That was a lot of work

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 4/21/2005 11:44 AM EST
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16 Comments

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  • Mojo_HK - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link

    Your comments on driving volume w/ price to stimulate the development eco-system is interesting. Noting the cheapest Intel dual core is ~25O $, it would be interesting to see a performance comparision b/w AMD's equivalent priced single core product as well as Intel's product from it's P4P-HT line up. Point being - end user's try and buy the best value in their budget. What options exist at the 250$ price point - is dual core really the best bang for buck?

    Mojo
  • Howard - Monday, April 25, 2005 - link

    #13,#14 never mind. There's no measurable difference using -j2 on WinXP, dunno what I was looking at before.
  • Howard Chu - Monday, April 25, 2005 - link

    #13, likely not, good point. There's so much overhead in running Cygwin already. MinGW/Msys would have better throughput. I use -j2 when building OpenLDAP on WinXP on my Centrino laptop, using Msys. It takes several times longer to do the corresponding build with Cygwin, with or without -j2.
  • Red and black - Monday, April 25, 2005 - link

    #12, note that they're using cygwin gmake on MS Windows. Is the 2xCPU setting of -j still a good idea given the horrible behavior of the MS Windows scheduler?
  • Howard Chu - Monday, April 25, 2005 - link

    Generally you can get away with "-j" set to twice the number of CPUs. Compiling is a fairly I/O intensive task - reading source files, writing object files, temp files, etc.; while one job is in I/O wait the processor can compile something else that's already been read in.

    By the way, I designed the current "make -j" feature in GNU make, and wrote the first implementation of it, so I'm pretty familiar with its advantages and limitations, in case you're wondering.
  • Matt Smith - Sunday, April 24, 2005 - link

    #10
    SSE3 might have made a small difference, but the main reason encoding performance was way up was the dual cores. Intel's HT has helped them a lot in this area, and now that both have 2 cores things are pretty even.
  • Red and black - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link

    Excellent article. I look forward to the mentioned look at linux multitasking. Thanks for including a compilation benchmark! Also, it would be neat to see how the compile performance changes with the "-j" parameter to "make" -- I think it should be set to no less than the number of cores.

    Was the better AMD media encoding performance because of new SSE3 stuff?
  • Matt Smith - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    #7, The entire chip is throttled down at the same time. :(
  • Blake - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    Anand, what bios were you running on the Tyan K8WE?

    I've been looking into that board and it's really nice but I agree with you; the bios releases up until now have been horrible.

    Tyan is supposedly releasing a new version of the board without the 6 pin power connector and maybe some other changes too.

    Have you heard anything about that?
  • Dan - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    How does Cool & Quiet work on a dual core athlon64? Do both cores throttle down at the same time or can you have one core running at full speed and the other at half speed?

    10x
  • raja - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    Great Work!! and really fast too .. i thought it would two days for the review to be out. One suggestion it was nice to see the single core athlon offerings being included thanks to AMD's marketing. I mean the Pentium D being compared with the athlon64 3800+ and 4000+ .. but since these single core amds are also pitted against higher clocked single core pentiums it would be nice if you could add the benchmarks for single core pentium offerings like the 660 or 570 and the EE chips. It would be nice to compare the fastest single-core pentiums against the dual-cores too. Especially in the encoding section where the dual-core pentiums are limited by clock speed.
  • crtfanboy - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    Even if it was alot of work, it sure was worth it. Great article.
    All in all, I think you couldn't ask for things to be better. Intel did all they could with their archtecture, it's great they're pricing them so cheap. AMD did all they could with their manufacturing and came out with some great CPUs.

    Most important for me is that I have a good reason to wait to upgrade (other than the painful lack of money).
  • CKD - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    I was looking for some information about power consumption and heat issues with these dual core CPUs. Please do a writeup on power requirements and heat issues of dual core CPUs vis-a-vis the AMD64 ones (various cores, if possible).
  • ksherman - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    Wonder how complicated OCing a dual 64 will be... single CPU's are complicated enough...
  • Mark - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    Are there plans to look at Home theater boxes?
  • Insomniac - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    Are there plans to look at overclocking performance?

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