Slashdot Mirror
Phenom IIs, Core I7-920 Win Out In Value Analysis
An anonymous reader writes "We've all seen processor benchmarks, but how do today's enthusiast CPUs look when you account for performance per dollar? Using a smorgasbord of charts, scatter plots, and performance tests, The Tech Report attempted to single out the highest-value offerings out of 16 popular Intel and AMD processors. The results might surprise you: AMD's 45nm Phenom IIs (both triple- and quad-core) prove to be strikingly competitive with Intel's Core 2 Quads. And, on the high end, Intel's $266 Core i7-920 turns out to be a compelling step up despite the higher costs of Core i7 platforms in general."
Really, who doesn't know that AMD is higher performance per dollar.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
which one is more more secure?
TFA says that the Core i7-920 is $284; the chip below it (The Core 2 Quad Q9550) is $266. It's still up there on the performance/price scale, though.
Its about your investment.. For me Phenom II was a no brainer because of AM2+ compatibility. Once newegg put those suckers at 200 bucks i jumped. Its like i have an entire new PC and that was upgrading from the 9600 quad core.
Oddly enough i didn't have complaints about the performance of the 9600.. i just figured encoding times and processing times would be reduced enough that it would accelerate my work and well, for 200 bucks its done so and more so than i expected.
i7 is a nice platform but i'm penny pinching right now and looking for better ROI vs bragging rights.
I for one welcome our new "Bang for the Buck" overlords.
It's been like this for the past few years. If your on a budget, go with AMD. If you have a little more dough to spend, go with Intel.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
It is wrong to compare performance/price because this assumes price scales linearly with performance, which is clearly false. Nobody expects to get 50% more performance when they pay 50% more. But if there is a $100 process having a performance of 1000, then we would normally consider it an excellent deal if we could pay $150 for a performance of 1300. The value for your money therefore scales in a non-linear way, and it's better to just have everyone look at the scatter plot and choose their own price point based on their personal internal scaling function. The core i7 has the greatest discontinuity in jumping ahead of the rest of the crowd in this regard.
None of that is important. Any modern x86 CPU is going to have enough performance for anything you want to do. You'd get more benefit shaving a baby's ass than squeezing the cost/performance ratio on these chips these days. Better to throw more money at a separate server if you really need more power than trying to boost the speed of any single computer.
Really, the thing that will make the biggest difference is the OS, but if you're running any modern OS you're already wasting most of those CPU cycles on platform overhead.
Until electricity is free, comparing CPUs based on up-front cost of the CPUs alone ignores a major part of the expense of owning and operating computers, particularly if you're running servers.
But that's okay, Slashdot. I understand that you live in your parents' basement and you don't pay for electricity anyway.
What stood out to me is that AMD seems to have a fairly consistent price:performance ratio. Is this policy?
Most of their offerings fall pretty close to a line (not quite a zero crossing, but close). If this holds true for all their current and future offerings, you don't have to have test metrics for every processor. You can use price as a reasonable estimate of performance. i.e. Double the price gets you twice the performance.
Intel on the other hand, you can't trust price to indicate performance. A lot more research is involved. OR else you have to assume there's a high likelihood that the AMD offering for the same price will be better.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Best performance per dollar: the 486 i got for free. Do the math yourself :)
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
I recently had to make the tough choice of a Phenom 2 vs Intel Core Quad. I went with the Intel because I somehow came to the conclusion that they run cooler.
You see, I'm building a recording PC, so I want to have as few fans as possible. I plan on having a huge heatsink with NO fan. Most reviews, if they focus on heat, focus on the overclocking aspect.
If wattage correlates to heat like I think it does, I may have been better off with a Phenom 2. But, then again, the wattage test was only run during one task in this review. I read another review where it was different.
There just aren't enough review sites out there for... ahem... "grown ups". Maybe I should start one that takes a look at performance with DAWs like REAPER.
In the end, I don't care about best performance per dollar, or wattage per dollar. I care about performance per degree of heat, because heat = noise. Performance of modern CPUs is good enough these days.
