How long before Core2 becomes like Pentium4?

[VirtualLarry]

Just wondering. I have a bunch of 775 systems, and I told my buddy with an EP45-UD3R board that I would make him an offer when he decided to get rid of it.

How long do I have before they are considered as obsolete as Pentium 4 rigs?

For gaming, I guess SB quads are nearly twice as fast as C2Q in some games. At least according to some Q6600 benchmarks that RussianSensation linked to some time ago.

And SB has power-gating, so idle power is around 30W or more for SB rigs (regardless of dual or quad core), whereas most Core2 rigs idle a bit higher. (Although, my Q9300 @ 3.0 with GTX460 @ 715 idles at 96W, but an E5200 rig with onboard G31/X3100 graphics idled at 40W, load at 80W. So I guess comapred to 45nm Core2, the SB chips aren't THAT much better.)

 

[Idontcare]

Haswell timeframe IMO

 

[KingstonU]

I would agree with IDC, by the time Haswell at 22nm is released in 2013/14, Core2s will be over 7 years old!

Core2Duo I would say became the first CPUs that many of us considered still more-than-adequate more than 2/3 years after release. Or you could say, it will take much longer than the pentium 4 did to become obsolete.

 

[Munky]

I consider them obsolete already. Not that the Core2 is an infamous under-performing power hog like the P4, but there are better and cheaper choices available for just about any task or price. Case in point - low end AMD quads for under $100.

 

[tweakboy]

Beautifully said. You got talent my friend.

IMO

Well a P4 render say takes 2 days, with this SB or core2 it will take10 minutes .. thats huge, SB is not much higher in CPU Queen Scores. Its faster but not ground breaking like the Core2 was.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

I'd wager that depends largely on when we get new consoles. Many of today's (and the foreseeable future's) industry leading games are being largely developed for PS3 and 360 hardware and thus the translation to the PC side of things doesn't have much weight on CPU power.

Idontcare threw out Haswell time frame of which we're currently expected to see the first Haswell sometime in 2013 but we might not get new consoles from Sony and Microsoft to truly push game hardware requirements forward until 2014 (although depending on the success of the Wii U we might see that time-frame reduced a bit)

Current 32nm is going to bring us 6 and 8 core CPUs, and 22nm certainly will bring us firmly to 8+ cores, however even the super fast 32nm quadcores we see today that could otherwise put Core2s to shame go largely unused by the vast majority of games.

 

[RU482]

considering Dell is selling E7500 systems for $299, I'd say last week

but seriously, C2D will never bear the shroud of shame that P4 was

 

[Idontcare]

...the shroud of shame that P4 was

LOL :thumbsup:

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Hmm. $299 for a bottom-end Dell. So . .. per some notes in another thread . . . maybe Steve Jobs is right: "A PC will be demoted to 'just another device'. . . "

Some of you show that you're still clinging to your Q6600's. I think I could've gone another three years with my Q6600 B3 stepping. One computer in the house is still socket-478 -- relegated to scanning documents and some "server" functions. [It should be 'decommissioned.' But I'm guessing that it uses less than 90 watts . . . ] The rest are LGA 775 . . . . Except . . . . except for this bad boy Sandy Bridge sitting here, waiting for "first launch."

I pass these things around the fam-damn-ily like side-dishes at Thanksgiving Dinner. Hand-me-downs, but no signs of "attitude without gratitude."

I still have this other system, named after Nagasaki bomb. It's just a C2D E8600, but probably the best system I ever built. OC'd variously to 4.25, 4.2 and then 4.1 Ghz, it's still stable as a rock -- very fast, but only the fastest I've personally seen. Heck -- I have a friend who traded in his Pentium D dual-core for an i3 Dell system, and . . . I'm impressed.

I cut back on my feverish keep-up-with-the-Jones's effort to build a new machine every year or so -- when the economy was really sliding south in '08. Built my WHS file server in '09 out of spare parts accumulated between '07 and '08.

I just couldn't help myself for this . . . Sandy Bridge project.

How many years can I squeeze out of this one? I don't know. It's a subjective juggling between need, want and obsolescence.

 

[dma0991]

I think it depends on the task that you want the CPU to do that will decide whether C2D will be like a P4. If by definition of basic usage is web browsing and document processing, I think that the C2D has at least 3-4 years of usability left unless of course the internet has become more complex and more demanding due to HTML5 and GPU acceleration plays an even bigger role.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

In 3-5 years, if not more. Even 5 years from now, I think a mainstream Core 2 Duo (something like an E7200) will still be adequate for most users.


Top of the line Core 2 Duo E8600 is around 90% faster, or almost 2x faster, than the top of the line Pentium D EE 955. Against the top Pentium 4, the 660, it absolutely crushes it: it's around 4x faster.

