebench or encode all the time anyway. A 8120 overclocked to 4.2Ghz is a fast little guy. Too bad power consumption is so high on those though.

AMD will be rolling out a revision later in the year. People are expecting a 20% improvement, so it will be more competitive. Supposedly Ivy Bridge is only bringing 5-10% improvement in performance, but a major decrease in power consumption.

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Interesting, greater power consumption generally leads to more heat which isn't at all a good time.

I don't care all that much about Cinebench but I have been known to go in stretches of re-encoding my dvd and bluray collections to different formats and that takes time, lots of it. The last session I did took 36+ straight hours.

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Originally Posted by Nabby

Interesting, greater power consumption generally leads to more heat which isn't at all a good time.

I don't care all that much about Cinebench but I have been known to go in stretches of re-encoding my dvd and bluray collections to different formats and that takes time, lots of it. The last session I did took 36+ straight hours.

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Fire up a large CPU instance on Amazon EC2 and just do it with ffmpeg or the HandBrake CLI. It will cost you a couple bucks (if that) and finish in under an hour. It's probably cheaper than the electric it costs you to run your home PC for 36hrs straight.

Your jaw will drop when you come back after lunch and it says that it's done. :) I've done this with HandBrake and the results are, well, ridiculous. The part that take the longest is actually uploading the file if you have a small upstream pipe.

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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

Fire up a large CPU instance on Amazon EC2 and just do it with ffmpeg or the HandBrake CLI. It will cost you a couple bucks (if that) and finish in under an hour. It's probably cheaper than the electric it costs you to run your home PC for 36hrs straight.

Your jaw will drop when you come back after lunch and it says that it's done. :) I've done this with HandBrake and the results are, well, ridiculous. The part that take the longest is actually uploading the file if you have a small upstream pipe.

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First of all that is awesome. Secondly, upload would be a drag, it would probably take longer to upload then to convert the files ;). My ISP would also kill me due to uploading a few hundred gigs of data. Thought Provoking idea though.

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Originally Posted by Nabby

First of all that is awesome. Secondly, upload would be a drag, it would probably take longer to upload then to convert the files ;). My ISP would also kill me due to uploading a few hundred gigs of data. Thought Provoking idea though.

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You can actually send a physical HDD to Amazon and they will transfer it to their S3 service. It costs about $100. Probably not worth it, but just throwing it out there. If you have a TB of stuff you want to transfer, you can do it on Amazon for under $200. Seems like a lot, but given the amount of hours that takes on a normal PC it's really quite a deal.

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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

You can actually send a physical HDD to Amazon and they will transfer it to their S3 service. It costs about $100. Probably not worth it, but just throwing it out there. If you have a TB of stuff you want to transfer, you can do it on Amazon for under $200. Seems like a lot, but given the amount of hours that takes on a normal PC it's really quite a deal.

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Yeah but even when I run this my power bill is under $60 so not really worth it for me ;). But still very cool option for those who can use it.

Maybe I'll slap together an AMD 8120 for my work/VM machine. Just to see what all the hoopla is about :D.

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Originally Posted by Nabby

Yeah but even when I run this my power bill is under $60 so not really worth it for me ;). But still very cool option for those who can use it.

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I've used HandBrake on EC2 instances with 20 compute units, and the results were ridiculous. HandBrake scales pretty well across threads. What would have taken hours on my computer took about 10 minutes. 2-pass encoding is basically impossible on my notebook, but on EC2 the sky is the limit. The longest part was the 2hrs it took me to upload the file because I had no upload bandwidth at the time.

I've not used it, but they have instances that go up to 88 compute units (ie. 88 parallel threads). I'm not even 100% sure you can use a normal application on these instances. Perhaps I'll try just for benchmarking.

Now that I'm thinking about it though…there really isn't a service that does this. That could be a great business. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would pay for easy/quick transcoding—even if you had to do it via snail mail. Send me a USB stick with the files you want transcoded, and I'll send it back to you in whatever format you need for $20 with a 24 hour turn around.

Lets do some ray tracing on EC2. Scales perfectly.