
Tom's Hardware End of Year CPU Roundup 217
Wister285 writes "Tom's Hardware has just posted one of their now famous CPU comparisons. Aside from looking at all of the nice graphs, they also compare the speeds of overclocked processors with their factory rated counterparts. It looks like the AMD chips just don't overclock as well as the Intel ones do, but when run at their specified level AMD almost always has the best price/performance ratio. Hopefully the upcoming year will be as promising in the processor sector as 2003 was!"
they should have said PC CPUs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:they should have said PC CPUs (Score:2, Insightful)
In my opinion, the PPC 970 was the surprise of the year. A shame not to mention it.
Re:they should have said PC CPUs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:they should have said PC CPUs (Score:2, Informative)
It's an unfair judgement to make, though, as a similar problem exists with other fine processors such as the Sparc and MIPS processors.
UltraSparc? (Score:2)
Last year's midrange server is this year's workstation, but Tom's advertisers aren't the ones that are selling parts for it. (To be fair, the majority of his readers probably build computers for games, which my workstation's 8-bit framebuffer isn't likely to deliver on.)
Re:they should have said PC CPUs (Score:2)
Aren't Toms Hardware very pro-Intel anyway? Rembember some rumor about that.
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN the 2nd coming IS TROLL (Score:1)
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN the 2nd coming IS TROLL (Score:2)
Um, unless every post you've made hits a +5, your karma isn't perfect...
(And mine will take a hit for this post!
Excellent Article (Score:3, Informative)
However, it has to be pointed out that he missed several important incidents:
- AMD alliance with SUN: news article [amd.com]
-AMDs deal with Tippet studios: We built some prototype desktop workstations powered by AMD Athlon(TM) MP processors. We had tried systems powered by a competitor's processors, and they worked fairly well. However, we absolutely preferred the performance of the AMD Athlon(TM) processor. A good part of the advantage comes from the performance of AMD's floating point engine, which is very important to compute-intensive operations such as rendering.
-Intels new challenge in process technology with a cheap strained silicon process, finally unveiled at the iedm. AMD, this will be a touch one: IEDM article [iedm.com]
where's the G5 comparisons? (Score:3, Interesting)
If at the very least, they could do speed comparisons on the AMD64, the P4, and the G5 all running various Linux distributions to make it fair. (I'm heavily assuming the Yellow Dog distribution supports the G5)...
Comparing apples (no pun intended) to oranges (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be a waste of THG's time when the whole idea was to compare x86 CPUs. Yeah it ignores the PPC -- why? x86 archetecture comparison is an apples to apples comparsion.
Re:Comparing apples (no pun intended) to oranges (Score:1)
Re:Comparing apples (no pun intended) to oranges (Score:2)
You can compare the 2.6 Kernel and how its features are supported/optimized within each CPUs architectures.
You can compare features like, preemption, smp, threading, bus saturations, memory management, network throughput, database performances, reiserFS, XFS, etc..
How about the ceiling performances of all 3 CPU architectures performing identical tasks?
Then a cost breakdown.
WebServer performance in clusters? Loadbalancing performances of Apache2 on all 3 arc
Overclocking reviews (Score:5, Interesting)
The other major problem is that review parts are often hand-picked, nullifying their value as indicators of overclockability completely.
Re:Overclocking reviews (Score:5, Insightful)
It must be a bragging rights thing because it doesn't take long for faster chip to be released, and you've run the risk of an unstable system and sometimes people spend more for cooling than they might have just getting the next chip up.
As for AMD vs. Intel OC-ability, the two companies may simply have different comfort margins in marking a chip.
Re:Overclocking reviews (Score:2)
News flash: Yes, overclocking reduces stability. No, the processor companies aren't trying to trick everyone into using slower processors out of spite. No, you're not sticking it to The Man by overclocking. They really, really aren't trying to keep you down, and you're not some modern day Robin Hood,
Re:Overclocking reviews (Score:2)
I attempted to do just that with my celeron 300A cpu: I had it oc'd to 400mhz, no prob, and then when I tried for 450, my mobo had a nervous breakdown. Now I'm computerless, and right after Christmas (when I had absolutely no cash flow whatsoever).