Oh well, that's my rant of the day.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Did anyone notice that the only benchmark they base their chart on is Cinebench? Coincidentally, this is a benchmark that makes the Phenoms look especially good. There is also no commentary whatsoever why they chose that benchmark. So IMO the article is completely useless unless you only use Cinema 4D on your machine.
The article is missing the best CPU value for the money, in my opinion. The AMD Kuma 7750 AM2+ processor. It's dual core, but at around $60 shipped (Newegg) nothing else touches it from a performance to dollar perspective. They should have included the 7750 in the comparison rather than the Athlon X2 6400+ (the 7750 is K10 architecture vs. K8 for the 6400+, has 2MB level 3 cache, is not discontinued, etc.)
I just redid my system line by putting an e8400 in my desktop, where I mostly game. I switched out a Phenom 9600 (cause the tlb erratum for vista x64) to my file server/media center (which runs Ubuntu). and really as this graph will tell you: fast dual-cores are going to blow away slow quads in gaming because most games are not programmed for multiple threads and take advantage of a higher clock core. However, for most other tasks I do, like compiling the Linux Kernel (I run gentoo side by side with vista), the Quad Core Phenom 9600 seems to be much faster. Plus, I had a hard time overclocking the 9600 to anything past 2.6 ghz whereas the 3.0 ghz stock e8400 easily clocks up to ~4.0ghz on air. I should also note that I picked the e8400 over the q8200 because of the virtualization tech as I do alot of virtual systems for testing.
Live Free
I want to know what's the best processor to buy if one's going to use mainly only one core?
What is it with sites like that and insisting I click "next page" 11 times? No, that drop-down isn't enough. I want everything on one page, TYVM. Usually "print this" is a good get-out-of-dodge for this sort of thing, but not here. It gets me four pages, two without content, and together they contain only the first "page" and a printed version of the drop-down bar to find the next "page". I'm not your clicky-slave, techreport. I'll go read somewhere else.
..like audio software and soft synths.
Ableton Live will support multiple chips/cores, so I want something that will really make short work of those VSTs that are currently beating my CPU like a redheaded stepchild.
Any ideas?
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
The fact I can now unlock my memory and QPI now completely reevaluates the worth of the 920. The performance increase over my old quad is scary. I was gonna upgrade my 9800 round xmas and see absolutely no need to. I run everything cranked on a 28 inch 1920 x 1200 monitor and it never even hiccups. I think factoring in the fact that I no longer need a GPU upgrade makes the 920 more appealing as I just saved 5 bills (CAN) from having to get a 285. Plus the option on current mobos to go Crossfire or SLI and my P6T SAS compatibility make the platform fairly immune to obsolescence for a while.
When they ruled the roost late in the Netburst era.
I want them around, and like them to some degree, but they rested on their laurels to a big big degree.
Granted, this was after Intel rested on their laurels and gave us the engineered-by-marketing NetBurst.
It's probably because at stock clocks (what they have to run for this test), the 7750 runs a lot slower than the 6400+, while probably using the same amount of power.
Other than that it's a darn good chip.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
I saw an i7 motherboard/cpu combo for $534. The prices does seem to be coming down.
I nominate the semi-ubiquitous '\' backslash. Seen here escaped with apostrophes to provide emphasis. It could also be escaped by itself to represent itself: \\. This however leads us to my favorite regular expression in java: "\\\\\\\\" which is a pattern to match two backslashes in a String that is being searched. (the backslashes in the search String need to be escaped twice, once for being backslashes in a String and once for being backslashes in a Regular Expression.
Can anyone familiar with groovy verify if it gets even worse at that level? What about dumping a regular expression in javascript generated by a servlet?
The article is missing the best CPU value for the money, in my opinion. The AMD Kuma 7750 AM2+ processor. It's dual core, but at around $60 shipped (Newegg) nothing else touches it from a performance to dollar perspective.
