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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."
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.
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!
It's a lot like slashdot used to be
You must be new here
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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
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?
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!
Because the benchmarks are pretty much single threaded, so only one core is actually being used, so on these particular benchmarks a dual core CPU won't show any benefit, it might even suffer a little, if the fact of it being dual core allowed a small background task that might have otherewise stalled to run and was therefore fighting for the cache.
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.
"Does anyone else find it odd that in practically all the benchmarks, the single core processors beat out the dual core processors?"
No more odd than say a pickup truck beating a sports car in a race to move from one apartment to another.
"Derp de derp."
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.
You laugh, but this is how I keep my dorm room warm....
To be or not to be: There is no maybe.
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.
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 was looking at this very recently. First, most of the tests are single threaded, so the dual core is of limited use. Secondly, and more importantly, the individual cores run slower on the X2 processors than the single core does. For example, the AMD64-3800+ runs at 2.4GHz; the X2-3800 runs two at 2Ghz. For single threaded apps, like current games or benchmarks, the single core chip will beat the dual core hands down. The AMD64 3800+ is cheaper too.
For general heavy use on a non-gaming rig, you're still better off with an X2, as the dual core really comes into it's own as one core can concentrate on say, rendering or encoding, while the other core is available for other high-CPU apps.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
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?
Yes, this is news. This is the time of year that many people, myself included, plan on buying computer upgrades. Based on Tom's charts, I can see my (older) CPU, compare it to newer CPUs using the video card, memory, etc. as a control, and decide if the upgrade is worth it. Although Tom talks about the latest and greatest all the time, only once or twice a year does he put things in perspective with older hardware. Personally, I want to see the same thing but with video cards, because Tom's article showed me that upgrading my CPU isn't worth the money.
Besides, Tom is talking about computer hardware. Nerds (myself included) love this stuff. So yes, this is news for nerds. And it does matter.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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.