How Today's Low-Power X86 & ARM CPUs Compare To Intel's Old NetBurst CPUs 77
An anonymous reader writes: In trying to offer a unique look at how Intel x86 CPU performance has evolved since their start, Phoronix celebrated their 11th birthday by comparing modern CPUs to old Socket 478 CPUs with the NetBurst Celeron and Pentium 4C on an Intel 875P+ICH5R motherboard. These old NetBurst processors were compared to modern Core and Atom processors from Haswell, Broadwell, Bay Trail and other generations. There were also some AMD CPUs and the NVIDIA Tegra K1 ARM processor. Surprisingly, in a few Linux tests the NetBurst CPUs performed better than AMD E-Series APUs and an Atom Bay Trail. However, for most workloads, the 45+ other CPUs tested ended up being multiple times faster; for the systems where the power consumption was monitored, the power efficiency was obviously multiple times better.
News? (Score:5, Informative)
Breaking important news! New CPU's are faster and more efficient than old CPU's! News at... wait... this is news!?
Re: News? (Score:1)
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
Breaking important news! New CPU's are faster and more efficient than old CPU's! News at... wait... this is news!?
It's interesting to take a look how technology has advanced.
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With Phoronix having turned 11 years old last week, there's been several interesting articles looking at the historical performance of Linux, large GPU/driver comparisons ...
For this nostalgic testing ...
Phoronix turning 11 years is newsworthy in itself, let alone a proper nostalgia blast. Michael's been doing great work.
Now get off my lawn.
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Disappointing for AMD fans (Score:3)
I would have liked to have seen more AMD processors in the comparison.
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Sadly, the most interesting chart (power/performance) is based on reported TDP. Fail, fail.
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It is good enough.
I want to know if it is a lie.
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The FX 8350 does actually put in a pretty respectable showing in many of the benchmarks.
Not really fair (Score:3, Interesting)
NetBurst CPUs were crappy in their day too. It would be more honest to compare against the Athlon 64 or the Pentium 3.
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I do also. It has been running my FreeBSD router for a decade now.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Everyone here cheered for the MSFT antitrust trial but if there was any company that deserved to get busted right along with MSFT it was Intel.
Except intel actually did get busted, albeit probably nowhere near as hard as they should have, while Microsoft got caught and convicted but then not busted. So while this story doesn't have a happy ending, at least intel did get some punishment.
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If I recall correctly, the P4 was the first chip to allow multiple simultaneous execution. The new compilers just reordered instructions it knew the P4 could execute at the same time (a 100% speed increase). That is what lead to the huge increase in performance. You are most likely misremembering how intel's compilers wouldn't use some of the more advanced techniques on AMD chips because some of the AMD chips lied and didn't correctly implement the features they claimed they did -- which led to poorer pe
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Calling bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)
Every test was either multithreaded or otherwise accelerated (x264 for example). The Pentium 4 chip was one of the slower CPUs from the 130nm era (SL6WT), and Pentium 4 went into the 65nm era. 2.8 GHz versus 3.8GHz is a big handicap. 1 core versus 2+ cores is a big handicap. No built-in video card for x264 encoding is a big handicap.
Would it break the bank to provide even one non-accelerated single threaded comparison? Just one?
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Why? When comparing performance per watt, the single-threaded score of a multi-threaded part is irrelevant.
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eeeynope.
Some of my jubs multithread well, in which case, I care about multithreaded performance. Others don't in which case I care about single threaded performance.
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Also, they probably used compiles/instruction sets that don't work well on NetBurst. IIRC those processors had slow rotates.
I agree, total fail. This is the kind of stuff you'd expect from Anandtech back in the day.
Wow that's confusing (Score:1)
I think his article would have been a lot better if he'd put the YEAR OF MANUFACTURE on it. He might recall the details of long gone chips but I don't.
Core i7 3517UE, vs Core i7 3960X + HD 6770, one is 3-4 times faster.... I assume the newer one is the faster one???
I think he's also confused 'low power' with 'small'. NUC and Intel Compute Stick are hardly low power devices, neither runs off batteries and Intel Compute Stick might be sort of small stick shaped, but its got a fan it runs so hot. LowER power t
I them remembered... (Score:1)
Pentium D: image two of these P4C taped together (Score:1)
I've one of those rare Asus 865+ICH5R that supported Pentium D with just a BIOS update, which I of course did. So I've one (two actually) of the last Pentium Ds able to run on DDR instead of DDR2.
Hey! I still *run* a P4 3.8GHz (Score:2)
I still *run* a P4 3.8GHz as my main Linux box. Sure it heats up the apartment like a space heater, but it works. Until it stops working, I won't be spending $1200 on a new box... :P
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I still *run* a P4 3.8GHz as my main Linux box. Sure it heats up the apartment like a space heater, but it works. Until it stops working, I won't be spending $1200 on a new box... :P
$1200 is a *lot* to spend on a new box.
