Not another Intel vs. AMD Debate!? (This Time, It's About Video) - Self Build vs. Pre-fab
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When searching for a professional editing workstation, one with support for Beta cam/ component inputs and outputs etc., capable of doing not just Digital Video (DV) quality and DVD quality, but also Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD) work, you wouldn't build it yourself. You'd go to a company that specializes in these systems. (Even with DV systems it often makes sense to go with a company specializing in video machines, like Poweroid). In the video market there are a lot of incompatibilities, issues, awkward patches, certain order in which drivers and software need to be installed etc., and those headaches are best borne by somebody else. Here's where everyone suddenly goes AMD shy!
Now, before the flames start, let's get something straight: this article is not about gaming PCs. It's not about the average home PC. It's not about the beige boxes sitting in offices around the world. Even without dedicated hardware rendering facilities or a hardware MPEG encoding chip, these general purpose machines can chomp their way through some heavy DV work -- and they come based around a wide range of CPUs options from Intel's Pentium P4, Extreme Edition, and Noconas to AMD's Athlon 64, Athlon FX ,and Opterons.
But this article is not about these PCs.
It's specifically about professional video production workstations, solutions for enterprise level production, processing, transmission, storaging and managing of video content, machines that start at about $10,000 and go up to several hundreds of thousands of dollars each. These workstations are all based around Intel processors. Surely the FX range of AMD CPUs with their extra processor cache, or the Opterons with their multi-CPU potential -- and their support now for 8-way processing -- would make for good video editing machines, right? And wouldn't they make for some cost savings? Yet, they are never used. Why?
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