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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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
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.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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'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;
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
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.
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 $33, then of course it's worth it to get the 1.4Ghz! Otherwise, every time your friends use the system and say, "Wow, that's really fast! What is it, a 1.4Ghz?" you have to bow your head in shame and say, "No...it's a 1.33Ghz." You might as well throw Windows ME on it! When you're getting the hot rod of systems, it's not about bean-counting, it's about style.
What hard hitting journalism. An amazing display of analytical prowess. I've had better stories rejected.
Of course the top of the line stuff is too expensive. What the hell is there even to discuss with this article?
(At home, I have a Celeron 466 or so on my Linux box. a PIII 600 or so on my 'doze box for games. Big frickin' deal, right? For the price of a processor upgrade, I can be running 1GB of ram in both systems. Through in another 100 bucks, and I've got more disk space than on the file server here at work (which is no slouch for what we do)).
Guess what? Processors don't really matter anymore. Neither does any of that hardware. What in the hell is anybody doing with computers that requires all of this horsepower? Yeah, something will come out. But what, and from whom? Don't we have enough cycles to have incredible voice interfaces? No, because everybody (and by that, I mean Joe Six Pack, aka, my mom) needs M$ 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.
But in this case, clock speed is a valid comparison. The article specifically compares products within a family (top two PIII's to each other, top two PIV's to each other, etc)
We are not talking about a difference between PI and PI-mmx. Heck, it's not even as different as the two types of PI's.
The reliability, speed, etc. of the higher clock speed chips is actually more suspect. Remember that the 1.33 and the 1.4 chips are coming out of the same fab. But one is a little faster than the other, so they call it a PIV.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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."
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.
Wouldn't that be nice.
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.
:) hahaha.
Spoken like a true salesman!
Seriously though, for the bulk of us, the P2-450's are *still* awesome machines. Plays all the games, displays all the graphics and all that. Lately, I simply don't crave more power. Everything works fine for me. (Is this a sign of age?)
Are you on crack? New products are notoriously less reliable than old products.
Hahaha... I know what you're TRYING to say, but I was just imagining that my old AMD processors will suddenly become more reliable as a benefit of its age. In a sense, they are... because they are no longer in use... they sit there...reliably.
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
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.
Typing this on a blazing fast P5-233, and this is the _fast_ machine in my office.
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
I ran a PII-400 until about 30 days ago.
It still ran the new games I played, it still compiled my apps as quickly as I needed.
It did NOT however, lend itself to DV editing.
I finally broke down and bought a Athlon 1.4 with a new mb and memory (bundled got better deal).
No more funny audio quirks in rendered DV.
But I'm all for staying with the max speed you need.
3+ years on one processor made sense for me.
Kind of interested to see if this 1.4 will hold its own for another 3 years.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
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.
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)
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 $150 card. Again, you'd be surprised how many of them there are.
I cost my employer a little more than 4 cents
a second to employ. So, if a CPU costs 40
dollars more, a mere 17 minutes saving to my
time pays for the difference.
C//
High price? What are these people talking about? My 1.4 ghz athlon 266bus cost me about 190$ 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.....
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.
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'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.
How about "Night of the Living Clones"?
Or maybe "Clones in Spaaaaaace". :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
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.
900 - - - - -$65 - 13.85 Mhz/$
1000 - - - - $85 - 11.76 Mhz/$
1200 - - - - $100 - 12.00 Mhz/$
1333 - - - - $130 - 10.25 Mhz/$
1400 - - - - $175 - 8.00 Mhz/$
It seems to me the best value for the dollar is the 900 Mhz CPU, followed closely by the 1.2 Ghz.
I look to buy the one just below the major increase in slope. there is ALWAYS this trend.
You say this, but then you say "It only makes sense" to opt for the 1.3 Ghz when in actuality the 900 Mhz and the 1.2 Ghz are much better values.
Enigma
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."
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.