Value Propositions of Current CPUs Put to the Test

J. Dzhugashvili writes "Processors are typically compared by their performance alone. However, the folks at The Tech Report have put together an article that attempts to quantify the value propositions of AMD's and Intel's latest processors. The article takes 16 processors through an extensive battery of tests that range from gaming and video encoding to Folding@Home and energy efficiency, and examines the value they offer in each. The results may surprise you."

Comments

Wait for the next price drop

[cerqon]

In a few weeks the E6600 will be at $170, quite a bargain...

Re:Wait for the next price drop

[pushing-robot]

And the Q6600 will be $266, not $530. It'll be a much different playing field.

At least they lay out all the figures so you can recalculate price/performance when the big drop hits.

Re:Wait for the next price drop

[ceeam]

Saying "wait" in these comparisons is foul-play.

Re:Wait for the next price drop

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Coincidentally, I started serious research into building my next PC last weekend. I initially looked into the E6600, Asus P5B, DDR2 combination that has been popular in recent months, but was rapidly warned off by others because the next round of hardware is starting to hit.

As an aside for anyone else who's in the same boat and hasn't found the info yet: Intel 3-series chipset motherboards are already available, 6x50 Core 2 chips are due any time now, and DDR3 RAM is starting to filter through the retail channels. All of these like a 1333MHz front-side bus, which potentially brings quite large performance benefits. There are advantages in terms of power consumption and overclocking potential as well. Also, they bring major price cuts in older kit: one retailer here in the UK was listing a much lower price for advance orders of a top-of-the-range E6850 chip than they are listing for buying an E6700 today, which presumably means the price of the latter will plummet when the 6x50 chips arrive.

All of this makes it an odd sort of time to run a data-based comparison like TFA. There are things that matter about processors beyond raw performance and price, but those are the dominant factors. Similarly, you can always say something better is just a few months away in this business, but right now, the annual upgrades are literally starting to arrive in retail channels as I type this and in less than a month many of the data points used in the article will be obsolete. That said, some of their notes are likely to remain valid, so it's worth a read for anyone not familiar with the recent processor line-ups. Some of the results are counter-intuitive if all you do is look at the theoretical numbers and go for what looks like the best price performance: the relative lack of advantage of a Q6600 over an E6600 for many applications because the extra cores aren't used effectively in practice is one example.

Re:Wait for the next price drop

[RMingin]

DDR3 is worthless so far. It's hotter, burns more juice, same speed, and expensive. In time it'll become desirable, but that time is still quite a ways off. If you're really horny for 1333FSB (which isn't the second coming of performance Christ, BTW), you can do what I did two months ago: Core 2 Duo e6600. I got it for about 220$. eVGA nForce 680i. All the checkboxes, official 1333FSB, and as low as 150$ with a good mail-in rebate. 2GB or more of DDR2-667. I got DDR2-800 because I hadn't done all the math first, and I like headroom. Once set to 1333FSB, your e6600@2.4 magically becomes an e6850@3GHz. Say hello to 1333. While you're here, you'll want to make sure your ram is set to sync with the FSB, which puts it at 666MHz. What's that you say? You simply must have DDR3-1333? Hell no. The FSB is QDR, the ram is DDR. FSB=RAM*2 for a proper sync. Your FSB won't be able to meaningfully use more than that, you'll just be nudging the FSB saturation up from 99% to 99.5%, for a performance gain of near 0. The price cuts next month will rework this a bit, mainly I'll swap out the e6600 for a q6600 and attempt to get the same settings. 4 cores at 3GHz each ought to be possible, and I'm looking forward to it.

It goes to show

[Bullfish]

That, now more than ever, the best processor for a person's needs depends on what they are going to do with their machine. The large number of choices in CPUs means that if your needs are simple, you can put together a fast machine with relatively few dollars. Ditto for video cards really. If you aren't married to the fastest cards, there are a lot of cards for around $100 give or take that will give great performance in most things, and even run a few games decently. The hype that CPU makers love to throw out there and the cost of high end parts belies that you can put together a machine cheaper now for most needs than ever before.

Re:It goes to show

[SwordsmanLuke]

I agree... for first person shooters. It's hard to match the accuracy and agility you can get with the mouse/keyboard combo with a couple of thumb sticks (or one thumb stick and a Wiimote). But, I also find that many games (esp. fighting games) work much better on consoles. I think it really just depends on what the game genre was intended for.

FPSes (in their current incarnation. Battlezone[1] doesn't count.) were born on the PC[2] and have evolved to use take advantage of the mouse/keyboard control scheme. OTOH, fighting games (to stick with my example) started out in the arcades[3] and were designed with joysticks in mind. I am a long time gamer and own most of the major consoles from the Atari 2600 to the present and I also have a collection of PC games going back to the original King's Quest[4] series (And yes, I still have an old PC with a 5.25" drive to play them on). I don't think there's any real conflict vis-a-vis PC vs Console games. They're just different platforms with their own strengths and weaknesses.

