Thread: CPU Test

So you thought the mega¬hertz war was over? Dead wrong; the battle for clock speed simply carried on over a dif¬ferent battleground - the multi¬core one. In the time before the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 Intel and AMD were determined to out¬clock each other and with little heed for whose architecture was actually superior they kept slug¬ging it out. Intel was the major culprit of the two; their Pentium 4 CPUs scaled terrific speeds of up to 3.8 GHz and in the bargain provided users not only with a CPU but a free room heater as well. AMD finally used some grey matter and came back with the Athlon 64 range of CPUs. Thanks to brilliant design. greater IPC. (Instructions Per Clock), and a highly efficient memory control¬ler integrated on the CPU die itself these processors enjoyed' a peaceful dominion for some two years; and AMDs depleted coffers gradually filled up with the spoils; nobody in the desktop space with any common sense was even buy¬ing Intel anymore.

These well¬gotten gains were used by AMD to gobble up ATi Technologies in the hope of procuring good integrated graphics solutions for their platforms and for just a little while AMD was slightly remiss in its duty to develop the best CPUs around. which is obvi¬ously a function of cash-in-hand. This is a business where even slim opportunities are capital¬ised upon, and Intel is nobody's fool. Silent for nearly two years, smarting from the back-handed insult the Athlon 64s had deliv¬ered; nestled deep inside their research bunkers in Israel, a team of Intel engineers had prepared a little surprise they codenamed "Conroe"; an architecture that did away with the Pentium 4s NetBurst Microarchitecture totally and had a number of new. radi¬cal improvements. We know the CPUs based on this architecture as Core 2 Duo, a name that has become synonymous with the term performance over the past two years.

Core 2 Duo methodically destroyed Athlon 64 overnight, and Intel was basking in the glow of enthusiast affection again. One thing that the Core archi¬tecture did was delve deep into muli-eore processing territory; from where the CPU industry has yet to return; and perhaps never will. Parallelism is the future and we're seeing dual-eore processors fast becoming the de facto stan¬dard globally. Newer tri-eore and quad-eore CPUs are also becom¬ing widespread; their main func¬tional principle? Simple. more hands can do more work.



Sadly application support for these tiny computing marvels is sorely lacking; and applications have only just started featuring support for up to two processing cores. A select handful of applica¬tions have incorporated support for more than two cores. The rea¬son for this dearth in application support is simply volumes; what's the use of spending resources developing and optimising a soft¬ware application for a quad-eore processor when only some five per cent of the total desktops around the world feature these proces¬sors? Such multi-eore CPUs spoil applications by giving developers the liberty to assume infinte processing resources, which leads to a whole new can of worms.

Then there are those applications that benefit more from increased core clocks, a good example being 3D games in general. In fact any application that doesn't support more than a single CPU core will respond to higher clock speeds favourably. Obviously a quad-eore CPU cannot maintain the same clock speed as a dual-eore CPU; the laws of thermal dissipation just don't allow it. Similarly a single core will be able to maintain a higher stable clock speed than a dual-eore; and will gener¬ate less heat at any given clock speed. Now there's a dilemma - what do you buy, if you were shopping for a processor? Do you look at performance primar¬ily and go for a dual-eore, (single cores are history now, so they're out), or do you invest in a quad¬core; which surely would be more future proof, as applications will eventually become heavily multi¬threaded? Then there's the all important factor of cost. Do you spend Rs 10,000 on a 3.2 GHz dual-eore or do you opt for a 2.5

GHz quad-eore instead? There's no simple answer for this ques¬tion. Some applications will run better on the quad-eore, while others will favour the dual-eore, so your choice of application dic¬ta tes which processor would be better. Obviously you could hunt around for a 3.2 GHz quad-eore, but then you would probably pay around Rs 25,000 for it; a hike of 250 per cent, for a performance delta of not more than 30 per cent. We've got a mix of dual-, trio, and quad-eore CPUs in this comparison; ten CPUs from AMD and five from Intel and we've thrashed them through some of the most taxing applications around just for fun; and to aid you in choosing one.