Well, anti-AMD people should not piss you off, AMD should piss you off. Most anti-AMD people, including myself, have owned or do own an AMD system.
For business applications the K6 series processor is great. It gets the job done as well or better than a comparable Intel processor.
But it lacks FPU power. That's not hearsay, it's a well known fact. Compensating with a massive cache of course doesn't help with realtime processing either.
First we can talk about games. I have an AMD K6-2 400Mhz system w/128MB and a Voodoo3 2000 AGP card. I also have an Intel Celeron 400Mhz with 128MB (well actually it has 160 now but that's a recent change) and a CL TNT 16MB AGP card. While the AMD appears to run games well enough, it's just over half the speed of the Celeron. I used to use Quake2 for benchmarking and my celeron machine would do it at roughly 60fps, while the AMD system (with Q2 3DNow! drivers) would only do 38-40. That's a substantial difference. We typically call a monitor doing 60hz as "flicker free", in that the eye cannot detect the refresh...and a game doing 60FPS appears so much smoother than a game doing 40FPS it's hard to explain. It also means that there's that much more power available during portions of the game where things start to bog down. You can usually drop down to 26FPS without completely losing control.
Now lets consider multitracking. I didn't have too much trouble with RAW tracks on my AMD K6-2 400Mhz system. I was able to do many bare tracks...which makes sense because using proper bus mastering drivers and DMA hardware, drive access requires minimal CPU support. The speed of the drive is more important. So where's the difference? DX effects. Maybe you're not into it but you should be. The ability to do 20-30 effects on a total of 15-20 or so tracks has made me very happy....but that's on my Celeron system. My AMD would choke out after only a few nasty effects like reverb. Not to mention that it was less responsive in the mixing console.
Both a Celeron and a K6-3 are priced well under $100. Price is not an issue. Celerons will outperform K6-2 and K6-3 processors in any realtime multimedia application.
Yes it is possible to use your existing AMD K6-2 or K6-3 system for multitracking. But do not spread rumors about the K6 series being comparable to Intel in this regard. It's narrow-minded, ignoring obvious facts, and misleading to those building a new system. I know it sucks when someone picks on the system you currently own, but it's time to buck up and get over it. It's just a computer.
Athlons are a different story, but then we're faced with incompatibility issues with certain prosumer soundcards and a some software (most notably games). The Athlon is the first really good chip that AMD has made since they split ways with Intel. Next time maybe they'll work harder on getting a decent chipset. I certainly look forward to Intel having some competition.
I've posted numerous times in this regard. Searching this newsgroup will provide you with several links to backup the claims I have made here today. The funny thing is, each time I do this I say it's going to be the last time. Where's the FAQ when we need it??
Slackmaster 2000