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

Posted by kdawson on from the wait-for-meeee dept.

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.

4 of 354 comments (clear)

  1. Conclusion by houghi · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    --
    Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    1. Re:Conclusion by Jazzbunny · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Anandtech 'Bench' compares ALL recent CPUs... by distantbody · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  3. And now for reality. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.