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The Mother of All CPU Charts
||Plazm|| writes "Tom's Hardware has an entertaining read on the latest offerings from processor makers Intel and AMD. Not only does it contain a plethora of benchmarks on the latest Dual core CPU's, but it also includes benchmarks from over 60 other legacy processors. Better yet, they let the benchmarks speak for themselves and let you draw your own conclusions. You may want to fill up your 44oz mug before sifting through this one, though."
Tom's hardware makes the list.
It's a massive undertaking to create it.
That's news.
Is it really news every time they update the list?
Pretty Pictures!
Summary: AMD wins every single result except the synthetic Sandra benchmarks, which Intel wins quite convincingly (all except one test). Something tells me there's something slightly wrong with that benchmark.
From TFA: "One stalwart component has survived through all of these innovations: the 3.5" floppy. [...] The floppy is the only component that still remains in use today".
Do people actually still have floppy drives in their PCs? I haven't owned one in many years, and wouldn't have a clue where to get floppy disks even if I had one.
AMD must have cheated in the other tests :D
Then whose it's daddy???
Thank you, I'll be here all week.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
At 52 ounces, It convienently holds 4 x 12oz sodas + ice
and it will stay cold as long as you could want.
Even long enough for you to click through Tom's Hardware un-printer-friendly website.
and i thought this was funny too:
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
We had a little optics lab "image processing" computer with: no active ethernet connection (within reasonable cord distance), no usb ports, and no CD burner.
Aside from bodily moving the CPU (don't want to do that when it needs to be near the microscope), there wasn't really any other convenient way to get modestly sized images and text files off it than through floppies. The next challenge was to find a machine in the department that: was connected to the school's intranet, had a floppy drive, and wasn't behind a locked door.
Of course, when we started needing to move movie files, well, we had the shop techs wire us up a very long cord. Just one more thing to trip over in the dark.
Sure, they're not fast, but for just one or two small files nothing really beats them in price and ease of use, especially when you have some machines that are still running Win 95 or 98. Besides, the FDD chunking sound is soothing.
Toms Hardware chart that compares CPU's which double as heaters!! Wow - that will be great for those cold winter nights reading slashdot.
Does anyone else find it odd that in practically all the benchmarks, the single core processors beat out the dual core processors? Each core in the dualies has the same processor as a single core, so why would that be?
I'd like to see a comparison of average cost against the speed, since the real question is what's the fastest speed I can get for the money.
KeepTrackOfIt.com - Find the lowest gas prices in your area graphically
Where are the Motorola and PowerPC chips? hehe
Processor speeds haven't increased much in the past 2-3 years... Are we hitting the end of Moore's law, or just taking a detour as CPU makers decide dual-core is more important? I've been wondering about this for awhile, but haven't seen much discussion of this. Do we have to wait for quantum computers before we can get more single-thread performance?
why Toms Hardware plugged so often on Slashdot when they're just a mouthpiece for MS/Intel?
I guess you never had to flash bios. Just curious; who makes your mobo's that don't require flashing.
I was really hoping to see who some of the older CPUs, stacked up. The lowest on this list is still acceptable for most people. What about 486 and before? The would give us oldies a clue how far the PC has come (with power consumption to match).
Is Tom's still promoting deathstars by using them in benchmark testing, and refusing to acknowledge problems with these drives severe enough to result in a class action lawsuit and the moniker "deathstar"?
Check Tom's archives against other hardware review sites. More than a year after deathstar news first came out from what I remember (and since I was calling sites on their use of deathstars in benchmarks and rave reviews about a year after the news first came out, about a year or more is what I recall.) Tom's was promoting the drives as great performance, and continuing to use them in benchmark testing of other hardware.
How much, exactly, does it take to buy you, Tom's Hardware?
this is correct for most 3rd party disk controllers, im talking IDE / SATA / SCSI and all the RAID subsections of.
...
oh and even if you think that your nice new W2k3 server install has all the right drivers just cause it detected your SCSI card fine
it doesnt.
just try and install a SCSI tape drive and watch it fail to detect the device. you still have to get the latest drivers from the manufacture ( for both the controller and the tape drive ) .