Thanks for reminding me
Re:Overclocking reviews (Score:2)
If you're so worried about having performers at least get a new board like a Socket A [which runs from cheapo durons to barton]
Tom
Xp2100+.. (Score:2, Insightful)
This article is a bunch of crap. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This article is a bunch of crap. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually he didn't miss that point at all. This was mentioned in the very end of the article under the heading "Conclusion: Common Sense Prevails" [tomshardware.com]. Some of the comments there include:
That certainly sounds like somebody who understands that most ordinary users will get all the performance they need by buying a cheaper processor, especially one of the notably cheaper AMD models.
Re:This article is a bunch of crap. (Score:2)
You do need faster CPU's nowadays. (Score:2)
That might be true up till recently, but the increasing integration of digital still cameras and MiniDV/MicroDV camcorders with computers has finally forced many users to upgrade to far faster machines. Still-image processing and editing videos downloaded from camcorders nowadays make MAJOR demands on CPU processing power; with the price of computers
Re:This article is a bunch of crap. (Score:2)
Re:This article is a bunch of crap. (Score:4, Insightful)
For it to be a "fact", it has to be true...
Not true.
People will make use of the CPU power that they have available. Since most people don't have terribly fast processors, they don't do more advanced, and hence, CPU-intensive tasks.
Back when DOS was in charge, very few needed 100MHz processors, but more, new, applications come along to make use of that extra power.
If CPU power was more abundant, you'd probably see people commonly converting all their DV streams from their camcorders to MPEG4 to save space. Since that is rather time-consuming, most people don't do it.
My main CPU-intensive purpose is video. Live, real-time encoding from a TV-card uses plenty of CPU power, and to be able to also playback at the same time, you probably want more than 2.5GHz. Then, to also be able to encode a DVD in the background, you probably want an even more powerful processor still. Since most people don't have such powerful processors, they don't bother to do these types of things on their computers, yet. When the power is there, you will see people using it.
Yes, well you could have said the same thing about early, graphical DOS games if you had a 100MHz computer at the time. These days, 100MHz isn't enough, and in the near future, 2.5GHz won't be enough for the new games.
Re:This article is a bunch of crap. (Score:2)
Whether quicker was 2 years compared to 6 years or 2 months compared to 6 years, I don't know.
And this is news because? (Score:3, Insightful)
me (Score:2)
Re:And this is news because? (Score:2)
I do in some cases. My multimedia machine has an XP 1.66GHz processor in it. At the time, anything faster would have cost 25% more for very little performance improvement (and it would have tripled the cost to get a 2GHz). Instead, my XP2000 is running at XP3200 speed, with no noticable imcrease in heat, nor electrical power usage.
If that sentence made sense to anyone, please raise y
Re:This makes perfect sense(+) (Score:2)
What are you expecting for 2004? (Score:1)
Talking about the becoming year, what technologies that are still in study (or on test phase) you're expecting to become concrete on 2004 (not 2005, 2010 or "Stardate 45494"
In the beginning of 2003 i heard about SiGe (ibm) and (150GHz transistors [infoworld.com]) but didn't see the impact of that technology already (besides some 20% improve on intel processors because of SiGe, that seens low for me).
Overclocking a Z80 (Score:1)
Re:Overclocking a Z80 (Score:3, Interesting)
Has anybody overclocked a Z-80?
In a word: yes!
When I was a young and foolish electronic engineering student I and my friends did just that and partially ruined an otherwise perfectly sound rubber keyboard Sinclair Spectrum. I can not remember the exact details but it was not a succesful project. IIRC we tried feeding the system clock line from a squarewave of our own making and tried to run some timer code in an EPROM to flash an LED on an i/o port. My guess is that the Sinclair support chips (and po
Re:Overclocking a Z80 (Score:2)
I cant remember where I first saw the stuff linked below, some of the ZX stuff wasnt quite closed source enough.
Prepare your soldering iron:)
How to build your own ZX80/ZX81 [btopenworld.com]
Another zx81 clone using an FPGA [freeserve.co.uk]
Yet another ZX81 [angelfire.com]
I was about to say "Shame no one's done it for a Spectrum", but a quick Google search reveals that someone has [2y.net]. I am not worthy.
Is this [blackface.co.uk] a worthy haggis?
