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One of my friends was saying how her old Mac Pro with dual X5670 CPUs was one of the fastest machines for video transcoding she ever saw. That's a little bit le
by chx 8y ago
One of my friends was saying how her old Mac Pro with dual X5670 CPUs was one of the fastest machines for video transcoding she ever saw. That's a little bit less than ten years old but still older than Sandy Bridge. Someone did the math and it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this pair of CPUs in multithread performance https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-dual-x5670.1963388/#post-1043712895 https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-dual-x5670.1963388/#... Obviousy since we are talking of 8 new cores matching 12 old cores the single thread performance will be 50% faster.
Wait, what? 50% faster? Is that all? I mean, many tasks are still single threaded and from 2010 to 2018 we have grown 50% in single thread and 100% in multithread? If things were going the "old way" then in 8 years would've seen a 2^(8/1.5) -- well over thirty times speedup (Moore's law as stated by David House who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months). You can see some of that http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm here.
No wonder there's no point focusing on old CPUs any more.
- mustaflex 8y agoI have a desktop with an intel 3570k bought in 2012, I wanted to build a new gaming desktop with a ryzen 2700x. The ryzen is only 20% better in single threaded performance. I could easily overclock my cpu to close further the gap. Just need to upgrade my gpu and I'm good for a few more years. These cpus have aged quiet well.
- Nition 8y agoI recently replaced my main desktop PC after nine years and the new CPU benchmarks at only about twice the performance. Double the performance isn't too bad obviously, but that's about the same timespan as between the 486 and the Pentium III.
- _arvin 8y agoI'm right there with you guys. I made my desktop in 2014 with a Haswell i5-4670K @ 3.4GHz. Overclocked it to 4.3GHz, and I still don't have a reason to upgrade. I really want a Ryzen 2700X also but staying patient. Newer and better hardware will keep coming out so I'm in no rush. (but my next CPU will definitely be AMD) My current thing right now is compiling the Linux kernel exactly catered to my Haswell machine, and using the latest gcc with "-march=native -O2" optimizations. It might seem minor, but man if she ain't screaming right now. I should mention I have an AMD RX 480 graphics card also. So I'm up-to-date in that world and enjoying the best of team red and blue right now. New drivers, software, kernels, and optimizations keep coming out that make my current hardware faster. But then came Spectre and Meltdown lol.
- mrdmnd 8y agoJust remember, http://funroll-loops.teurasporsaat.org/ http://funroll-loops.teurasporsaat.org/
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoSo... always use `-O0 -march=i586`, because using obvious optimizations for your hardware is a total waste of time and will definitely never ever be beneficial? Seriously, I get that it's possible to go off the deep end over optimizing, but that site is way off the deep end in the opposite direction.
- _arvin 8y agoI'm sure it was just poking fun. We can't be kernel ricers and get mad when people make fun of it. CFLAGS matter! lol One thing I will say, compiling your own has many benefits, as all the distribution kernels use Generic x86-64 and miss out on all the Intel/AMD optimizations. For example, just by switching from "Generic-x86-64" to "Core 2 or newer" in Processor type and features -> Processor family in kernel config, adds these 5 optimizations: CONFIG_X86_INTERNODE_CACHE_SHIFT=6 CONFIG_X86_L1_CACHE_SHIFT=6 CONFIG_X86_INTEL_USERCOPY=y CONFIG_X86_USE_PPRO_CHECKSUM=y CONFIG_X86_P6_NOP=y You can say it's pulling hairs, but hey, that's what I want. Not many people have the time, know-how, run Linux, etc. to be able to make these optimizations.
- berti 8y agoIn a similar boat with my old 4770k and a new RX580. I'm kicking myself for the k model though, as I would like to pass my old GPU through to a Windows VM, but the unlocked k model CPUs don't have VT-d, necessary for IOMMU.
- wila 8y agoBuy a 4th gen second hand CPU? No need to kick yourself, those are cheap now. For example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-i7-4770-3-4GHz-Quad-Core-System-Desktop-CPU-LGA-1150-8m-Cache-SR149/173443437210 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-i7-4770-3-4GHz-Quad-Core-Syst...
- wink 8y agoHello, fellow 3570K user - I've also been using one for 6 years now as my main (and gaming) machine. Had to upgrade my GPU once (HD6870 originally, now an RX 470) but I can even play Quake Champions without any problems, in addition to all the games that are a few years old. I've decided to evaluate getting a new machin in 2019, not earlier.
- mbell 8y agoI'm not sure I buy the analysis, for many applications the single threaded performance of a 8700k vs an X5670 is doubled, e.g. ~6000 vs ~2600 in geekbench single threaded. You also can't draw conclusions of single threaded performance from multi-core comparisons due to turbo boost. It's also worth noting that a X5670 cost ~$1400, so you're comparing ~$2800 worth of CPU to ~$350 worth of CPU in something like an 8700k, and that doesn't cover platform cost differences. Another way to look at this is that 8 years after the release of the X5670, you can get better performance for ~10% of the price, that's not bad. If you did plop down ~$2800 today for a CPU or two, you'll have 28+ cores at your disposal.
