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Are High-End CPUs Worth The Money?
Rampaging Goatbert (aka Jeff Feld) has posted a story at Newsforge about something you may want to argue about with your boss or significant other. Specifically, whether high-end CPUs are worth their high prices. Personally, I look even lower on the processor food chain, but watching those price-curve inflection points makes the runner-up chips pretty tempting. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.
(ducks thrown tomatoes)
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Buy a 386dx40 at $80, or a 486dx33 at $600?
Buy a 486dx100 at $80, or a P1-166 at $600?
Buy a P120 at $80, or a P233MMX at $600?
Buy a P300-CelebA at $80, or a PII-450 at $600?
Buy a Ath800 at $80, or a P4-1.3g at $600?
You're always paying a premium, its the premium of boasting, and since the actual performance increase merits at max 50% (probably far less unless you're using max-cpu apps, and the rest of the kits not bottlenecks).
So, No. Unless someone else is paying...
Smid
This article is about the "high-end" of a low-performance architecture...
When I saw the headline, I thought "At last, a real comparison of x86 v. UltraSparc, Mips, Alpha, et al. .."
... but no. Same old crap about Athlon and Pentium.
Not even a mention the Itanium, let alone a date.
Is the plural of Pentium "Pentia"?
Is the plural of Itanium "Itania"?
You're absolutely on target about the situation. I recently built a mondo system, and found out a few things I had only suspected:
The difference between a 750Mhz Duron and a 1.2G Athlon isnt perceptable in most programs, even Q3Arena.(With the same hardware)
RAM makes a difference to 256MB, above 512MB you can get problems.
Hard drive speed is now the major bottleneck.
Try a KT7A-RAID (Cheap,now) with an array of 7200RPM fast drives, and you will be amazed at the boost! Be careful about shutting down, as those heavily cached harddrives don't get to write their info when you shut down! And the windows fix for that problem doesn't work.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Rock solid with my AMD K62 /350, couldn't wish for
anything more reliable.
The Internet's sole purpose is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children
Porn making plans? "Insert slot A into tab B..."
You seem to think that Abit and Asusn are killer motherboards...I think you need to visit Abit/Asus Newsgroups, maybe that will change your mind. I got the newest ABIT KT7a and I've never had so many stability problems since I got my first computer 7 years ago.
The high end funds all the R&D. Todays sweet spot is yesterdays high end.
Actually, many RAID systems use IDE drives, even ones that appear as a SCSI device to the host system.
SCSI is most important when you're dealing with a smaller number of drives that need to be very fast. When you're just dealing with mass storage with a 98% read/write ratio, a huge cluster of IDE drives with an appropriate RAID controller is often best.
I saw a decent system that uses four 15k SCSI drivers (just 9GB each) in a RAID 0+1, with a drive array (RAID 5, or a comparable proprietary standard) of two terrabytes in a few cabinets filled with 40GB drives. It was a quad CPU P3 (I think) with 8GB of RAM, I was told.
The caching was properly setup, and all the temporary tables, and index files, were on the fast drives, and very few (comparatively) requests had to go to the drive array.
Not that the array was slow though... maybe 60% of the speed of 10k drives (15k ones are too expensive for a huge array) and that like 1/3 or less price.
Going by THAT Mac and Linux comparison then... I would guess that THEY would say to me.... Amiga? Why do you need a GUI that does multiple Shells (Command Line Prompts, with history), Multitasking, can look like you want it, can switch apps from 640 to 1600 screens without re-booting, can do a Disk-scan without stopping you from doing your work, can navigate through the directory levels faster than a CPU 10x faster......... Oh! I forgot, I'm accessing the Internet with a DEAD COMPUTER!! Drats, JK
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
the 1.4GHz athlon MP costs $300, and the P4 Xeon 1.7GHz costs $600. Hasn't really changed much.
CPU's except for the very latest top end are v.cheap now anyway. In all my Experience the BIG performance choke on Win NT/98/95/Linux/Unix is the hard disk/controller. old Pentium 233 much faster than PII 450 in all apps including gaming using 9Gb/7200rpm SCSI on DPT 64Mb Cached controller. Even on "cpu" intensive app's most of time spent waiting.... underclock your current pc by 25% and I'll be surprised if you can tell the difference.
Back in my day if we even had 0.075 GHZ we were the bomb for the rest of the year. Now it just "helps".
better spent on RAM (Especially in a Windows machine.)
Actually, lots of ram is a waste of money on Win9x. Seat of the pants experiment running two long processes involving lots of file i/o (OS, run1, run2):
Win98ROM,7.5min,7.5min
Win2K,5.5min,5.0min
Linux,4.5min,5 SECONDS
Summary: Increase Win9x performance with a fast HD and video, increase multiple app performance under WinNT with lots of ram, put lots of ram in a linux box and your jaw drops.
Assuming that disks are non-local, power is probably not the really big concern. After all, faster processors made on the same process are going to consume more power, require more cooling, etc. in rough proportion to their speed. Since processors and disks are easily the biggest primary power consumers in a box without a big graphics card, that means that power consumption is going to scale reasonably closely with processor speed.
Getting back to the choice of lots of wimpy processors or a few powerful ones, ISTR that the rule of thumb is that more processors is better if interprocessor communication is limiting and faster processors is better if communication is not limiting. That seems counter to naive intuition- if interprocessor communication is important it seems like you'd want to minimize the number of processors- but turns out to be correct because communication is so slow compared to number crunching. In communications intensive tasks, fast processors just wind up idling a lot waiting for high latency communications. I'm not sure where rendering fits in, but if it doesn't require fast local disks to be efficient that suggests that it's not particularly communications intensive and is probably best suited by faster processors.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
You make good points. My only quibble is about disks: I've seen render farms where the storage isn't local to the rendering machines.
But space, licensing, support, these are all real concerns -- power too.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
barring technological leaps, incremental steps always cost more. it is also important to remember that the 1.33 is superceded by the 1.4, and back stock always sells for less that new production, so, in actuality you are getting a great deal on the 1.33 rather than paying a premium for the 1.4. also the article ignored the overclocking issue, it is possible that the 1.4 can be overclock a magnitude above the 1.33, especially if the 1.4 is an athalon 4, which runs significantly cooler (enough to allow it for use in laptops). on the other hand, i personally went with the athalon 850, with the first gen gigabyte 761 motherboard (which only supports only 200mgz memory bus, but then i had it a couple months before anyone else) and it screams and i have no regrets.
It's like having a new Porsche compared to your neighbors new Camaro
No sig for you!!
P5?? So is that 233 Ghz? :)
No sig for you!!
Where I work, we have multiple boxes running Dual 1000ghz processors /w between 1-2 gigs of ram.. and they aren't powerful enough. Sure, we can build more machines.. and we do, we add at least 2 machines a day.. often more. For us, fast boxes are pretty essential.. for Joe Average Linux user.. he doesn't need much more then a pentiumII :)
At home I 'm using an Celeron 400 with Win95 for wordprocessing and to keep up my bank account. I do have several toys to do some serious things like linux boxes for websites and mailservers. For these tasks I tend to use "older" hardware which have to be at least one year at the market.
Why?, because i hate to dig through zillions of kernelpatches,biosupdates etc. before i found this or that particular bug this newest and fanciest hardware comes with. So is it worth to buy the fastest cpu? For 95% of the general user, no. For those with heavy computing tasks, yes as do memory, fast harddisk and fast io.
You forgot engineers, video editors, etc. Speed does count there. However, I used to do the same sort of engineering jobs on a 386 -- just had to schedule my work so autorouting would run overnight, if I picked the right settings. 500 MHz will autoroute a similar board in 10 minutes, so scheduling is a little easier, and I can try more different settings to try to get the best routing. 1.4GHz might or might not get it done in 5 minutes (CPU cycles aren't the only limiting factor!). So if I was doing that everyday, a few hundred extra for the fastest system would improve productivity be cost effective. Two 500MHz boxes and a keyboard-monitor-mouse switch would improve productivity far more...
