Today's Best CPUs Compared... To a Pentium 4

Dr. Damage writes "How do current $74 CPUs compare to the $133 ones? To exclusive $1K Extreme Editions? Interesting questions, but what if you took a five-year-old Pentium 4 at 3.8GHz and pitted it against today's CPUs in a slew of games and other applications? The results are eye-opening." Note that this voluminous comparison is presented over 18 pages with no single-page view in sight.

Comments

Conclusion

[houghi]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/18448/18 is the page with the conclusion

Re:Conclusion

[Jazzbunny]

Just install AutoPager and you get the article in one long page. You find performance per dollar at page 17 and other interesting nuggets of information well before that last page conclusion.

Anandtech 'Bench' compares ALL recent CPUs...

[distantbody]

And its constantly growing. check it out: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?b=2&c=1

Re:Games don't use multiple cores?

[dwater]

OpenGL Performer managed to enable applications to run on different platforms, from single CPU, single GPU, all the way up to hundreds of CPUs and upto (IIRC) 16 GPUs, without any changes.

OK, so the developers of OpenGL Performer were clever and motivated, but it certainly proves that it isn't a technical limitation and (IMO) invalidates your assertion that they "have to go for some version of the lowest common denominator".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL_Performer

Re:Games don't use multiple cores?

[hvm2hvm]

Physics is very friendly to multithreading since most computations are done in parallel anyway. N objects interacting with each other would be simulated in a series of steps, and for each step you need to calculate the next attributes taking into account the previous ones of all the objects. Then, you would save this instance and start again. During each step, threads can more or less operate independent to each other.

A very good example of this would be NVidia PhysX.

And now for reality.

[Anonymous Coward]

As somebody working in the gaming industry, let me correct you on each of your points.

1) A great many game-related problems can be parallelized quite well. It differs by genre, but most games today could easily split graphics, audio, input processing, game logic and AI into separate threads. Some gaming engines have started to do this. AI is one area that really benefits from multiple threads of execution, so that we can simulate several different outcomes at a time.

2) This was true in the 1970s. We've come a long way since then. From compiler-assisted technology like OpenMP to a variety of higher-level approaches and techniques, multithreaded programming doesn't have to be difficult. Even just making your data immutable, like functional programmers have been trying to teach us for decades, removes many of the IPC woes you mention.

3) This isn't a problem at all. Aside from netbooks, most consumer laptops and virtually all consumer desktops sold since 2006 have had at least two cores. Intel's Core i7 has been out for over a year now, and has seen very good adoption rates. The average number of virtual CPUs (ie. physical, cores or threads) on the average gaming PC today is roughly 2.7. Besides, games shouldn't care how many CPUs are present. They adapt to the available resources. If you have one CPU, we do everything on it. If you have 8, we'll distribute the load appropriately.

4) Where did you hear this from? Again, this was true in 2003, but things have changed a lot since then. Virtually every engine written since then, by a half-decent team, has included mulitprocessor support.

Re:Games don't use multiple cores?

[Mashdar]

+1. Rhaban, physics/graphics is one of the MOST parallelizable operations we have. The "shared dataset" is the previous solved set, and no communication is needed so long as the previous set is in shared memory of some sort. The new data should be deterministically determined by the previous set. Graphics processors use this in a non-core-based system where specialized hardware modifies the data set in a pre-determined way massively in parallel.

Re:P4 and MythTV

[Big_Breaker]

With 100 watts of power consumption at ~10 cents a kilowatt hour you would be spending about $88 a year to run your backend 24x7. That doesn't count the extra draw for air conditioning in summer months (the benefit in winter is pretty minor). Different costs per kwh or power consumption scale accordingly. Hopefully your P4 is a northwood and not a prescott! At some point the reduction in power costs will justify a switch to something like the Revo. My total power costs are about $0.30c a kwh (don't get me started!) so I could pay for the switch in a year.

There is a great product called the "Kill-a-watt" that will measure the power consumption of a device simply by plugging it in through the kill-a-watt box. My Q6600 rig draws 120-140 watts for a good fraction of the day as measured by my kill-a-watt. It's a non-trivial cost and a 45nm chip might pay for itself in a year and a half.

Re:Where's the P4 vs. Modern CPUs conclusion ?

[Quirkz]

The P4 appears to be included in every one of the performance benchmarks (or at least on the one performance page I bothered to check on). The headline here is badly skewed. It's a new chip comparison that includes benchmarks for a lot of older chips, including the P4. Not a "how far have we come" article remembering the bygone days of P4 yore. Bad /. headline.