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

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.

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'.

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.

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

[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: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.

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.

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: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.