Whats the best processor

The Troll

I was reading a little about Centrino, P3/4 and AMD processors, but I'm still a little puzzled as to whats better.

Say for example, I've got a 3.4 GHz P4 processor. Will thyat perform better than a 2.26 GHz Centrino or a 3000AMD processor?

Surely, the extra 1.2GHz is quicker than the efficeincy of the Centrino?

Can someone please explain more about the performance of these?

Thanks.

kaimera

AMD fx-57

The Troll

Well i didnt actually mean whats the best available processor. More how do different processors perform againste ach other. For example, as above, a 3.4 GHz P4 vs a 2.26 GHz Centrino? Someone told me they are about the same performance wise, just the Centrino is less noisy.

WizZard

The Troll wrote:

Well i didnt actually mean whats the best available processor.

Well then learn to phrase your question correctly instead of just typing in random shit that pops into your head.

Are you interested in the way the different architectures perform against each other, or the difference in clock speed of identical architecture?

In the case that you've mentioned above - the Centrino/Pentium M offers better performance per watt than the P4 and thus should perform similarly to a desktop P4 running at ~1.5x - 2x it's clock speed, in the real world. However, it will generally be beaten by the P4 in artificial benchmarks.

And there is no best processor, just best for you/your needs.

Capt'n Midnight

what OS,
what apps, many games are more limited by graphics card / ram speed than cpu
are you intending a mid life upgrade, ie doy pay for ram or c[u now and replace the other in 12-18 months
would faster ram / motherboard have a better effect than a fast cpu that is crippled by slow I/O into it

The Troll

WizZard wrote:

Well then learn to phrase your question correctly instead of just typing in random shit that pops into your head.

Are you interested in the way the different architectures perform against each other, or the difference in clock speed of identical architecture?

In the case that you've mentioned above - the Centrino/Pentium M offers better performance per watt than the P4 and thus should perform similarly to a desktop P4 running at ~1.5x - 2x it's clock speed, in the real world. However, it will generally be beaten by the P4 in artificial benchmarks.

And there is no best processor, just best for you/your needs.

Indeed, the phrasing of my question was extremely misleading. That's Friday mornings for you.

i asusme by architecture, you're talking about the board, the chipset and the rest of the system?

What I'm asking is which processor will perform better. Which will process quicker. I understand that the Centrinos design allows it to process instructions more efficiently thus likening its performance to a quicker processor.

How reliable are benchmark tests? Are they a good indication of real world performance?

The Troll

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

what OS,
what apps, many games are more limited by graphics card / ram speed than cpu
are you intending a mid life upgrade, ie doy pay for ram or c[u now and replace the other in 12-18 months
would faster ram / motherboard have a better effect than a fast cpu that is crippled by slow I/O into it

Running WIndows XP. Not intending an upgrade on a processor.

I've a 3.4 GHz CPU, 2GB RAM and a 128MB GFX Card. Am considering a GFX Card upgrade.

I've a friend with a Centrino 2.26 and her system seems to outperform mine for games and other general apps, even though she only has 1GB RAM and the same GFX card.

Khannie

WizZard wrote:

Well then learn to phrase your question correctly instead of just typing in random sh*t that pops into your head.

1) Take it easy. No need for that.
2) Don't try and find smart arsed ways to swear

WizZard

The Troll wrote:

i asusme by architecture, you're talking about the board, the chipset and the rest of the system?

No, by architecture I meant the actual way in which the chips are designed. The Pentium M chips are based on the Pentium 3 architecture. Pentium 4 was a complete change in direction.
I was also questioning whether you wanted to know specifically about Intel, or AMD chips.

The Troll wrote:

What I'm asking is which processor will perform better. Which will process quicker. I understand that the Centrinos design allows it to process instructions more efficiently thus likening its performance to a quicker processor.

That is correct. Process what quicker? Unfortunately there is no ONE super-duper processor that anyone can point to and say "That's the best". Instead it's a kind of "horses for courses" scenario.
Generally the way informed, unbiased people go about a processor choice is by:
a) listing what they want to do most (e.g. video processing, gaming)
b) heat/noise (a hot processor will require more airflow to cool, which usually equates to more noise from fans)
c) what they are prepared to pay
d) whether they are buying for now, or future-proofing

This will usually leave you with a suitable processor in mind.

The Troll wrote:

How reliable are benchmark tests? Are they a good indication of real world performance?

No, they are artificial scores awarded by stressing the hardware in a way that most normal users will never do.
However, certain benchmarks can give a good indication of how a piece of hardware will perform at specific tasks (e.g video rendering)

The Troll wrote:

I've a friend with a Centrino 2.26 and her system seems to outperform mine for games and other general apps, even though she only has 1GB RAM and the same GFX card.

There could be many reasons for this. Intel processors are not the best for gaming. A newer graphics card will give you much more noticable results for gaming than a processor upgrade.

Khannie wrote:

1) Take it easy. No need for that.
2) Don't try and find smart arsed ways to swear

Sorry

The Troll

So essentially the speed of the processor isn't the most important thing???

if thats true what is the signifance of the GHz of a PC and whats the difference between say a 3.0 GHz and a 3.6GHz Processor?

Khannie

It's an indicator if you're looking at two processors from the same company / same family. E.g. a 3.6GHz P4 is > 3.0 GHz P4. Otherwise it's not a great indicator any more.

