Die another year

Happy new year, everybody !!

Just saw the James Bond flick, "Die Another Day".

Now, only if I had a penny for every pun in the movie!

AMD vs Intel

I am thinking of buying a new PC in the recent future (come on, I need to graduate from 550Mhz), and this led me to research on some of the processors available today. A bit of searching on the key "Intel vs AMD" led me to the following comments by Linus Torvalds :

"I'm a bit disgusted at Intel for not even _mentioning_ AMD in their documentation or their releases, so I'd almost be inclined to rename the thing (x86-64) as "AMD64" just to give credit where credit is due. However, it's just not worth the pain and confusion.

Any Intel people on this list: tell your managers to be f*cking ashamed of themselves. Just because Intel didn't care about their customers and has been playing with some other 64-bit architecture that nobody wanted to use is no excuse for not giving credit to AMD for what they did with x86-64.

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What I found so irritating is that _hours_ after the Intel announcement, people were _still_ confused about whether the new intel chip was actually compatible with AMD's chips. Why the f*ck not just come out and say so, and talk about it? It took people actually reading the manuals (which didn't mention it either) to convince some people on the architecture newsgroups that yes, 'ia32e' was really the same as 'amd64' except in the small details that have always set Intel and AMD apart."

The basic conclusion of the discussion was that AMD had been there, done it, while Intel was just about jumping on to the 64-bit bandwagon (with full 32-bit compatibility). Somehow, the Internet seems to be against the popular perception in India, where processor==Intel.

Back to my original problem, I realise that buying a new PC involves more than just selecting a processor - the motherboard etc. are important as well. I looking into those too. One thing is for sure - I am going to build the baby with my own hands.