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Hardware

Tom's Hardware End of Year CPU Roundup 217

Posted by michael from the horses-under-the-hood dept.
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!"
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Tom's Hardware End of Year CPU Roundup More

Tom's Hardware End of Year CPU Roundup

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  • they should have said PC CPUs (Score:5, Informative)

    by the_2nd_coming ( 444906 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @05:21PM (#7814435) Homepage
    there is no PPC 970 on there.

  • Excellent Article (Score:3, Informative)

    by Bender_ ( 179208 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @05:25PM (#7814458) Journal
    This linked article is an excellent roundup of the ongoing battle between AMD and Intel. It holds a lot of insight for people who have not been following the news closely.

    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)

    by The Lynxpro ( 657990 ) <lynxpro@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Friday December 26, 2003 @05:28PM (#7814474)
    Sure, a Mac is a Mac but there should be a G5 performance comparison with there. After all, not too many Tom's Hardware readers have Itaniums in their home PCs. And with the PowerPC970 (G5) climbing to 3Ghz by March 2004, it should really be included in the article.

    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)

      by gatesh8r ( 182908 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @05:44PM (#7814552)
      Just because it's the same OS does not imply that it will be a direct comparison -- they are completely different archetectures and can never be directly compared; an indirect comparison is about the best you can do. Still what does it mean? Not a lot, since the archetectures are fundamentally different.

      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.
      • that does not mean that the CPU can not be benched. and a user can still sit down and play with the system for a few days and see which processor made the system feel the best, or which processor's pretty much the same from user perspective.
      • Sure you can compare all 3 CPUs running Linux.

        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)

    by CTho9305 ( 264265 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @05:32PM (#7814493) Homepage
    Overclockability reviews are pointless for a couple of reasons. The first, of course, is that there are never any guarantees - not every one of the famed 300MHz celerons would run at 450MHz, and just because the few samples a reviewer tests overclock well (or poorly) does not mean that all chips will be similar.

    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)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @07:11PM (#7814932) Homepage Journal
      I agree that overclocking isn't the panacaea that some computer geeks seem to believe, and I think the hardware sites are squeezing out their relevance every time they bring it up.

      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.
      • The main problem with overclocking is the overclockers themselves. The absurd martyr complexes, the insane conspiracy theories, the undeserved pride in spending 5 seconds changing something in the bios...

        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,
    • ...not every one of the famed 300MHz celerons would run at 450MHz

      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 :(

  • Xp2100+.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by rylin ( 688457 )
    Well, My xp2100+ (1.733Ghz) is currently running at close to 2250MHz (195fsb, 11.5x Multiplier), which is over a 500MHz OC.. I'd call that a pretty nice OC, as it's still only cooled by air. . .

  • This article is a bunch of crap. (Score:4, Informative)

    by VeXteR ( 706385 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @05:44PM (#7814548)
    He has missed one very important fact. Very few of us need any more power then a 2.5 gig CPU. And INTELs 2.5 is twice the cost of AMDs 2500. I run better then 100 FPS in any game that I want to play. Including such hogs of power as BF1942 with the DC mod....

    • Re:This article is a bunch of crap. (Score:4, Informative)

      by rgmoore ( 133276 ) * <glandauer@charter.net> on Friday December 26, 2003 @06:27PM (#7814717) Homepage

      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:

      Over and above the clear test results, our price-performance analysis clearly shows that the added performance of CPUs in the upper bracket bears no sensible relation to the extra price. ...

      In the gaming sector, many processor makers are dogged by the fact that only a few programs need really fast CPUs. One reason for this development is the displacement of graphics-intensive operations to the graphics card; another is the ongoing tense competition between AMD and Intel that long ago outstripped the requirements of modern standard software in terms of performance. ...

      Novices should certainly consider the AthlonXP 2600+ or 2800+, since a serviceable platform with 512 MB of memory is inexpensive and will do nicely for the next 18-24 months. ...

      The AMD Athlon64 FX and Intel's Pentium 4 Extreme Edition are still status symbols for the computing jet set. After all, you can pick up a complete and high-performance system for between $750 and $1,000, which as our benchmarks show, also offer a superior price/performance ratio.

      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.

    • Actually, "most" of us need far less than a 1 ghz cpu. Most people I know could get by nicely with a 3-500 mhz celeron, for what they use their computers for. Go even lower if you're willing to tolerate unstable Win9x or a slower Linux (running a modern WM). I bought my 1800+ a year ago, and I still have yet to use half of its power doing anything. It helps that I'm willing to save a bundle of cash and just game on a console, but beyond that, I just don't see the use. If I got into mpeg video encoding, poss
      • Actually, "most" of us need far less than a 1 ghz cpu. Most people I know could get by nicely with a 3-500 mhz celeron, for what they use their computers for.

