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AMD Intel Hardware

Which CPU Is Tops in Price/Performance? 345

Posted by Zonk from the zing-for-your-buck dept.
mikemuch writes "You can spend 150 bucks or over a thousand on a processor, but how do you know which gives you the most power for your money? It's a little like MPG for CPUs. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case does extensive benchmarking on twenty-three current desktop processor flavors from AMD and Intel. While of course most folks won't make dollar-efficiency the sole basis for their chip decisions, it's interesting to see which CPUs get you, for example, the most frames per second in Far Cry for a dollar." From the article: "Take PC games, for example. The cheapest CPU available may have the best frame rate per dollar ratio. But you still need an adequate frame rate for an optimum gaming experience, and the cheapest CPU may not deliver that. On the other hand, office applications are generally not as sensitive to raw performance, and the lower cost processor may be better. It's all in what you do."
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Which CPU Is Tops in Price/Performance? More

Which CPU Is Tops in Price/Performance?

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  • Cheap as Free (Score:3, Funny)

    by mikejz84 ( 771717 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:44AM (#13872719)
    I would say a Pent Pro 200mhz processor, given that most are given away for free now.

    • Re:Cheap as Free (Score:5, Funny)

      by cbiltcliffe ( 186293 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:56AM (#13872846) Homepage Journal
      I would say a Pent Pro 200mhz processor, given that most are given away for free now.
      That's what I run my website on, you insensitive clod!

      (And before you ask, yes, I did get it for free....)

    • Given away by whom? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Given away by whom?

      I recently got an old server from my office for free. It was dual capable, so I figured I'd stick another PII 450 in there for fun. What could it cost, like $10?

      Called up Dell to make sure that it could handle the 450, and I was offered to buy it from them. Get ready for the price:

      $457.

      That doesn't include installation or anything. I literally laughed out loud and the guy on the other end said "Yeah, you should probably get it somewhere else."

      I went to pricewatch and I got it for $12
      • Dell CPU price secret formula: $1 per MHz + $7 postage.

      • Re:Given away by whom? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Sylver Dragon ( 445237 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:41PM (#13873245) Journal
        That's not uncommon. When a company doesn't want to carry/sell a product, instead of saying no, they just price themselves out of the market. That way: a) The customer never hears a, "no", which is something to avoid. b) If someone actually does buy from you at that price, what the hell, you made a buttload.
        I ran into this on my home printer. I bought an HP 2550 printer (for doing all of the printing for my wedding). It comes standard with 64MB of RAM. This is plenty until you start sending graphics to the printer. So to stop the "Out of Memory" errors, I decided to upgrade the memory. The printer would handle an extra 128MB SODIMM.
        Price from HP: US$800 [hp.com]
        My response: Bullshit!
        Price from Kingston: US$50 [kingston.com]
        And, it only took me moments to find the right part with Kingston's website (they have a really nice memory finder). Also, Kingston offers a lifetime warranty and puts out a solid product, so no worries about a fly by night company.
        So, in the end, I got what I wanted and HP got to stay out of the memory business, without ever explicitly telling me "no".

      • Re:Given away by whom? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by thebdj ( 768618 )
        i think the reason most companies do this is because they expect most the people looking for a PII 450 to be some unlucky sap who still has that running as their server at work and they know no better then to pay Dell $457 for a new CPU because they HAVE to keep the server up. Sometimes it is said how dense some IT departments and their managers are when it comes to parts...

  • Processor {Power vs Heat vs GHz} (Score:3, Interesting)

    by anandpur ( 303114 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:44AM (#13872722)
    Almost all power consumed by processor get converted to heat any idea about Power consumed vs work done?

    • Re:Processor {Power vs Heat vs GHz} (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SlimSpida ( 850632 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:54AM (#13872815)
      To answer this, AMD64 processors typically draw less power, and perform better than their Intel counterparts. Welcome to the mixed up tech world of today, with Intel inside Macintoshes, IBM inside Microsoft hardware, and overheating Intel chips.

    • Re:Processor {Power vs Heat vs GHz} (Score:5, Funny)

      by angrist ( 787928 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:05PM (#13872911)
      // Mechanical Engineer Rant

      Well ... there is no boundary work, no (mechanical) forces acting over a distance, and no shaft work.

      I'd say that a processor produces ZERO mechanical work.