Re:Overclocking a Z80 (Score:2)
Have you tried a few small local butchers, instead of supermarkets?
Re:Overclocking a Z80 (Score:2)
Re:Overclocking a Z80 (Score:2)
Re:Overclocking a Z80 (Score:2)
And it seems I will finally be able to write a few games I always wanted but lacked a few CPU cycles!
Thanks!
AMD VS PIV OC (Score:1)
I cannot infer it from those OCDBs (and was about to shop for AMD for the first time ever):
http://www.vr-zone.com/guides/AMD/Barton/ [vr-zone.com]
http://www.vr-zone.com/guides/Intel/Northwood/ [vr-zone.com]
CC.
Overclocking (Score:1, Interesting)
james@g5linux -> uname -s -r -m -p
Linux 2.6.0-65 PPC G5
james@g5linux:~> cat
processor : 0
vendor_id : IBM
cpu family : 6
model : 6
model name : PPC 970 (G5)
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 2315.13
cache size : 2048 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp
the fastest solution RIGHT NOW? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:the fastest solution RIGHT NOW? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you have infinite money to spend? Go with an AthlonFX-51 [newegg.com]. It's the single fastest solution available, but it's at a premium price. The boards are around $200, and 1GB of memory will cost you around $350 because you have to buy Registered ECC memory. The upside of all this is that you're buying components rated for server operation, so you're looking at very high stability. I just built a $4300 computer system for a customer based on the FX-51. I was expecting some problems here and there because it's all such brand new technology, but was pleasantly surprised at the unbelievable stability. Word to the wise: if you're going high end on everything else, go with a high end power supply. A True Power 380 or 430 from Antec is a smart choice. For reference, I went with an Asus SK8N for the mainboard in this case. Also, make sure you get the recommended memory from Asus (listed at the bottom of their website's page for the board). It'll cost you more money, but it's worth it to not have to worry about stability.
If you don't want to spend quite that much, an Athlon64 3200+ is also a good value. Intel has confirmed, accidentally, that it's got a 64-bit desktop CPU in the works in case the AMD64 platform takes off, so you can bet your bottom dollar that we'll probably see a bunch of 64-bit applications available in the next year and a half.
Aberdeen Inc (Score:2)
Re:Aberdeen Inc (Score:2)
So far, I've not had anything but good experiences with newegg. They can sometimes be a little bit cheaper than my usual suppliers (TechData and D&H) and are sometimes the only suppliers for certain parts, especially high-end memory. I can't say that I've had any problems with them, other than the fact that I had an or
You're an idiot (Score:2)
They've failed to uphold their end of the bargain and until they do they'll have a black mark with the BBB. Even the makers of the case told us NewEgg only needed to send us out a new PSU. NewEgg even lied about having the case in stoc
Re:You're an idiot (Score:2)
They're morons. No matter how much you want to hold to the idea that NewEgg is great, they fucked up
Re:the fastest solution RIGHT NOW? (Score:4, Informative)
Clock speed doesn't really matter for CPUs of different architectures. The best thing to do is to check out the benchmarks for yourself to see which one performs better at the tasks you most often use. Some hardware sites with benchmarks are:
Ace's [aceshardware.com] (Recommended)
Ars [arstechnica.com]
HardOCP [hardocp.com]
Tom's [tomshardware.com]
Anandtech [anandtech.com] (Recommended)
Take all benchmark results with a grain of salt. Many things can influence the results, and some sites like Tom's have long been known to be quite biased. If you read enough sites though, you tend to get a much better overall picture of how things really are.
Re:Benchmarks are for fanbois (Score:2)
" the AMD chips are not nearly as capable as Intel chips, even today."
Interesting how the poster talks about modern CPU capabilities, then proceeds to tell us a delightful story about how he had problems using a pair of 5 year old [aceshardware.com] processors.
As for benchmarks being only good for producing reproducable numbers, this is in fact the case for synthetic benchmarks. Most hardware sites now test using actual games, reporting the average framerate received, and test how long it takes to render
Re:the fastest solution RIGHT NOW? (Score:2)
You're already off course, if you're thinking in terms of "a AMD chip" or "the latest p4 chip". Drop the singular; spe
Re:the fastest solution RIGHT NOW? (Score:2)
This especially true if you are going to edit image files from your digital camera or edit video files from your MiniDV/MicroDV camcorder; such editing places very major demands on sheer CPU processing power, and a fast enough CPU will make for a much more pleasant multimedia editing experience.
