muzician21 said:
Trying to understand the breakdown of things as far as dual core
systems. Things got a little murky for me since it isn't simply
Pentium -whatever- and an ever higher gig number.
I've got a 2.4 gig P4. How does that compare both to early dual cores
and to whatever the current fastest processors are?
Is there good a site that shows the breakdown of things as far as the
history of processors to present day?
Thanks
Modern Core2 family processors and Athlon64 processors, are roughly
1.5x faster per clock cycle, compared to a Pentium 4. So the clock
can be lower on a modern processor, and it will be just as good
or better.
If you had a Pentium 4 at 3.6GHz, a single core of a 2.4GHz Core2
Dual Core processor would match it. The conversion factor is somewhere
between 1.5x and 1.8x or so. I quote 1.5x to people, so they won't be
disappointed when they buy it.
Occasionally, you can run into a pathological situation, where
some code doesn't run well on a Core2. In that case, the Core2
can slow down to the speed of the Pentium 4, losing its advantage.
But in many situations, the 1.5x to 1.8x is what you'd expect.
So if you buy an E8600 3.33GHz processor, a single core of that
would be equal to a P4 at 5GHz+. And that one costs $270.
In some situations, a single program can run on two cores. Photoshop
is an example of a program that does that. But programs like
Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint or other old programs, are less
likely to use both cores. Multimedia programs are more likely
to be multithreaded like Photoshop (video editing, transcoding etc).
That is when the extra cores really help.
The benchmark charts you typically find on enthusiast sites, don't
cover enough generations of processors, to make useful comparisons
possible. They don't like to put a P4 on the same chart as a Core2.
HTH,
Paul