      When you look at a computer as a whole, you put in electrical power, and get out heat (with only a tiny amount of real 'work' from the fans). So from a thermodynamic standpoint, it's just an overpriced, inefficient spaceheater.

      Always keep that in mind when upgrading ;) // end Mechanical Engineer Rant

  • Only amd and intel? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:44AM (#13872724)
    By narrowing the field to intel and amd, dont we cut the pie awefully thin?

    What about IBM, Sun, Motorola, Transmeta, and hell even VIA?

    What I'd really like to see is how the "normal" chips stack up in price/performance effeciency vs the "non standard" lineup....

    -GenTimJS

  • That has to be the coolest unit ever (Score:3, Funny)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:44AM (#13872725) Homepage Journal
    What is the metric equivalent of fpsFC/dollar?

  • allow me to save you all the trouble. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's no clear-cut price/performance leader.

    there, and without cutting it up into pointless pages and appendixes (?!) to generate more ad dollars.
    • I had thought it a strange summary actually , After reading through the article the Athalon 64 3000+ was a clear winner by a large margin .. unless I misread some of the results .The only things the AMD chips did badly on were artificial tests.

      They didn't even mention the chip in the summary and it pulverised every other chip
      Defiantly a great buy for your money .
      • They covered that as well.
        The real sweet spot here looks to be the Athlon 64 3800+. While lower-cost processors will give you a better frame rate-per-dollar ratio, some of the games tend to get a bit chunky in some titles--Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, for example.

        Bascially, it is cheap and does well in the fps/dollar catagory but the fps is just too low overall to be acceptable in certain applications. An opinion I guess.
      • Nice.

        Interestingly, this is the same processor I told my brother to get for his new computer. He asked me to help him to buy a new computer to make Audio/Video processing. (From Video capturing to DVD writing). Of course the main constraint is the money, as the compuer should be around $1000.00

        I am not very savy on hardware but for what I know I could give him what I think is a good deal:

        CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor [pricegrabber.com]

        Mobo:Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard [pricegrabber.com]
        memory: Corsair 1GB PC3200 DDR DIMM Memo [pricegrabber.com]
        HD: Seagat [pricegrabber.com]
        • You seem confused about bus speeds.

          What you commonly see as an "800MHz" FSB speed for an Intel system is, in fact, a 200MHz bus that can transfer 4 times a second, and you get 800 Mega-Transfers per second (MT/s). The Intel bus is 64-bits wide, so that is 6.4GB/s of data transfer.

          The AMD interconnect is 1000MHz HyperTransport. This is the correct clock speed, but HyperTransport is DDR, meaning it transfers twice a second. Therefore the AMD bus transfers at 2000MT/s. However the AMD interconnect is 16-bits i
      • > I had thought it a strange summary actually

        It's customary for review sites not to take sides. How else will they continue to get free product to test?

  • No clear winner (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EggyToast ( 858951 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:46AM (#13872741) Homepage
    I like how after the full analysis, the ultimate result is that there's really no answer. Cheap is slower, expensive is faster. Dual core has poor support in Windows currently.

    Not exactly surprising, but I wonder how much of that is tied to the OS (f'rinstance, dual core kicks ass on OS X for processor-intensive tasks). Similarly, I wonder how much of it is simply benchmarking the wrong kinds of things. Comparing "office productivity" is mostly useless, as they say in the article, yet it still gets benched. Similarly, graphics, while still relying on the CPU, uses the GPU more and more.

    I've found in my own little "tests" that heavy-duty rendering and long-term CPU processes are really where the benchmark tests are at. Fire up something like VirtualDub and compare the time it takes to transcode video files, for instance, or use ffmpegX on Mac OS X. That's where the real CPU tests come into play. Not office and games.

    (I'd also be curious to see what happens if you start switching around operating systems. Test to see if an AMD chip and NVIDIA board is better running a Linux flavor compared to Intel, for instance).

    • "...I've found in my own little "tests" that heavy-duty rendering and long-term CPU processes are really where the benchmark tests are at..."

      Ah, I'll start rendering immediately. I've clearly not used my processor in full up to now :)

    • Not exactly surprising, but I wonder how much of that is tied to the OS (f'rinstance, dual core kicks ass on OS X for processor-intensive tasks).

      Wow. Where'd you find those benchmarks?