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_(arcade_game)
4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_Quest

Accuracy somewhat questionable

[PoliTech]

FTA: "For instance, our Core 2 Duo E6600 and E6700 processors are actually a Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor clocked down to the appropriate speeds. Their performance should be identical to that of the real thing."

One must question the accuracy of the results due to the above verbiage.

Re:Accuracy somewhat questionable

[CajunArson]

Maybe you need to look up the term 'speed binning' sometime. The X6800 is simply an e6600 or e6700 only at a higher clock speed. There is no differnce in cache or in architecture so I see nothing wrong with using it in this manner. There is one way in which the results might change, and that would be to differences in memory bandwidth due to messing with the FSB. However, the X6800 has an unlocked memory multiplier (Intel unlocks this on the 'X' series CPU's to make overclocking easier). By changing the multiplier and leaving the FSB alone, the reviewers are able to turn the chip into an e6600 or e6700 for any practical purpose. I mean, there will probably be some minute differences between different batches of the same e6600/e6700 production run that would have miniscule differences just as big as the difference between a properly clocked X6800 and the 'real thing'.

The most useful information

[WuphonsReach]

Ignoring the game-based benchmarks - which are somewhat interesting, I think the most useful information is the Windows Media Encoding & LAME encoding (page 6). And some of the other charts on other CPU-focused benchmarks.

It shows that for the CPUs priced under $250-$300, there's not a lot of difference in performance for a particular dollar value. Both AMD and Intel seem to be on parity in that market segment in terms of performance per dollar. (One exception would seem to be benchmarks like POVRay/Cinebench where there's a distinct gap between the two product lines, which flips around on the Myrimatch/STARS page.)

Summary, and Flawed Analysis

[MojoRilla]

Bargain basement CPUs do better at $ / work than faster, more expensive ones, because they are so cheap. AMD does well at the low end.

But this doesn't consider the total price of a computer which would help mid priced chips. A $113 CPU is 54% more expensive than a $73 one, so it would have to perform 54% better. But when you throw them into identical $200 systems (case, hard drive, fan, power supply, memory, etc), the $113 CPU (with a total system cost of $313) is only 14% more expensive than the $73 CPU (with a total system cost of $273).

So, while the extremely low end chips do well with this analysis, they make much less sense when you consider total system costs.

Re:Summary, and Flawed Analysis

[MMC Monster]

The problem is now: Is a person is going to use that extra few percent? It used to be (in the days of sub 500MHz CPUs) that everyone could use more power. Now that's not always true. There are people that do fine with a low power, low GHz CPU. And that 30 buck savings may be put to something else (ie: extra hard drive space), and the slower CPU may also waste less electricity as well.

Re:Summary, and Flawed Analysis

[ciroknight]

You mean waste more electricity right? Cheaper the processor, the more goodies they knock out of the chip to keep the price down. That $70 Celeron is built without SpeedStep. The $110 Core 2 has the full sized Smart cache and SpeedStep. The Celeron might be 80% as fast as the Core 2, but the Core 2 will probably use 60% of the energy, meaning the net win (if you can afford to spend $40 more bucks) goes to the Core 2.

In all honesty, it makes the most sense to buy the most "featureful" chip at the bottom of the clock bracket and overclock it. Not only will you have all of the features those chips ship with, you'll likely have more performance than the CPUs at the top of the bracket. You might cut the lifetime of the chip down, but computers today are such commodities that hardly anyone cares if the chip burns out after 3 years instead of 10; they won't be using that chip by then anyways.

Re:Summary, and Flawed Analysis

[wangerx]

I would add to this notion of diminishing impact. What about the value of time? If a quad core will run 4x but costs 7x the cost impact will diminish within two weeks of use! The 7x cost is a one time cost; say for example $500 more. The 4x impact on performance and time is forever. For an exaggerated point, if I can get four times the work done, every hour saves me three. If my time were a paltry $10 per hour, I would pay for the CPU cost difference in less than a week. Anything after that it gravy! You might say that the article it is relates to the impact on gaming and not real work (I see encoding as real work) but quality has a cost associated with it too. Entertainment can be largely impacted by quality. It used to be said, that you are not having fun until you spend $20 per hour (circa. 2000). Heck, one might even say that bragging rights have a certain value.

