Phenom IIs, Core I7-920 Win Out In Value Analysis 214
An anonymous reader writes "We've all seen processor benchmarks, but how do today's enthusiast CPUs look when you account for performance per dollar? Using a smorgasbord of charts, scatter plots, and performance tests, The Tech Report attempted to single out the highest-value offerings out of 16 popular Intel and AMD processors. The results might surprise you: AMD's 45nm Phenom IIs (both triple- and quad-core) prove to be strikingly competitive with Intel's Core 2 Quads. And, on the high end, Intel's $266 Core i7-920 turns out to be a compelling step up despite the higher costs of Core i7 platforms in general."
This is a TERRIBLE comparison (Score:5, Interesting)
Price is all-important (Score:1, Interesting)
None of that is important. Any modern x86 CPU is going to have enough performance for anything you want to do. You'd get more benefit shaving a baby's ass than squeezing the cost/performance ratio on these chips these days. Better to throw more money at a separate server if you really need more power than trying to boost the speed of any single computer.
Really, the thing that will make the biggest difference is the OS, but if you're running any modern OS you're already wasting most of those CPU cycles on platform overhead.
Let's stop making reviews for gamers (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently had to make the tough choice of a Phenom 2 vs Intel Core Quad. I went with the Intel because I somehow came to the conclusion that they run cooler.
You see, I'm building a recording PC, so I want to have as few fans as possible. I plan on having a huge heatsink with NO fan. Most reviews, if they focus on heat, focus on the overclocking aspect.
If wattage correlates to heat like I think it does, I may have been better off with a Phenom 2. But, then again, the wattage test was only run during one task in this review. I read another review where it was different.
There just aren't enough review sites out there for... ahem... "grown ups". Maybe I should start one that takes a look at performance with DAWs like REAPER.
In the end, I don't care about best performance per dollar, or wattage per dollar. I care about performance per degree of heat, because heat = noise. Performance of modern CPUs is good enough these days.
Oh well, that's my rant of the day.
Re:This is a TERRIBLE comparison (Score:5, Interesting)
In the cluster I run, I've been quickly swapping out old xeons for new Core i7's. With just the 4 920's I have running, I've been able to remove 20 old xeons, all while improving the overall performance of the cluster.
Price / Performance also helps you judge how fast the computer will be antiquated. If you now need only 500 gflops, and this computers offers 1000, you know that it should sustain you into the future.
Re:Let's stop making reviews for gamers (Score:3, Interesting)
Missing the best value for the buck, AMD Kuma 7750 (Score:3, Interesting)
Just about threading (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:AMD price : performance linear (Score:4, Interesting)
AMD is the loveable underdog, but don't forget how expensive their X2s were when they were dominant. AMD isn't cheap because they're doing us a favor, they're cheap because they have to be.
That's a thing that people don't seem to get - prices are what they must be in the market. The question is, can you skim off enough to keep designing new chips and developing your foundries? Already they've failed at the latter and is trying a huge bet trying to make a foundry company spin-off. No matter how badly they're really doing, in the "here and now" they'll be competitive right up until they file for chapter 11.
Re:Now something about that linked site... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Price is all-important (Score:3, Interesting)
There is another barrier that we will eventually hit. The current process schedulers in use on modern operating systems have a problem. Attempting to use more than roughly 38 logical processors will result in the additional processors either waiting to run the process scheduler, waiting for a memory access, or waiting for I/O. Currently this is sidestepped on mainframes using virtualization and low latency I/O. I have a hard time seeing how virtualization or lower latency I/O could be adapted for use in desktop computers. Running Windows Aleph-Null, MacOS X 12.8, and Linux 2.8.1853 would probably not have much appeal to average users that would still need the power a desktop computer offered at that point. Intel, the main driving force of the PCISIG keeps pushing newer versions of PCI-Express that do not address the interconnect's inability to play nice with multiple masters, providing any type of packet routing, or deal in any way with its absurdly high latency, which is over 100ns even with PCIe 1.1, and gets worse with each newer version. Some sort of low latency sideband channel would work, but figuring how to maintain backward compatibility with current PCIe cards and motherboards is not easy. Instead Intel has added only DRM features, but no actual security for the computer's user on the bus itself (think Firewire and writing to whatever memory locations you want).
Bad form ahead:
If embryonic stem cell research does not make you uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough. --James Thompson
Better:
If embryonic stem cell research makes you uncomfortable, you have thought about it far too much. Try researching the actual potential feasibility of the scare stories, and consider that adult stem cells have never been made totipotent, only pluripotent.
Yeah sorry about that.
Re:Price is all-important (Score:2, Interesting)
But I don't run transcoding on my workstation anyway. Why? Because all the I/O continuosly flushes out my disk buffers for other processes.
Which is exactly the reason why posix_fadvise(2) exists.