      My understanding was that even with Tiger's "fine grained locking", there were still lots of threading bottlenecks in OS X, especially for networking and disk I/O. And I've heard conflicting predictions about how well the dual cores will share cache on the new powermacs.

      So what makes you say that dual core kicks ass on OS X bu

    • Re:No clear winner (Score:5, Insightful)

      by demachina ( 71715 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @01:29PM (#13873687)
      I think a key conclusion is that ExtremeTech is trying to drive page hits and ad revenue. Strategy, run a bunch of benchmarks, draw no particularly insightful conclusion, get it posted on Slashdot. A horde of page clicks ensue. Oh and a key point put an incredibly small amount of actual information on each page so that your army of unpaid clickers have to page through a dozen Next links to get to the conclusion, all the while probably generating tons of hits on their ads on each new page.

      I pass.

  • The Simple Way (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Seumas ( 6865 )
    Once you've decided on which company to go with (and most of us already have and stick with our choices), you look for the most powerful CPU just before the price break. Come on - this is nothing new. This is how people have been picking CPUs for at least a couple decades. And if powe consumption matters to you - and you're only buying a couple of these things and not hundreds - then maybe you should rethink the whole computer thing focus on affording your top ramen or whatever.

  • Everybody knows the answer: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by schwaang ( 667808 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:47AM (#13872754)
    You buy the fastest CPU you can afford at the time. Stay away from the one or two top-of-the line chips unless you have mad money. And know that in another year you could buy twice the performance for the same price.
  • A used computer is far cheaper than a new computer. As with cars, people seem to want to pay through the nose for something new and shiny. The price then drops the minute they get the box home. For most computing activities these days, a top-of-line machine that is a year or so old does a good job relative to a brand new low-end or mid-range system. And for basic work (web/email/word), a 5 year old machine can be both very affordable and provide acceptable performance.
    • I have a pile of 286s you might be interested in, one owner, only used them on Sundays...


      • I have a pile of 286s you might be interested in, one owner, only used them on Sundays...

        Awesome! Most people don't realize that the automobile industry has little in common with computer technologies. The comparison doesn't hold. A new and shiny car can perform as nicely as an older well-kept car. The same doesn't go for computers.

        As with cars, people seem to want to pay through the nose for something new and shiny.

        Whoever modded this guy up as "insightful" is an idiot.

    • And for basic work (web/email/word), a 5 year old machine can be both very affordable and provide acceptable performance.

      Until your 5 year old Western Digital Crapiar(tm) hard drive fails and you're going: "Fsck. Where's my data?"

      If you're buying a used computer that's three or four years old, factor in the cost of replacing the hard drive within a year. If it's five years old, you might as well replace it the day you get it home.

      Ironically, I've got 40MB Connor drives that are kicking around, still

      • The trouble with putting a big new hard drive in a five year old system is that to use it fully, you will have to jump through some hoops. I've tried a few IDE controller cards over the years and always found stability problems with them.
        • Use a Seagate ST340014A, or even an ST340015A, if you don't think 7200 RPM will speed up your PII-400 (it will, trust me...) and set the jumper for the 32GB clip, if necessary. If it POSTs using the full 40GB, great...some of them do. I've got a P-166 with 80 and 120GB drives in it, it sees all of both, and works great as a home fileserver.
    • I love used PCs. Especially since the free crap out there is pretty good.

      This morning I edited video of my daughter on my linux box. I run Debian sid and I use kino for video editing. I had no trouble dumping the video from the DV cam, tidying up the timeline, and burning a VCD for her grandparents. How much did I pay for my nice video editing setup? NOTHING. Well, $15 actually.

      1Ghz PIII machine with 256MB of RAM and Geforce MX400 adapter: free from friend
      256MB of RAM: had it laying around
      CD burner:

    • I agree. About three weeks ago I bought a 3-year old 950MHz Duron box with an 60GB hard drive, Voodoo3 graphics card, and 384MB RAM for $100 (I'm a poor college student, so I can't afford anything brand new). It is much better than the 266MHz Pentium II laptop with 64MB RAM that I was stuck with, and also better than the 475MHz K6-2 with 64MB RAM that I had at home.

      The Duron machine runs FreeBSD and KDE like a charm. I wouldn't recommend a similar purchase to people such as graphic artists and gamers wh

  • Cheaper means better performance/price (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:48AM (#13872768) Journal
    No surprise there. Now if they could add celerons and semprons to the benchmark, we might see which is really the better value, otherwise they've wasted a lot of their own time and money.

