The Top CPUs Under Linux

Linux Hack writes "LinuxHardware.org has published their latest review and this one covers the top processors from both the big x86 manufacturers. If you want to see who's on top under Linux, you should check out this review. There's something here for both Intel and AMD fanboys!"

Comments

Re:First post?

[QuantumRiff]

That is not a spoiler, it is a summary.. It would only be a spoiler if people actually read the articles....

Power consumption -- wow!

[dougmc]

The Intel Pentium D 840 cpu uses 130 watts. (The other cpus still use lots of power, but this one was tied for #1.)

Wow.

You know, it wasn't that long ago that the 60 mHz Pentium (1) was the chip that had massive power requirements. That behemoth used 13 whole watts of power!

At 130 watts and 1.4 volts, that's 93 amps. That's just plain crazy. All that heat in that itty bitty package ...

Re:Power consumption -- wow!

[questionlp]

The 130W number is the maximum TDP (Thermal Design Power) for that line of processors, so it may not hit 130W even in peak usage. AMD uses the same kind of logic behind their power numbers as well. Unless if you are running several CPU burn-like programs at once, the processor will average below that number, mostly when the throttler kicks in so that the processor doesn't burn up.

I believe the newer versions of the Athlon and Pentium 4/D processors will scale back clock speed and/or voltage in order to preserve power (be it through Enhanced SpeedStep or AMD's equivalent).

Re:Power consumption -- wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

If 130W is the max usage, I don't doubt it'll average *below* this figure... *cough* ^_^

Re:Power consumption -- wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Max in standard usage anyway, processors can peak above the TDP number using some nasty tools that Intel, AMD, etc. use to test for breaking points.

Re:Power consumption -- wow!

[Dark Coder]

Wait until you hear about a 1,000 watt for a typical 1Gbps Intrusion Prevention System.

Expect to see the wattage to go ten-fold increase once we go to 10Gbps Ethernet IPS/IDS.

On a side note....

All that powerful high-speed packet examination, and alas, sorry to say, that signature-delivery is a failing model for the IPS/IDS industry. Put stock in HIPS (Host-based Intrusion Prevention System) as its the right way to go.

Running Linux? SELinux or GRSecurity is one such HIPS-derivative.

Re:Power consumption -- wow!

[Frumious Wombat]

We will note that the Power Consumption of the Pentium-D is pretty much identical to the first generation Itanium-2. Those chips had a power/heat envelope that convinced us to stop buying them, except for specialized applications, because of the cooling issues.

Not to ask the obligatory Non-Intel question, but how do those numbers compare against G5 (PPC-970) or current IA-64?

Re:Power consumption -- wow!

[oncebitten]

well, i'd buy one.

winter's coming in a couple of months, and with the price of gas/oil being what it is compared to electricity, you can now heat your house and have a cutting edge machine at the same time.

Re:Power consumption -- wow!

[elasticwings]

Actually, I save quite a bit on the gas bill in the winter due to that fact. I have a three bedroom one story house that I live alone in, and I spend the majority of the time in the smallest room in the house which is the computer room. I run two desktops, a laptop, a router and a modem in that room. I generally keep the vent closed off to that room in the winter and the heat set about 5-10 degrees lower than most people. I have covers on the bed at night to bundle up in. So my gas bill generally comes up quite a bit cheaper than other people in my area.

Wait a minute...

[JamesTRexx]

Comparing the two top mainstream dual-core parts, the Pentium D is priced at almost half the 4800+. Seeing that the Pentium D 840 is no where near half the performance, it makes the Pentium D dollar-for-dollar, a better deal.

Shouldn't that be the AMD is better dollar for dollar? The Pentium is priced a little more than half the AMD, but it doesn't give even half the performance. Sounds more like if you want to brag about having a dual core, but can't pay for a decent chip, buy the Pentium D.

Re:Wait a minute...

[FidelCatsro]

NO , the performance is roughly 35% -40% less(too tired to work it out exactly) on the Intel chip (under certain tests) , The price/performance crown in this goes to the Intel chip here by a fair margin .

Re:Wait a minute...

[JamesTRexx]

Well, then they shouldn't say "nowhere near half the performance". I didn't bother to look at the graphs again, but it seems they didn't take a good look either. And I can't imagine they'd be more tired than you. :-P

Re:Wait a minute...

[FidelCatsro]

I think they meant "Nowhere near" as not that bad , its just phrased in a way that could be rather misleading , I did a double take of the results myself

Careful there, pilgrim...

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

All that heat in that itty bitty package ...

That's jailbait yer talkin' 'bout...

Why x86 only?

[TheRaven64]

Most (All?) of their benchmarks were running open source code. Surely they could have managed to test a few other CPU architectures. Of course, then the compiler optimisation would have come in, but that's understandable. If you're looking for a machine to run Linux on, then x86 isn't necessarily a requirement - and if it wins on performance or price / performance then that would be an interesting result.

Re:First post?

[ArsonSmith]

"Spoiler: Dual Core AMD64 4800+ has gotten pretty good scores."

Ohh great, now I can't even post as a no RTFA person because I know what it was about.

damn you Paulius_g

Farked if you do, or not

[suitepotato]

So it is either put up with an Intel hotplate or put up with the cost of an AMD chip. Is that what I am reading there?

What I want is a chip that is fast, doesn't incinerate itself without a coolant system akin to that of a helium liquefaction plant, and doesn't cost more than two off-the-shelf boxes which I could yoke together with clustering.

