Redgarl,
Do you really think the only thing computers are used for are games? Run a big compile and you'll know why fast processors are very important.
Besides that, all I commented on was the design of the i7 being vastly superior to the Phenom II. Where did I say people should buy the very expensive i7s for games? I wouldn't presume to know what's best for everyone and made no judgment in that way.
You on the other hand, seem to make the judgment. For some people playing games, the i7 will be a perfect solution. AMD processors are very well priced,, but that's not because they are inexpensive to make, but because AMD sells them for what they can. Where the rubber meets the road though, AMD solutions can make a lot of sense.
From a design perspective, I never liked the inelegant K7 design, and I still do not. It's too "worst-case" in the design, and uses brute force instead to making intelligent trade-offs by understanding what a common workflow is. It's got an overly powerful x87 unit, despite the fact it's essentially useless now, and still supports 3D Now!, which was always essentially useless since it was not supported much. On top of this, the AGUs and ALUs being part of the same port strikes me as inefficient, and I've never been too crazy about exclusive cache arrangements that they still cling too, despite the fact that making the L3 inclusive would eliminated a lot of snooping traffic. On top of this, they still have inferior scheduling with regards to memory reads and writes. Intel calls it 'memory disambiguation', AMD calls it "we don't have it, because we believe in worst case situations, and the memory read 'might' be wrong if the write is not fully understood before we do it'. Intel just does it, and if it turns out it's wrong, they redo it. This happens roughly 2% of the time, so the other 98% you get a benefit. But, nope, it's not worse case, which seems to be their design philosophy.
To reiterate, I never said no one should buy AMD processors. They are smart enough to price them so they are competitive, and with the 790GX, make a very attractive platform for integrated graphics solutions. I just said the Phenom II is a bad design compared to the i7, which is about as controversial as saying the world is round, except for the fact people have some weird attachment to CPU companies. Probably someone needs to make a pill for that, since it belongs squarely under the category of pathology.
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