Anyway, routing circuit boards is not my main job, and 500MHz is essentially instantaneous for everything else I do. But I remember when home computers were 8-bitters running games like the text-only D&D, and engineers got $50,000 Unix workstations, or else just a dumb terminal and a logon to the mainframe. Now the gameplayers need more power than most engineers...
This may have been more pertinent back when I paid $500 for the latest and greatest Intel Pentium II-400. Now with Intel and AMD duking it out in the "Great American PC Price War" it is more of a non-issue really. Back when Intel was the only reliable chip manufacturer (Yes I did try one of them Cyrixes) they could set any price they wanted, and the premium for the top of the heap cpu was ~$200 or more. Right after I spent $500 for my chip, every tech savy bargain hunter in the world bought a celeron 300a and overclocked it to 500mhz or greater. You could get more performance for significantly less money.
.1g) or anything P4, for that matter. Damn those things are expensive. But if the rich gotta-have-its out there don't mind paying for it, thats fine with me. That's why they sell a wide range of cpu's instead of just one. The huge profits from the high end make up for the R&D and other overhead. Honestly how much do you think Intel makes from selling a Celeron 600 for $35?
Now the 1.4g Athlon I just bought (to replace my aging p2-400 which incidently goes for $58 now) cost just over $150. Sure I could have saved $30 and gone with the next one down, or even saved $80 and gotten a 1g. But come on, $80 only fills my gas tank 3 times.
Now I totally understand if you are talking about spending $568 for a P4-1.8g, or $326 for a P4-1.7g, ($242 markup for
Beauty is truly in the eye of the tiger
Cache is good, but don't go too far hoping that that large L2 on a Xeon will save you in all cases. Sometimes cache is almost completely irrelevant. If you're walking large datasets, then you're completely trashing your cache anyway, then spending the money on getting faster RAM chips is wiser.
With big data sets that have low cache/memory hit rates a good way to speed the machine up is to get faster drives. If your on a budget though this can be an expensive proposition (which will completly hide the noise of a $33 CPU diffrence) running in the tens of thousands. For people who are doing this on a budget that notices $33 then just get over this instance on high RPM scsi drives and buy a nice _CHEAP_ IDE RAID controller (or run software raid). The resulting 2x+ disk speed improvments from running 3+ drives will help to move the bottleneck back towards being CPU bound. Of course all this depends on where the curves the particular application falls, its pretty easy to find applications that run better on a single proc PIII with 256M and a fast disk subsystem than a quad xeon with 8G and a crappy disk subsystem. Bottle neck removal is king! lol. This is partially how SUN is still making money, they sell boxes with lots of ram and couple them with fast disk subsystems.
Well, technically, Warp 7 is 343 times light speed, warp 8 is 512, almost double. All else being equal, the fastest ship is better, especially in a commercial sense. Deliver your cargo twice as fast, you'll get almost all the jobs, unless your price is a lot higher.
But, in the spirit in which it was asked, lets deal with linear speed.. Assume a scale of 0 to 2, normalize to 10, gets W6.65 and W7. One is 95% of the other.
Not a huge difference, out of a month-long trip you'll get there two days faster. Not enough to really make a difference in non-emergency cargo prices.
But, factor in pirates, and treat the faster engines as insurance. They might make a negligible difference most of the time, but will make 100% of the difference some of the time.
Now, assume a bell-curve of top-speeds among the various races pirates belong to (because in Trek, whole species use the same ships). Obviously, every step away from the center of the distribution will offer diminishing returns, but if the returns are great enough.... If an upgrade will take you from middle-of-the-road, faster than 50% of pirates, to being faster than 80%, that's worth it.
However, you need to weigh a few factors... Slower pirates tend to be less technilogically advanced as well, and thus less dangerous. Replotting the speed distribution after removing all enemies you could defeat easily will yield different numbers.
Also, some enemies will never be beaten. Normally, just being faster than the rest of the targets is good enough... pirates will attack the straglers. However, if you annoy 'Q', you're toast, regardless of engines.
Then there's philosophy. You may feel that death happens, and shouldn't be worried about. In this case, buy slower engines and live it up, after all, being pirated isn't a financial setback, but a permanent end.
If you have investors, they may take this decision out of your hands, opting either for the quick payoff (ie, the cheapest ship that can do the job) or a stable investment (a fast, well-armed ship that'll still be doing the job years from now.)
I hope that helps.
I hope your employer is charging you $2 for the time you wasted on /. then..
Not only gaming. There _ARE_ other CPU bound tasks. True, not many users out there are doing them, but they are out there.
Someone brought up computational fluid dynamics - I'll bring up large statistical analysis problems, where large mainframes take a week, never mind many days to do a subset of the problem on a PC
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Highend processors may be worth it if you are running a large server farm. Within some cities and areas it may cost upwards of $30 a month per square foot. If a farm is to exist for at least 2 years then that is about $660 per square foot. This minimises the benifits of buying older technology for a given processing ability.
Geeze I don't know about most people but I'd hate to see how long Windows takes to load on a 1.4 Mhz processor.
I think the poster was saying that they don't make as much of a profit per car selling on the lower end vs the higher end. If there was not as much profit on the higer end, they may have to charge more on the lower end to make all their shareholders happy.
So I think that you're both talking about the same thing, only he wasn't being a specific and precise.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
800 duron- 305 $ = 0.38 $/Mhz
900 athlon 309 $ = 0.34 $/Mhz
1000 athlon 363 $ = 0.36 $/Mhz
1200 athlon 363 $ = 0.30 $/Mhz
1300 athlon 403 $ = 0.31 $/Mhz
1400 athlon 450 $ = 0.32 $/Mhz
(Note that the systems are not exactly the same, but all including windows tax.) If we look at this the sweet spot it seems the 1.2 Ghz system is money wise the best to buy. And the 1400 just a little bit more expensive but is faster.....
------ 50% of all statistics are lies.
Good point RE incremental costs vs incremental value. However, although a touch off-topic, while thinking about marginal increases in your value, what about typing proficiency?
A constant source of irritation in the IT workplace is seeing all this scorching hardware, and highly (note - not over-) paid professionals hunting and pecking at approximately 15wpm.
Sure, not all tasks are typing rate intensive. However, for whatever reason I ended up at over 80wpm, and there's little to beat the feeling when you're deep in the groove at the command prompt, firing in a sequence of commands as fast as you think them, punctuating each command with a decisive punch on the return key as per Bishop in Aliens.
And then you look across at your colleage, hunting around on the keyboard, typing in the same commands with an error in the first dozen characters.
So - good point RE processor upgrade, and I'm all in favour of more coal on the fire, but think about the increase in your value to your employer by bumping up your WPM. In any event, there's a great personal return to you by being able to painlessly touch-type.
Aegilops
Not for me though, here the processor prices for AMD CPUs go up in exactly the right increments so there is no premium for a fast CPU, not even the 1.5 Thunderbird.
Heh, I imagine when you were my age you weren't paying anyone anything, and probably working at a gas station or movie theater or something....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
I prefer "They all wait at the same speed".
Yes, but are you willing to pay 10% more to go from warp 7 to warp 8? How much is that increase in speed worth to you? *eg*
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
"You get more mileage out of a cheap pair of speakers" apologies to Billy Joel
If you buy a Lexus instead of a Toyota you're buying status
And if I was involved in an accident I know which one I'd prefer to have been driving.
Hint: It's not the Toyota.
My current car (a Toyota) I purchased as it was fairly cheap and looked quite nice.
My next car, the main factor will be that my future family will still be alive if they are involved in a collision.
Ian.
That's quite the blanket statement. In a clustering setup, both quantity and speed of the processors on the nodes affect the total run-time.
If for example, you cannot further decompose the dataset, then the only manner to increase the performance of the cluster is to add faster CPUs.
The question of whether a 1.2 vs a 1.4 GHz CPU is a worthwhile investement, depends on the value associated with the increase in performance. If for example, upgrading to slightly faster CPUs allowes you to take on more work, then you can derive a direct monetry gain from the upgrade. If on the other hand, your workload remains constant, then the net effect is that you can process a dataset faster at the cost of increasing you idle time (poor efficiency).