  • but no analysis of performance / $ with wattage? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Surt ( 22457 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:48AM (#13872770) Homepage Journal
    You really need to look at your long term costs ... the power to run your computer in the long run is likely to account for a significant fraction of the overall price, so you should factor that in.

  • Buy Cheap, Buy Often (Score:5, Insightful)

    by saterdaies ( 842986 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:49AM (#13872778)
    It seems it would be more cost effective simply to buy a cheaper processor and upgrade your system more often than it would be to spend on the more expensive processors.

  • AMD64 3000+ (Score:4, Informative)

    by laffer1 ( 701823 ) <luke@@@foolishgames...com> on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:51AM (#13872793) Homepage Journal
    I found it interesting how well the AMD 3000+ did in the benchmarks. On almost every benchmark it had the highest score for price/performance in 3d and gaming related tests. It seems like buying this cpu and putting money in a better video card are the smart choice. I'm basing this on the fact that most gamers go through quicker upgrade cycles anyway.

    • Re:AMD64 3000+ (Score:5, Informative)

      by Shivetya ( 243324 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:58AM (#13872867) Homepage Journal
      and leave it to AMD to drop that chip, AMD64 3000+ processors are no longer being produced. The new low end is the 3200+

      http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo m/0,,51_104_609,00.html [amd.com]

      It has been known in performance circles that the 3000+ Venice cores were ideal overclockers. They had the best price/mhz ratio as well. (and yes I have one)

    • Re:AMD64 3000+ (Score:2, Informative)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 ) *
      I found it interesting how well the AMD 3000+ did in the benchmarks. On almost every benchmark it had the highest score for price/performance in 3d and gaming related tests. It seems like buying this cpu and putting money in a better video card are the smart choice. I'm basing this on the fact that most gamers go through quicker upgrade cycles anyway.

      This is precisely why I bought one of these.

      It's an upgrade to 64 bits, it's cheap, it runs cool, it uses less power then the CPU I currently have. It's a

  • I've been extremely satisfied with the Athlon XP processor line. They perform well and are cheap. I actually wish they wouldn't phase them out. Grab them will you can.

  • article cliff notes... (Score:5, Informative)

    by i7dude ( 473077 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:55AM (#13872830)
    ads...
    words...
    benchmarks...
    ads...

    conclusion: there is no conclusion.

    this article was the longest bit of nothing ive ever read.

    dude.

  • rule of thumb (Score:3, Interesting)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) * <yayagu.gmail@com> on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:55AM (#13872841) Journal

    I haven't been deep in numbers for processor performance over the last couple of years. I've found the processing speed to be so fast lately that the software I use or care about runs FAST on most modern processors.

    That said, when someone asks me for advice, unless they have some specific high-end gaming requirement, the only advice I offer is don't buy a Celeron!

    Other than the poor performing Celeron I suspect most processing bottlenecks today are more from insufficient memory, bad or slow bus architectures, network latencies, and disk I/O bandwidth.

    Frustrating to me is the non-sequitur naming of technology, I don't know if it's done intentionally to confuse the buying public. A friend of mine saw the ads for some manufacturer's laptop with Centrino technology (which really isn't about processor anyway), and went to her favorite electronics store and got talked into a laptop with the Celeron (mistakenly remembering the "C" word incorrectly).

    I made her take it back and exchange for Centrino.

    • Thats the problem with naming processors based on their "performance". Intel and AMD don't acutally do this, because if an $200 A64 3000+ became say, a 500, then a $600 A57 would become a 515 or something. Same is true of intel, the 600s and 500s perform the same, and the 300 celerons aren't actually that far behind. The 700 Pentium Ms perform SLOWER than the 500s & 600s. I think we should go back to having processors named "Pentium 4, 3.6 GHz, 2MB L2 cache, x64", or at least a condensed version: "P

    • Re:rule of thumb (Score:5, Informative)

      by wpmegee ( 325603 ) <wpmegee@yaTIGERhoo.com minus cat> on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:42PM (#13873254)
      Oh noes A Celeron! It might have *gasp* half the cache! Centrino is just a buzzword for a Pentium-M Processor with a certain kind of intel wireless chipset. Big fucking deal. And guess what else? Celeron-M processors are exactly identical to Pentium Ms other than the cache and clock speeds. Same pipeline, same architecture, same power-saving features. Same great performance per-clock compared to the P4. Celeron Ms are more than fast enough for people just wanting to do office stuff. They're a perfectly fine value processor - not a high-performance one - and certainly not something to be avoided like the plague.

