How Today's Low-Power X86 & ARM CPUs Compare To Intel's Old NetBurst CPUs

An anonymous reader writes: In trying to offer a unique look at how Intel x86 CPU performance has evolved since their start, Phoronix celebrated their 11th birthday by comparing modern CPUs to old Socket 478 CPUs with the NetBurst Celeron and Pentium 4C on an Intel 875P+ICH5R motherboard. These old NetBurst processors were compared to modern Core and Atom processors from Haswell, Broadwell, Bay Trail and other generations. There were also some AMD CPUs and the NVIDIA Tegra K1 ARM processor. Surprisingly, in a few Linux tests the NetBurst CPUs performed better than AMD E-Series APUs and an Atom Bay Trail. However, for most workloads, the 45+ other CPUs tested ended up being multiple times faster; for the systems where the power consumption was monitored, the power efficiency was obviously multiple times better.

Comments

News?

[TheReaperD]

Breaking important news! New CPU's are faster and more efficient than old CPU's! News at... wait... this is news!?

Re:News?

[jones_supa]

Breaking important news! New CPU's are faster and more efficient than old CPU's! News at... wait... this is news!?

It's interesting to take a look how technology has advanced.

Disappointing for AMD fans

[drinkypoo]

I would have liked to have seen more AMD processors in the comparison.

Re:Disappointing for AMD fans

[drinkypoo]

Sadly, the most interesting chart (power/performance) is based on reported TDP. Fail, fail.

Not really fair

[Anonymous Coward]

NetBurst CPUs were crappy in their day too. It would be more honest to compare against the Athlon 64 or the Pentium 3.

Re:Not really fair

[hairyfeet]

Ironically that was when the first "crippled" Intel compiler came out. They didn't target AMD chips until the second release, the first release targeted the Pentium III which I would argue is the smoking gun that proves the "Intel knows how to optimize for their own chips" is total horseshit or else they wouldn't have targeted their own CPU for crippling!

If you look up the very first benches of the P IV at release? It was just getting curbstomped by Tualatin, in some areas the P III was winning by nearly 40%, it wasn't even close, then Intel releases their crippled compiler and throws money at the benchmark companies to use it and wadda ya know....the P IV is suddenly beating the exact same chips by nearly 35%! Isn't that amazing?

Everyone here cheered for the MSFT antitrust trial but if there was any company that deserved to get busted right along with MSFT it was Intel. They rigged the benches, bribed OEMs, even stole a page from MSFT's book by offering OEMs discounts and huge kickbacks as long as they only sold a limited number of low end AMD chips instead of the whole lineup. Anybody remember how hard it was to find good AMD systems on store shelves? That was why. Just imagine how much power was wasted thanks to the OEMs shoveling all those millions of power hog P4s, which is why while I have no problem selling early Athlon X2s or Core based if a Pentium D crosses my desk? Into the trash that garbage goes.

As for TFA congrats Phoronix, your site is one of the few places you can get 100% unbiased benchmarks (thanks to their using GCC instead of ICC) which is why you see results like these AMD vs Intel becnhes and wadda ya know, just by using GCC instead of ICC suddenly you have AMD A10-5800K trading blows with the I5 2400S and the FX-8350 trading blows with i5 3470, chips that cost twice as much.....wow the guys that wrote GCC must be the bestest coders on the entire planet to magically get double the performance that the mainstream benchmarks show...ya think?

Calling bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Every test was either multithreaded or otherwise accelerated (x264 for example). The Pentium 4 chip was one of the slower CPUs from the 130nm era (SL6WT), and Pentium 4 went into the 65nm era. 2.8 GHz versus 3.8GHz is a big handicap. 1 core versus 2+ cores is a big handicap. No built-in video card for x264 encoding is a big handicap.

Would it break the bank to provide even one non-accelerated single threaded comparison? Just one?

Re:Calling bullshit

[serviscope_minor]

eeeynope.

Some of my jubs multithread well, in which case, I care about multithreaded performance. Others don't in which case I care about single threaded performance.

Re:Hey! I still *run* a P4 3.8GHz

[serviscope_minor]

I still *run* a P4 3.8GHz as my main Linux box. Sure it heats up the apartment like a space heater, but it works. Until it stops working, I won't be spending $1200 on a new box... :P

$1200 is a *lot* to spend on a new box.

You can get a FX9590 (is that the part? the silly/awesome 220W one) with the stock water cooler, a decent mobo, 16G ECC 1866 RAM, a 500W PSU, a decent enough case, an unimpressive NVidia graphics card and some extra 120mm fans for about 450 GBP or so. Maybe $700.

I know I just bought a bunch (if you look at my story submissions, I asked about a cluster a while back. We got some new money and this is an update).

They are very fast.

Of course, that's a bunch to blow on a new machine, but you can drop the specs a bit and spend rather less.

That said, I fully understand. My home PC is still my trusty eee 900, which is substantially slower than your P4. Recent repair to busted keyboard involved using the dishwasher and now it works perfectly again :)

I also kept on using a 1996 vintage P133 until about the end of 2003.

Re:Hey! I still *run* a P4 3.8GHz

[cb88]

Motherboard and PSU capacitors going bad.... possibly the CPU going bad but the caps are more suspect.

Michael Larabel doesn't correct his errors

[Theovon]

Here's one specific case:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LGPL-GPGPU-NyuziProcessor

Multiple people have contacted Michael Larabel and told him that it is in fact Jeff Bush, not Theo Markettos, who developed Nyuzi. I emailed Larabel directly. Multiple people pointed the error out on the forums. People mentioned it in response to Larabel's tweet. Larabel has been contacted in enough different ways that he simply could not have missed this, so he's intentionally refusing to correct the error. BTW, this is not his only error in the linked article.

Just to be clear, this is not an isolated incident, otherwise it wouldn't bother me so much. Innocent mistakes happen. But I've caught him on numerous occasions posting factual errors on his site. It is clear that he has zero interest in correcting his errors.

Here's another one:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwNTQ
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwODY
And some others on this topic.

The OGP is more or less dead, although Nyuzi has the potential to bring is new life. However, Larabel got his information about the demise of the OGP from this weasel named Michael Meeuwisse who for whatever reason got a bug up his ass to undermine the OGP. I think he wanted to take attention away from us to put it onto his ProjectVGA. Now, disagreements happen. But Larabel is a sensationalist, not a journalist, so it was more in his favor to get his "facts" from some malcontent. Instead of me, the guy who founded the OGP who would therefore be able to present a different perspective and correct some of the factual errors. But that wasn't interesting to Larabel.

Does any of this matter in the long run? Not really. Nobody who matters really believed any of what Meeuwisse was saying, and it hasn't had any impact on what's going on with Nyuzi or any other work in this area. Meeuwisse and his ProjectVGA have disappeared into obscurity even moreso than the OGP.

The fact still remains that Larabel has zero interest in correcting errors or presenting rebuttals or any kind of balanced viewpoint.

Are you satisfied now?