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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!"
Just because it's the same OS does not imply that it will be a direct comparison -- they are completely different archetectures and can never be directly compared; an indirect comparison is about the best you can do. Still what does it mean? Not a lot, since the archetectures are fundamentally different.
It would be a waste of THG's time when the whole idea was to compare x86 CPUs. Yeah it ignores the PPC -- why? x86 archetecture comparison is an apples to apples comparsion.
Karma whorin' since 1999
Who bothers to overclock a CPU anymore? With the falling prices of machines, you can almost replace it for the same cost. And 2 CPUs are always better than one, because you can run them in parallel.
I agree that overclocking isn't the panacaea that some computer geeks seem to believe, and I think the hardware sites are squeezing out their relevance every time they bring it up.
It must be a bragging rights thing because it doesn't take long for faster chip to be released, and you've run the risk of an unstable system and sometimes people spend more for cooling than they might have just getting the next chip up.
As for AMD vs. Intel OC-ability, the two companies may simply have different comfort margins in marking a chip.
This must be the only site that does not mention the Athlon 64 in the conclusion. Therefore I can only draw one conclusion (if you remember that a Athlon 64 3000+ outperforms a similar priced P4) Tom's hardware is done for.
I've been following Tom's hardware for years on end, and I loved their articles on RAID and drive benchmarks. Nowadays the articles are mostly written by mediocre "editors" though, and they bear little resemblence to articles by Tom himself.
To be fair, sometimes they still have great reviews (printers, screens and harddisks mostly), but you will have to look for them between articles that should never have seen the light of day.
Linux users should avoid this Windows site at all cost.
For it to be a "fact", it has to be true...
Not true.
People will make use of the CPU power that they have available. Since most people don't have terribly fast processors, they don't do more advanced, and hence, CPU-intensive tasks.
Back when DOS was in charge, very few needed 100MHz processors, but more, new, applications come along to make use of that extra power.
If CPU power was more abundant, you'd probably see people commonly converting all their DV streams from their camcorders to MPEG4 to save space. Since that is rather time-consuming, most people don't do it.
My main CPU-intensive purpose is video. Live, real-time encoding from a TV-card uses plenty of CPU power, and to be able to also playback at the same time, you probably want more than 2.5GHz. Then, to also be able to encode a DVD in the background, you probably want an even more powerful processor still. Since most people don't have such powerful processors, they don't bother to do these types of things on their computers, yet. When the power is there, you will see people using it.
Yes, well you could have said the same thing about early, graphical DOS games if you had a 100MHz computer at the time. These days, 100MHz isn't enough, and in the near future, 2.5GHz won't be enough for the new games.
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