AMD's Athlon Juggernaut Continues...
Or "Who Are These Guys Anyway???"
The PC world was a pretty sedate place for years: Intel dominated the scene and there was little serious competition. Sure, Cyrix, AMD and some others made their own CPUs but who really cared? No one else need apply for the lofty position of primacy in the land of Windows where the sun rose and set on Intel...
That changed when AMD's Athlon came along.
As a shop that has both Macs and Windows machines in our digital video and animation studios, we've always found it rather funny to read the Mac and PC religionists when they take up righteous jihads, defending their respective denomination. After all, anyone who has seriously used both systems in their studios knows that neither is really all that much better (or worse) than the other. I have long believed that if you were to take a week of real production and have two competent users on the two systems in a shoot-out -- it would end in some sort of twisted Mel Brooks comedy routine. As the dueling cowboys drew their weapons and fired, the bullets would collide in the mid-air and fall to the ground -- midway between the combatants. A draw. There's really not enough difference on either side to overpower the other...
Then there are the Athlons.
When it comes to the performance-to-price ratio, the Athlon is standing alone at the head of the pack. We've been exploring the Athlon for much of a year now and they are nothing short of revolutionary. Whereas there is little difference between the best Macs and Intel systems in the actual workaday world of dynamic media production -- there is so much difference while using an Athlon that you know it just in the way it works. You can feel the speed and it doesn't take a benchmark test to validate the sensation -- although there are plenty of those around to back up the experience. No, you aren't hallucinating; you've just found out why Athlons have exploded in the market and why products like SoftImage certify the Athlon for use by their customers. The Athlon processor is a dynamic media creator's chainsaw that rips through data like Warner Brothers' Taz tears through cartoon shows...
We've been using Adobe After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop, Canopus RexEdit and Vegas Video in our Athlons. All of these programs run very solid and the performance has been superb. For more on the real world experiences of other users here at Creative Cow, visit the After Effects, Premiere, Canopus and Sonic Foundry Vegas Video forums. The fact of the matter is this: AE runs quite well on the Athlon and it blazes through renders unlike anything we've seen in its class. Our Mac G4's can't compete and our Pentiums hang their heads and shrug their shoulders as well. Numerous users on the After Effects, Canopus and other forums report the same findings.
And don't buy the line from the naysayers that AMD isn't capable of running video and animation apps successfully. It's bunk, bull and just flat wrong. The AMDs do quite well in this market -- as long as you stay away from cheap motherboards and go with something reliable like the GigaByte or Tyan boards. For what's hot in media use today, check out the CreativeCow.net AMD forum for the latest user reports.
Now there are the dual CPU Athlons at long last.
Why are the AMD dualies so different?
If adding two Athlons together in a single box weren't enough to entice the most jaded dynamic media pro into a giddy state of digital nerdvana, then picture this: AMD's dual BUS architecture means each of the Athlons has its own BUS. No BUS bottlenecks and no battles between the CPUs as they try to route information across a single BUS. No, this is a high-bandwidth highway with no roadside rests scheduled or needed.
This is indeed big news for video production pros and those wanting to get extreme broadband performance for use in video and animation production workstations, servers, etc.
Can a Thunderbird keep up with a Palomino on this highway?
Many longtime AMD Athlon users will want to know if the Thunderbird CPUs can be used in the new units. In a word: No -- at least not officially. If you use a Thunderbird on a Palomino motherboard, AMD says that you will be notified that it can only work in single CPU mode -- though we have learned that there are workarounds, (but animation and video professionals are usually not the sort of souls that stray as close to the edge of the cliff as possible. We leave that to the bit-heads who like to push the envelope; we prefer safety and reliability, for the most part.).
As mentioned earlier, SoftImage has recently certified the AMD Athlon for its users and Alan Waxenberg, third-party business manager, Softimage Co. said in a press announcement: "We believe AMD is changing the way animators view hardware. The addition of AMD Athlon MP dual processors provides animators powerful options when choosing multi-processor workstations." The Athlon has proven itself to many users of high-end tools like SoftImage, Maya and Arete -- tools once exclusively the domain of SGI boxes. Though not all the aforementioned tools are yet enjoying the certification kiss, we know many users who work with these tools and who use Athlons to creating great work quickly.
Even LucusFilm has joined the AMD party and in an official statement from the Ranch, Rick McCallum says: ""AMD processor-powered workstations have become an unequalled addition to our pre-visualization work," said McCallum, producer of the motion picture Star Wars: Episode II. "The nature of digital motion pictures requires hardware tools that allow our pre-production team to meld digital and 'real' worlds in a time- and cost-effective manner."
After years of using Macs and Pentiums, I recognize a rocket when I get to ride one and our Athlons have definitely been rockets in real world tests here in our studios. Whereas it's a "six of one, half dozen of the other" scenario when it comes to real world results of using our Macs and Pentiums, the Athlons are hands down winners and it's no contest in the real world workaday world of video and animation production -- AMD is the winner.