Re:Summary, and Flawed Analysis

[Bishop]

Your average 250w-300w system does not use anywhere near that much power most of the time. I would guess that at idle either of those systems would use about 60-70w (assuming onboard video). At full cpu load I would expect the system to consume 70-80w. Possibly as high as 90w. A video card will make a big difference. In a system I tested the nvidia 7900 GTX consumed about 40w at idle and much more under load. When looking at yearly power consumption the power usage of the DVD-rw and floppy drive are effectively zero as those devices are so seldom used. (Unless you are running a DVD piracy shop :-)

For most users the systems will be idle most of the time. (Even when playing mp3s my Core 2 cpu is running at its slowest cpu speed.) Either of the above systems will likely consume about 550 kW-hours of electricity a year. If you run Folding@Home the systems will likely consume about 650 and maybe as high as 780 kW-hours. If you estimate electricity at 8cents per kWhr. You are looking at operating costs in the range of $45 a year. Running folding@home would cost $55 to $65 a year. Using the suspend feature can save you a few bucks every year.

If you are running Linux use the "ondemand" or "conservative" speed governor.

Re:Summary, and Flawed Analysis

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

You mean waste more electricity right? Cheaper the processor, the more goodies they knock out of the chip to keep the price down. That $70 Celeron is built without SpeedStep. The $110 Core 2 has the full sized Smart cache and SpeedStep. The Celeron might be 80% as fast as the Core 2, but the Core 2 will probably use 60% of the energy, meaning the net win (if you can afford to spend $40 more bucks) goes to the Core 2.

The problem is that you're looking at Intel, whose low-end CPUs suck. AMD's $59 Athlon 64 X2 3600+ has the latest process (65nm), power saving features (Cool n Quiet), full AMD-V support, and two cores.

Oh, and the X2 3600+ is massively overclockable, too. Mine hit 2.85GHz (300x9.5) with no trouble - and it probably would have gone higher if my mobo supported higher LDT frequencies.

My system is 100% stable (as far as I know, based on a 36-hour two-process Prime95 run that pegged both cores at 100%, and based on a 12 hour Memtest86+ run). My motherboard is a $49 GeForce 6100 chipset board (right now, my board plus an X2 3600+ sells for $94 on Newegg). My heatsink is a $10 Arctic Cooling Alpine 7. My memory is cheapshit Kingston DDR2-667 (2x1GB).

Including my HDD, DVD burner, GeForce 8600GT, Motherboard, CPU, DDR, and case, I've put maybe $500 into my machine.

Question: Cost of the energy to run the CPU?

[Futurepower(R)]

Note that the Power consumption and efficiency section in the linked article shows CPU power plotted against cost of the CPU, rather than CPU power plotted against the cost of the electricity.

For computers that are on much of the day, the cost of the electricity over the perhaps 4-year life of the system is significant, and more important than relatively small differences in the cost of the CPU.

Although the article has some flaws, it is very useful.

It's the same for everything

[Colin Smith]

Buy last year's hardware at a fraction of the cost and let someone else take the depreciation hit/development cost. You benefit from lower depreciation and usually, better reliability. There's always a dogleg increase in cost for the latest and greatest.

Works for cars too.

"The results may surprise you"

[tkw954]

The results may surprise you.

How come does it seem like all the summaries lately have to have a cliffhanger? I'm all for reading the articles, but give us the results. This is a news site, not a murder-mystery.

Re:"The results may surprise you"

[jd]

Call that a cliffhanger? In my day, we had to make our own cliffhangers. With our bare hands! And we were grateful for it.

Re:"The results may surprise you"

[evilviper]

It's not actually a cliffhanger, but pure hyperbole.

I, for instance, wasn't surprised in the least by the results, nor can I see any reason anyone would be.

Re:Wait for the next price drop...

[DogDude]

You can say that every single day and still be right. I'm a big fan of buying PC's from my local thrift stores for $20 each. PC's are, by themselves, probably the worst investment that I can think of. Not even American cars depreciate as fast as PC's. I always tell people that unless you're playing games on a PC (which is an insanely expensive hobby), or doing something important, just get the cheapest thing you can find.

Just wait!

[dtolman]

Once the page is slashdotted it really will be a cliffhanger...

Power management still has a ways to go

[bhmit1]

I'd like to see computer manufacturers get to the point where all non-essential components can power down when a machine isn't using them. This would be huge for server rooms, where most machines are there waiting for users to connect. For my mythtv server, it's running non-stop, but hardly using any cpu until it's recording or playing back. Same goes for a mail/file server. The 100-200 watt idle numbers are wasteful, lets get this down to 10-20 watts. Hibernating or suspending doesn't work when you need to be standing by to service a user.

Re:Power management still has a ways to go

[evilviper]

The 100-200 watt idle numbers are wasteful, lets get this down to 10-20 watts.

Stay away from the high-end, and computer are nearly there already, thanks to AMD pushing CnQ/PowerNow on everything (while Intel STILL omits SpeedStep on their low-end chips).

The only real problem/exception seems to be GPUs, so for now, you have to go for a lower-end, (preferably fanless) video card to be safe.

