6 ms·
Hardware review sites are very good at distracting us and making us think that absolute performance is all that matters (hence your comment about "blowing compe
by mrb 11y ago
Hardware 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.
- cfallin 11y agoYup, all those things are useful, but they don't solve everything. I've worked on projects where a single change to a header file would lead to a 20-minute rebuild adventure and where individual .cc files would take 10 minutes to compile. Caching and distcc build farms help somewhat but there's still, fundamentally, the critical path of a single file's (re)compilation, and only a faster CPU will help with that. (And if you say "thin client, distcc, big build farm", then you just need the latest CPUs in the build farm instead.) Of course this is as much an argument for a real module system in C/C++ as anything else... (And, I completely agree that TSX and other architectural stuff is totally awesome, too. Perhaps that'll drive adoption more than incremental perf, but I'm just arguing perf is still often really important.)
- tychuz 11y agoWhen workplace is buying - ofcourse not. I have never ever seen a workstation for developers with AMD CPU here in Baltic countries.