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AMD vs Intel: A Linux Bout 227

Posted by CmdrTaco from the battle-of-the-titans dept.
CrzyP writes "AnandTech puts the latest and greatest AMD and Intel CPUs, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions, to the test in their first ever "Linux Desktop CPU Roundup" to see which performs the best in various Linux applications including database, compiling, rendering, encryption, and more. They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560 for "balancing price and performance". Very informative!"
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AMD vs Intel: A Linux Bout More

AMD vs Intel: A Linux Bout

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  • But they didn't even, like, use Gentoo! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:33PM (#10300513)
    Everyone KNOWS that for the best Linux performance you must use a specially optimized compile with Gentoo! It's a FACT!

  • Wintel vs AMDnux ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:35PM (#10300545) Journal
    So, isn't there some Bias here ?
    We associated so much Intel and Windows in the past that it now seems obvious that AMD is better for Linux ?
    Just a question, I have not checked the thoroughness of these tests.

    • A question in a vacuum isn't worth much (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Roadkills-R-Us ( 122219 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:02PM (#10300828) Homepage
      Since you didn't read the article, why are you asking the question? The testing looked pretty thorough to me, and the analysis was reasonable.

      And for the record, I know a number of AMD freaks. None of them are pro-AMD because of the Windows vs Linux thing. A few of them are anti-Intel, but some of them use Windows.

      So at least among those I know who voice an opinion, your thesis rings false.

    • Re:Wintel vs AMDnux ? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by quelrods ( 521005 ) * <(quel) (at) (quelrod.net)> on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:04PM (#10300845) Homepage
      I would certainly agree with you. Many of us who were anti-Intel and wanted a competitor constantly hoped that AMD would produce something better. The same anti-Microsoft sentiment that Linux users continue to enjoy windows take hits from security, stability, etc. I do know Intel is historically good at releasing all the documentation needed for developers. But AMD seems to have gotten more people excited about 64bit processors. Though, AMD's 64bit chip actually has per page locking on it (something no other x86 chip can boast.) Also, the 64bit windows xp isn't out yet, so performance is obviously better with the linux+AMD choice over windows+AMD.

    • Re:Wintel vs AMDnux ? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by fedork ( 186985 )
      the thing may be that with both Linux and AMD one of the reasons to choose them may be the unwillingness to go with the mainstream. It is that way for me anyway. So there certainly is a correlation.

  • AMD (Score:2, Interesting)

    by yonatanh ( 815045 )
    I've always been an AMD fan, this just confirms my beliefs and makes my next processor being an AMD processor decision final. Anyone know why an AMD 2400+ would be running at over 50 degrees Celsius? Check the fan and the case is at around 30 degrees Celsius.

    • Re:AMD running at 50deg C. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:52PM (#10300730)
      Because you probably have a crap heatsink/fan combo. If you like to live richly get a Swiftech MXV462-V series heatsink for it... Works wonder but it's damn pricey (around $50.00 for the heatsink itself, big heavy copper block with a few hundred rough surface aluminum spikes driven into it in a spherical layout)

      It also has one of the best mounting methods I've seen, no more screwdrivers prying against super strong springs in tight corners...

      http://www.cluboverclocker.com/reviews/heatsinks/s wiftech/mcx462-v/page2.htm [cluboverclocker.com]

      • Re:AMD running at 50deg C. (Score:5, Informative)

        by jmke ( 776334 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:25PM (#10301065) Homepage Journal
        The Swiftech MCX462-V (MVX does not exist afaik ;)) is not the best heatsink out there money can buy. There are a lot of others which beat the Swiftech in both performance, price and noise levels. I've done 2 AMD heatsink roundups, one of them was posted at /. here [slashdot.org]

        The latest update I made can be found here from August 2004 [madshrimps.be] and includes tons of innovative Heatpipe coolers which deliver great performance at a lower price! can't beat that?

        Look for a Thermalright SP-94 or Sharkoon HSP1 to get your AMD chilly :)
        • Look for a Thermalright SP-94 or Sharkoon HSP1 to get your AMD chilly :)

          actualy the Thermalright SP-94 is for socket 478 CPUs, he'd be after a Thermalright SP-97 for socket A CPUs. Sadly the SP-97 has been discontinued but he can probably find some around. That combined with a Panaflo or Vantec Tornado fan (depending on what performance/noise ratio he's after) will be the best air cooling solution for his socket A cpu. the Zalman CNSP7000A-ALCU is also a nice option if you're looking for a quiet, decent
      • I would suggest the Zalman CNSP7000A-ALCU [overclockersclub.com] as being a more resonable alternative to the Swiftech. Note I'm talking about the -ALCU version, not the -CU. The pure copper -CU is a bit TOO heavy and you risk damaging your core when you move your system. For a few degrees higher temperature it's worth getting the cheaper -ALCU.