You can get a FX9590 (is that the part? the silly/awesome 220W one) with the stock water cooler, a decent mobo, 16G ECC 1866 RAM, a 500W PSU, a decent enough case, an unimpressive NVidia graphics card and some extra 120mm fans for about 450 GBP or so. Maybe $700.
I know I just bought a bunch
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Since the 2000's, every box I've built has been specced to about $1200 in parts. One of the reasons this one in particular is going to be so pricey is going for the fastest RAM the mobo will support, the fastest CPU I can afford (in terms of single-threaded performance), and an SSD drive because such a fast CPU would be IO bound on a physical hard drive when running my pet project.
Sure I could go with a lower end CPU and stuff, but the odds are that by the time I'm actually ready to buy, another CPU or
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Other option is thermal paste gone bad. Might be worth removing the CPU and heatsink, scraping off the paste (it will be hard now) and reapplying.
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I just replaced the CPU cooler last year, though, so I doubt the paste has gone bad.
Capacitors -- unlikely. They're the square block type mil-spec capacitors on this mobo, not the tube-type with electrolytic fluid.
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What about the other caps? Those of the power supply, those of ancillary equipment (video card, sound card, whatever else you have plugged in)?
A bad cap anywhere can cause enough of a glitch in the works that something unexpected happens, and things freeze up.
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I think the more likely issue is a failing PSU or the CPU itself.
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Its not the PSU because lockups would be growing in frequency at a quite noticeable rate. if his issue is still only once or twice a month then that cannot be the case.
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This is bad value thinking, though.
The fastest CPUs today generally aren't more than 30% faster than a baseline (let's say a $150 Core i5). If all you care about is single threaded performance, then a Pentium G 3258 (overclockable) will get you anywhere you want to go for $70.
That same Pentium G will be 5-10x faster than your 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 with probably (guessing) 1/3 the power usage.
So you can spend $300-500 on a CPU that is 30% faster and hang onto it forever or you can spend $70-150 on a CPU and rep
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The fastest CPUs today generally aren't more than 30% faster than a baseline (let's say a $150 Core i5). If all you care about is single threaded performance, then a Pentium G 3258 (overclockable) will get you anywhere you want to go for $70.
This.
The way to be thinking about this is that you will be spending $X on a computer over a period of time T. Figure out how much that is per year, and then formulate a buying strategy that keeps you ahead of the curve for the longest proportion of time.
In his case I suspect that he is probably looking at an average 6 year cycle on his $1200, which is $200 per year. Clearly and obviously he would be much better off spending $400 every 2 years instead of $1200 every 6 with regards to how much computatio
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Blow the dust off the motherboard.
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You can get a FX9590 (is that the part? the silly/awesome 220W one) with the stock water cooler, a decent mobo, 16G ECC 1866 RAM, a 500W PSU, a decent enough case, an unimpressive NVidia graphics card and some extra 120mm fans for about 450 GBP or so. Maybe $700.
Yes, but that's a false economy.
You can buy cheap crappy computers like that, but you end up replacing them twice as frequently, and since they cost 70% as much, you spend 140% overall.
I buy dual socket workstations with 1 CPU to begin with. With a dual-socket machine, I can upgrade the CPU to a larger one; then I can install a second CPU; then I can install more RAM; the motherboards have more IO and so I can install more drives and NICs as needed. My current machine has a 6 core CPU, can be upgraded to 2x
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Pshaw, I still have a 350MHz Pentium II desktop, and a 133 MHz Pentium MMX (Oooo!) laptop with the maximum 96M RAM it can have. Okay, I don't run them as my main boxes, but I do still use them occasionally. The laptop needs 30 seconds to bring up Firefox 3.5, Stellarium is unusably slow, taking 5 minutes to come up. You might think a 133 MHz processor should be able to do better than that, but actually MHz is much less important than capabilities and, at that level, RAM. Below 256M, every megabyte coun
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My router is still a 600MHz Coppermine P3. Runs 24/7, and never gives me a problem. Those are (were) good chips, the early Coppermine CPUs were only 10-15W, much better than the later P4's.
This is Phoronix (Score:1, Flamebait)
Which is synonymous for bad journalism. What did you expect?
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What's wrong with Phoronix?
They seem pretty decent compared to a lot of the review sites. Thi benchmark suite is opena and the results seem decently reproducable. And also, they produce benchmarks on Linux which is what I care about.
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Even when these "review" sites are trying hard to be honest, they often drop a $50 cpu into a box with a high end motherboard, high end ram, very high end video card, etc... such a "review" is complete garbage.
Passmark has it right. Test real world end user systems. Do these tests on hundreds or even thousands of systems and report
Michael Larabel doesn't correct his errors (Score:3)
Here's one specific case:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LGPL-GPGPU-NyuziProcessor
Multiple people have contacted Michael Larabel and told him that it is in fact Jeff Bush, not Theo Markettos, who developed Nyuzi. I emailed Larabel directly. Multiple people pointed the error out on the forums. People mentioned it in response to Larabel's tweet. Larabel has been contacted in enough different ways that he simply could not have missed this, so he's intentionally refusing to correct th