Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
I have to agree with you on this one.
But to stay on-topic, when I bought my A-Bit BP6 a couple years ago (jurassic computing, I know), I got it with two 366s, considering their value was good and the price was more or less middle-of-the road. It didn't take all that long of a period, maybe 6 months or so before I was able to get a couple of 550s to replace them...all without breaking the bank.
So getting the faster chip isn't worth it initially, but the motherboard that handles it is worth every cent. After all, prices will fall as the newer, better, faster hardware items come out.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
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
Typing this on a blazing fast P5-233, and this is the _fast_ machine in my office.
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.
This is what happens when you have a capitalist government. A capitalist government? We've never seen one of those, that's for sure. This is what happens when you have a (more-or-less) capitalist economic system. Poor people get a lot for a bargain. Rich people pay a premium to feel special. The premium that the rich people pay help companies charge less for the lower-line products that poor people buy. Everybody's happy. Rich people aren't forced to contribute (except by their egos) and no political bureaucracy dissipates the money being redistributed because it makes economic sense for companies to act this way. Hurray for capitalism! Thanks for pointing this out!
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
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//
True regarding the performance of the two cars. But if you drive a Lexus people think you're successful. If you drive a Toyota you're just another schmuck. The problem with your arguement is that you are disregarding how the two separate brands are percieved. Automakers do this with countless models. Honda/Acura Accord/TL, Nissan/Infiniti Pattfinder/QX4, Toyota/Lexus Land Cruiser/RX430. If you're worried about bang for the buck performance on a car, go out and get a camaro (ick).
Anyway, your car comparison doesn't fly when put in the same context of the article. If you buy a 1.4 Athlon vs a 1.33 Athlon you'll end up saving about 6 second of kernal compile time (read the article). If you buy a Lexus instead of a Toyota you're buying status.
Pete
The sole purpose of the Internet is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children.
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+
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.