Slashdot Mirror
Comparative CPU Benchmarks From 1995 to 2004
Lux writes "The guys over at Tom's Hardware Guide have been busy recently! They've compared over a hundred different architectures dating all the way back to the Pentium 1 in one huge benchmarking effort. Looking to upgrade an older system? Unlike most benchmarks, which compare modern systems to other modern systems, these charts can help you figure out if the cost of upgrading is worth the speedup or if you should hold off for a bit longer."
Back when I upgraded my 386 16 Mhz, I told myself that I'd upgrade every 10x in performance gain. I upgraded to a Pentium 90 Mhz, then to an Athlon 900 Mhz. It seems that with the recent troubles of AMD/Intel at breaking the 4 Ghz barrier that I won't keep my 'promise' anytime soon, sadly.
How will they keep their market alive if they can't upgrade the performance? Its not like CPU chips are burning easily anyhow... so why get a replacement if the performance gain is not worth it? (Especially for web browsing / text editing only folks who upgrade based on marketing ONLY... yes! 3 Ghz more will make your internet go faster! Heh)
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
Actually, they only benchmark one architecture, x86. A real shame, I would love to see a thorough comparison of *multiple* processor architectures over a long period of time.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
"Comparative CPU Benchmarks From 1995 to 2004"
I only see x86 CPUs. What about the PowerPCs, SPARCs, MIPS, Alphas, ARMs, and so on?
For instance, the m68060 was the first consumer level processor with branch prediction and branch folding, superscalar dispatch, and real-world throughput of more than one instruction per clock cycle. Except for floating point where it performed only modestly, the m68060 seriously outperformed the Pentium in spite of only having a 32 bit data bus as compared with the Pentium's 64 bit bus. Isn't this significant in illustrating the influences in processor architecture?
http://www.sixgirls.org/ is an m68060 Amiga running NetBSD 2.0. Still very useful after all this time. Where are all those Pentium 60 machines?
This site says different, it lists:
80487 Intel 487 SX CPGA SZ494, USA
Another forum I found has this to say, which is interesting (take it with a grain of salt, I don't vouch for what "RatBoy" says)
Intel created an inferior version of the CPU in the SX, but remember they did the same thing with the 386 SX and DX. There was a nasty rumour that the 486 SX was created only because a batch of 486 chips had faulty FPUs and this was a way for Intel to sell damaged goods and still make some money on them. This rumour was helped out when Intel introduced the 487 math co-processor for the 486 SX. It turned out the 487 was really a 486 DX with one extra pin whose job it was to completely shutdown the 486 SX when you plugged the 487 into your motherboard next to the 486 SX!
Either way, there was (is) a 487.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I must disagree with you on the "most human eyes can't distinguish the difference between 40 and 80fps." This may be somewhat more true of movies which are made with motion blur that blends the frames together. But you can certainly still tell the difference for the better when a movie is captured at 60fps rather than 30. Its not as big a difference as changing the framerate in a game is due to the motion blur but its certainly more visually pleasing when a video is captured and played at a higher framerate.
Back on track though, games have no motion blur... each frame is sharp and leads into the next with no blur. So in order to get a smooth look to it the framerate must be much higher in order to trick the brain into seeing a smoothly transitioning scene. I can easily tell the difference between framerates up to about 120fps, after which it becomes very difficult to discerne the changes.
Of course if you are playing a game and bump up your framerate without increasing your refresh rate as well, you are basically wasting rendering power as the monitor is only drawing the same number of frames as the current refresh rate. Keeping your refresh at or higher than your average framerate will make for a much more pleasant gaming experience.
Here is an ancient but still very much valid write-up on Framerate and Refresh Rate in regards to gaming:
Framerate and refresh rate write up