Stability? (Score:2)
Re:Stability? (Score:3, Interesting)
Generally speaking, I find that using a name-brand power supply, such as Antec, with a Gigabyte or Asus mainboard, and crucial memory
Re:Stability? (Score:2)
Depends on the conditions, but I've noticed a lot of problems with AMD chips running hot, and this can cause stability problems. If you control the climate carefully, they will run OK -- for example, my
Re:Stability? (Score:2)
Seems to me it stability would be more of a hardware issue. Keep the hardware cool enough, and get a decent enough power supply so the voltages are right and clean and you'll be fine whether Athlon/P4.
Dollar per megahertz (overclocked) (Score:3, Interesting)
First they give overclocking capablities and then non-overclocked price/performance ratio.
We know Intel CPUs are overclockable better but more expensive than AMD.
So, say, I can buy a 2GHZ AMD and overclock it by 300MHZ, getting 2.3GHZ. For the same money I can get a slower Intel and overclock it more. Now, if it was that I can get i.e. 1.7GHZ Inter and overclock it by 600MHZ, it would mean the CPUs are pretty much equivalent for me. Means - about the same price per megahertz overclocked. But if I can buy P4 1.6G overclockable by 500MHZ, giving total 2.1GHZ, it just pays better to buy the AMD.
Re:Dollar per megahertz (overclocked) (Score:2)
Some people care about real performance, with maybe a touch of reliability, rather than touting numbers.
(slashdot foe == *plonk*)
Conclusion (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been following Tom's hardware for years on end, and I loved their articles on RAID and drive benchmarks. Nowadays the articles are mostly written by mediocre "editors" though, and they bear little resemblence to articles by Tom himself.
To be fair, sometimes they still have great reviews (printers, screens and harddisks mostly), but you will have to look for them between articles that should never have seen the light of day.
Linux users should avoid this Windows site at all cost.
Re:Conclusion (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Conclusion (Score:2)
Yes... I noticed this part in the "cons" section of the Athlon 64: "No 64-bit software". Hmmmmm, I own an Athlon 64 system that currently has 4 operating systems on it and about a thousand pieces of 64-bit software installed.
Oh, I get it. Tom's hardware probably means WinZip64 hasn't been released yet, so that means there is no 64-bit software.
Re:Conclusion (Score:2)
Please share some more info with the group. I am 3 days out from buying an MSI K8T and Athlon64 3Ghz and a couple of sticks of Kingston or Corsair. How is the 32-bit and 64-bit driver support on Windows? How about kernel and userland driver support on Windows Server 2003 64-bit or on the XP 64-bit betas? [or even the Longhorn alpha that is floating around] Any known timelines for Microsoft's releases?
I can't dig up any information on any Microsoft AMD64 products, or their hardware compatibil
Blahh (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Blahh (Score:2)
There is always the issue of encoding video though, it would be nice to convert a DVD to divx in like 30 minutes instead of 4 hours.
toms biasware (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:toms biasware (Score:2)
Re:toms biasware (Score:2)
You can barely find a Socket A mobo that takes them.
Want a killer system? (Score:3, Insightful)
AMD's 1.4 GHz Opteron 240, thanks to being "obsolete" is now down to about $215 per chip. (Anyone who thinks Opterons are expensive, is on crack.) Throw a couple of these into a dual-socket-940 motherboard (about $360), and you will have something that can bite the head off of (and shit down the neck stump of) a high-end single P4 system. And costs about the same (not counting the P4EE, which costs more).
The Pentium 4 "Extreme Edition" is the ultimate ripoff for suckers. $1k for a processor? You can get four "obsolete" Opterons for the same price, which make the "extreme" chip look extremely slow. (Hm.. trying to find a quad-940 mb to look up the price, but I'm failing. I know they exist, and there's no way they cost over $600.)
Of course, you can play the same dirty tricks by building multi-P4 systems out of older "obsolete" versions of the P4 which are cheaper, too. But I think the Opteron still wins. The point I'm trying to make is: "day-old" chips are cheap, and if you build SMP systems out of them, they slay!!