    • Re:AMD (Score:5, Funny)

      by leoboiko ( 462141 ) <leoboiko@gmail . c om> on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:59PM (#10300801) Homepage
      I've always been an AMD fan

      Poor guy. You have an heroic job, my friend. Keep on spinning, our processors' integrity depends on you.

  • Intel never on top for price/performance.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by brxndxn ( 461473 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:35PM (#10300554)
    Aside from the few times Intel released a great overclocker, I have never seen a lower-priced Intel processor beat a higher-priced AMD processor in any significant set of benchmarks..

    AMD4tw!

    Yet, benchmarks, until recently, always seemed to compare same clock speeds/ratings despite Intel's offerings always costing more. It's nice they're starting to be more fair to AMD.

    • Re:Intel never on top for price/performance.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:08PM (#10300881) Homepage Journal
      Yet, benchmarks, until recently, always seemed to compare same clock speeds/ratings despite Intel's offerings always costing more

      The prices always fluctuate over time, from store to store, etc., so it is hard to compare $200 AMD with $200 Intel. And then there's the motherboards and chipsets. I think comparing based on price might need to be an exercise left to the reader.
      • When I bought my P4, the CPU was more expensive than a comparable AMD.

        But, once I factored in a mobo with the feature set I wanted, the total package was actually about 5 bucks cheaper.
        • motherboard has more tendancy to fluctuate in price than cpu itself. because there's lots of different manufacturers offering different products to consumers. ECS offers a low cost crap board that
          'll get you by, while, or so i've heard ABIT products are generally thought to be slightly better. brands aside, you've got lots of people making different things for a wide range of price. from my prior research, low entry boards were about the same price, i'd expect midrange boards to be similar. anyone can

  • duh (Score:4, Funny)

    by Nate Fox ( 1271 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:35PM (#10300556)
    They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560

    Well yea. The AMD has more and bigger numbers. Its got to be gooder.

  • Hyperthreading (Score:5, Interesting)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:36PM (#10300558) Homepage Journal

    So this latest benchmark suggests that HyperThreading doesn't do a whole lot. Is this the case on all unixy systems (ie: is HT geared more to Windows?) or is lacklustre performance on Windows the case as well?

    I'm leaning heavily to the AMD 64 stuff for my next home unixy machine, any arguments for the P4?

    • Re:Hyperthreading (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Nos. ( 179609 ) <andrewNO@SPAMthekerrs.ca> on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:43PM (#10300639) Homepage
      No hyperthreading is hyperthreading. How the OS is written will make some difference, but HT is not some supper technology that makes slower processors act like faster ones. It just makes them a bit more efficient. Your better off going dual processors or to a faster processor. Of course, I'd agree with your last statment, go for the AMD64, according to everything I've read and heard, you won't regret it.

      • Re:Hyperthreading (Score:5, Funny)

        by Sevn ( 12012 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:48PM (#10300691) Homepage Journal
        but HT is not some supper technology..

        It could be with some thermal glue and a fondue pot.

      • How the OS is written will make some difference

        Slightly offtopic, but there was an article [lwn.net] at linux weekly news awhile ago about a new scheduling algorithm for NUMA machines. They made an interesting point that load balancing between hyperthread cores (by migrating processes) is much cheaper than load balancing between separate physical cpus, since both hyperthread cores share the same L2 cache, and thus the process doesn't have to start over with an empty cache.

        -jim

      • Re:Hyperthreading (Score:3, Informative)

        by cthrall ( 19889 )
        > How the OS is written will make some difference,
        > but HT is not some supper technology that makes
        > slower processors act like faster ones.