      Perhaps you should look at these two links before you post another ill-informed post bashing an intel processor.
      http://www.intel.com/products/processor/celeron_m/ [intel.com]
      http://www.intel.com/products/processor/pentiumm/i ndex.htm [intel.com]

  • I'm happy with my setup (Score:4, Informative)

    by RiotXIX ( 230569 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:55AM (#13872842) Journal
    I'm fairly confident that I'll never have to uprgade again. I'm running on 2ghz, and it's more than adequate for my linux window manager - it runs perfectly adequately. In fact probably 500mhz would have done a suitable job. If you're not a gamer or a windows user, then you shouldn't need that much to run an eye candy laden os. I'm fairly sure the only thing pushing the cpu market is the gaming industry, and the necessity for Microsoft to push a new generation of their products in coming years. CPU speeds have increased usefully over the last 15 years, but I can't come up with any home-computer user applications (apart from gaming) that would need more.
    • the home user application that will eat your cpu will be editing videos of your kids (and of course other kinds of home video editing).
    • Or the fact that good quality video encoding still takes many hours and leaves your desktop near-unusable in the process. Or Photoshopping, that can always use a horsepower boost. With the prevailance of high-power computing, tasks that were once reserved for server-farms can be done on my desktop. For example, my mechanical engineering friends are running CAD software on their laptops. And I would've never thought about making xvid backups of all my dvds on a 500mhz processor. You can stay far away from ga
    • Like all good things, Java and .NET have the drawback that they require more cycles and memory. For that the developers get a better interface, and you will get more stability and hopefully, cheaper products. Furthermore, it makes it easy to use objects from the user interface (see the new Microsoft scripting language for instance) - in other words, more features. Fortunately the Java VM and the .NET framework are getting faster by the minute, making an upgrade a bit less necessary (try Java 1.4 or earlier
  • This could have been an awesome metric. However there are no older or low-end chips in the whole thing. (!)

    I think the results might be really interesting because the low-end chips are really cheap compared to the top-dollar stuff.

    For example, I have an AMD Mobile 2600+ that cost like $90 and when clocked at 2.4+ Ghz is damn near close to the performance of my Opteron 250 (which was $800 at the time) at many tasks. I would say the low-end Athlon would have more FPS/$ than the Opteron.

    That's what I was hop

  • Am I reading it wrong, or is it flawed? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Enigma_Man ( 756516 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:56AM (#13872849) Homepage
    They say price/performance higher-is-better... Higher would mean more price for less performance... I don't understand how they're coming up with that metric, maybe they're actually saying performance/price, but they don't know how ratios work, or am I just missing something important?

    -Jesse
    • I don't understand how they're coming up with that metric, maybe they're actually saying performance/price, but they don't know how ratios work, or am I just missing something important?


      No, you're not missing anything. They actually mean performance/price (at least all the metrics they use seem to be benchmark/price), but for some reason they insist on calling it price/performance in the article. Strange.

    • Uhg. Yes. I lost all my respect for this article, the author and the site. If they can't present the units right, what else did they do wrong?

  • The review calculates price/performance based on the price of the CPUs instead of total system cost. A useless measure, since a CPU on its own cannot do anything useful. It also hides the added system costs for CPUs that consume a lot of power: larger PSU, more cooling and noise reduction measures. And then there are the additional platform costs for CPUs that only work with particular chipsets or expensive motherboards. Never mind the increment to your electricity bill.

    What this smells like is yet anothe

  • The analysis is nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Saunalainen ( 627977 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:59AM (#13872869)
    Suppose processor A costs $100 and gives 100 units of performance, but processor B costs $200 and gives 150 units of performance. Then the cost per performance is 1.0 unit/$ for processor A and 0.75 unit/$ for processor B. Right? WRONG!

    Both of these processors need $500 of ancillary equipment in order to function. Therefore, a system with processor A gives 100 units for $600, or 0.167 units/$, whereas processor B gives 150 units for $650, or 0.231 units/$. This analysis shows that processor B is better value when speccing out a new system

    But what about the case where you're just upgrading your cpu? Well, in that case it's moot to compare the AMD with the Intel processors, as you would need a new motherboard too. But simply dividing the performance by the cost of the cpu is meaningless here, too, because staying with your existing processor ($0) would give you a performance/price ratio of infinity.

