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Which CPU Is Tops in Price/Performance?
mikemuch writes "You can spend 150 bucks or over a thousand on a processor, but how do you know which gives you the most power for your money? It's a little like MPG for CPUs. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case does extensive benchmarking on twenty-three current desktop processor flavors from AMD and Intel. While of course most folks won't make dollar-efficiency the sole basis for their chip decisions, it's interesting to see which CPUs get you, for example, the most frames per second in Far Cry for a dollar." From the article: "Take PC games, for example. The cheapest CPU available may have the best frame rate per dollar ratio. But you still need an adequate frame rate for an optimum gaming experience, and the cheapest CPU may not deliver that. On the other hand, office applications are generally not as sensitive to raw performance, and the lower cost processor may be better. It's all in what you do."
Not exactly surprising, but I wonder how much of that is tied to the OS (f'rinstance, dual core kicks ass on OS X for processor-intensive tasks). Similarly, I wonder how much of it is simply benchmarking the wrong kinds of things. Comparing "office productivity" is mostly useless, as they say in the article, yet it still gets benched. Similarly, graphics, while still relying on the CPU, uses the GPU more and more.
I've found in my own little "tests" that heavy-duty rendering and long-term CPU processes are really where the benchmark tests are at. Fire up something like VirtualDub and compare the time it takes to transcode video files, for instance, or use ffmpegX on Mac OS X. That's where the real CPU tests come into play. Not office and games.
(I'd also be curious to see what happens if you start switching around operating systems. Test to see if an AMD chip and NVIDIA board is better running a Linux flavor compared to Intel, for instance).
I had thought it a strange summary actually , After reading through the article the Athalon 64 3000+ was a clear winner by a large margin .. unless I misread some of the results .The only things the AMD chips did badly on were artificial tests.
They didn't even mention the chip in the summary and it pulverised every other chip
Defiantly a great buy for your money .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Both of these processors need $500 of ancillary equipment in order to function. Therefore, a system with processor A gives 100 units for $600, or 0.167 units/$, whereas processor B gives 150 units for $650, or 0.231 units/$. This analysis shows that processor B is better value when speccing out a new system
But what about the case where you're just upgrading your cpu? Well, in that case it's moot to compare the AMD with the Intel processors, as you would need a new motherboard too. But simply dividing the performance by the cost of the cpu is meaningless here, too, because staying with your existing processor ($0) would give you a performance/price ratio of infinity.
Conclusion: you have to calculate your total outlay in order to figure out which cpu is the better value.
There is an interesting article at pcworld ( http://pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,122700,pg,3, 00.asp ). It states that both AMD and Intel have low cost 64 bit microprocessors out(AMD Sempron 2200+, Intel Celeron D.) The AMD Sempron cost only $60 so it is less than half the cheapest microprocessor reviewed here. I would like to see one of these reviewed using a 64 bit Linux operating system with only 64 bit programs.