        If the OS equates a single hyperthreaded CPU with multiple CPUs, there could be a performance hit:

        http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/ 09 /13/228780.aspx

        This patch has been around for a while by the looks of it:

        http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/391/972

    • Re:Hyperthreading (Score:4, Informative)

      by currivan ( 654314 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:46PM (#10300667)
      I bought an Athlon64 3200+ system in June and I'm quite happy with it as a server, but there are a few issues. There doesn't seem to be any way to run Wine on 64 bit chips, or at least the compilation fails for lack of support for low level locking operations. Also, the dual library setup (/lib and /lib64) creates problems for some projects that use older build systems. I also made the mistake of getting an ATI graphics card, and they don't have 64-bit drivers, and the Mandrake ones are too buggy to run UT2004.

      • Re:Hyperthreading (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:58PM (#10300785)
        You bought a 64bit consumer orientated chip to use as a server, tried to install 32 bit Windows emulator as AMD64 native binary and have an ATI graphics card to play UT2004?

        1+1=5

        Wouldn't you be better with WinXP 64 beta? This isn't a troll, I have a rack full of Opterons running linux and a desktop AMD64 machine but I'm not a gamer, and I've no use for Windows programs. You on the other hand...
        • You bought a 64bit consumer orientated chip to use as a server, tried to install 32 bit Windows emulator as AMD64 native binary and have an ATI graphics card to play UT2004?
          What? UT2004 has native Linux 64-bit binaries...where you getting the "32 bit Windows emulator" from?
          Are you claiming that ucc-bin-linux-amd64 is an emulated Windows program??

      • Re:Hyperthreading (Score:5, Informative)

        by dmayle ( 200765 ) * on Monday September 20, 2004 @05:08PM (#10301555) Homepage Journal

        There doesn't seem to be any way to run Wine on 64 bit chips

        Pure, misinformed mistakes

        I use Gentoo primarily on my Athlon 64 3000+ SFF, and I use wine to run Forte Agent and Microsoft Photo Editor. I haven't yet found an Open Source program (or pair of programs) that performs as well as these two for looking at... pictures of sailboats. Yeah... pictures of sailboats

        Wine works just fine on amd64, it just needs to be compiled to 32-bit code.

      • If you want a 32bit Wine (most people want that as they want to be able to run Win32 apps), you need to tell it (actually tell your build toolchain) to issue a 32bit binary rather than the default 64bit.

        To do so, follow the instructions given here [winehq.org], and you should be set.

    • Re:Hyperthreading (Score:4, Insightful)

      by adisakp ( 705706 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:46PM (#10300671) Journal
      Hyperthreading is REALLY good for allowing low work threads to be much more responsive under heavy system conditions. One of the places I've noticed hyperthreading really shines is allowing MS Windows systems to have a more responsive UI when the system is stressed out by heavy CPU workloads.

      This is useful in programming because the editor keeps up nicely without going "away" for a couple seconds if I decide I want to make some changes or revisions to a file while compiling the rest of the project.
    • well, mostly hyperthreading doesn't do a whole lot.

      it's not like it's some super tech that gives you two real cpu's or something..

      • Re:Hyperthreading (Score:3, Insightful)

        by stratjakt ( 596332 )
        No but it keeps Windows nice and responsive even when somethings crunching away in the background, which is what it's for, IMO. That is, doing a great big compile job in the background doesn't slow down my slashdot reading.

        It's not a second CPU, but a way to share a bit of the power. The problem is, Linux treats it like a CPU, Windows has some special rules for it.

        I'll just say I noticed the difference as far as "responsiveness under load" between a P4 2.8 (no HT) running at 3.06, and an actual 3.06 wit
        • I've always felt that Linux does a better job than Windows of staying responsive when things are going on in the background anyway... So perhaps what you're seeing is a deficiency of the Windows kernel being mitigated by HT.

        • Re:Hyperthreading (Score:3, Informative)

          by gnuman99 ( 746007 )
          I'll just say I noticed the difference as far as "responsiveness under load" between a P4 2.8 (no HT) running at 3.06, and an actual 3.06 with HT, under Windows. Didn't notice any difference with Linux.

          HINT: Because Linux does it the right way in the beginning.

          BTW, HT is only supported in Win XP and Linux 2.6.x. Linux 2.4 does not have proper support for it, and Win 2k, well, knows nothing about HT.

      • One example that blew me away was doing openssl speed md5 vs. openssl speed md5 -multi 2 on an HT-enabled NetBSD box (2.6C P4).

        The throughput went from under 300M/s to 480M/s (can't remember and can't be bothered to reboot now to check).

        That's just one counter-example. The general increase in responsiveness under load is a plus, too.

        For real workloads a real SMP box is obviously better, though.

