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Intel processors are great and really blow competition away (on desktops). But that's kind of annoying - when there's no competition, Intel holds on releasing h
by tychuz 11y ago
Intel processors are great and really blow competition away (on desktops). But that's kind of annoying - when there's no competition, Intel holds on releasing high end CPUs (w/ 6 cores) on new architecture and their price is insane...
- muro 11y agonot sure what you mean by "desktops" - their chips are the fastest CPUs you can get for notebooks, workstations and for many (most?) servers.
- josteink 11y ago> not sure what you mean by "desktops" I would assume he means "non-mobile". I.e. things not ARM.
- tychuz 11y agoI meant that I have no clue and intereset in notebook situation and workstation is a desktop PC. Same for servers - I have no idea what sysadmins use, nor I care. Monitoring shows CPU percentage, it reaches 80% - we tell them to upgrade. :)
- mrb 11y agoHardware review sites are very good at distracting us and making us think that absolute performance is all that matters (hence your comment about "blowing competition away"). And, yes, Intel has the fastest processors. But what matters to most people is performance per dollar. And in fact AMD often beats Intel at this game, especially in the consumer market (sub-$300 range). Example: I recently built a Linux video transcoding machine to reencode H.264 BluRay movies to smaller H.264 files [1]. A $110 AMD FX-8300 is able to reencode an average BluRay movie around 47-50 fps, while you would need to spend more than twice that amount of money to match this performance with Intel (the performance of the FX-8300 at this tasks falls between a $200 Intel i5-4590 and a $250 Xeon E3-1231 v3). [1] Using: avconv -i input.mkv -threads auto -s hd720 -c:v libx264 -c:a libmp3lame -sn -b:v 1400k -b:a 128k -ac 2 output.mkv
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoBoth measures have their place. In clusters e.g. rendering farms, then perf/dollar or even perf/watt are paramount. But in a single desktop for a performance-hungry engineer then absolute performance is the number that counts.
- monochromatic 11y agoOnly if he doesn't care at all about money.
- cowsandmilk 11y ago> Only if he doesn't care at all about money. Power is not always the only cost. I work in an industry where you pay per core for software license fees far in excess of the cost of power. There, perf/core is what matters.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- cfallin 11y agoWell, even if money does matter, the tradeoff is often more complex than just the one-time hardware cost. If you are a software engineer whose time is expensive, and a slower workstation processor means you wait an extra 5 seconds for a compilation 100 times a day, then the time costs add up quickly. I would imagine the same is true for e.g. server response latency when that latency correlates to user experience and thus growth/popularity of your service. People might not notice a few ms, but 100ms vs 300ms is definitely visible.
- uxcn 11y agoCompiling can be more expensive than 5s/compile, but you should still probably lean toward things like ccache/ramdisks/distcc instead of the latest processor. I think the real value is new things like TSX/HLE.
- bhouston 11y agoThis is a real issue. At my company, we always buy the $300-$400 CPUs but they are barely getting faster with each generation. The last time there was a big jump was with Nehalem.
- foldor 11y agoOn the bright side, they're typically getting far more power efficient, and cooling them becomes easier.
- bhouston 11y agoFor developer boxes, the price of power and cooling do not matter compared to developer productivity, and developer productivity can be in some cases hugely impacted by the speed of their PC (during builds, simulations or renders, etc.)
- Someone1234 11y agoAre many people often CPU capped anyway? How would you detect a performance increase unless you're over-utilising the machine. For example, my work machine has an i7, 8GB of RAM, and an SSD. I can cap IO and RAM, but I am yet to see the i7 max out, heck even over half the cores. I guess what I am saying is: Is CPU really a bottleneck most people encounter day to day anymore?
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoConfused. Faster CPU means lower latency for all operations. Doesn't have to be maxed-out.
- Someone1234 11y ago> Faster CPU means lower latency for all operations. Not really. Per core CPUs have become slower and slower. It become about throughput and not raw per op speed a long time ago. Using that measure you'll want to install a Core Duo in your machine.
- akuma73 11y agoIntel is still incentivized to provide much higher performance CPUs to the market because they compete with themselves - they want to encourage upgrades. What you're seeing here is beginning of the end of Moore's Law. Dennard scaling is dead and that will limit performance going forward. The implications are huge for the computer industry. As Bob Colwell liked to say - imagine if Moore's law ended in the year 2000. We'd never have smartphones.