TL;DR - The AMD CPUs seem to perform like Xeons in my experience.
@Leiurus: First off, let me just say that I completely agree with your last point about "trying to cut cost too much and wasting money", that is absolutely true! If it were my choice, I wouldn't buy a CPU that had less than 4-cores atleast, but that's just my opinion. I know that my last machine, which was a dual core 2.13 Ghz first gen core2, was amazing, and even though it was slow when multi-tasking compared to my 6-core, it did everything else just as fast and as "smoothly" as I could expect of it. So even though I personally would shell out the extra cash for more cores, I do realize that even a dual core machine can be very fast.
Secondly let me just say that I would recommend that you stick with your current comp until the next new wave of CPUs comes out, because I know that position you're in, where you have a 4 year old computer and the new stuff sounds like it'd be fun to build, but trust me, it's no faster now than it was back then
.
Anyhow, I'm not even sure what the technical term is for "CPU hiccups", but I've been using that term for years just because that's my biggest pet peeve with bad / cheap computer builds. I assume it has everything to do with low amounts of cache, causing unwanted swapping because I rarely see workstation CPUs have those problems (which tend to have more cache). Basically, I'm sure you've experienced this, but you're doing a task and you're definitely not using 100% of the CPU and it just hangs for a split second for no apparent reason. Or even worse is when you have a 4-core system and you utilize 1 core to 100% and 3 other cores at 5% and yet your system is still basically frozen because of that 1 utilized core! Sandy Bridge seems to be really bad for these hiccups, in my experience. That's my biggest problem with my i7-2600 at work, I'll have 4 GB ram free, 3 cores un-utilized and yet I'm basically frozen when I'm utilizing 1 core to 100%. If you're running one task (ie, rendering an image) and all cores are fully utilized then you're probably never going to see any slowness or inconsistency, because you're not switching between tasks.
I notice these issues quite a bit working in the visual Fx world. I've worked on a wide range of computers, both desktops and workstations and I always note the specs of the machine that I'm working on. I often cache particles (which is single threaded) for hours at a time, and then I'll also render images (multi-threaded) for hours at a time. I do the exact same work at home on my 1090T that I do at work on the machines that I've used for work, including my current machine which is the i7. Both the i7 that I use at work and the i5-2500 that I built less than a month ago have been genuinely disappointing. An example of what I'm seriously disappointed with is this: when I'm caching particles (which is single threaded), I can't do ANYTHING!!!! ... It drives me insane! I honestly can't even browse the internet! No youtube, not even Winamp will play smoothly, it makes me wanna cry ;(. Out of curiosity, I decided to try the same thing on my last build which was the i5-2500 and that was the exact same way, maybe a tiny bit better actually, which made me feel good, and the person it's going to isn't going to care, but seriously, I was disappointed and at the same time, I was not surprised because I have noticed this trend with the successors of the core 2. They just don't seem to work quite as well in real world use.
Now, on the flip side, the 1090T that I'm typing on now is the exact opposite. There's virtually no slowdown at all when multi-tasking. I can
almost play games while I'm caching .... almost
. Just to test this, I decided to cache one of these scenes I have at work and I'm typing this with no noticeable slowdown, playing winamp and switching between tasks is completely drama free, no slow down whatsoever. I even tried starting Civ IV, but that definitely didn't work haha, so I'm closing it now. On the i7, Chrome freezes on about 80% of webpages, Winamp skips and hitting Ctrl alt del takes about 5 minutes to pop-up, as opposed to about 10 seconds on the AMD. Both machines have 8 gigs of ram.
One more story on this subject was a job I did in October of last year where the company I went to needed computers badly to finish the project I was hired for. They asked me what kind of workstation I wanted and I spec'd out a machine that I wanted on newegg. It was a 24-core, 64 GB machine for $4,000. Yes you read that correctly, 24-cores and 64 gigs for $4k! To make a very long story short, they ended up ordering two of these machines, and they also ordered a 48 gig, 3.0 Ghz 12-core intel mac workstation, both of which would run windows, maya and render images on the renderfarm as well as do fluid simulations (which is multi-threaded). Well overall, after a lot of different real world usage and stress tests and a month straight of rendering and fluid sims, the AMDs were roughly 20% faster than the 12-core Intel Macs. Sure the AMDs had a bit more ram, but there was a long period of time where they were running 22 different renders on a single machine, so each core had less than 3 GB of memory per frame! Still, performance was solid and the machines were very responsive the entire time. Single threaded performance was far better on the Intels, there's no doubt about that, but all the work we were doing was multi-threaded, which balanced things out, but actually favored the AMDs a tad more. At the end of the project, I found out that the mac was actually purchased directly from Apple with all those 48 gigs (meaning that they actually paid Apple's ridiculous ram prices!) and the cost was around $12k!!!
Honestly though, we all know exactly what you mean when you say that you haven't heard anything positive about AMD... that has always been the case! It has everything to do with Intel's marketing and the public image advantage that Intel has always had since the Pentium 1. I remember when the AMD K6-2 came out, it was made out to be a joke because of its bad floating point performance, but its integer performance was on par, if not better than the Pentium II and it was actually much faster when comparing dollar for dollar... but still, the public just hated it, mostly because they loved Intel. Then fast forward a few years later and the first Athlon came out and totally obliterated the last generation PIIs in terms of floating point performance and it cost less too, but even that was hated because now it was the integer performance the people were griping about. Then there was that whole 5 year period of the Pentium 4, which was just an attrocity in terms of CPUs.... and even during those years, AMD was offering a far superior CPU for less money and even still Intel had the good public image and sells about 10x more than AMD... it was just plain sad! The P4s were proof that the public was just a bunch of sheep, because that CPU was trash... Even the IT guy that worked at the company where I built my two 24-core systems had nothing but bad things to say about AMD, yet he clearly knew just enough to have an IT job lol! After a month of seeing every other machine have issues, those magny-core systems were rock solid and totally saved our project from a slow and painful death... Yet he still said nothing good about them til the day I left (I assume he felt dumb for buying the $12k mac).