    • Re:Hyperthreading (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:05PM (#10300853)
      No input re: M$ on HT'd cpu's.

      Under Linux I have seen various effects due to HT in the CPU. In the bad old (2.4 kernel) days dual Xeons would often run slower under relatively high load because the scheduler was agnostic of the fact that virtual cpu's share cache. I have also seen some sections of code which a)caches up nicely and b) is VERY heavy on FP math, give me about 1.8x the throughput by enabling HT. Seems the more a feature is hyped by marketing, the more likely it is that your mileage will vary greatly. Now if we could just get an OS/compiler that could use all the freakin' MMU's on a Power4 instead of just one .....

    • It mostly solves problems that don't exist on AMD (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ColourlessGreenIdeas ( 711076 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:08PM (#10300890)
      Hyperthreading lets the other thread use execution units that'd otherwise be empty due to pipeline bubbles. This makes a reasonable difference on many applications on the P4, due to its absurdly long pipeline. A more sensible pipeline length (i.e. an AMD processor) means there'll be less benefit to hyperthreading. I can't think of any good reason why the effects will be different between Windows and Linux.
      • A more sensible pipeline length (i.e. an AMD processor) means there'll be less benefit to hyperthreading.

        Actually, any processor with an "overabundance" of resources (say, if the Athlon 64 had 4 FPU and had HT) can make use of HyperThreading.

        Simplistic example: In the P4 case, the pipeline is long (20 stages) and there are ~4 or so execution units. That's 80 things that can be in-flight that can have stalls. HyperThreading can help keep more of the 80 "things" doing something every clock than only one

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I suppose that depends on your tests. How much attention should we pay to the databse test if the review says:
      We expect to see a performance increase with HyperThreading - SQL servers must thread well. [anandtech.com]

      Yet the sql-bench manual says:
      Note that this benchmark is single-threaded [mysql.com].

      Take a decent benchmark, run it with 10 instances simultaneously and then we'll see if it really helps for heavy multithreaded loads. (That doesn't really belong in a desktop test, but does compiling?)

  • Linux Users Prefer Underdog Company (Score:5, Funny)

    by adisakp ( 705706 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:36PM (#10300561) Journal
    Why am I surprised ?? :)

    • Re:Linux Users Prefer Underdog Company (Score:4, Funny)

      by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:42PM (#10300631) Homepage Journal

      Huh? Nowhere in the article was Apple mentioned...
  • I don't have an enormous pile of money to shell out all over. AMD has always done everything I need for significantly less than anything Intel has offered.

    • Re:I love AMD processors (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tsiangkun ( 746511 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:15PM (#10300974) Homepage
      I love AMD for the stealth marketing.

      AMD has never ran an ad campaign informing me the processor is inside the computer. AMD has never assaulted my ears with crappy noise from painted blue freaks.

      1. Put the money into R&D
      2. produce a great product a fair price
      3. let the word of mouth advertising do it's thing.
      4. Profit

      There is no ??? in this business strategy.

      • Re:I love AMD processors (Score:5, Insightful)

        by 0racle ( 667029 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:45PM (#10301260)
        Ya because todays consumer is well informed about all issues surrounding the product they intend to purchase. Thats why OS/2 and Apple beat out the less then stellar offerings from Microsoft over the past decade.

        Hmmmm....

        People buy what ever a company makes the most noise about. There are still people that you really have to slam their head against a wall to convince that an AMD processor isn't inferior to Intel, simply because they never hear of this 'AMD thing.' The only real reason to choose one over the other is the cost. That said, being a fan of either is just silly. Unless you run benchmarks that spit out numbers, which are meaningless in the real world, you will not be able to tell what a system is running. If I threw a AMD processor in a box and slapped an Intel Inside sticker on the front, 99 out of 100 people would tell me I'd get better performance from an AMD chip after they used it, the last person probably wouldn't care. You see an increase in performance in an AMD system because you expect to, not because it actually is so much better, since the differences in real performance are imperceptible.
      • AMD is doing something else. "Word of mouth" can be VERY powerful today. But I bet they'd be doing LOTSA publicity if the internet hadn't arrived yet.

        Remember what the lack of marketing did to the Commodore Amiga (with its powerful Video Toaster), when IBM only made bleeps and creeps.

        Think about it.