Re:Power management still has a ways to go

[pz]

I've been thinking for a long time that CPU manufacturers could do well to promote low power chips through the following tact: take an older CPU design (say the venerable PIII) and reimplement in the newer technology. A 1GHz PIII is a reasonable CPU for every-day things like surfing the web, reading email, watching videos (with the help of an MP4 chip), and so forth. At original spec, they dissipate 35 W or so. Current-generation CPUs dissipate 2-3 times as much power, have 3-4 times as much cache, run at 2-3 times the clock rate, have memory systems 4-5 times faster, and on the whole run somewhere between 5 to 10 times faster. How about taking the massive improvements in device design, fabrication, architecture, power management, and so forth that went into these impressive achievements and re-implementing the lowly PIII 1GHz, but at 5-10W maximum power?

Re:Power management still has a ways to go

[Plekto]

How about taking the massive improvements in device design, fabrication, architecture, power management, and so forth that went into these impressive achievements and re-implementing the lowly PIII 1GHz, but at 5-10W maximum power?
****

You can do this with some motherboards by underclocking the processor. That Celeron D 360, for instance, is essentially a 3.6Ghz Northwood with much lower heat. Underclock it and presto - it runs at 20W power(we're talking stock cooler with the fan *off*!) as fast as an old 2.4Ghz P4.

These can make for great appliances.

P.S. - Could Slashdot implement a quote function? Please?

Re:Is AMD faster for 64-bit?

[ceeam]

If you don't need OSS graphics drivers AMD is a damn good choice. And it has been for the last 20 years except small K5 vs Pentium period.

As for Vista being the last 32-bit MS OS, it could well be the last MS OS period. Anyway - it really stretches 32-bit address space as it is trying to fit its fat ass within i386 pants.

Re:don't forget the e2160

[sjwaste]

2160 is $91, x2 3600 is $64 (both Newegg prices). That Core2Duo costs 40% more than the x2, so while it's a step in the right direction, its not there yet. Plus, factor in that you can get a good AM2 board for ~70, whereas you have to spend north of 100 to get comparable features for Core2 (ie, Nforce 550 vs 965P chipsets).

Since they both take DDR2 memory, you can quickly add up the cost of moving from one platform to the next (assuming one already has a PCI-E card, just for the sake of argument). Figure $70 for 2 gigs of DDR2, and we're at 205ish for the 3600 system vs 280ish for the 2160 system (figuring a gigabyte 965p board). Definitely not a trivial difference to overcome.

That said, as consumers, we're really benefitting from this. I hope that it can continue, we're getting great CPU's out at a fast pace, and the bottom offerings like the 3600 and 2160 are still VERY good processors. Back in the day, the bottom of the barrel truly sucked.

Insanely Expensive?

[thestuckmud]

playing games on a PC (which is an insanely expensive hobby)

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you have never tried yacht racing, which really is an expensive hobby. I play games on a computer which cost under US$2000 three years ago. New games are stressing the system, so I'll have to upgrade to a faster CPU and graphics card (another $600) this year. Including games, that works out to less than I spend on my bicycle.

Games cost $60, less if you are willing to wait, often for a hundred hours of play time. No travel expenses. No special clothes required. Hell, gamers don't even need to buy deodorant. Ever priced a round of golf at a good course? How about membership at the club so you can play there?

I know... if you want to compete with the best players or impress your friends you may choose to buy lots of bleeding edge hardware. My point is you don't have to do so if you just want to play games.

Re:Insanely Expensive?

[grumbel]

### which cost under US$2000 three years ago. New games are stressing the system, so I'll have to upgrade to a faster CPU and graphics card (another $600) this year.

A game console costs between $200 - $600 and lasts you for five years or more. There are certainly more expensive hobbies then PC gaming, but then there are also much cheaper solution to play a game.

Very happy with Dell AMD x2 3600+

[adrew]

You can't argue with the value of the entry-level processors. I bought the system below a couple of weeks ago for $688, including shipping and tax. Dell had a coupon for $350 off any system $999 or more, so I played with the options until it was exactly $999, then applied the coupon.

Dell Dimension E521
AMD x2 3600+, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, nVidia 7300LE, 16x DVD burner, card reader, keyboard, mouse, Vista Home Premium, Dell 22" widescreen LCD

For a home computer, performance is great. Vista is nice and snappy and it runs everything I've thrown at it without any problems. I work at a university, so I bought a copy of Office Enterprise for $30 and it runs beautifully. The speech- and handwriting recognition works great and doesn't bog down the machine at all.

same goes for

[TheAxeMaster]

Hibernating or suspending doesn't work when you need to be standing by to service a user. Same goes for hookers.

Re:Is AMD faster for 64-bit?

[ceeam]

I have Radeon 8500 in this machine - is that old enough? Where do I get a "fully working" (as in "beryl works great and does not hang") open-source driver? The one in xorg is not it IME.