E5200, not to mention you can OC almost every E5200 to 4GHz
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I just got one of those for my media center, and it flies for 1080p decoding (mplayer-mt is awesome). The 7750 is the Black edition, so the multiplier is unlocked. It runs at 2.7GHz stock, it'll overclock to 3GHz without really breaking a sweat in my experience, not to mention having all the extra cache that sricetx noted.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
It also has vastly increased memory bandwidth (3600 vs 2000), a much improved CPU cache, support for faster RAM, uses less power (95 vs 125W), has a 65nm die instead of a 90nm one, works in AM2+ motherboards, and contains the latest set of SIMD extensions. The 6400+ maybe slightly faster (as this shows), however it is twice the price of the 7750 for not a lot of benefit. (and the 7750 overclocks better than the 6400)
With that in mind, I'd imagine the 7750 would have been solidly beaten the 6400+ CPU in all of the performance/$ graphs in the original article...
Slashdot's seemingly-ridiculous problems with non-ASCII characters are simply a safeguard against displaying the nullity character, which would cause the universe to implode.
vetos.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Until the i7 has ecc, there in no winning against the phenom II which has ecc. If you are doing anything excepting gaming, you likely need ecc. Since the i7 doesn't have it (until the i7 based xeons come out), there is simply no comparison. Like bring a knife to a gunfight, you are fscked.
In general i like AMD better, but these comparisons are usually wrong! If you upgrade your engine in your car and get +20% horsepower, are your car really 20% better?
Please notice that your computer is not just a processor, so when measuring performance of the processor/dollar then please use the performance/whole-machine formula instead.
However if you use your machine for io-intensive tasks, the question is bad for you. Anyways this way of calculating is simply not correct. If you are a quantum-mech scientist maybe... even my eclipse building my java code eats the hdd not cpu.
If you look at the graphs, the 6400 the best bang for the buck...
Look, $100 buys 100% performance. No other processor comes close to meeting that price / performance ratio. Take the top processor, it's 10x as expensive, but less than 2.5x the performance. Same goes for everything else. No other processor is twice as fast for twice the cash. Or three times as fast for three times the money... All the rest are just overpriced on a price / performance basis. Which is what the graphs should have made clear. They should have plotted price / performance ratio instead, because that is what the article was supposed to be about. Also, there are many CPU's that cost less than that 6400 and can outperform it. My Intel 2180 comes to mind ($50). And it overclocks 50%.
Very true if your system only runs that single application. However, everyone I know runs multiple applications just by booting their OS.
And how many of those don't become I/O bound very quickly, such as the usual gaggle of svchost processes waiting for a request to service?
Sounds like you need to get a better application for transcoding your videos. Say one that is actually multithreaded.
In theory, transcoding video is an embarrassingly parallel problem. Split the video into n parts and transcode one part on each core. But that still doesn't help if all the threads are blocking on cache misses.
you can run multiple separate non-multithreaded apps on a single machine and get better performance from each of them.
If they are interactive apps, then all but one of them will be blocked on I/O the vast majority of the time, waiting for a mouse click or a keypress. So what do multiple cores buy you?
Let's get away from this absurd undead i386 architecture garbage. Linux runs on any architecture.
Non-free applications for Linux run only on the architectures that the publisher wants you to use. Free applications for Linux do not serve all niches, such as games.
Now run your comparisons based on 64 bit code instead of 32 bit.
What's so special about 64-bit code? I can buy a 64-bit gaming computer for under $25 shipped. And I'd bet that any of the Intel and AMD CPUs reviewed in this article can emulate it.
Yep, runs like a charm, really really fast processor and cost me next to nothing (~70 euro). Mine was sold as a "X2 dual core black edition" but it definitely has got an AMD 10 inside. Nice wattage (65W TDP) too, now idling along at half speed. The rest of my money is being spend on memory (8GB 1066MHz, 150 euro) and SSD (60 GB Vertex around the same). The motherboard was 90 euro, all solid caps and everything (but firewire) build in. So cheap I bought a high end power supply as well.
Brilliant speed and silence on a budget, but look out that you don't inadvertently buy an AMD 8 instead.
One of the x3 processors or the I7? everyone keeps telling me to get the i7.