The single best thing MS could do to facilitate the installtion of their OS, is make it so you can have 3rd party drives on a CD / network share / Flash disk ANYTHING!
just give us a God Dam option that isnt a fkn floppy disk!
It looks like the author has a bit of a limited focus. This chart hardly covers all CPU's. Where are the Alpha processors? Someone else mentioned Motorola. Or take the Cray processor. People would be surprised to see how slow PC processors are! This chart even does not cover all AMD and Intel CPUs. For example, processors like the AMD 29K, Intel i860, i960 and the Intel Itanium are missing. But maybe the narrow view of Tom's Hardware Guide is what PC users want, no?
:-)
And how about the good old Intel 4004? January 1971!
when your newest cpu isn't on any of the lists.
people must still be reading that monstrosity of an article.
Too many zeros, not enough ones
I'm in the process of building my "media center" PC, and I know that processors can become a bottle neck if there are more than 1 or 2 capture cards running, as well as live playback or other activity.
Is anyone up to speed with which processor to go with for this, but more importantly, which capture cards to use?
Thanks.
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
Heh, you call that a list?
SPECcpu beats this hands down. THG is great and all, but SPEC are a non-profit organization *dedicated* to measuring the performance of computing systems. Believe me when I say their "CPU 2000" benchmark is not only the standard benchmark, but the *best* standard benchmark out there. It's cross-platform: Windows, Linux, HP-UX, AIX, whatever: you name it, it's been tested. It's cross-compiler: GCC, Intel ICC, AMD/Pathscale, IBM xlC, they're all here.
Here's the list. It's big.
Enjoy.
Hey guy's did you hear? Now apostraphe's go in any word that end's with an S!
Ye's, thi's i's fabulou's new's.
You must be new here. Welcome.
What I'd like to see is the grand daddy of benchmark comparisons going from the present day Geforce 7800 series/Radeon X1800 all the way back to the Voodoo1.
Mostly I would like to know how my Radeon 9700 Pro stacks up against the current series and the Geforce 6x00 series. They stop at 9800XT =(
Bill> How big is that large?
Station operator> You're gonna wanna pull your truck up out back. I'm gonna go start the pump.
Bill> Shit that sounds like a lot of coffee man. I don't know if I wanna be awake that long in Tennessee.
It's a nice list. Seems really lacking without the Pentium-M line though. THat's where intel is going.
Five hundred and twenty pages later and I still havent' ogtten to the stupid chart! WTF???
I would call this spam!
How is this the "mother of all CPU charts" when it leaves out all the dedicated mobile processors? I'd like to know if that Turion 64 laptop I've been looking at will outperform the P4 unit sitting next to it, or what clock speed of Centrino or Pentium-M will beat my two-year-old desktop.
Does anyone know where I could find a chart that compares mobile processors to their desktop equivalents? I really am about to buy a laptop, so it'd be quite helpful.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
It doesn't include such processors as the Opteron 165. The least expensive dual core offering from AMD. What gives. Since Intel has basically faded off the performance charts entirely we should at least be able to find out how AMD will stack up against its self.
> Not only does it contain a plethora of benchmarks on the latest Dual core CPU's, ...
;)
Can someone please block the posting of articles from poeple who can't distinguish "CPUs" from "CPU's"?
Thank you.
(Or do i have to do it all by myself?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No 386/486/Pentium CPUs tested there, no Sparcs of any kind, no Motorola, no IBM/Freescale's CPUs etc..
:-)
Oh well, maybe it's time to upgrade the old pentium anyway.
I used to have oil heat but with the price of petroleum, now I just use SETI@Home.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm probably not the only one on slashdot who tends to accumulate old hardware. As I think many of the collectors here might sympathize, often the pieces are obscure/generic brands for which not much information is available. In fact, even some of the brand names often no longer have any documentation. Locating drivers has become an easier task, but performance features and such are still hard to find. I have an old 486 class motherboard which I found out (only from talking to older folks) was very well regarded by those who used it. But it was very hard work trying to find anything to coroborate those casual conversations on the web. Charts and tables like the ones compiled by THG can give a good idea about which pieces should be paired up for an appropriate system that avoids unnecessary bottlenecks. I really wish this kind of information exists for soundcards, video cards, and modems in the form of a giant database of hardware products from the past as well as the present.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
What a bunch of whiners!
