[geeks] Sun to adopt newest Intel Xeon chips for upcoming servers (link)

[Joshua Boyd]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 06:10:08PM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > Given how polarized ATI and nVidia are in the market, I'm a bit worried
> > that we'll see a stupid standards war.
> > 
> > I'd hate to see it become hard to run nVidia graphics cards on AMD
> > systems, or ATI graphics cards on Intel systems.
> 
> So would I, since I like AMD CPUs and nVidia GPUs.
> 
> (Then again, it's been a long time since I tried an ATI ....)

In my opinion, if you aren't using Windows, and don't need good shader
support, then your best bet is an ATI card with free software support.
As I understand it, that means a x800 or less.  Anything x1?00 is not
adequately supported by free drivers.  I found the free drivers with a
ATI Radeon 9000 to be adequately fast and much more stable than either
the ATI or Nvidia binary drivers. 

If you need shaders, the ATI shader support is terrible under linux, and
ATI is less stable and less featureful than Nvidia.

I would love to try the 965G chips under linux sometime, but at the
moment I don't look forward to what it takes to install them, besides I
don't expect to be buying a new computer very soon, and if I was I don't
know for sure that I would be going with Intel.  The Core 2 Duos sound
very exciting, yet my work C2D notebook hasn't thrilled me even as much
as my prior Pentium-M notebook did.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd at jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/