  • Printable / 1 page link (Score:5, Informative)

    by aardwolf204 ( 630780 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:55PM (#10300748)
    Printer friendly link [anandtech.com]

    Tired of clicking next page

  • The Price/Performace of a VIA C5 (or C7)..... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Powertrip ( 702807 ) * on Monday September 20, 2004 @03:56PM (#10300770) Homepage Journal
    The Price/Performace of a VIA C5 (or C7)would be interesting to see here. No, I don't expect it to come even close in 'horsepower' to the players, but it would be of great interest for low-cost server appliances of sorts.
    • I reckon what would be really interesting is to factor in the power requirements (including cooling) of these systems, especially in a cluster configuration. Sure, a bunch of Xeons or Opterons (or G5's) will give you great peformance. But how much are you paying to power AND cool those hogs? A rack-full will pump out enough heat to require a good air-conditioning unit. How does a cluster of mini-itx's [slashdot.org] compare then? Inquiring minds want to know, and I'm available to do the testing for anyone who wants to don
  • Did I understand that if I install the 64-bit of Debian on an Athlon 64 (754) system, I will not be able to use 32-bit applications and the 64 compiled programs are not always updated and not all of them are available? This is mainly for a workstation usage.

    I am planning to upgrade in a few days to replace my old Red Hat Linux 7.2 box.

  • Where's the 754s? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ameoba ( 173803 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:08PM (#10300885)
    Any article that bases its conclusions on price/performance ratios that leaves out AMD's socket 754 Athlon64s is overlooking a major contender. Socket 754 chips generally cost far less than the s939 ones at comparable speeds and with the current generation of chips the dual-channel memory that s939 offers doesn't provide that much of a performance boost.

    Some might say that the s754 chips are an upgradability dead end but most people aren't upgrading CPUs without replacing the motherboard & RAM anyways. A s939 chip doesn't really get you much more upgrade headroom since there are no 939 boards with PCI-Express and DDR2 on them anyways...
    • Socket 754 chips generally cost far less than the s939 ones at comparable speeds...

      Only until this [monarchcomputer.com] Wednesday [monarchcomputer.com]. These new 90nm chips run cooler too, 1.4V core instead of 1.5V. The 90nm 3500+ goes on sale Monday [monarchcomputer.com]. I'd expect Newegg [newegg.com], MWave [mwave.com], and the rest of the usual suspects to get them around then or shortly thereafter.

      DDR2 has much higher latency than DDR1 (negating one of the major AMD64 advantages) and costs twice as much. I don't know why AMD would bother with it. PCI-Express boards will be here soo
    • I got stuck when I bought a 700MHz SlotA that I'm still using. I wanted to upgrade vs buying new for a long time but I can't. Now I'll be getting a 939 in the hope that I can drop in a dual-core in the future. Aside from that, you'd be correct. I don't see clock speeds increasing fast enough to offer significant upgrades before everything changes. If AMD64 gets in the 3-4GHz range, they'll probably be using DDR2 by then and require a board change which will then put you into PCIX graphics...

  • compile times (Score:3, Informative)

    by planckscale ( 579258 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:08PM (#10300891) Journal
    To me, 4 1/2 minutes to compile the 2.6.5 kernel seems pretty smokin. The Athlon 64 3800+ must be able to burn liquid magma. I haven't done it recently on my boxes (I think it took around 30 minutes on my 1.3 Duron), but this seems really quick. What are some compile times you guys are seeing on your CPU's?

  • Price/Performance (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Slightly Askew ( 638918 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:19PM (#10301014) Journal

    They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560 for "balancing price and performance".

    Naturally, I didn't RTFA, but doesn't this suggest that I, as a geek who doesn't care about the value of my money, would get better performance with the Intel? Otherwise, they would just come right out and say that the AMD is the fastest of all processors, wouldn't they? I mean, I know that I would choose a DLP HDTV for "balancing price and performance", but that LCD is just so damn cool. Hell, I don't know, maybe I'll go read the article, but this sounds like some of that marketing speak we were recently warned about.

    • If you've got money burning your pockets, buy an FX53.

    • Re:Price/Performance (Score:3, Interesting)

      by catenos ( 36989 )

      They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560 for "balancing price and performance".

      Naturally, I didn't RTFA

      I don't see anything natural about that.

      Yes, I am aware that you are referring to typical behaviour of the Slashdot croud, but the natural behaviour would have been to read the article, if you wonder about that statement.

      but doesn't this suggest that I, as a geek who doesn't care about the value of my money, would get better performance with the Intel?