Howerver, I've yet to see an environment that does not grow to consume all available processor cycles!In the never ending quest for speed and the semi-instant response from computers that we want so badly, you have to keep the ever present price/performance ratio in mind.... I know someone mentioned it earlier, but then their is the feasability of overclocking, and how much you need to spend to successfully overclock a chip. When a 1.4ghz 266fsb chip costs 180 dollars and a 1.0 ghz 200 fsb chip costs 75, and has a good chance of clocking up to the performance of the 1.4ghz, then we can spend our time investing in it.... of course overclocking for business needs doesnt really make sense, so its always best to stick to the P&P curve, and evaluate our needs and place the money where it is needed most. Remember, a good motherboard will last through several processor releases sometimes..
Tweak like your pocketbook depended on it!
games are the only category of software that actually push the performance envelope
That depends on the type of game. RTS's take serious horsepower, God games and simulation games take considerably less. I've noticed that people who don't play RTS's tend to upgrade their machines at far longer intervals...
My 180mhz Pentium surfs the web just fine, and runs Sim City 3K and Tropico with no problems. (As well as Silent Service II, Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, and MOO I and II.) What's bothersome is the simulation game market is falling prey to the 'gotta have gizmos' frenzy, resulting in very pretty games that don't really work.
Excuse my language, but BULLSHIT!!!!
are you a moron? do you think that businesses sell cars to poor people and DON'T MAKE MONEY OFF THEM?!
Yeah, that's right, and then they tell the shareholders "sure profits are down this year and the stock is slumped and there is no dividend, but that is because we spent all the money we made selling Top Notch Kit to rich goons on cars for poor people, that's capitalism baby"
Cop on! the other poster is spot on, "market segregation" is what it is all about. I saw a talk by a former head engineer at BMW, and he basically said that their cars were not worth the money. They take a good car, and then load it up with crap (rosewood, leather, warning light to tell you your passenger beside you has not put on a seat belt, etc., etc.,) until it seems that they can justify a price which will mean that only rich folk can buy it (exclusivity), and then spend more money marketing it as-such. But fundamentally, the car is little better than any standard car of the same size from a reputable car-maker.
You say "Poor people get a lot for a bargain", are you an IDIOT?, do you not think that rich people get a lot of "poor people's" labour for a bargain?
And no matter what you buy, unless you buy from soup-kitchens or idiots, the seller will be making a profit (or they at least hoped to make a profit, i know this can change in sales and the like).
the joke is that posts like the parent to this one are modded up. I don't think anybody here with even a basic facility for science/engineering could accept this sort of pseudo-economics crap.
Just think, for a change!
m
Because then I can get their perfectable usable low end ones really cheap
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Did that say "food processor"?
"I forgot my mantra."
I thought the question was primarily focused on home users. There are tons of business applications where speed = productivity. In which case, they are usually running something really high powered like a Sun/SGI or some kind of Beowulf thing.
Now maybe there are people out there who do these kinds of things as a hobby, but then letting things run overnight isn't really a problem because you should have the same time demands with the hobby as you would with a job.
I do a lot of MPG/Divx/MP2/etc encoding and I often have to let things run overnight (or in the background all day while I do other things). Again, not job critical so my slower processor is sufficient. If I had to make a living doing this and I was being paid per job (as opposed to per hour which would be QUITE profitable) then I definitely would pony up for a 1+ Gz system.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Actually, the opposite is true. Equipment is cheap, people are expensive. In the lifetime of a company, salaries and other employment-related compensation are much more costly than any sort of assets (which can be depreciated anyhow).
Your employers don't care how you value yourself; they only care about your actual value in relation to balance sheets, cash flow, shareholder valuation, etc.
The last I heard, Oracle charged licencing fees not only per processor, but also per megahertz, so ramping up the speed ramps up the licencing costs too...
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
My 1987 Mac II (16.7 MHz) is still my best word processor. This Mac was high end, but it's unlikely that I'd still be using a Mac SE. For one thing, you couldn't change the monitor.
I buy capabilities: word processor, scanner, line art editing and photo editing and printing, MIDI and sound recording and editing with CD burning, development tools, web server, database, local network, voice mail and fax, internet access, backup, and reliability. I spent extra for a quiet fan. That helps me concentrate better, and saves me more time than a faster CPU.
-- Stephen.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I'm reminded of the old Tootsie Roll Pop commercials...
How many seconds does it take to load Windows on a 1.4 Mhz processer?
Maybe Mr. Owl Knows!
ah-one...
ah-two...
ah-three...
Aw, screw it - (power off)
>I'll ditto this. My wife runs a K5 (or is it a K6?) at 150 mHz
Wow, my 1 MegaHertz trs-80 machine was a blazing fireball compared to your wife's 1 milliHertz box.
what about apple and their risc procesors. http://www.apple.com/powermac/ their server w 2 800mhz cpu's kicks out 11.8gflpops of data. thats plenty to run a kick ass linix box. the industry doest compare them at the same standard. the speed of the cpu is not the only thing you need to have a great system. for example i had a p3 600(katmai 512k chache) and it was running just as good if not better than the 1.2ghz i have now. now whats is worong with that ??
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
This is analogous to the Porsche question.
If you have to ask the question, the answer is NO.
Or the said developer could just take a dump *before* work every morning and save the company 40 minutes a day or $32/week and in 16.5 weeks save the company $528.00 which could be spent on a big jar of tootsie rolls.
Andrew
In most cases, I'd say this argument is f'ing idiotic, but the Camry is a damn good car.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
I prefer to use multiple CPU of a lower priced CPU to handle my high end needs.
If you're into high-end graphics or internet gaming, then the fast chips may be a good buy. But if you're doing spreadsheets or simply sending e-mail, than a slower chip will serve you well for years to come.
It's almost analogous to buying a car.
I think that google's massive (over 10000 units) server farm (all x86) proves that the high end cpu's aren't worth it. Multiple low end CPU's do the same (if not better) job of one high end CPU. I think Google proves this point.
The anti-salmon
...right now I'm wishing my boss had went for the high end workstations. Waiting 2 minutes for a dwg to regen is a BAD thing.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Supply and demand. They charge that because they know they'll get it.
I've always been a large fan of using an army of small, low-powered boxes instead of one big expensive box. For one thing, if something breaks, everything else still works. For another thing, it's generally cheaper this way.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
It is not fair to compare a number, like clock speed and then say "oh well only 70 mhz more costs 25% more money." These processors have extremely complicated designs and the newer ones are much more efficient in every way. You might see a 70 mhz gain in speed on a piece of paper, but the reliability, speed, and robustness of the new processors far outweigh the price increase.
~ now you know
It depends on who's paying the bills. If you're an individual looking for a PC, even to play the hottest and newest games, you probably don't need and can't afford the newest processors. If you're a government or well-funded university lab, writing your own software, where the fastest results are critical, then you probably can't afford not to stay ahead of the processor curve.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Sure, for most of us, save for games, a 166mhz processor is enough. I use that example because I run my laptop's AMD K6-2 333@166 (vcore 2.2@1.8, I/O 3.3@2.5) and it runs Enlightenment as well as I need, and at that usually at 0% load. For games, there isn't much of a gain from 1.33ghz to 1.4, as stated in the article. However, they don't make mention of people who NEED the full 1.4ghz. People who do rendering and other CPU intensive applications are the people who need to pay the premium. If you were rendring a scene or movie for money, the difference between the 66mhz and $25 could potentially be hours, days, or profits. Nobody buys a 66mhz faster CPU for $25 more thinking how much faster they can compile a kernel, but leading edge has its purposes.
Of course, some people just like to brag, and ego can be worth $25
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
they don't help you achieve the fame and fortune of from getting the faboulous first post.
chips from AMD like the Athlon Extreme OC and the Moron They hit the best price point for me.
Tivo gives the best bang for the buck in video/sound recording and playback.
In computational fluid dynamics, where simulations run days or weeks, non-stop, maxing out the CPU the whole time, 5% faster is a lot. The price tag is actually relatively small when compared to the time savings that you can achieve. They certainly don't make sense for the average consumer, but for some simulations, they're worth every cent.
Hey, Win2k and Word2K aren't exactly flying but a few seconds wait is hardly intolerable.