        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
      • Yeah but most people don't do backups of their data etc etc. I find my computer a bit slow when I'm backing up stuff - coz I compress stuff first. Doing a dd bs=131072 if=/dev/hda | gzip -c > name-20031227.gz takes a bit longer than I'd like - I'm getting like 7-9MB/sec when the HDD can do 40MB/sec 10MB/sec = 4000 seconds to do 40GB. Of course if the CPU was fast enough to max out the HDD then the HDD may become a huge bottleneck for other things ;). If you don't compress then you end up spending a fair

    • Re:This article is a bunch of crap. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Saturday December 27, 2003 @02:36AM (#7816246) Journal
      He has missed one very important fact.

      For it to be a "fact", it has to be true...

      Very few of us need any more power then a 2.5 gig CPU.

      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.

      I run better then 100 FPS in any game that I want to play. Including such hogs of power as BF1942 with the DC mod....

      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.

  • And this is news because? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mycroft_514 ( 701676 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @05:45PM (#7814561) Journal
    Who bothers to overclock a CPU anymore? With the falling prices of machines, you can almost replace it for the same cost. And 2 CPUs are always better than one, because you can run them in parallel.

    • Got a p4 1.6ghz running stable at 2.1ghz. Spent $40 on a good heatsink even though the intel stock HS is pretty hefty. It runs fine at 2.2ghz but by then the pci bus goes out of spec past 66mhz.

    • Who bothers to overclock a CPU anymore?

      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.

      With the falling prices of machines, you can almost replace it for the same cost

      If that sentence made sense to anyone, please raise y

  • Hopefully the upcoming year will be as promising in the processor sector as 2003 was

    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).
  • Has anybody overclocked a Z-80? My Sinclair ZX Spectrum ran hot at 4.7MHz

    • 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

    • Z80 no, but 8052-based microcontroller, why not? :)
    • I've never heard of anyone doing that but I have heard that people used to overclock old PCs (8088, 8086, 80286) by swapping the crystal on the board for a faster one. Those chips use nearly the same instruction set and are of the same vintage.
  • It looks like the AMD chips just don't overclock as well as the Intel ones do,...

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have figured out the hidden jumper on the G5 motherboard to allow me to overclock the G%. Here is a snapshot of my cpuinfo from Linux running on it.

    james@g5linux -> uname -s -r -m -p
    Linux 2.6.0-65 PPC G5

    james@g5linux:~> cat /proc/cpuinfo
    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
  • so what exactly then is the fastest solution? they dont exactly specify that at the end of the review. i've got some x-mas money to spend, and I'm not sure weather I should buy a AMD 64-bit chip (to prepare for the onslaught of 64-bit software) or to buy the latest p4 chip? I'm looking for the fastest solution and a solution that will carry me the longest time (at least a year and a half)

    • Re:the fastest solution RIGHT NOW? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Loki_1929 ( 550940 ) * on Friday December 26, 2003 @06:45PM (#7814822) Journal
      " so what exactly then is the fastest solution?"

      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.

      • NewEgg is Fry's Electronics on-line. I bought a 1U server case from them and I'm still waiting for a replacment power supply after the first one blew after 3 weeks of use. Having heard gushing reviews about customer service I assumed it'd be a simple thing. After telling me to overnight the PSU they sat on my RMA for 2 weeks without so much as an e-mail to let me know what was going on. Then they demanded I send in the whole case. I told them no because I'm running a business using it with a contract t
        • I think you can run into a bad experience with just about any retailer, but I'm with you in that one especially bad experience with a company is enough to make me swear them off for good.

          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

    • so what exactly then is the fastest solution? they dont exactly specify that at the end of the review. i've got some x-mas money to spend, and I'm not sure weather I should buy a AMD 64-bit chip (to prepare for the onslaught of 64-bit software) or to buy the latest p4 chip? I'm looking for the fastest solution and a solution that will carry me the longest time (at least a year and a half)

      You're already off course, if you're thinking in terms of "a AMD chip" or "the latest p4 chip". Drop the singular; spe

    • Your starting point should be at least an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ or Intel Pentium 4 2.53 GHz based system with at least 512 MB of system RAM (you might want to spring for a full 1024 MB of system RAM).

      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.
  • Personally, I don't run very many processor intensive machines, but on the ones that I do, stability is more important than performance. I've never had good luck with AMD + Windows 2000. So even if I can get the same performance for half the price, it still isn't worth it to me if my web server crashes all of the time. Screw fastest, anyway. I just buy the cheapest Intel boxes that I can find, and they're always more than I need.