I mean, isn't that massive parallelism ability of Linux clustering one of the things that makes this whole CPU arms races less relevant? I'd rather buy a bunch of 1.8Ghz Intel 1U rack units than a couple high-end multi-core machines.

Re:Farked if you do, or not

[Anonymous Coward]

This from them reported here and here looks almost completey unlike what you're asking for.

Translation of Data

[jd]

Now, instead of just having n-way SMP systems, you need n-way SMP systems with different manufacturer's CPUs, if you want optimal performance.

The CPUs are specialized, which is why each does great at a few things but not so great overall. If you want a general system, then, you have to have multiple brands of CPU. How you're going to build such a monster, I don't know, but it's the only way to solve that problem if you want maximum power all-round.

Ummmm...

[DesScorp]

....Unless you need the dual-core chips, the "cheap" option, the AMD Athlon 64 4000+, is nearly $400 less than its Intel competitor, the Intel Pentium 4 670. It's still $100 cheaper than Intel's least expensive dual core chip.

ecs pf88

[zogger]

kinda like that

specviewperf

[bloosqr]

I was curious how the opteron compares to the amd64 so I hunted around a bit. I couldn't find the other tests but I found the specviewperf tests on amd's own site.

While those may be the 8.0 tests as opposed to the 8.0.1 tests, it strikes me that the testing on linuxhardware looks a bit funny. The benchmarks on AMD's site are for the opteron 150 and the piv 3.4 ghz (w/ 1 mb of l2 cache). The ratings are about neck and neck on the amd site but about twice the speed as on linuxhardware's site.

The actual piv that linuxhardware test actually (model 670, piv) has 2 mb of l2 cache and clocks in at 3.8 ghz and for some reason is slower than what AMD got on for a slower chip?

This may be a compiler issue, which at the end of the day says benchmarks are meaningless until you use the right compilers

before anyone responds to this by saying well they used the same compiler so it is a fair benchmark, it is not. That benchmark tells you how long the compiler people spent optimizing for a particular chip in contrast to another chip.

Re:specviewperf

[Anonymous Coward]

The systems on AMD's site have NVIDIA Quadro FX 4000 video cards in them. Please read the specs.

x86 vs UltraSPARC

[spaceyhackerlady]

x86 is for weenies. We all know real computers use UltraSPARC processors. Linux runs very nicely on them.

:-)

...laura who downloaded and played with Syllable over the weekend

Re:x86 vs UltraSPARC

[SA Stevens]

And we all know that real UltraSPARC processors aren't wasted running Linux. There's real business to conduct, and an OS written expressly for the UltraSPARC that suits it better than anything else.

Re:x86 vs UltraSPARC

[Squash]

Please...

The UltraSparc processor was introduced to the world in November of 1995. This is around the same time as the Pentium 133, and just befor ethe Pentium Pro 150.

You're going to try to tell me that a CPU that is closing on its 10th anniversery isn't "wasted" running linux, because it has real work to do?

Or will you tell me that the original UltraSparc isn't a real UltraSparc?

What real business are you likely to conduct on a Sun Ultra1 with a 167mhz processor and 64 megs of blistering 60ns memory? Holding down papers? Holding open doors? You certainly won't be running Solaris 10 on it, as it is not an officially supported system.

Back to reality.... Current generation UltraSparc processors are not competitive with Intel/AMD processors until you have more than a handful of said processors in a single image system. If you need to scale your system beyond about 8 cpus, you'll want to look at UltraSparc.

Besides, Solaris is expressly written for UltraSparc about as accurately as Linux is written expressly for UltraSparc. It started off on Motorola 68ks, then 32 bit sparcs, then x86, then 64 bit sparcs, then x86 again, then x86_64.

crap comparison

[smash]

1. Did the benchmarker play with make -j arguments to enable the compile to take advantage of multiple cores?
2. Did the reviewer try splitting the povray renders into sections, to render concurrently on multiple cores (as povray has been able to do since at least 1993).

Picking, or limiting benchmarks to a single thread when testing multiple core/multiple virtual cpus per core is retarded.

smash.

Re:crap comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

1. probably.
2. probably not.

Sounds like they're about half-retarded.

Re:crap comparison

[oncebitten]

benchmarks biased? say it ain't so.

Re:crap comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

If you like to tell me how a comparsion between a single and dual core can be fair without limiting to one 1 thread please tell me :)

For example it should increase the compiling times for the dual cores

Ok Ok... I havn't got a clue but it seems fair to me

Re:crap comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy, I wish people would actually READ the articles:

"For all of our multiple-thread benchmarks we ran the number of cores plus one for the number of threads. The only exception to this was the Extreme Edition with Hyper-Threading in which we ran four threads."

"Our final multi-threaded benchmark is our Firefox compile. This benchmark uses the Gentoo emerge system to unpack, compile, and install Mozilla Firefox. We are able to define the number of threads to use when compiling and the total time is reported."

Re:crap comparison

[stevo3232]

If you read the article, you'd know that he used make -j. As for number 2, why don't you ask the person who wrote the article? He seems to be doing a pretty good job of responding to all of the reader's questions.

I wait for dual core g5 benchmarks

[mAriuZ]

I wait for dual core g5 benchmarks compared to amd processors and intella ones

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/26/ibm_ppc970 mp/