Then if you look at the top Core 2 Quad, the QX9770, things get even more embarrassing: 4x faster than the Pentium EE 955 and 8x faster than the Pentium 4 660. Contrast this with the changes the newer architectures have made, and you'll see they're much smaller. The 2600K is 50% faster than the Core 2 Quad QX9770. There's just no point in even comparing unless to show how crappy Netburst Pentium was and how awesome Core 2 was (and still is).

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/54?vs=92
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/54?vs=93
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/48?vs=92
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/48?vs=93

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/48?vs=287

 

[toyota]

its going to be a while as any decent dual core will get the job done for the vast majority.


funny, I was just looking at lower end oem comps the other day and nearly all of them are actually slower than what was available at the same price point 3 years ago. some may have better integrated graphics but overall most of the cpus are actually worse.

 

[StrangerGuy]

My current workplace is only starting to dump their old P4s, Pentium Ds and C2D E4500s...now. Those things are slow not really because of the CPU but rather 512MB RAM is really inadequate.

Outside of enthusiasts PC tech moves really slow. Heck it will take a good 6 years for quadcore PCs to be sold as mainstream with Ivy Bridge since Q6600.

 

[drizek]

I think Phenom II made quad core desktops mainstream.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

My current workplace is only starting to dump their old P4s, Pentium Ds and C2D E4500s...now. Those things are slow not really because of the CPU but rather 512MB RAM is really inadequate.

Outside of enthusiasts PC tech moves really slow. Heck it will take a good 6 years for quadcore PCs to be sold as mainstream with Ivy Bridge since Q6600.

I must REALLY be getting old. I retired from my primary job in '97, and retired from teaching in '99. I can barely remember what hardware we were using in the office in '97. They always gave me a top-end PC -- I had a "reputation" for which it seemed a good bet by the powers-that-be. I THINK I had a Pentium 100 when I walked away from there. In the teaching post, we were building Pentium-II systems.

For office work, it would be usual to see a lag between this year's hardware and what you'd find in use. But to sum up: yeah -- 512MB RAM would be inadequate now. For me -- I ran into the limitations of 512MB in 2003 or '04 when I was trying to edit video with Pinnacle. It was a (now old . . and dead . . ) RAMBUS-based system -- really expensive memory then. I think the mobo was the ASUS P5T33-R -- something like that -- with only two slots for memory. I must've spent a bundle just upgrading it to 1GB. Eventually that system just died of old age. It would reboot when you selected restart, but you couldn't "shutdown." It was a P4 Northwood with a 533FSB.

So easy to think of the P4 systems as "Dark Age."

 

[Gikaseixas]

they'll be good for another 3-4 years, specially the quads

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Doubt it'll be going anywhere soon. Still a fair number of ULV C2D laptops and performance-wise, C2Ds are >= Phenom IIs, both of which are very adequate for most intents and purposes (advantages like lower power draw, etc. notwithstanding).

I just upgraded all of my folks' systems from E4300/965P to X4-940BEs last summer. Same thing with my ancilliary systems (fileserver, VNC/torrent/Skype machine, etc.) I expect that will easily last another 3-5 years.

 

[nenforcer]

Considering all of my family members are still using Athlon XP / Pentium 4 Netburst systems nearly a decade after their release with no intention to upgrade until after Windows XP support expires in 2014 I would say at least another 5-6 years of mainstream use like office applications and web browsing.

 

[JimmiG]

Pentium4 / Netburst was a flawed design based on the idea that Intel was somehow exempt from obeying the laws of physics. Core 2 on the other hand was revolutionary and blew everything else away at the time. Everything released since has been more evolutionary/incremental.

Dual-core might soon become outdated, but the Core2 Quads will probably last for several more years. With plenty of RAM, a good video card and SSD, an old C2Q can still be turned into a very good rig for almost any task.

 

[Arkaign]

Hmm, people have a very flawed memory of P4. I think it's because the AMD options of the era were so good that people have seriously fubared their memory, thinking that all P4s were super slow and super expensive.

P4 had several eras, and for a good amount of time was either the best thing out or so close that it didn't matter.

P4 Willamette was initially disappointing. It won some benches here and there, but it was tremendously expensive (RDRAM FTL $$$), and not that compelling. Athlon Thunderbird was certainly the better option compared to early socket 423.

P4 Northwood A was the first sign that they had gotten their act together somewhat. When paired with the DDR boards, they proved good overclockers and good performers, trading blows with early Athlon XPs pretty evenly (better at some things, worse in others).