I think you can divide the world into two categories...people who play 3D games on their computers and people who don't. If you play mostly RTS games like I do (I still enjoy StarCraft) then I think you tend to fall to the bottom of the upgrade cycle.
If you play mostly 3D games...it seems like you get sucked into ever increasing spiral of hardware needs. A new game comes out with a whole new bag of tricks (bump-mapped poly-textured fuzzy-logic nosehair) and you either need a good CPU to enable them or toss out your nVidia GollyGeeWhizForce and get whatever is the latest version.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Unless a CPU is going to be used for high-end gaming with pure performance in mind, buying the high-end monsters is a waste. The money is much better spent on RAM (Especially in a Windows machine.), or faster hard disks.
Even if the machine is to be used for gaming, the money is still better spent on a nice video card with a boatload of RAM, to compensate for the extreme sluggishness of a PC's system bus.
... nice article. I like the $5.50/sec breakdown on the kernel complie. I guess this also relates back to the "its not the size that matters" argument. Sure sure 1.33GHz is probably a better buy. Usually your friends will go "whoa that's fast" with a 1.4GHz instead of "damn boy, you saved $33???? You're the man!" with a 1.33GHz =)
Of course if you buy intel they should say "ahaha you are stupid." The advantage of this scenerio, however, is that they know you broke the bank with an intel proc so they won't hit you up for a 20 spot.
If your decision is between a 1.33Ghz athlon and and 1.4Ghz athlon, and the price difference is only $33, then of course it's worth it to get the 1.4Ghz! Otherwise, every time your friends use the system and say, "Wow, that's really fast! What is it, a 1.4Ghz?" you have to bow your head in shame and say, "No...it's a 1.33Ghz." You might as well throw Windows ME on it! When you're getting the hot rod of systems, it's not about bean-counting, it's about style.
High priced top end CPUs are never worth it performance wise - the only extra value they usually offer are bragging rights. However, if it weren't for the early adopters who spend huge gobs of cash on these badboys, chipmakers wouldn't be able to re-coup their R&D dollars as quickly. It helps keep Moore's Law on the books...
What hard hitting journalism. An amazing display of analytical prowess. I've had better stories rejected.
Of course the top of the line stuff is too expensive. What the hell is there even to discuss with this article?
(At home, I have a Celeron 466 or so on my Linux box. a PIII 600 or so on my 'doze box for games. Big frickin' deal, right? For the price of a processor upgrade, I can be running 1GB of ram in both systems. Through in another 100 bucks, and I've got more disk space than on the file server here at work (which is no slouch for what we do)).
Guess what? Processors don't really matter anymore. Neither does any of that hardware. What in the hell is anybody doing with computers that requires all of this horsepower? Yeah, something will come out. But what, and from whom? Don't we have enough cycles to have incredible voice interfaces? No, because everybody (and by that, I mean Joe Six Pack, aka, my mom) needs M$ bloatware to do anything. It's because Quicken wants to do so much that it takes many megs of RAM to load. Why???
Slashdot latest headline:
Top of the line stuff gives marginal improvements for mega price increase.
Christ, we knew that back when it was a 486-20 mHz vs a 486-25 mHz (and probably earlier). Christ on a crutch, how is this news?
I think I know how stories are picked: each one is printed out. One of the editors grabs a stack and wipes. Whatever story isn't covered in it gets posted.
Excuse me, I must go beat my head against the wall.
(And please, anybody who wants to mod this down, I would much prefer it if you answer my question: why the fuck does this matter?)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Most systems with high-end CPUs have the real bottleneck somewhere else (memory, motherboard, graphics). A lot of systems out there would benefit more from another 128 MB RAM than another 0.2 GHz of CPU speed.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
What a silly article. I think everyone in the computer business (the target of slashdot) already knows that increasing Mhz is for diminishing gains, so a 20% Mhz increase (for a given family of chips) naturally will be =20% price increase can be seen as a price gouge. However such is the cost of being on the bleeding edge: When looking at the cost of the CPU alone the differentials may seem outrageous, however when you're talking about a $2000 computer that 80% more expensive CPU that gives you 20% more performance might represent only 10% more for the cost of the computer.
Bleeble.
The early adopters, who want the absolute best, regardless of cost, will pay a premium.
Those who want to wait a while will get a price break as newer processors come to market.
Those who are on a budget buy the really cheap units that are flooding the channel.
It's called economics. Specifically, a little thing called 'supply and demand'. ;-)
One thing has changed, though : AMD has driven prices down across the board by having a credible alternative to Celeron/PIII. That's called competition. That's also simple Economics.
So, what was the point of this article again? :-)
In other news, Intel just got slapped by analysts for preparing another price war with AMD : this time over P4 market share. Looks like 50% reductions in the P4 1.8Ghz are on the cards for September....they wouldn't be doing that if AMD wasn't around.
-EvilMagnus
The price/performance curve for everything, from cars to planes to tvs to sound systems to cd players to clothes to anything else, follows about the same curve... the more high-end you get, the more what you get vs. what you pay follows the law of diminishing returns. This is especially true for computer hardware, where this year's high end piece of hardware is next year's bottom rung of the ladder. Anyone who thinks that this is worth researching (never mind being a lead story) needs a serious whack with the clue stick.
Of course this is subjective. What is it worth, to whom and why? It is worth an extra $33 dollars to have bragging rights? Perhaps. Is it worth and extra $33 to browse the web? Almost certainly not, an bottom of the line emachine is more than enough.
It is nice to see that the old philosopy of buying the second fastest processor does have its merits in relationship to the cost/performance ratio though.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
First frag!
I look to buy the one just below the major increase
in slope. there is ALWAYS this trend.
For example, the following is a highly viable price breakdown:
MHz - - - - price
------------------
900 - - - - -$65
1000 - - - - $85
1200 - - - - $100
1333 - - - - $130
1400 - - - - $175
It only makes sense that if you dont have unlimited
budget or a legitimate need for raw cpu performance
to buy the 1333 in the above graph.
just my $0.02
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I have an Athlon 800 (had it for quite a while now), play all the newest high-end games, and I have to tell you, for an industry that's about to pump out 2GHz processors, I haven't found even the slightest need to upgrade.
If I was to buy a new machine now, I wouldn't touch anything above 1GHz... I'd go, preferably, for slower with multiprocessors....
Even games, which are always bleeding edge (although that ruins the gameplay, but I digress) aren't running with the top processors. I say buy what you can afford - 1 level.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Once upon a time, the CPU was a hell of a lot more expensive than it is today. Before Intel had competition (and for a little while after AMD joined the party), their highest-end chip would cost about $800 and change, the next one down would cost around $600, and then the prices would drop off quickly. Back then, it made a lot of sense to buy a chip a rev or two behind the top of the line - the performance wasn't much different and you saved huge bucks.
Nowadays it really doesn't matter that much. Intel chips are still more expensive, but nowhere near what they used to be, and there's only a tiny difference between the top-end Athlon and the next one down - and even the fastest AMD chip is less than $200. It's just so cheap now as to not make a difference anymore on the desktop.
Intel still gets a premium for the Xeon processors, since AMD isn't really competing fully in the MP apace yet, but those will fall, too, over the next year or so as AMD competes in the server market.
So if I'm building a system today, I'd buy the top-end AMD processor and build a nice system around it. But by the time all the parts arrive, there'll be a newer, faster, and cheaper processor out anyway, and I'll just have to cry over it. Such is the way of Moore's Law.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Of course they are!
Well in 3-6 months anyways...
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
see above
You're using her as bait, Master!
Most people have... like, say, the title of the new Star Wars film. Even if people didn't like Phantom Menace, there's nothing more "News for Nerds" than that. Not that I'm bitter.
Oh, well... -1 Offtopic, here I come...
This was a reply to another post!!! Don't tell me I stumbled onto Taco's banjo site (hope for his sake "banjo" isn't code for beta testing IIS on XP) by mistake!
You're using her as bait, Master!
The last one was not working reliably, so we shipped it to the dealer. He couldn't reproduce the fault (not surprisingly, it had hardware related crashes only about every week / 2 weeks). So, we got it back. It took ages to stumble on something where the fault was reproducable and the dealer could find out what part of the coputer was defective and replace it.