    Conclusion: you have to calculate your total outlay in order to figure out which cpu is the better value.

  • Half the fastest CPU? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:01PM (#13872886)
    I haven't bought a new CPU for years. In the past I would look at the fastest CPU on the market, and then buy one that runs at about half the speed. It helps to also buy a motherboard that supports faster CPUs.

    For example, I bought a new system back in 2000. I think the top of the range Intel chips then were P3s @ 700-800 MHz. I bought two P2-450s for my computer. A few years later I bought two P3-850s, which was the max the motherboard would take. For those four CPUs, I paid less than the price of a single P3-550 back when I was originally shopping around.

    Buying top-of-the-range CPUs is just a waste of money. Gamers are the biggest fools of the bunch with their obsession to have the latest and greatest.

  • Price vs Performance (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Wells2k ( 107114 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:04PM (#13872904)
    I work in a high performance computing center, and we just recently acquired a new cluster. One of the major items that we looked at was the amount of heat that is generated by the systems, as cooling systems for large amounts of equipment can be quite costly. We went with AMD dual core systems because we were able to load up with twice the number of systems and cores (thus a 4X overall improvement in number of processors) for a heat load that was actually less than the old system we had that was running Intel Xeon processors.

    Shifting to a DC powergrid helped a lot too.
  • Aside from the HPC circles, I've never really seen a price/performance analysis like this before. I was even more surprised at the results. The P4 3.06 GHz processor came out in November of 2002, the Athlon 3000+ came out in February of 2003 and the P4 3.0 GHz with the 800MHz FSB came out in April of 2003. And these were the winners in terms of price performance with not much more raw performance in the newer and much more expensive chips.

    So, what does this say? To me, it says that SMP and mulitcore is

    • Re:Interesting (Score:2, Informative)

      by Draco_es ( 628422 )

      SPARCs are supposed to be multicore soon

      SPARC's are multicore now (dual core). They are supposed to be massively multicore soon(eight cores per die/four threads per core on 2006-1Q).

  • Of course, as the article states, gauging a chips' performance isn't a simple matter since everyone has different performance metrics based on the software they use. How many John Q Public will use 3DS Max and encode MPEG4 and give a rats ass about miniscule performance differences anyway? In my expereince, non-power users who do alot of CPU-intensive stuff just leave their computer overnight when they're converting the birthday DV into an MPEG or whatnot - for them, "slow" usually equates to "Swapping betw

  • Overkill (Score:5, Insightful)

    by COMON$ ( 806135 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:17PM (#13873042) Journal
    Given that most CPUs are overkill for non hard core gamers or encoders. Anyone can be more than happy with a AMD XP 3000. And right now those are going for pretty cheap, I think Tigerdirect was running a combo sale 3K and mobo for $100. And when you notice that it is slim picking to find a app that needs more than 1.8Ghz, I would say you are doing pretty well there.

    Sure you can solve little man's syndrome by buying an "efficient" powerhouse Processor, but what good is it when you wont see any difference 99% of the time and you can save $400.

  • As far as I can see the only thing being included in the price side is the price of the processor. However to get something that is of any use, say in a rendering farm, you need to add motherboard, memory, disk, case, PSU etc. to that. Even if this cost can be minimised, and can remain constant (in the case of the Athlon64s), it can be enough to swing the performance/price graphs around significantly.

    A 3000+ might be cheap, but factor in other costs and it might not be the fastest (indeed a quick check su

  • Most people (Score:3, Interesting)

    by merlin_jim ( 302773 ) <James@McCracken.stratapult@com> on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @01:35PM (#13873735)
    replying have said these metrics don't have a lot of value to them (in one way or another)

    I disagree

    But I'm a rendering geek

    I was VERY happy to see the POVRAY price/performance (technically performance/price) breakdown... and will definitely be getting an Athlon 64 XP when I build my system... the 3000+ model if these numbers are still valid when I get the loot

  • Overclockability (Score:3, Informative)

    by stoanhart ( 876182 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @01:45PM (#13873827)
    They left out overclockability

    Yes, I know not everyone overclocks, but with chips that clock as easy as the A64's, you almost have to consider it. For example, the 3200+ came out as second place for performance/$ in every test, beat only by the 3000+. However, my 3200+ is currently running stable and cool at 2.6 Ghz and has a 512K cache.

