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Tom's Hardware End of Year CPU Roundup
Wister285 writes "Tom's Hardware has just posted one of their now famous CPU comparisons. Aside from looking at all of the nice graphs, they also compare the speeds of overclocked processors with their factory rated counterparts. It looks like the AMD chips just don't overclock as well as the Intel ones do, but when run at their specified level AMD almost always has the best price/performance ratio. Hopefully the upcoming year will be as promising in the processor sector as 2003 was!"
there is no PPC 970 on there.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Anandtech is generally the best place to find information on anything you're looking for and is where all the cool kids go. They go above and beyond the call of duty in all of their reviews, and their monitor reviews are unsurpassed.
This linked article is an excellent roundup of the ongoing battle between AMD and Intel. It holds a lot of insight for people who have not been following the news closely.
However, it has to be pointed out that he missed several important incidents:
- AMD alliance with SUN: news article
-AMDs deal with Tippet studios: We built some prototype desktop workstations powered by AMD Athlon(TM) MP processors. We had tried systems powered by a competitor's processors, and they worked fairly well. However, we absolutely preferred the performance of the AMD Athlon(TM) processor. A good part of the advantage comes from the performance of AMD's floating point engine, which is very important to compute-intensive operations such as rendering.
-Intels new challenge in process technology with a cheap strained silicon process, finally unveiled at the iedm. AMD, this will be a touch one: IEDM article
A few other popular sources of information include:
HardOCP
Dan's Data
X-bit Labs
Ars Technica
Regards,
--
*Art
I hate to feed the trolls, but the sibling speaks the truth. This poster, rkz, is not a troll, but he is recycling comments. Not to mention his evil .sig
Yawn.
He has missed one very important fact. Very few of us need any more power then a 2.5 gig CPU. And INTELs 2.5 is twice the cost of AMDs 2500. I run better then 100 FPS in any game that I want to play. Including such hogs of power as BF1942 with the DC mod....
Don't forget Tech Report
"A few other popular sources of information include:"
;)
Not to mention Ace's if you're really into all the nitty gritty details of things. They do outstanding reviews and technical articles, but can get pretty heavy on the technical details. So far, Ace's is the only place I've found that actually goes over my head from time to time. I do enjoy the challenge.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Clock speed doesn't really matter for CPUs of different architectures. The best thing to do is to check out the benchmarks for yourself to see which one performs better at the tasks you most often use. Some hardware sites with benchmarks are:
Ace's (Recommended)
Ars
HardOCP
Tom's
Anandtech (Recommended)
Take all benchmark results with a grain of salt. Many things can influence the results, and some sites like Tom's have long been known to be quite biased. If you read enough sites though, you tend to get a much better overall picture of how things really are.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Well, compilers generally stress the memory bus a LOT, and if you aren't multi-threading (make -j3) your compiles your CPU has to wait for your DISK to fetch files to compile.
The most important factors in compilation speed (assuming you're sticking with one compiler) are CPU, bus speed/latency, memory size (for caching), and disk latency. Dual CPUs won't do ANYTHING for you unless you multithread your compile jobs, otherwise 'make' only dispatches one job at a time, and each job can only occupy one CPU.
I've found that recompiling the compiler from source with hand-tweaking helps too. In Gentoo the GCC source builder strips a lot of the flags, I undo that and make sure to use 'safe but effective' flags for a faster GCC.
Also remember that -O2 is actually a lot easier to compile and often faster at runtime than -O3 because of modern CPU caching mechanisms. (-O3 unrolls loops, which isn't much advantage on CPUs with larger L2/L3 caches).
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Blackdown released a 64-bit VM for Linux/AMD64 just a few days ago.