Tom Dunne

The Troll wrote:

So essentially the speed of the processor isn't the most important thing???

if thats true what is the signifance of the GHz of a PC and whats the difference between say a 3.0 GHz and a 3.6GHz Processor?

Consider a fully laden truck and a motorbike doing 70 Km/hour. Are they both doing the same amount of work? Of course not, the truck is doing more work. Internally, the truck has a bigger, more powerful engine and is designed to pull a large load.

Inside the motorbike, the engine is small and nippy, designed for economy and light loads.

So speed is not a good indicator, as Khannie said.

The Troll

Khannie wrote:

It's an indicator if you're looking at two processors from the same company / same family. E.g. a 3.6GHz P4 is > 3.0 GHz P4. Otherwise it's not a great indicator any more.

So in your example the difference between the 2 processors is simply that the 3.6 GHz processor has .6Hz more clock cyles per second?

Where would you notice the difference between the 2 performances in practice?

RotalicaV

I dunno about cpus, but wizzard sure is a better person than all of us.

The Troll

Is the performance of the processor directly linked to the RAM being used and the HDD in use? ie if you have alot of high-spec RAM and a 15k RPM SCSI HDD then these will all combine better than a slower HDD and slower RAM?

stevenmu

The Troll wrote:

So essentially the speed of the processor isn't the most important thing???

if thats true what is the signifance of the GHz of a PC and whats the difference between say a 3.0 GHz and a 3.6GHz Processor?

In the good old days, a processor would do one instruction per cycle, meaning a 3.6 Ghz CPU could do 3.6 billion instructions per second, a 3.0 Ghz CPU would only do 3 billion. These days the waters are muddied by long pipelines (the stages an instruction goes through before being executed), complex instruction sets (many instructions take more than one cycle), hyerthreading (having multiple pipelines holding instructions for different processes to switch between them faster) and other things. The delay in loading new instructions/data from memory can leave a CPU sitting idle much of the time, having instructions/data cached locally on the chip can help speed this up and the size of the cache can affect how likely the needed instructions/data are to be in the cache. The speed of the front side bus, which is what the cpu uses to communicate with the memory and the rest of the system has a huge impact too.

So really overall performance is a function of it's speed in Ghz, FSB speed, it's instruction set, it's archetecture (pipelines, hyperthreading, netburst etc), quantity and types of caches and probably all kinds of other things I can't think of right now. As Wizzard said, benchmarks can help decide between different cpus, but really you need to decide what tasks you need it to perform and try to find appropriate real world tests to decide, most reviews should show indicators for tasks like multi-media encoding, gaming, scientific/maths usage etc.

WizZard

The Troll wrote:

So in your example the difference between the 2 processors is simply that the 3.6 GHz processor has .6Hz more clock cyles per second?

Where would you notice the difference between the 2 performances in practice?

0.6MHz of a difference between those two processors mentioned would give, all other things being equal, around 2-5 FPS more in a couple of heavy duty games.
That's it.
Now if you can distinguish that kind of difference when a game is already running at ~30-40FPS then fair play to you. I couldn't.

In fairness it's just braggin rights. Number crunching or video rendering are the only times your CPU is stressed to it's fullest. Run Prime95 and check the Task Manager if you don't believe me. Then turn off Prime95 and see what happends the CPU graph.

Dual core processors have much more of an impact on performance, even though they run at much slower speeds.

In short, even Intel don't agree that MHz is everything any more. They've cancelled the design/fab of newer, "faster" P4 chips and have instead moved backwards to go forwards, using a modified Pentium M architecture for new chips and aiming for more performance-per-watt for their next-gen CPUs.

RotallicaV wrote:

I dunno about cpus, but wizzard sure is a better person than all of us.

I'm not, but thanks!

WizZard

The Troll wrote:

Is the performance of the processor directly linked to the RAM being used and the HDD in use? ie if you have alot of high-spec RAM and a 15k RPM SCSI HDD then these will all combine better than a slower HDD and slower RAM?

No, the performance of the entire system is based on all the above.

The Troll

WizZard wrote:

No, the performance of the entire system is based on all the above.

Thanks for all the explanations, really cleared up alot of the questions i had about processors.

WizZard

Glad to be of help

awhir

what the diffrence with a amd 3500+ and a p4 3.4

Cuddlesworth

The same as the difference between a american muscle car and a porsche. They are both really fast but the american car has a much bigger engine. Yet the porsche is better designed allowing for nearly the same speed on the straight away but its world class in the corners.

Replace engine with clock speed , design with design and corners with algorithims.

rogue-entity

As many people have posted before raw GHz dont mean much anymore but they are a useful guide. For example an AMD Athlon64 clocked at 2.6GHz can outperform a P4 at 3.4GHz by as much as 30% when playing games or performing any video-intensive application provided that you also have a capable graphics card. Intel Centrino chips are best suited to laptops as they are designed to run with a lower power requirement then the heavier P4 chips and as a result can extend battery life, in short they are small and efficient but not as well suited to gaming.
In contrast a P4 chip is a more inefficient chip that produces a large quantity of heat and also consumes up to 100W of power as a result it needs a large fan and heatsink to keep cool. That said AMD chips are not much better although they do not consume as much power and as a result do not produce the same amount of heat.

I would prefer the AMD Athlon64 X2 series, they are dual-core 64bit chips. AMD has the patent on the 64bit platform which means that companies using AMD's 64bit chip HAVE to build an open platform which is why Apples new macs will be using an Intel chip.