IMHO, using a computer for a long time, even when it starts getting slow (compared to up-to-date machines) saves time. I had a PPro 200 for maybe 4 years. Even if it costs a few seconds here and 10 seconds there, that is not much compared against the days or even weeks to get a new machine. Of course, this may look a bit different in large companies where you have someone order and test the computer, install stuff etc.
For a buisiness, these times are much more important than a few hundred dollars.
Here is an easy to understand comparison to show cheaper is better.
Say I had $10,000 to spend on cpus; a 1.3ghz athlon costs $133 and a 1.4ghz athlon costs $166.
With $10,000 i could buy 75 1.3ghz cpus, or 60 1.4ghz cpus. That's a total of 97.5ghz @ 1.3ghz, or 84ghz @ 1.4 ghz. This proves that it would be better value to build a cluster out of slightly slower cpus.
The breakeven point (where you get the same ghz for the same price) is at $670, where you could buy 5 1.3ghz cpus for a total of 6.5ghz, or 4 1.4ghz cpus for a total of 5.6 ghz.
"A 22-inch monitor with 20-inch viewable costs $685, while a 21-inch with a 19.9-inch viewable screen costs $415. In that case, you are paying a company 65% more money, for 0.5% more screen. Somehow, that doesn't seem "cost effective" to me."
You are paying for screen area.
Granted a 25% increase in price for a 5% increase in speed sounds ridiculous... and yes a whole farm of 1.33Ghz will be better than one lonely 1.4Ghz... but you're making up 6 seconds on a 4 minute compile so a minute and a half in an hour... now think of a whole farm of 1.4Ghz rendering Toy story and how much time you save. The other thing I wanted to get into was the monitor debate... granted it may not be worth it to you to have a screen that has one inch more viewable area... but an inch is quite noticeable(hold the smirks)... and it is altogether different from the processor debate... monitors take quite a lot longer to go obsolete... heck I'm still using my good ol' 17" monitor from 5 years ago, meanwhile processors are obsolete within 18 months.
About the only use for high-end processors on Intel boxes (other than games) are high-end databases (like Oracle). And, consqeuently, most people would never run something like Oracle on an Intel box. It's usually on an HP box (HP-UX) or Sun. Ever web servers (even heavily hit ones) are NOT CPU intensive at all. I've got 20,000 pageviews a day going just fine a PII 233. It's the databases that are fat, and nobody in their right mind would run an enterprise-class database on a PC that you can buy at Wal-Mart.
Besides, who wants to buy a barely tested top of the line CPU only to learn later that the thing has thermal problems?
The PoV-ray benchmark is kinda f*cked up... Of course they aren't gonna notice a large difference with such a simple scene with such simple settings and such a low resolution. For a better measurement of difference, choose several different scenes of varying complexity(Some with lots of surfaces, some with lots of textures, some with complicated lights... You get the picture), run them at a high resolution. Oh, and define a baseline for the benchmark also. One test that is pretty decent is the dresser.rib scene that is included with BMRT. Simple geometry, but highly complex radiosity solution. Takes a while to render, and gives more sense of the difference between chips.
Wouldn't that be nice.
Of course not. The tests prove the obvious, but this is not the point. People pay for the ego lift in have the biggest, baddest etc. These are people for which price is not an issue.
I had to do a presentation in tech comm, and I did it on upgrading computers. I pointed out how there is a price/performance curve, and the curve has a sweet spot after which you pay exhorbinant amounts for the extra performance. Anyway, I'm mentioning this for two reasons:
:)
1) My presentation was pretty crappy, actually.
2) It had a lot more information and useful advice than this article.
Oh, and I had better visual aids.
The enemies of Democracy are
Adding memory gets you more bang for the buck than havving a processesor that's maginally better than it's overpiced cousin. Additionally, having an IDE hard-drive that has a spindle speed of 7200 Rpm adds a vast improvment in responsivness than a slower 5400 Rpm drive - considering the usuall $30 differance.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
You think this doesn't happen in other industries as well? For instance, you think a Lexus ES 300 is any better than a Camry XLE as far as performance? Okay the ES300 is 210hp and the Camry is 194hp... that's a 8% increase in performance yet it has a 20% markup for your wood trim and extra 2 choices in exterior colors! The same can be said about ANY higher end car compared to the lower end model.
This is what happens when you have a capitalist government. The thing is, the companies know they can get a high price for the latest and greatest because there will be a certain percentage of us who will pay that price. Then, when prices "slump" a little, they will release a new chip that's faster and lower the price of the other chip. So now the "general public" gets those older processors at cheaper prices and that same group of gurus/morons will go out and buy the newest and greatest again. And the cycle of life continues...
One reason a company makes the premium product higher is because they need to recover R&D on that product, however I don't see why this is in the chip market. I honestly feel that Intel and AMD "milk" the market for these gurus/morons knowing they will always buy the greatest. So they release a 1.0ghz and these people get that, then they release 1.1ghz and they get this one, etc etc. Although AMD has the 1.0 and 1.1 developed at the same time, they strategically release the products to the general pulic to maximize their profits. Of course, again, this isn't anything new... but it's painfully obvious.
There is another reason to buy the high-end CPU that I haven't seen listed. If you are going to own the computer for 3+ years you'll get more milage out of that faster CPU....typing this on a three year old 233.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
sure there were some deals that were obviously bad ($600 for extra .1" of CRT) but when you talk about $33 for a faster CPU, it's one thing if you buy just the CPU, but if you are spending $1500 on a complete system, $33 isn't such a big deal.
1000 - - - - $85
1200 - - - - $100
1333 - - - - $130
1400 - - - - $175
Shit, but the 1.4GHz man. That's cheap! I recall my Pentium 200 MMX costing $600 back in 96. CPUs have never been cheaper than they are now. And thank god for competition. Even Intel is about to slash CPU prices thanks to AMD. Admit it, without AMD, Intel would still be selling "top of the line" 700 MHz CPUs for $600.
Performance comparisons are dead. The difference between 1.0 and 1.4 GHz Athlons is only ~$75, and lesser speeds aren't much cheaper. With so little price difference between the high end and low end, it's hard to pass on (arguably) the fastest PC processor in the world just to save seventy five bucks. I sure has hell wouldn't.
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
Newsforge about something you may want to argue about with your boss or significant other.
Like I need anything else to arge with my significant other about. We fight enough about other things, but she just doesn't understand. Oh well.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
...and as a result are not buying the latest and greatest. Just ask Intel today. :)
$0.02 (CDN)
Typing this on a blazing fast P5-233, and this is the _fast_ machine in my office.
A programmer's time, for example, is worth a lot of money and it might be possible to justify purchasing the better CPU if it saves enough of that programmer's time over the course of the lifetime of that CPU. From the standpoint of say, an employer: people are expensive, equipment is cheap! Having said that, I'm personally always buying a step or two behind the cutting edge because that's where I think the sweet spot is in terms of CPU pricing. From my standpoint: computers are expensive, I am cheap!
If you're just some script-kitty hacking on daddys 'puter then you don't need real performance.
If you are running a real business and performance means getting more work done, then the cost is cheap. Faster servers can handle more users or I/O requests. Also equipment goes out-of-date so quickly that, buying less than the best, means you'll just have to replace it sooner.
Tons of RAM and bigger HD/screen instead of faster chips. 800mhz gets you buy quite nicely. I have no problem using this 3 year old 450mhz box. We give our CAD guys 1.4's, but they need them.
Just check the PIII, at around 750-800mhz they started using a different die size. This reduced power/heat and increased electical reliability. True, there may be logic/design problems when the circuitry gets changed around but mechanically newer chips are generally better.
In 5 years computers will be able to do what you wanted them to 5 years ago.
Are High-End CPUs Worth The Money?
No.
Now, for a better question. Are high-end motherboards worth the money?
Every penny.
In the many, many computers I have built and fixed (I don't know how many hundred..I never counted), one thing became crystal clear: don't skimp out with a cheap motherboard in order to buy that next higher-up processor.
