An Intel 4-core processor for about $180 is going to be roughly comparable to the AMD 8-core, given sufficient threading; for single threaded, the intel will probably be faster because of higher IPC, and the power/heat will be much lower. This site has a pretty reasonable comparison: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-4430-vs-AMD-FX-8350

OTOH, AMD will let you use ECC, which would be nice; the Intel processor includes a video card on board, if that's of interest.

The server version is called Xeon and it's the same chip with ECC uncrippled.

One Haswell core is equivalent to two AMD cores. But yeah, AMD is dramatically cheaper than Intel for equivalent performance.

That leads me to a question that I was going to ask: what is it that justifies the massive markup on Intel chips vs AMD? Is it just the name? Is there an advantage in intel performance or power usage? If so, does it really make up for the price? Because as someone considering building a computer from scratch (I haven't in quite a while), that AMD price tag is very appealing.

I think many people would agree that the price discrepancy does have a lot to do with branding and marketing strategy.

Intel is a larger wealthier company and they assumedly pour a lot more money into R&D than AMD. If you go purely by market capitalization, Intel is about 50-60 times larger and AMD. That's not necessarily a fair measure and ignores a lot of variables but it does help shed a little light on the situation. In addition, AMD's business model has them focusing a lot of their attention on niches that intel doesn't seem as interested in. For instance AMD continues to develop new ARM technologies that could provide a very important market edge for them in the future as small "internet of thing" like devices start to emerge and become a part of people's daily life.

Here's a decent article on the subject: http://analysisreport.morningstar.com/stock/research?nav=no&...

Intel isn't performance per dollar, it is absolute performance. Performance per dollar I think the 8 core AMD parts still fail to mid range CPUs and maybe even ARM chips, just due to their insanely low cost, but it would take a bunch to get enough performance to use effectively in a workstation or server environment.

Well, AMD's power usage also affects reliability (motherboards fail way more often). That is, if you're buying a top of the line chip, which you should because it's almost as fast as Intel's midrange Haswells :-)...

But IMO, just go with Intel.

Thanks.

Last night I went shopping and for a mobo looked at the Asus M5A97 as at

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M5A97/specifications/

and that Web page says that the mobo will use ECC (error correcting coding, as I recall, use 72 bits for each 64 bits the programmer sees).

Thanks for confirming that the AMD processor also supports ECC.

Next I'll wonder what Windows Server does in case of ECC detected errors, correctable or not! Is the OS willing to disable blocks of memory that are giving ECC errors and report the situation?

Not in any benchmark I have ever seen and that not counting the performance/watt aspect which is where the new x99 with DDR4 an i7's have a nice improvement.

Equivalent being the key word there. You can get much more performance in a single Intel chip than you can in an AMD, but you're going to pay for it.

AMD chips support ECC RAM even in the desktop models. My FX-8320 supports ECC.

And usually IOMMUs and so on that Intel disables on many models (even servers!).

Name that $180 AMD processor before you imply objective superiority. The $180 Intel processor is probably as fast or better. Keep in mind, Intel's $1000 processors aren't meant to be 5x as fast as the $200 ones.

Intel has had better performance per watt for years, and an "8 core" AMD processor and "8 core" Intel processor are not equivalent.

I've had a vishera 8 core for several months and am happy with its performance in some ml tasks I'm doing for fun.

A 4 core intel processor running at the same clock rate as a 4 core AMD processor will be wayy faster and efficient per watt and overall.