intel chips

[shankle]

My present machine has a Pentium 2.80ghz chip in it.
What is at least the equivalent of that in the new Dual Core chips?
I notice that Dell is advertising the Optiplex with from 1.6 to 2.00
dual core chips.
Thanks,
JPS

[Vortex]

Do you mean the E processors?

INTEL E2140 1,60GHz
INTEL E2160 1,83GHz

[shankle]

These are the ones listed for the Optiplex:
  Intel Core 2 Duo Processor           E4300  1.80ghz
  Intel Core 2 Duo Processor           E4400  2.0ghz
  Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor E2160  1.80ghz
  Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor E2140  1.60ghz

As said above my machine has a Pentium 4  2.80ghz
So I am having trouble figuring out if the Core Duo 2 processor
is faster or slower than my machine.
Thanks,
JPS

[Tedd]

It doesn't make so much sense to compare them anymore - they're not equal.
The dual core chips are limited to a lower clock rate to keep power consumption down (appearing to be power efficient being the current fashion) and to avoid overheating (two processors generate twice as much heat.) So in raw clock rate, yours is faster. But you could consider a dual-core to be twice as fast as a single-core at the same frequency, though in reality you would rarely have them both running anywhere near full speed at the same time.

[Mark Jones]

Is it still the case that each "core" is thread-specific? Because the vast majority of applications out there must still be single-threaded, although multiple-thread coding seems to be gaining popularity. I remember the old P-PROs, I used to assign a particular application to run on the second core (affinity) simply because it was a priority thread and nothing else ever used the second core.

[shankle]

So if I am reading Teds answer correctly we are getting less for more $.

[Tedd]

Arguably, you're getting two processors for less (..than the price of two separate processors.) :P
(But they are 'slower' processors.)

[jdoe]

When I worked as a system administrator (few years ago) and I had to buy servers, I've been told that for getting the real speed of dual processors server you had to multiply by 1.5 the speed of the processors but I don't know if it's the same for dual core.

[daydreamer]

worstcase scenario is running a game that is made singlethreaded with sloppy programming because anyway game spec is 3ghz, but now it runs at halfspeed
bestcase scenario is renderer app, rendering tiled lowres textures and it fits in Duo 2 cores large cache so it works on same data but like you had your computer full of cachespeedmemory instead of 1367mhz and you choose rendertodisk so your renderapp doesnt waste memory bandwidth on screenupdates

[hutch--]

The general drift is that you need to write code to take advantage of a multicore processor to see a speed advantage. On single thread applications a late PIV is faster than the current munticore processors on single thread apps but a correctly written app for a multicore processor takes advantage of parallel processing to get higher throughput.

Double dual core processors are available which effectively gives 4 working cores but both AMD and Intel have much higher count multicore processors in the works over the next few years so it will depend what they chase first, higher clock counts with reduced heat production or higher processor counts with lower clock speeds.

[zooba]

My favourite thing about the dual core processors is I can be using a program which absolutely thrashes the CPU and yet still have a responsive machine. Also, it's possible to achieve usable real-time results under Windows when you have multiple cores (since doing it with a single core makes the OS lock up completely).

I believe CPU speed is largely irrelevant anyway. I've lived on laptops (big chunky Dell laptops) for the last eight years and my 1.4GHz Pentium M still seems faster than the 2.8GHz (or something like that) P4 I used to use at work. There's a lot more affecting apparent speed than the CPU clock.

Hutch,

I'm pretty sure Intel are chasing more cores in less space, since that's what their 45nm technology achieves. Clock speed can't really get too much higher and, IMHO, it's better if it doesn't for a while, since it will force programmers to write efficiently to achieve the performance they want.

Cheers,

Zooba :U

[shankle]

What about AMD chips? I think they are still making the old style chip.
They have so many versions that they are confusing to me.
Is there a basic read on them to help bring me up to speed?

[dsouza123]

It depends on the application but for some regular programs (and most benchmarks)
a Core 2 Duo at a lower clock speed is faster than a Pentium 4.

For example using the single threaded SuperPi version 1.5 to 1M (one million) digits.
SuperPi is a CPU benchmark that calculates PI to various large numbers of digits.

Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 1.86 Ghz
completes in 33.071 seconds

Pentium 4 @ 2.8 Ghz
completes in 71.983 seconds

The E6300 is similar to the E4300, the main difference is
the E6300 has a 4MB shared L2 cache
the E4300 has a 2MB shared L2 cache


PCMark 2005 - CPU version 1.1.0

Core 2 Duo E6400 (Allendale, 2130/266, i975x DDR2-800)
score 5489

Pentium 4 520    (Prescott,  2800/200, i975x DDR2-533)
score 3522

The E6400 is similar to the E4400, in the same way as the E6300 and E4300.



The Core 2 has a much shorter pipeline than the Pentium 4.
Core 2 is 14 stages
Pentium 4 early versions 20 stages, last version 31 stages.

The Core 2 can process more instructions in parallel.
Core 2 up to 4 instructions in parallel.
Pentium 4 up to 3.

Together they give the Core 2 a higher IPC (instruction per clock cycle).

Core 2 also has increased SSE2, SSE3 perfomance.



Sources:
The SuperPi Score Board
http://www.buildyourown.org.uk/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=18050

PCMark 2005  Tom's Hardware
http://img48.imageshack.us/img48/3433/695463171wl9.png

Intel's Core 2 Extreme/Duo Processors
(Describes the architectural history of recent CPUs ending with the Core 2)
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_core_2_performance/