Re:Want a killer system? (Score:2)
You can get 4 "obsolete" opterons for that price, but you can't have them working together..
The cheapest 4x Opteron chip you *can* buy is the Opteron 840 for $744.00. And at that, consider the price of a quad motherboard too.
If I'm not mistaken, doesn't standard windows limit the # of CPU's to 2 on a standard copy, and charge more for 4x systems?
Yeah, I know this is a linux site, but not everyone in corporate culture has adopted yet. :D
If you're going against the P4-EE, wouldn't a dual 244 be a bet
Re:Want a killer system? (Score:2)
AMD x86-64 with non-Microsoft OSes? (Score:5, Interesting)
The review takes pains to point out that AMD-64 binaries are as rare as hens teeth, and for the reviewer's primary audience who are gamers on Windows, and who have to run whatever P4-optimised or Athlon-optimised binaries the games vendors supply, that's pretty much true.
However, for many readers of this august forum, things are a bit more flexible - the only app I run at home that works the CPUs at all hard is digital video processing (transcode / mplayer / mpegenc on Linux), all the binaries for which are of course built from source, thus could potentially be 64-bit if one had AMD-64 hardware and suitable compilers.
Likewise, for the scientific community using Beowulf clusters, who generally run home grown code, this surely has a lot of potential.
Can someone post a summary of the state of the art in terms of AMD-64 binary output from gcc/egcs, and some info on how well it runs with CPU-intensive number crunching like this?
Professionally speaking, all our stuff at work is Java based, and we are looking for price/performance and space/performance ratios - our latest batch of servers (1U pizza boxes with desktop 2 CPU chipsets are the best price/perf compromise) have dual P4's because of the better memory bandwidth of the i7500 dual channel setup compared the dual Athlon chipsets which were stuck at single DDR-266 for the longest time, but if there was a byte compiler which targeted AMD-64 I could see potential for really nice price/performance with the Socket 940 systems, and even just using 32-bit code the higher memory bandwidth would help a lot with Java apps.
Re:AMD x86-64 with non-Microsoft OSes? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:AMD x86-64 with non-Microsoft OSes? (Score:2, Informative)
Lovely... (Score:2, Insightful)
Ummmm.... Tom's yet again incorrectly identified a CPU. IA-32 != IA-64 people, however backwards, IA-32 = x86-64... Of course knowing how perceptive people are on /. this has already been posed, right?
I used to overclock (Score:3, Interesting)
Preferred sources for technical information? (Score:2)
Re:Preferred sources for technical information? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Preferred sources for technical information? (Score:5, Informative)
A few other popular sources of information include:
HardOCP [hardocp.com]
Dan's Data [dansdata.com]
X-bit Labs [xbitlabs.com]
Ars Technica [arstechnica.com]
Regards,
--
*Art
Re:Preferred sources for technical information? (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention Ace's [aceshardware.com] if you're really into all the nitty gritty details of things. They do outstanding reviews and technical articles, but can get pretty heavy on the technical details. So far, Ace's is the only place I've found that actually goes over my head from time to time. I do enjoy the challenge.
Ace SpecMine - Great Tool (Score:2)
Re:Preferred sources for technical information? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:you fail it dikky (Score:1)
Well, Tom may be overly enthusiastic at times, but you should not forget that he, and only he, had several world first on his website.
For example when he published thermal problems with the AMD athlons, instabilities of the to be released Pentium III 1.13GHz article [tomshardware.com] and much more.
Judge the articles by themselves, not the website as a whole.
Re:you fail it dikky (Score:5, Interesting)
1.) Their P4 was shown to run at a constant 29C. Thermal throttling on the P4 doesn't even start until ~65 or 70C. If the chips were running at 29C, they wouldn't be throttling at all.
2.) The P4 can throttle down to an absolute minimum of 1/8th of it's clock speed, though it's set to 30-50% by default (factory setting) according to Intel's thermal design guidelines. At 30% of it's clock speed, a P4 will still consume easily 20-30W of power, which is WAY more than you can disapate with no heatsink. Yanking the heatsink off a P4 WILL cause it to crash in a very short period of time.
