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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.
I've been using a Pentium 4 3.0GHz-powered box as a MythTV frontend/backend for more than four years. It often records four high-definition over-the-air or FireWire MPEG-2 streams while playing back another.
For the first three years I used an Nvidia video card with Xv output to play the recordings at very good quality with 50-70% CPU usage. A year ago I moved to VDPAU, which gives me even better playback with under 5% CPU usage, and will do the same with h.264 recordings (generated by the Hauppauge HD-PVR, for example). Thanks to VDPAU, there's every possibility I'll be able to use the Pentium 4 box for another four years.
...and the fastest modern CPU is still not fast enough for another 2%.
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Speaking as a PS3 dev, the SPUs are very different to program for than a normal multi-core cpu (and you only get to use five and a half of them anyway, not 7).
On the flip side, everything based on UE3 (which is most big cpu-hungry multi-platform titles these days) is multithreaded to two or three significant threads: Game, rendering, and possibly physics (depending on physics engine used). None of them are SPU threads (though they may use the SPUs for some tasks), so PS3 performance isn't generally as good as the 360's, but in most games it's a non-issue as both platforms go over the 30 fps cap.
On PC, most UE3 games will run best on two cores, with anything above that being unnecessary.
Did anyone else notice how the Q9550 and Q9650 are absent from this article?
Probably the last thing Intel wants is these previous generation (and attractively priced) chips appearing in the "overall performance per dollar" chart on "Page 17 - The value proposition". Instead, we get a graph where only the i5 and i7 chips appear to perform well beyond any of the older options, but it's a carefully crafted illusion because the faster (and attractively priced) versions of those older chips weren't tested.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I work on flight simulators and we DEPEND on multiple core processors to get everything done at once. What used to take multiple racks of computers can now be done on a single computer with dual quad-core CPUs.
You think IPC is slow on a single machine? Try using reflective memory across multiple computers. Of course we have to handle a bit more than your typical video game since we have to handle hundreds of buttons and switches from multiple crew member stations, night vision, FLIR and day TV cameras, as well as out the window displays.