- arthurfm 8y ago> If you did plop down ~$2800 today for a CPU or two, you'll have 28+ cores at your disposal. In just over a weeks time you will be able to get a 32 core / 64 thread AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990X [1] for around $1,500-$1,800 which is pretty amazing. [1] https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2990x-2970x-2950x-specs-leaked-by-hwbot/ https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2990x-2970x-2950...
- jagger27 8y agoWhat's great is how cheap X5600 series CPUs are. I'm upgrading my off lease Dell PowerEdge T410 from dual E5640s with 8GB 1066 MHz RAM to X5670s and 32GB 1333 MHz RAM for less than $200 CAD. I should be also able to sell my old hardware for a few dollars. The only annoying issue is having to use a piggyback PSU for my graphics card, an RX480. Dell just had to use a proprietary ATX-style connector or else I would have just replaced the stock PSU all together.
- sandra666 8y agoIm making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do, ====http://www.todaysfox.com http://www.todaysfox.com
- woolvalley 8y agoThere is also a ~33% decrease in power usage. So a i7-8700 which also has a similar score now has 65W TDP vs a 95W TDP. Since moores law is leveling off, programming skill & quality will become more important to extract more performance out of computers. I forsee less javascript and python and more golang, java & rust and other %100 statically typed languages in the future.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoA language's documentation, ease of use, and community are all far more important than CPU performance. Point me to one java project on Github with >1000 stars and I'll give you a hundred Python and JS projects.
- hyperpallium 8y agoHigh quality TV shows are more popular than oxygen. Unless oxygen runs out.
- theyinwhy 8y agoYes, finally I will be able to use pen and paper again!
- hyperpallium 8y agoHigher resolution, higher contrast, tactile feedback, cheaper, lighter, thinner Does not explode, just burns
- swiley 8y agoDijkstra preferred pen and paper to computers.
- berti 8y agoYou answer to his/her assertion that popularity will shift is that it hasn't shifted yet?
- 8y ago
- platz 8y agoWhat kinds of activities do you need to do video transcoding for?
- adzm 8y agoPlex and other home media servers for example.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoVlogging? I hear it's pretty big with the kids these days.
- ajross 8y agoDesign imperatives change too, though. The old machine probably had 3x the power draw. A 4-5x improvement in instructions per joule is nothing to sneeze at. Frankly there are laptops that compete reasonably well with that old space heater.
- mrb 8y ago«it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this pair of CPUs» Well, the X5670 was a high-end 2P server CPU sold for $1400 (https://ark.intel.com/products/47920/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X5670-12M-Cache-2_93-GHz-6_40-GTs-Intel-QPI https://ark.intel.com/products/47920/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X5...) so to fairly measure how performance has improved, you should compare it to a similarly priced product, like the AMD EPYC 7401 (https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-epyc-7401 https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-epyc-7401). And, oh, look at this: the SPECint_rate "h264ref" benchmark subcomponent, which measures multithreaded video encoding performance, shows a 4.2× improvement (472 to 2000): • X5670: https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2010q2/cpu2006-20100329-10198.html https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2010q2/cpu2006-20100... • EPYC 7401: https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2017q4/cpu2006-20171211-50965.html https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2017q4/cpu2006-20171... Edit: oops, fixed major screw up. I had linked to SPECint numbers, instead of SPECint_rate. The real improvement is 4.2× not 45×! Far from what Moore's Law predicts (2^(8/1.5)) but still a very notable improvement. I'm sure your friend would be happy to transcode 4× faster...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIs it possible to buy a Mac Pro with an AMD EPYC 7401 CPU? Surely the fairer comparison would be against the current top-of-the-range in Apple's lineup.
- akvadrako 8y agoExcept the Mac Pro hasn't been updated in a while, partially due to thermal constraints. That isn't related to long-term progress, but an uneven cycle.
- chx 8y ago2x or 4x doesn't matter , you'd need magnitudes of difference to need to think what an OS can or can't do. Which is what the old ten year was about -- and look, 2^(10/1.5) is a bit above 101. Two magnitudes. That matters. To compare, let's presume (this is a great exaggeration I know but it serves the purpose) each Chrome tab takes equal CPU time. Say, on the current computer the 100th tab makes it unusuably sluggish. At 2x, the previous computer could open 50, even at 4x we are looking at 25. At 100, we are looking at not being able to run Chrome.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- derefr 8y agoThe same pair of video codecs won't magically transcode orders-of-magnitude faster on newer CPUs†, because video codecs—like crypto primitives, compression algorithms, and a few other categories—are designed, in the choices of the types of maths they do, to take advantage of the existence of certain accelerated instructions (e.g. SSE) that exist at the time of their creation. You can't make them take advantage of newer accelerated instructions (e.g. AVX-512) without it being a different algorithm. In other words: new CPU architectures don't make old algorithms faster†. Instead, new CPU architectures enable newer, faster algorithms. † Yes, this used to happen, in the 90s, when "new CPU" meant "appreciably higher clock speed." Nobody is making computers faster by increasing clock speeds any more, because higher clock speeds = higher power-draw and higher TDP. CPUs are now advanced by making them work smarter, not harder: accomplishing the same abstract tasks faster by providing hardware that enables newer algorithms to be used for those tasks, while using the same or less energy than the previous implementation would have used.