3.) The comment that was made that AMD's thermal sensor could only react to 1C/sec temperature changes was absolutely ridiculous and CLEARLY showed that the author was completely clueless! Such terrible performance couldn't be accomplished by incompetance along, you would really have to TRY and make it that bad!
The whole deal about the instabililties of the PIII 1.13GHz wasn't so much technically incorrect for the simple reason that there was next to no technical info provided, it was almost all just self-congradulation.
I DO judge the articles by themselves, and the articles on Tom's site generally leave a LOT to be desired. The article linked from this story seems to be mostly fluff with a few benchmarks requiring the standard (ie very large) grain of salt.
Re:you fail it dikky (Score:2)
If you'll look often, you'll note that the articles on Tom's tend to slant toward whoever is advertising on their site at the time the article is published. When AMD is advertising on Tom's, the benchmarks slant AMD's way and Intel is nothing more than a monopolisti
do people actually bother overclocking ghz+ CPUs (Score:2)
Something to consider (Score:2)
They still do good work, now lets avoid the fanboy flame wars and just leave this alone.
Re:you fail it dikky (Score:2)
AMD/Linux/IBM good, Intel/MS bad.
Slashdot should change its title to that or "Bias news for nerds, stuff we think should matter"
Re:you fail it dikky (Score:2)
Tom's has long since been known to skew results to please their advertising Masters, whoever they may be at any given time. The choice of benchmarks and the particular machine setup account for many of the results yielded. To prove this, I can show you [theinquirer.net] a review in which the P4s get their asses handed to them in gaming benchmarks by the slowest Athlon64. From that link:
"As you can see, Athlon 64 won
Come on, it's /. (Score:2)
Re:you fail it dikkyfancy words (Score:1, Insightful)
that's way over the top. you sound like a CNN reporter. can we say "over sensationalize"?
i think i'd just simply describe tom's as:
"not very good anymore"
Re:POSTED PREVIOUSLY BY A DIFFRENT AUTHOR, MOD DOW (Score:5, Informative)
Re:POSTED PREVIOUSLY BY A DIFFRENT AUTHOR, MOD DOW (Score:2)
Re:POSTED PREVIOUSLY BY A DIFFRENT AUTHOR, MOD DOW (Score:2)
Don't worry... IE will have a pop-up blocker sometime next year. For those of us who have joined the 21st century and use a good [mozilla.org] browser [opera.com], popups aren't a problem.
Re:POSTED PREVIOUSLY BY A DIFFRENT AUTHOR, MOD DOW (Score:2)
I should know - I looked at the code. What it is is simple on-mouseovers, and window movers. However, it is designed to be REALLY evil on Internet Explorer - it hides all titlebars, and pops up a window with a different window mover script that only works on IE, with a flash animation that says "You a
Re:POSTED PREVIOUSLY BY A DIFFRENT AUTHOR, MOD DOW (Score:2)
Strange. I clicked on it in Galeon (based on Mozilla), and didn't see a single popup. I have JavaScript enabled and only disallow unrequested popups.
Re:POSTED PREVIOUSLY BY A DIFFRENT AUTHOR, MOD DOW (Score:2)
Or... (Score:2)
That's one way of thinking of it (Score:2, Interesting)
I think maybe they're keeping things as is to maintain a foothold in the enthusiast market.
After all, who doesn't like somethin
Re:OC? Tell that to my AMD (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But What About Programmers (Score:2)
With Plan 9's C compiler (written by Ken Thompson nonetheless) on a 2.66MHz Pentium IV machine I compile a kernel off a local hard drive in 14 seconds (1.4MB size).
Compilation of the _entire_ operating system (roughly equivalent to a "make buildworld" in FreeBSD) takes ~400 seconds on the same machine.
Intel's compiler suite is also said to be very fast in both compilation and binary execution speeds.
Re:But What About Programmers (Score:3, Informative)
The most important factors in compilation speed (assuming you're sticking with one compiler) are CPU, bus speed/latency, memory size (for caching), and disk latency. Dual CPUs won't do ANYTHING for you unless you multithread your compile jobs, otherwise 'make' only dispatches one job at a time, and each job can only occupy one CPU.
I'
Re:How to multihread your compiles (Score:2)