[thinkpad20]

That leads me to a question that I was going to ask: what is it that justifies the massive markup on Intel chips vs AMD? Is it just the name? Is there an advantage in intel performance or power usage? If so, does it really make up for the price? Because as someone considering building a computer from scratch (I haven't in quite a while), that AMD price tag is very appealing.

[tacotime]

I think many people would agree that the price discrepancy does have a lot to do with branding and marketing strategy.

Intel is a larger wealthier company and they assumedly pour a lot more money into R&D than AMD. If you go purely by market capitalization, Intel is about 50-60 times larger and AMD. That's not necessarily a fair measure and ignores a lot of variables but it does help shed a little light on the situation. In addition, AMD's business model has them focusing a lot of their attention on niches that intel doesn't seem as interested in. For instance AMD continues to develop new ARM technologies that could provide a very important market edge for them in the future as small "internet of thing" like devices start to emerge and become a part of people's daily life.

Here's a decent article on the subject: http://analysisreport.morningstar.com/stock/research?nav=no&...

[zanny]

Intel isn't performance per dollar, it is absolute performance. Performance per dollar I think the 8 core AMD parts still fail to mid range CPUs and maybe even ARM chips, just due to their insanely low cost, but it would take a bunch to get enough performance to use effectively in a workstation or server environment.

[jotm]

Well, AMD's power usage also affects reliability (motherboards fail way more often). That is, if you're buying a top of the line chip, which you should because it's almost as fast as Intel's midrange Haswells :-)...

But IMO, just go with Intel.