Motherboards are not created equal, not even close. In fact, from my experience, they are either the cause of good reliability or they are to blame for crashes and instability (in terms of hardware). Buying a good chipset put together by a good hardware manufacturer (Abit, Asus, etc.) is key to building a reliable system that will last several years of hard use.
A good review site for motherboards will describe not only the features it has but how those features are laid out. A well designed motherboard has shorter interconnects and well placed components. Also, a motherboard should have a nice array of capacitors that keep maintain the electricity going to the processor. There should be ample room around the processor to stick the larger and better cooling cpu fans (another things never to skimp on). A heatsink and fan on some of the chipsets helps to improve reliability.
But from my experience the best part about going with a better name is a reduced likelihood of getting a dud. I ordered a cheap Soyo motherboard to fit a K6-2 450 Mhz processor I had sitting around - I wanted a cheap computer. The first one was a dud, the second one was a dud. I ended up going with a different manufacturer and getting a 750 Mhz Duron. I had previously purchased an Abit with a Duron 700 Mhz and had no problems whatsoever. You pay about $20-$30 more for the motherboard, but it's definately worth every penny.
In short, don't bother spending that extra $30 to get however many more Mhz, or even to get the difference between a PIII and Celeron or Athlon and Duron. More important than speed in most systems in reliability, and for that you should plunk your spare dollars into the motherboard and a decent heat sink/fan.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
It's rather silly in a case like this to look at just the price of the processor, disk, etc. You have to look at the price of the whole system and decide what kind of tradeoffs you need to make. Is $33 worth it for a 5% increase in processor speed? That depends on how much the whole system costs; if the system costs more than about $700 then the $33 is less than 5% of the system price and it may be worth it to pay more for the extra speed.
The case when this really kicks in is with expensive proprietary software licenses. I've seen various programs that I might want to use in my work that have license fees in the thousands of dollars. In some cases that's the price per box, but in others there's actually a per-CPU license. If you're running somthing that costs $5000 per CPU, it makes sense to spend some fairly serious cash on getting the fastest possible processor.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
For my money, lots of memory and a fast hard drive are worth way more than a fast CPU.
are those who play 3D games and those who have their own starships.
In 5 years computers will be able to do what you wanted them to 5 years ago.
Obviously, the answer here, for the majority of users is "No, it's not worth it."
Having said that, a six second difference compiling a kernel may well be worth it for a firm that does kernel-sized complies frequently. Say you're paying a developer who does such stuff $2K/week, and this thing saves six seconds five times a day. Suddenly, you're talking about 2.5 minutes per week, which works out to $2/week.
So, 16.5 weeks later, the high end processor pays for itself. Just a thought.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
Here is some good advice. When you go and buy a computer do two things:
- Make a budget you can afford
- Spend every penny of it and buy the best system you can.
When you do that, you assure the following:Then, of course, there's always the option of simply overclocking your hardware. Put the motherboard in an insulated styrofoam case, flood it with mineral oil (making sure there's no air or water droplets remaining), and then hook up to a decent-sized compressor. You should be able to get the system cooled reliably to very low temperatures.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"For performance comparison purposes, similarly configured systems are used, where only the memory type (PC133), the processor type and the motherboard are different."
Now I don't know about the rest of you but that strikes me as some pretty important stuff to be different. I mean besides harddrive speed, is anything else as important has the speed of your ram, your bus (motherboard) and the type of your processor(cache, instruction sets)? I'm curious as to what his exact configurations were (they're not mentioned),and if he used the exact same configurations relative to the system. (Such as using exactly 256 of the same relative speed memory, etc).
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
The high-end processors are a waste of money. There is nothing they can do that lower end can do. The speed difference in nilch.
The reason for this pricing is to maximize the profit reaped from the "money is no object" buyer - the one who will say "I want the fastest chip you can put in a PC" and not worry about how much it costs. You'd be surprised how many of them there are, and how much of a chip manufacturer's profit comes from these buyers. These are the same people that spend $400 on a video card to get them 50% more frames per second than a $150 card. Again, you'd be surprised how many of them there are.
So basically, a 1.4GHz will only be a few dollars more than the next step down, and so on, until you hit the next tier where it drops significantly.
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
I cost my employer a little more than 4 cents
a second to employ. So, if a CPU costs 40
dollars more, a mere 17 minutes saving to my
time pays for the difference.
C//
Just remember Tuna's Rule: All computers work at the same speed when they are turned off.
That the best values are found in the Duron CPU followed by the Athlon and then the Celeron. Frankly, I doubt that 85% of the people out there that use computers need anything faster then a 400 Mhz CPU. I mean for email, doing a spreadsheet, word processing or web browsing this is just fine. Sure, for gaming, graphics, etc. a faster CPU might be needed, but this is a minority of computer users. Finally, there's the people who just 'have to have' the latest, greatest, fastest CPU. I see them like people who buy sports cars that can go 150 M.P.H. then wind up driving at 75 or slower.
>Say you're paying a developer who does such stuff $2K/week...
:)
Of course you're right; but you've actually understated your case. For example, it's typical for a software developer to COST THE COMPANY from anywhere from 1.5 to 3 times their annual salary in terms of overhead, hidden expenses, bonuses, 401K, social security, medical, vacation, sick
leave, holiday. and so on. So that developer who is being paid $2K/week may very well cost the company a full $5K a week to employ. A quarter-million per year total cost of employment for a software developer isn't unusual at all.
Even for expensive processors, it doesn't take long at all to recoup the additional hardware investment in productivity gains. Assuming that your developer isn't goofing off on Slashdot, of course.
C//
no duh... but that had nothing to do with the article. The article was about how almost equal fast processors can have a wide price gap.
High price? What are these people talking about? My 1.4 ghz athlon 266bus cost me about 190$ USD. Compare that to same time last year, when the top end AMD processor was 400$, and the top end Intel processor was 600$. Processors expensive? Maybe if you live in a trailer park.
One reason a company makes the premium product higher is because they need to recover R&D on that product, however I don't see why this is in the chip market. I honestly feel that Intel and AMD "milk" the market for these gurus/morons knowing they will always buy the greatest. So they release a 1.0ghz and these people get that, then they release 1.1ghz and they get this one, etc etc. Although AMD has the 1.0 and 1.1 developed at the same time, they strategically release the products to the general pulic to maximize their profits.
It's quite possible that they _need_ to do this continuously to recover the R&D costs and other overhead costs.
Chip cad/simulation tools cost $0.5M-$1M per _seat_. Prototyping runs cost $300k+ each. The test gear and special-purpose simulation rigs aren't cheap either. A fabrication plant costs over $1B to build, which must be amortised over all chips manufactured there until the next major fab overhaul (typically only 2-3 years away).
Chip design and manufacture is _expensive_. I seriously doubt that they're gouging as badly as you seem to feel they are.
(In case you're wondering how smaller low-end x86-makers survive - they outsource their fabrication, which saves on amortized fab costs and capital at the cost of not having a fab process optimized for their chips (taking a performance hit). If they're wise, they'd also design their chips to either be more robust, or more easily tested, or both, to cut down on simulation/testing costs at the expense of performance.)
1. A new motherboard, capable of faster bus access and with more RAM, might be worth it. But just because it can take a 1.0 to 1.4 GHz chip, doesn't mean you should put a 1.4 in it. Consider buying a 1.0 and replacing it with a 1.4 when you buy more RAM.
2. New RAM is almost always a better choice than a new CPU. Consider having your CPU be "ancient" - buy a 1.2 GHz instead of a 1.4 GHz, and spend the difference on more RAM.
3. Faster disk access and even multiple disks (for striping or redundant access) might be more cost-effective than a better CPU.
4. If you are a graphics professional, game designer, or are already maxing your systems out on RAM and hard disk, then you should consider buying a new, faster CPU. Otherwise, don't. Or, even better, take the same money you're spending on Intel chips and buy AMD or Transmeta - twice the bang for the buck.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
One of the things I like to do is compress mpeg2 video down to mpeg1, both from a digital camcorder and/or dvd's I have to watch on a plane (my laptop is too old to have a dvd drive and doesn't have enough cpu to watch dvd's anyhow).
Compressing 3 hours of video and adding subtitles on my dual p3-450 was 18-20 hours.