When I last had to purchase a processor I was reading articles all over the place before I finally scratched the surface of the absolute mess of the processor world. I thought keeping up with RedHat was tough! This chart has saved me a TON of time. Last time I went with a Tualatin. At this point the Toledo 4800+ is looking very good. Mabye its time to try AMD...
Without this chart I wouldn't have a chance of keeping up. Thanks guys!
(and who cares about mobile processors? There are only 3 powerbooks - pick one. The processor doesn't matter after you've tried one of these beauties. Vaio never again.)
I thought I remembered this article from a few days ago. It seems that even Dell is finally starting to see the light.
Could it be that Intel's days as a CPU manufacturer are numbered?
I am slightly unsatisfied about the chart. Where are the Xeons and the Opterons?
You call yourself a geek and you do not use a CPU that fits to a server?
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20051121/the_mothe r_of_all_cpu_charts-39.html
is about the only page worth looking at, the rest is all adverts and barely any text or conclusions.
#include <sig.h>
When I read that word, I thought there would be comparisons old CPU's such as 486s, then I started reading TFA and it talked about the evolution from 1993 till today, so I though "so it will be from Pentiums on, ok". Then came the benchmarks and the only one "legacy" processor is an Athlon Thunderbird 1400, from 4 or 5 years ago. The rest are still sold today (well, some cores might be difficult to find, but Semprons and Athlon64 3000's are definitively still sold).
I think the article should better read "from over 60 other recent processors".
Gosh, my 1GHz Athlon MP doesn't even make the "legacy" category any more. I'll just go cry now...
I wasn't surprised to see my processor (1.4GHz Athlon) on the list... I WAS surprised to see that it's the OLDEST and slowest on the list though... especially since it still handles everything I throw at it with no problems.
I'm willing to bet a large percentage of slashdotters still use processors that aren't even on the list anymore... and feeling no need to upgrade... am I wrong?
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
Here's some things i particularly enjoyed:
-The charts showing "...performance per watt of processors from 1993 to today" that mention time on neither axis.
-The picture and caption describing James Watt....as though most of his readership had never heard of him.
-The picture of a sticker with the caption that read "This seal guarantees that the box is unopened.". Duh.
Good stuff...good stuff. I do however agree with the assesment that the floppy drive is not dead. Although I may use it once a year if i'm lucky, it does still come in handy from time to time.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
Thanks for the handy CPU comparison charts. Very timely as I am in the process of assembling a new 64 bit system based on a VIA KT800 chipset motherboard using a AMD Venice CPU chip socket 939. I have everything I need except the very expensive processor chip. I have been shopping for the biggest bang for the buck and the comparison charts are very handy. There doesn't appear to be much of a performance gap between the base model 3000 and the top of the line 3800. Delta 18% for Direct X v.9 and 23.5% for the video test (FPS), even though the gap is extremely large. Maybe somebody can explain the difference between the version E3 and the E6 chip. The difference is not apparent on the charts.
Floppy drive will always be there, until there's a new standardized removable media supported natively in BIOS.
I still put floppy drives into every computer I build, since it is still the only reliable way to insert driver during OS installation, and upgrade/flash BIOS of your system. Although most system can be booted via optical drive, but there's no easy/simple way to produce a bootable CD or DVD..
some MB can boot via USB/flash drive, but it's again not universally supported, and the media compatibility varies a lot, too.
I put together this web-scraping chart comparing price/performance of available x86-compatible CPU families on http://dclug.tux.org/cpu.png. The daily-run script collects web-advertised prices, and displays them as a series of lines showing price-vs.-nominal clockspeed data within the CPU sub-families.
Note the logarithmic scale of the Y (price in US$) axis---in linear scale it's easier to see the knee in the curve, where additional speed increments begin to cost disproportionately more, but the linear graph was much less readable.
The method used is a hacked-together heuristic, easily fooled by vendors' ever inventive approaches to reporting the parameters of the CPUs they are selling. Still, it's a good visual aid showing how various CPU families are positioned
with respect to each other.