P4 Northwood B continued the rough parity, with things like P4 2.4B easily matching Athlon XP 2500+ stock, and both overclocking very nicely to 3ghz+ and 3200+ levels.

P4 Northwood C ran away with the performance lead for a little while. A 3.0C was faster than the 3200+ Athlon XP in almost everything, and really, one didn't even need to buy that expensive a chip. The smart people were buying 2500+s, and lower-speed northwoods and getting fantastic results.

Even more interesting, early Athlon 64 wasn't dominantly better than P4C. The 3000+, 3200+ early chips were better and worse in varying areas. Yeah, I preferred the A64, but 64 bit software wasn't common yet, and for many things, including especially media encoding, it was a pretty even match. Socket 754 in particular was a bit weak when you look at it.

Of course what happened next was Prescott and the complete failure to keep up with AMD. 3500+, 3800+, and beyond, they ran away with it.

Unfortunately though, this resulted in tremendously expensive pricing fairly quickly. Remember the initial socket 939 X2 chips? The absolute cheapest model was about $300, the 3800+ x2, while the others were $500, $800, and $1000. Nuts. Everyone on a budget was forced to settle for a single core. I grabbed a cheap PD 805 and overclocked it to nearly 4ghz though, was as good as the 3800 for 1/3 the price (though comparing overclocked performance to stock isn't exactly even).

Anyhow, other than the beginning (Willamette) and the very end (AMD 3500+ and beyond), the P4 was the leader or tied in 1st with performance, and they weren't terribly expensive (eg; 1.6a, 2.4b, 2.8c as time went on).

 

[RyanGreener]

My little brother is still rocking a Pentium 4 HT and it does fine for everyday tasks, along with my single core AMD V120 @ 2.1 GHz. Honestly, there really is nothing intensive about everyday tasks (music, browsing). The only thing that is SLIGHTLY intensive is Adobe Flash, but flash just sucks anyway. Hopefully they make it more efficient or things switch to an alternative.

 

[wirednuts]

yeah i dont think they will be 'obsolete' for at least a decade. most tasks (especially now with cloud computing taking way) are done with little cpu power. right now, an atom cpu is capable at doing most everything outside of gaming (i use an atom latop as my everyday computer).

i think they will be considered way too power hungry before they are deemed too slow to be useful.

 

[toyota]

yeah i dont think they will be 'obsolete' for at least a decade. most tasks (especially now with cloud computing taking way) are done with little cpu power. right now, an atom cpu is capable at doing most everything outside of gaming (i use an atom latop as my everyday computer).

i think they will be considered way too power hungry before they are deemed too slow to be useful.

that must be a dual core Atom because my single core is painfully slow. I am now using the Atom's rival, the E-350, and it is like night and day. of course even the E-350 has only about 1/4 the processing power I was used to with an overclocked E8500.

 

[Cerb]

Hmm, people have a very flawed memory of P4. I think it's because the AMD options of the era were so good that people have seriously fubared their memory, thinking that all P4s were super slow and super expensive.

No, but the ones that weren't super slow were super expensive, right until the A64 hit, and the slow ones weren't any cheaper than AXPs.

865P came in force around summer of '03. Until that time, the P4s either used RDRAM, which was painfully expensive, sometimes more than the rest of the whole PC cost, or [SDR] SDRAM, which ran slow, and felt, in actual use, worse than it looked in benchmarks.

Northwood made the 850 more viable, but it still used RDRAM.

By the time the 865 came, Bartons were out, and AMD just needed to tweak prices to stay quite competitive, even though the P4C took their thunder, until they got the A64 out. Outside of the untouchable duallies, the A64s were very good values, compared to most of Intel's chips, right to Conroe.

P4s weren't all absolutely terrible (they were poor successors to the P3), but Intel helped them to get that reputation, and those of us that needed to stretch our wallets a bit saw very few good values in the P4 line-up, while the majority of AMD's line-up offered very good performance for the money.

 

[Ratman6161]

I just built a "new to them" system for a family member using spare/junk parts out of my parts drawer. I ended up with a socket 939 Athlon 64 x2 4400 with 2 gb of RAM and nVidia 6150 onboard graphics, 50x CD drive, one 120 GB and one 160 GB IDE drives and a 21 inch tube monitor. Other than the graphics card, this was more or less the system I was using up until the spring of 2008 when I built my Q6600 based system.

The point is, that for its intended purpose which is web browsing, email, and running Open Office - this system is actually pretty quick and much more than adequate. It will never become obsolete unless the person using it significantly changes the tasks they want to accomplish with it - which isn't likely to happen. And the Athlon 64 x2 is not as fast as a Core 2 Duo. So all of these systems are likely to still be around for a long time to come.