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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
A few other popular sources of information include:
HardOCP
Dan's Data
X-bit Labs
Ars Technica
Regards,
--
*Art
Overclockability reviews are pointless for a couple of reasons. The first, of course, is that there are never any guarantees - not every one of the famed 300MHz celerons would run at 450MHz, and just because the few samples a reviewer tests overclock well (or poorly) does not mean that all chips will be similar.
The other major problem is that review parts are often hand-picked, nullifying their value as indicators of overclockability completely.
My server
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....
The "thermal problems" with the AMD Athlons is a PERFECT example of why you should NOT read Tom's Hardware Guide! At the very least do not take the articles read at face value without verifying the facts first!
1.) Their P4 was shown to run at a constant 29C. Thermal throttling on the P4 doesn't even start until ~65 or 70C. If the chips were running at 29C, they wouldn't be throttling at all.
2.) The P4 can throttle down to an absolute minimum of 1/8th of it's clock speed, though it's set to 30-50% by default (factory setting) according to Intel's thermal design guidelines. At 30% of it's clock speed, a P4 will still consume easily 20-30W of power, which is WAY more than you can disapate with no heatsink. Yanking the heatsink off a P4 WILL cause it to crash in a very short period of time.
3.) The comment that was made that AMD's thermal sensor could only react to 1C/sec temperature changes was absolutely ridiculous and CLEARLY showed that the author was completely clueless! Such terrible performance couldn't be accomplished by incompetance along, you would really have to TRY and make it that bad!
The whole deal about the instabililties of the PIII 1.13GHz wasn't so much technically incorrect for the simple reason that there was next to no technical info provided, it was almost all just self-congradulation.
I DO judge the articles by themselves, and the articles on Tom's site generally leave a LOT to be desired. The article linked from this story seems to be mostly fluff with a few benchmarks requiring the standard (ie very large) grain of salt.
"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."
I'm surprised no-one else is bringing this up ....
The review takes pains to point out that AMD-64 binaries are as rare as hens teeth, and for the reviewer's primary audience who are gamers on Windows, and who have to run whatever P4-optimised or Athlon-optimised binaries the games vendors supply, that's pretty much true.
However, for many readers of this august forum, things are a bit more flexible - the only app I run at home that works the CPUs at all hard is digital video processing (transcode / mplayer / mpegenc on Linux), all the binaries for which are of course built from source, thus could potentially be 64-bit if one had AMD-64 hardware and suitable compilers.
Likewise, for the scientific community using Beowulf clusters, who generally run home grown code, this surely has a lot of potential.
Can someone post a summary of the state of the art in terms of AMD-64 binary output from gcc/egcs, and some info on how well it runs with CPU-intensive number crunching like this?
Professionally speaking, all our stuff at work is Java based, and we are looking for price/performance and space/performance ratios - our latest batch of servers (1U pizza boxes with desktop 2 CPU chipsets are the best price/perf compromise) have dual P4's because of the better memory bandwidth of the i7500 dual channel setup compared the dual Athlon chipsets which were stuck at single DDR-266 for the longest time, but if there was a byte compiler which targeted AMD-64 I could see potential for really nice price/performance with the Socket 940 systems, and even just using 32-bit code the higher memory bandwidth would help a lot with Java apps.