    • Re:Stability? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Loki_1929 ( 550940 ) *
      I would tend to look elsewhere for the stability issues you're seeing. While no product is ever 100% perfect by any stretch of the imagination, the AMD chips, in my experience, don't have any more problems than Intel chips since the Athlons. If you could tell me which configurations you've had problems with, then perhaps I could shed some light on where things are going awry.

      Generally speaking, I find that using a name-brand power supply, such as Antec, with a Gigabyte or Asus mainboard, and crucial memory
      • While no product is ever 100% perfect by any stretch of the imagination, the AMD chips, in my experience, don't have any more problems than Intel chips since the Athlons. If you could tell me which configurations you've had problems with, then perhaps I could shed some light on where things are going awry.

        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

    • What do you mean by stable/unstable? Months/years?

      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)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @06:34PM (#7814754) Homepage Journal
    What I would like to see - "If I'm going to overclock, which one pays better"?

    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.
    • As the coward said slightly more politely above - yeah riceboy, just because it's got a noisy engine doesn't mean it goes well.

      Some people care about real performance, with maybe a touch of reliability, rather than touting numbers.

      (slashdot foe == *plonk*)

  • Conclusion (Score:4, Insightful)

    by owlstead ( 636356 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @08:03PM (#7815107)
    This must be the only site that does not mention the Athlon 64 in the conclusion. Therefore I can only draw one conclusion (if you remember that a Athlon 64 3000+ outperforms a similar priced P4) Tom's hardware is done for.

    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)

      by Monkelectric ( 546685 )
      Toms hardware is pretty weird. Three or for years ago now they were looking for reviewers and I applied. They "offered" me a "job" reviewing hardware based on experience and a writing sample. They said I'd have hard deadlines, not much time and the "job" would require alot of dedication the odd thing was there was -- no pay, no freebies, (I still might have done it to get my name on a few articles), but the killer was I had to *pick up* the hardware, they wouldn't even ship it to me (their office was 200
    • Linux users should avoid this Windows site at all cost.

      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.

      • foobar,

        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)

    by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @08:24PM (#7815177) Homepage Journal
    I just upgraded (MSI motherboard died) from an Athlon 1.33 to an Athlon XP 2600+ (1.92.ghz). Can't tell much of a difference. Seems kind of depressing but then I remind myself that w/ negligible difference between last year's and this year's processors, we can all afford to wait for the 5ghz 64bit processors of our dreams.
    • I have an Athlon XP 1800+ I got about 1.5 years ago. I didn't feel the need to replace it until I started playing Desert Combat. Can't run it reliably at 1600x1200 like every other game.

      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)

    by chullymonster ( 695441 )
    Anyone who knows about this stuff will tell you that Tom's is notoriously biased. It can be shocking. He has been caught out on numerous occasions - photoshopping pictures of cpus, reviewing certain components on crippled test rigs, swapping colours over on his graphs without telling the reader; you name it, he's done it. On his original A64 vs P4EE review he even benchmarked the A64 with three year old 100mhz SDRAM. Unfortunately, hardware newbies (including /. it seems) don't realise this and take what h

  • Want a killer system? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Cajun Hell ( 725246 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @10:31PM (#7815507) Homepage Journal
    Want a killer system that isn't (very) expensive?

    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!!

    • 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

    • Problem is, many apps don't scale well or at all for multi-processor systems. If you are in gaming, the second processor is idle most of the time. If you're unlucky, the 2-proc-system is even *slower* due to the added overhead of SMP proc management.

  • AMD x86-64 with non-Microsoft OSes? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RallyDriver ( 49641 ) on Friday December 26, 2003 @11:08PM (#7815648) Homepage
    I'm surprised no-one else is bringing this up ....

    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.

  • Lovely... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pantherace ( 165052 )
    "the FX is one of the most expensive x86 processors on the market - not including the Itanium and large Opteron server CPUs."

    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)

    by io333 ( 574963 ) on Saturday December 27, 2003 @10:44AM (#7817022)
    I used to overclock, but I don't anymore. It mattered when a medium speed CPU was barely affordable, and then I could ramp it up to being a fast CPU by OCing. And then when CPUs starting getting cheap it turned into a hobby, and I'd buy a new CPU not because I needed extra speed, but because I just wanted to see what I could pull off. I had MEGAHUGE fans all over the place and finally graduated to water cooling. I was even starting to think about cryo stuff. Then one day a year or two ago I bought an XP2000+ for $65 shipped. I even clocked it up for a few days, but it was so fast at stock speed I just couldn't tell a lick of difference. Stuff happened either instantly, or instantly. The only delays on my system, were non-CPU related. Now today, for practically no money at all, I can have a rediculously fast CPU, or a rediculously fast CPU, depending on whether or not I want to try to clock it. So I don't bother.

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