Hello.

I typically run Windows XP. I have avoided buying computers with AMD CPUs the past couple of years in my house primarily because my past experience has been that the Climate Prediction clients (the previous one and BOINC) do not run as fast on AMD CPUs as on Intel ones (such as perhaps a Pentium 4 640).

Has this situation changed, for people running Micro$oft OSs? For example I have a family member who needs a cheap newer machine. It\'ll probably be running XP. And the cheapest out there all have AMD Athlon 64 - perhaps a 3500+. But I don\'t want to buy it if BOINC or the newer BOINC running climate prediction models are going to run consequentially slower on an AMD than on an Intel.

Perhaps the developers hadn\'t thought that users like me would make purchasing descisions based on a lack of past support for AMD CPUs. Maybe for what the climate prediction models do AMD CPUs are somehow inferior to Intel? But in the past I\'ve personally supported AMD just so to support competition and price lowering on CPUs. But the last cheapo Windows XP PC I got in my house was an Intel and it\'s running BOINC. My own personal computer has an AMD. And now I need another cheapo machine here. What do you say? AMD or Intel - in the context of running these models?

My AMD A64 3000 runs the coupled model at 1.7s/ts (overclocked by 40%).

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Intell 630 two models 3.2 s/timestep each.

I\'ll get flamed for this but from what I\'ve been told the AMD chips are not as accurate on the math intensive programs as the intell.

AMD have been in the past targeted at the games market, Intells at business. Thus for most games it is not that important if the 15th digit after the decimal in a calculation is a 7 and not an 8. Science however needs it to be spot on.

That being said however, I read that the new Opteron cores are very very good and quick. just not real cheap.

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In a cost per performance or cost per power output with the new models, AMD wins. As for the myth that somehow the math is better on Intel, not true. The only reason Intel was faster with cpdn under BOINC was because an old Intel compiler was used which skewed results toward Intel. With the new compiler, AMD is not handicapped and performs better overall, but not by a lot.

Athlon64s/Opterons are built on the same core and are very much the same processor, so the difference is minimal.

And of course, the most efficient processor to use (watts per ts) would be a dual core, either Intel or AMD.

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I bought me an AMD X2 3800+ (2.0 GHz) dual core and am very pleased with that, runs two TCM models at 2.25 s/TS stock speed and now around 2.00 a bit overclocked.
A good thing is the low energy consumption, much cheaper to run than the older ones.