On a 1.4ghz athlon it's about 6.5 hours.
YOW...definately worth the upgrade!
My K6-3 337 + EDO ram which costs much more than a 6x faster Duron 800 w/DDR ram is still plenty fast for me.
obviously I'm not running windows 2000.
building a new system? always get a the low end of the curve CPU (currently a 1ghz athlon) and a high end motherboard plus lots of ram, you'll be much happier with everything but your dnetc bechmarks.
if that cpu isn't long enough for you you can upgrade it later to a 1.5ghz model when those are old and cheap one year from now.
.. I'd say high end CPU's are certainly worth the money. The company isn't "wasting money" for people down time - I can get back to coding instead of waiting for the compiler.
Thanks!
One of the best laughs I've had in a while came from your "One of the editors grabs a stack and wipes" line.
Most of my work these days is in databases. It is MUCH more cost effective o spend he extra money on the fastest memory, memory buses, disks and controllers you can get. Most Intel type cpus spend an inordinate amount of time waiting on IO. Faster IO means a faster system. In addition, on the low end Wintel systems, SMP is a joke. I have yet to see a system running with more than ~75% utilization per chip. In addition, in database systems, Oracle and MS both charge by number of processors and MHZ. So going single processor with a slower chip can save a considerable amount of licensing costs!
For a DB system the rule is 'fast disks, fast memory, fast buses, fast controlers', for heavy network traffic (lots of web hits), get the fastest networking you can afford.
And remember, MHZ is only part of the equation on processors. If you really need (and few people really do) a fast chip, good and large L1 cache is a bigger win than raw MHZ.
My $.02
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If the processor is the thing you wait for then you need the fastest processor you can.
;-)]
I personally wait for my internet connection most; secondly I wait for the system to boot up/shutdown (that's a lot more to do with disk throughput); third I wait for my graphics card (I've got an ancient Matrox G400); last of all I wait for my processor.
And that's the order I would upgrade for performance, given the choice. But if I spent all day burning processor cycles doing some compute intensive operation, then I'd upgrade my processor.
The RAM speed doesn't make a lot of difference, only a couple of percent. Not having enough RAM can have a much bigger effect- I recently added 256 meg- and the system is now noticeably faster- I was using up my RAM and the system was swapping stuff out. (RAMs at 20c/Megabyte it's a good time to buy. [Also, Quake III was able to use the extra RAM and gives a higher framerate
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Plus, the extra .07 Ghz really helps your dating profile.
If you use the machine for actual work which is CPU bound (simulations, rendering) just calculate what your time is worth and how much you will save with the faster model. if number of hours saved over the lifetime of the machine multiplied by the cost of those hours is greater than the price difference the go for the faster one.
You will find that it will take a very high price difference, not to justify a faster processor in such cases.
However most people do not run anything CPU bound so they should find a cheaper model.
Where I work we generally buy the fastest (dual) CPU workstations we can get simply because it makes finacial sense. We constantly run simulations or calculation heavy software. It only takes a saving of 1 designer day over the lifetime of a machine to justify a $100 price increase.
This is pretty hilarious, considering how far more gruesome the price performance curves were just a few years ago.
max
If you're paying through the nose for per CPU licenses then it often makes sense to get the fastest processor your application runs on.
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
With the newest technology, you're the pilgrim taking the arrows to see what quality control may have let slip (early adopter syndrome). P60's that double as hotplates, Zip dirives with the "click of death" come to mind. If you buy the cheapest available (most often the oldest), you run the risk of technical relevance and quality of support (why is it so darn cheap again?). I like sega, but if you don't own a Dreamcast, do you want to sink $49 into one at Xmas "just 'cause" when that could be a Playstation 2 or GameCube game?
I don't think Joe Average consumer goes wrong with any technology buying somewhere to either side (or on) the middle of the road. Taking the leading edge or the trailing edge is the sure way to get taken as a consumer.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
With Intel chips the desparity seems to be greater for instance. Spending a whopping 33$ more for top of the line is worth it to me because its not so big a deal. However if it was like 75 or 100 dollars I'd have to think about it more.
http://www.hamiltonite.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/raytra cing/POVMacros.html
Are you saying that your employer pays you 4 cents a second? Or are you a contractor hired out by your true employer to your customer?
Regardless, 4 cents a second (times 3600 seconds per hour times 2000 work hours per year) adds up to about $288k per year. At that rate, I'd sure as hell hope your employer was maximizing every second of your productivity.
That'd be a good justification for installing workstations in the bathrooms. Or maybe toilets at the cubicles.
I saved money on the cpu to spend on memory, and hard drive. Which is used more than raw cpu power. Fact is that most people could get by pretty well with 600Mhz cpus. Even most gamers would be fine with 600Mhz systems. Unless you are doing some serious heavy duty gaming, or super intense graphics or scientific number cruntching then 600 is plenty fast. (or some type of emulation)
Only 'flamers' flame!
.....that there is 6 times as many posts here on /. than on the original Newsforge article.....
Does that mean /. is running the 1.4Ghz and Newsforge the 1.33?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I've been a bit nervous for quite a while about the name 'NewsForge' for a news site.
News isn't forged by journalists. Obviously it is meant to parallel the 'SourceForge' website. Unfortunately, it just doesn't make sense as the name for a credible news source.
I'm sure I'm not the only person to think of this.
Yes, this could be construed as off topic.
This is what happens when you have a capitalist government.
Welllll, I don't think it's an evil cabal of government officials and captains of industry hoodwinking the poor consumer. While this does happen in other cases, there's a much simpler explanation for this.
Costs do not scale linearly. At the low end the fixed costs are dominant, which is why you don't see 2GB hard disks anymore -- it's just as cheap to make them 10GB or more. Conversely at the high end of cost or performance the marginal cost of just a bit more performance or capacity is great.
Like the guy who mated the helicopter jet engine to a motorcycle frame. The amazing thing is that it isn't that much faster than a high end conventional motorcycle, something like 210mph vs. 190s. But building a bike that will go 210 vs. 190 is a much bigger leap than going from 90 to 110, even if it is smaller in relative terms.
I expect that if you're aiming to produce a 1.4Ghz processor, a lot fewer will check out OK at the rated speed than if you are aiming for a 1.33 GHz processor, all other things being equal.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Cheapo: I'm not going to buy the Puttalong 5 when the Sell2moron Now with 3D-day costs $30 less.
Leetist: But they're both over $150, you might as well spend the extra $30.
Cheapo: I don't see the point. It's not worth the money.
Leetist: It's just $30.
Cheapo: It's $30 I don't have.
...
I'm sorry but my view on the situation is that if the decision of a CPU comes down to $30 -- perhaps you don't need to be into computers in the first place. Standard upkeep on a computer can sometimes cost more than that. You never know when a hard drive will go out, when you'll want to buy the newest game or accessory, and lord forbid something like your monitor ever fry.
Computers are expensive. Sometimes you have to accept the fact that you will be forking over a lot of cash. That doesn't mean get rediculous and spend $800 when you can spend $200, not at all. But some people act like they've done something wonderful by saving themselves $100 on the total cost of the computer by cutting costs "Here and There", then in the end they wonder why their system is cheap overall.
When you don't have the the fastest CPU, you don't have a whole lot of memory, when you don't have a huge hard drive, you don't have the best sound card, and your graphics card is fairly low grade, your whole system is usable at best, total rubbish at worst.
Don't complain when the money you saved costs you performance (or stability, or features, etc.)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Now that my CPU sprints along at 1.4GHz, I can't say my 5400 RPM IDE, 128MB box is CPU-bound!
The subject sortof sums up how I buy motherboard/processors/etc. for my home systems. When Intel (or whoever) brings out their latest chip, I find great deals on the previous generation chips. I buy those chips at the higher clock speeds and then, lately, I'll use them in an SMP configuration. By the time I feel a need to upgrade again my systems are about 4-5 years old. However, I might just break with tradition soon and jump into a dual-Athlon board. Even doing that, it looks like I'd still save money over the latest Intel offering.