      No. Just because an Intel processor isn'

  • Anandtech, AMD isnt the only 64bit x86 player (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cwcpetech ( 733201 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:20PM (#10301025)
    I'd allow them to skip the Itanium processor line, but to skip the 64bit EM64T is quite odd for such a review. Handing the 64bit categories with no competition like that is almost a PR exercise. You might as well be throwing G5 performance numbers at x86 machines instead of consulting the POWER5 equivalents (closest competition).

  • What's with the OpenSSL part? (Score:3)

    by photon317 ( 208409 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:45PM (#10301258)

    Maybe I'm blind (seems to be the case), but I stared at the OpenSSL graph results, and I see the opposite of what the written text claims about them both on the benchmark page and in the conclusion. The written statements were to the effect that the 64-bit binaries sucked and that it was probably because OpenSSL was so heavily 32-bit optimized - but when you mouse-over for the 64-bit OpenSSL graphs of AES and RSA, the 64-bit binary result numbers look like they're trouncing the 32-bit counterpart binary on the same processor, as well as everything else in the test. What gives?

    • Err.. well, I was half blind - the crypto benchmark part of the article does read that the 64-bit binaries are faster, I think, which agrees with the graphs - I just misread it after reading the conclusion first. But in the conclusion, they make the statement "Unfortunately, there were still several cases where 64-bit binaries performed slower; John the Ripper and OpenSSL being two of those examples."

      The conclusion is in error, I think..

  • Things I've taken away from this review. (Score:3, Funny)

    by rmy1 ( 815018 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @04:55PM (#10301395)
    According to the review, faster processors performed better than slower ones.

    Gee, whodathunkit.

  • LinuxHardware.org has similar article (Score:5, Informative)

    by vherva ( 22270 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @05:03PM (#10301500)
    Recently posted: Intel's New Platform Verses AMD's 64-bit Prowess [linuxhardware.org]. Similar scope in benchmarks, perhaps better analyzed.

  • publish your methodology (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 ) on Monday September 20, 2004 @05:09PM (#10301560) Journal
    The benchmarks would be a lot more credible and useful if scripts and data could be downloaded and run by readers.
    • It seems I was a tad hasty. Perhaps some kind soul will distill it all in to a nice perl script.
    • Well, all of the benchmarks are available. To make it easier for people to run benchmarks on their computers and make more tech sites to GNU/Linux benchmarking, I am currently developing a LiveCD for benchmarking purposes (and of course the benchmark scripts will be usable by everyone as well as the programs for configuration etc.). http://linbench.sf.net

  • This mostly goes to show (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dlakelan ( 43245 ) <{gro.stsitra-teerts} {ta} {nalekald}> on Monday September 20, 2004 @05:25PM (#10301752) Homepage
    How little in the way of data analysis skills even tech savvy people have.

    Mouse over to see the 64 bit results, on a different scale? Yuck.

    Do the test 3 times and take the maximum? Yuck, how about the average?

    Bar charts? With non-constant widths between factors? yuck.

    I think probably 3 charts would have sufficed to show the whole thing. One showing total sum of time taken to run each of 3 suites: desktop, content, and benchmark, one color per suite.

    One showing the effect of 32 vs 64 bits on processors capable of doing both.

    One anova of DDR1 vs DDR2 (text) and of Hyperthreading vs. Not.

    One plot of performance to price ratio for the best config of each processor.

    And don't even get me started on the HINT benchmark (which is hard to get anymore I guess).

  • ...a slightly larger roundup. xServe is supposedly the best bang for the buck [com.com] when it comes to big cluster servers. How about: P4-, AMD-, G5-Linux roundup?
  • They suggest the Athlon 64 3500+ over the P4 560 for "balancing price and performance" ... and this is also the result they'd also get if using them on Windows?

    I don't see why it wouldn't anyway.

    For personal use, Athlon's have almost always (at least since the first Athlon was released) had better "balance between price and performance".

  • Double bias test (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Reson Amd chips run better when kernel is built for amd. Intel chips are the same. Benchmark total screwed up. But no more bias than windows vs linux ones it is always the wrong kernel.

    Rebuilding the kernel to match process can give upto 40% speed boast depending on the processor.

    Poor windows users never see there processor chip work to its best. Hypertheading disabled ment that intel did not stand a chance since Hyperthreading is required to make up for there lack of general performace(linux kernel do

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