    This puts it between the 4000+ and the FX-55. And my OC is very typical. As a matter of fact, it is low. Just about any venice 3200+ will hit that speed easily, and many will reach 2.7+Ghz. This puts the peformance/$ WAY up there.

    The 3000+ would probably also beat it. For some reason when I purchased my CPU, I forgot that I could run my RAM on dividers, so I ordered the 3200+ for its higher multiplier, which is completely useless with any modern motherboard, since RAM speed and CPU speed are independant of each other.

    So basically, I am saying get a 3000+, since it is the best chip out there for for performance/$, and almost matches the top of the heap for raw performance as well.

  • Significant flaw with their math skews results (Score:3, Informative)

    by Thagg ( 9904 ) <thadbeier@gmail.com> on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @02:09PM (#13874059) Journal
    It was an interesting article, with tons of good data (and, to their credit, they include the raw data without comment in the appendix (ok, it would have been a lot nicer if they included it in a spreadsheet-friendly format, but ...))

    Unfortunately, you can't do anything with a bare processor. You need a system to plug it in to, and that system costs money.

    If you assume that the disk/video/case/fans/power-supply/motherboard/OS package would cost $600 or so, then that would have the effect of adding $600 to the cost of each processor for a system that can do actual work. For example, in the 3Ds Max 7 Rendering Test, their calculated best performer was the Intel Pentium 4 630 or Intel Pentium D 820 -- relatively cheap processors.

    But, adding the $600 to the cost makes the best performer the Athlon 64 X2 3800 (the cheapest of the Athlon dual proc chips.) The other X2 chips round comprise four of the next five places as well.

    I think that adding a minimal system cost makes for a far more useful comparison -- and it does show the value of the new dual-proc systems. Not too surprisingly, the Athlon 64 FX chips still the worst price-performance solution -- they're just too expensive for what you get.

    Thad Beier

  • Why no Sempron or Celeron? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EnglishTim ( 9662 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @03:15PM (#13874805)
    It's odd that they've not included any Semprons or Celerons in there...

  • (performance ^ 2) / $ (Score:3, Interesting)

    by smithmc ( 451373 ) * on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @03:32PM (#13874970) Journal

    When I buy a new CPU, I use a slightly different metric. Bang-for-buck is important to me, but so is raw performance. So I multiply the two together: (units of performance) * (units of performance per dollar) = (perf units ^ 2 / dollars). This tends to yield a maximum at a couple of speed grades below the highest available, which is the point at which the prices really start to take off.

  • Why didn't they consider power consumption? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pclminion ( 145572 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @03:54PM (#13875230)
    At current average energy prices (which are only increasing at this point), it costs about $7 a year for each 10 watts of continuous power. So if two processors' power consumptions differ by 50 watts, that's a savings of $35 a year. This might seem insignificant but it's enough to shift some of their results around.

    As energy prices climb the effect will only become more pronounced. Selecting a processor which is cheaper and faster but also happens to consume as much power as a small city is NOT a cost effective solution. Why blind ourselves to this?

  • You must consider Pentium M and power consumption (Score:3, Informative)

    by demiseofman ( 914884 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @06:26PM (#13876683)
    As previous stated, you must consider total cost of ownership. Pentium M desktops are not common yet but if you check the benchmark sites, you will see that the 2.1GHz Pentium M out performs the P4 running at 3.0GHz. And at 1/3 the power consumption. Intel Engineers knew the P4 was a dog when they ran the first simulation, but upper management didn't want to wait 2 months and spend millions to rework the core, so they used marketing to push the product and their marketing department should all get raises, because it worked. They used the lame excuse to techies that the pipeline is designed to work better at higher speeds, so the clock speed race had begun. When the PM are available I'm scrapping my P4, getting more perfomance, lower electric bills, lower medical bills (later in life from EMI)and leaving the dog behind. As for AMD, I am a big fan of the underdog with the superior product, AMD64, but it still is a little too pricey and sucks a lot of power also. It would be my fallback if the Pentium M does not make it to market soon. The Notebook manufactures want all of the PM production and are fighting to keep it. We will see.

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