And since Windows only gets used for (infrequent) games, why would I want or need to have the latest and greatest Intel space heater sitting under my desk?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
... it's the best value. I bought dual P2-450's 18 mos ago. They were the best value I could then. They were already old CPUs. I'm still using the machine today with 384MB of RAM. I only wish I had more speed on a small number of occasions (I don't get to play Quake 3 as much as I would like!). I have a good graphics card, lots of memory and fast hard drives, and I rarely feel like I need one of these new fangled 1.5GHz CPUs. I'm thinking of upgrading, and it looks like P3-850's would be best fit for the motherboard. I have a Tyan Tiger 100 (1832DL), and I'm hoping that Tyan releases a BIOS update so that I can run the P3-1GHz 100MHz FSB... but they will need to drop another $100 before I go there (probably about the time P4-2GHz comes along).
It feels good and you profit from it. There's a problem here?
It's not a question of price/performance, it's of price/happiness. If the dollars make you happier, then keep them; if the megahertz makes you happier, then buy them!
-B
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
I've got to piss myself laughing at the snot nosed kids commenting on how cool their 1.4Ghz Athlon or whatever is..come on guys.. if you include 'high-end cpus' in the title, then at least talk about REAL machines. Doesn't everyone use Alphas in Cray machines?:-) Even better, a nice MTA (can't wait to get near an MTA-2) *cs grad student hacking on a cray*
Max Payne
I've also had good luck with two MediaGX boards, wow! Like the k6-2s, low power consumption and low cost. Stick em in an old AT case with a 125 watt power supply and roll on. They even ran Win 95 until the registries blew up. One is now a fine internal FTP server (red hat), the other a second gateway (Debian) for the cable modem.
Yes, I have too many PCs. That's what happens when you don't have to throw them out because they are "obsolete", unstable or broken and you don't want to sell them. Next money is for memory.
A quit fan is worth it's $5 weight in nerve endings. Ohhh, ball bearings, nice. There indeed , I've seen a quality difference.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So how much is it costing your employer for you to be on /. during working hours?
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Well, I do quite a bit of development, so a speed up in compilation times is always appreciated. Plus, I like being able to play games on my box. And seeing as how it only cost me $130 for a 1.33GHz AMD Athlon...how the heck can I pass that up? I built a 1.33 Athlon system, 256MB DDR RAM, UDMA 100/7200rpm 30GB drive for under $600...granted I already had a burner and a GeForce 2 card, but still... These questions are kind of useless, cause it's going to be different for every person. If you really want to play games, or you do some intensive stuff like lots of compilation, or database access, etc, then more horsepower is certainly useful. BUT you've also got to make that decision in comparison to what you've got. If you have a 1 GHz system, a 1.2 or 1.33 isn't going to be that much of a difference, you're bottleneck will more likely be that of your hard drive and RAM. But if you're like me, going from a P2 400...ya, that 1.33AMD is quite nice.
http://dark-techno.org
This is are not being the flamebait! This is are being TRUTH!!! FUCK YOU ALL!!!!!! ;-))))) loloralra
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Please, I are begging you! To save Dmitry from teh jail!
A long-standing guideline for purchasing CPU's has been to buy 1 notch below the absolute latest in technology. That way, you can get about 80% of the performance that the newest product offers, at about 60% of the cost. That way, you can get the best price-to-performance ratio, and have some money left over for other computer components. The "cutting edge" technology almost always has at least a 20% price premium attached to it, and should be avoided whenever possible. Save that money and spend it on something else, like more memory or storage.
I run a P3-500 with 512 megs of RAM. That's enough to do anything I want to do. I regularly run Photoshop, 3 editors, 2-3 development environments, a database, some middleware, 2 web servers, a TV tuner, a couple SSH terminals, VMWare, Outlook and a dozen browser windows.
Most of the time, the bottleneck on my box is the ATA/33 path to my cheap IDE disks. I would spend the money on a faster disk (IDE RAID or SCSI) before I upgraded the CPU.
The most CPU intensive stuff I run is audio/video compression, Photoshop filters on big images, VMWare, and stupid f-ing bloated MS Internet Explorer. The video compression is the only thing that makes me want a processor running over 1gig. VMWare and some of the other stuff makes me wish for a dual processor board.
everyone knows that you need an Athlon 1.4GHz processor if you want to be 1337. Of course, 3v3ry0n3 isn't 1337 l1ke m3.
It's a lot easier that way. If you know the right bars to look in, you can shop around and get a pretty good deal right now. Of course, if your SO comes with a lifelong service contract, this is a WAY toi expensive upgrade path.
I really don't care how fast my computer is any more (and I'm a software engineer, so I do a lot of builds). I care a lot more that the box does its job with a high MTBF (mean time between failures). And I don't like to replace the box very often. I prefer a slower CPU with a smaller, quieter fan, and slower disk drives that make less noise.
I just built myself a P4 1.7 GHZ box, my dick feels bigger but i still am waiting for the render. So far bragging rights don't justify the price
Why pay top dollar? Bring in the clones. Oh, wait, do I have the right story?
Useful benchmarks are performed using real-world software (such as Quake or office apps), which utilizes every component of the system (such as memory, video card, and hard disk). Comparing price/performance of the CPU is not very useful since you don't use a CPU by itself. It is only a part (albeit the most significant part) in a system.
For example, excluding the CPU you might spend $500 on the other PC components. Adding an Athlon 1.33 Ghz would add up to $633. Using an Athlon 1.4 Ghz would give you $666. That is a difference of less than 5%. The difference in real-world benchmarks would probably be less than the difference in processor speeds because other components also impact performance but this price/performance is more useable than simply rating the price/performance of the CPU.
The Athlon/Duron line is the only CPU series since the days of the 486DX line that I could upgrade my CPU to double the processing power without changing my motherboard, since both the low end and the high end are still available and supported by current motherboards. Unlike the Pentium line wherein you had to change motherboards to support an upgrade to 166-200 Mhz from a 90 Mhz Pentium, a Celeron 366 from a Pentium 200, a Celeron 600 from a Celeron 366. By the time 166 Mhz Pentiums, Celeron 600s became cheap and motherboards that supported them were available, you could no longer find a 90 Mhz or a Celeron 366 for retail. For the entire Pentium line, Intel has never let me upgrade the CPU without needing to change the motherboard.
I was planning to build an Athlon PC with a 1.2 Ghz CPU worth around $110 but I've decided to get a Duron 700 CPU instead worth around $30 despite the nearly 100% difference in performance since with the $80 I save now, I can upgrade later to a faster CPU later on, maybe even a 1.6 Ghz CPU.
But I really, really wanted to get that 1.2 Ghz Athlon inspite of the huge price difference. If I hadn't stopped and thought it out carefully, I would have bought it instead of the Duron 700.
Interesting article, but I have to take issue with the monitor analogy. First off, the math is wrong: Going from a 19.9-inch to 20.0-inch viewable area is 1% more screen, not the stated 0.5%. (Screen area scales as the square of the diagonal; a 20-inch screen is four times the size of a 10-inch screen, not two times.) Second, chances are good that these two monitors have differences besides the extra 0.1 inch of viewable diagonal. The more expensive monitor could well have higher refresh rates, better color-calibration options, or other features that drive up cost.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
And I believe almost everyone has *some* material thing they love having/doing which they're willing to spend more than other things. For some, the best pot. Others? Furniture, clothing, expensive travel/houses, music eq,sports cars/SUVs, etc.etc.
Some people don't believe they should spend a lot of money on things they don't care about. The people who are passionate about it. However, for material objects that push your buttons, why not give yourself the best you can afford?
"First off, the math is wrong: Going from a 19.9-inch to 20.0-inch viewable area is 1% more screen, not the stated 0.5%."
I noticed that when I read the article as well,
but your math is also wrong. (100.5)^2 equals
101.025, not 101. So it's 1.025% more screen,
which is a larger error than you had claimed.
I can't help but wonder if your obvious bias is
due to a close blood relationship with the author
of the article, or if you own some stock in a
company that makes monitors with a small viewing
area. Well, whatever your reason for underreporting
the error, it's unsavory, unwholesome, and the
American people won't stand for it!
When you start working and paying far a car, paying your own rent, paying for health insurance $166 is nothing.
Unless you believe in conspiracy theories of course.