IDC great testing methodology and great results!
Test setup: 10/10
Testing: 10/10
Presentation of results: 10/10
Conclusion:10/10
thanks for the very kind words :$
In the end we owe it to ourselves to test with the apps we use. Synthetic benchmarks are a good guide to go by in the absence of performance data with one's specific applications of interest, but there is no substitute for just getting your hands dirty with the very software you intend to use on the hardware in question.
It was very much my pleasure! Thanks for continuing to be AT's technical encyclopedia. It was a while ago, but are you sure I didn't use a Phenom I 9850 for my testing? I could be wrong here, it has been a while.
Glad to see you found a use for it, something making it worth keeping. Will you overclock with an aftermarket cooler and a voltage bump now? Or if this is going to be a 24/7 machine, maybe undervolting? Looking at your graphs, I do not see another few hundred MHz changing anything... but, if you're like me you have to take those MHz just because they are there.
Yeah you also tested the same app with your original PhenomI but I left those data off these charts for the sake of clarity (you'll recall the PhI was slightly better than the PhII, but still underperformed the Q6600).
I plan to test the stock HSF with non-stock TIM, then I will test with non-stock HSF's (NH-D14, H100, and a
TME III), and then I will lap the FX-8350 and test again.
Even if I don't get higher clocks, if I can lower the operating temperatures and reduce power consumption at 4GHz operation then I'll take it.
Excellent work. However, I have one caveat. If one is using the computer for an income producing function, as if I understood correctly that you are, the performance per dollar would also include the extra income produced by having more timely and/or more complete data. In that case the initial price differences between 2 cpus would be very minor relative to the lost income from lesser data output, although I dont know how one would quantify this. If you are using the term "money-maker" application in just a figurative sense, my apologies.
Edit:BTW, I also have a degree in chemistry, but was never able to go past a BS level. So I really understand how difficult and complex the work you are doing really is.
This is for income, and definitely there are two sides to that coin. There is "operating cost" which must adhere to a budget, and then there is "revenue opportunity" which is capped and limited by the expenditures made in the operating cost window.
You can't win the lottery if you never buy a lottery ticket
In general, yes a faster computer ought to lead to increased revenue that would outsize the cost outlay for the faster computer in the first place.
However, in this specific case since I already own the FX8350 and my choices are (1) find something to do with it, or (2) resell it and recoup pennies on the dollar - I am simply trying to find something that I can do with it.
The other thing I took away from this experience is that I really need to re-evaluate my existing software choices. Gaussian isn't the only computational chemistry app out there, nor is TMPGEnc the only transcoding app that can give me good IQ/bit-rate.
The MT4 situation is one that does lack choice though. I either use that app or I use no app. Thankfully it appears to be an app that uses a portion of the ISA for which Intel continues to optimize and improve the IPC.
@AtenRa:
You apply conditions/rules that I find to be completely arbitrary and irrelevant to both consumer purchasing decisions and in reviewing / objectively trying to qualify "good design".
There is no way I can engage you in debate that I would find reasonable, because my impression is that you are determined to pigeonhole BD into a place where it will be seen in the best light. We will never agree on this, and it seems pointless that we debate each other further. Good day, sir.
At the risk of inserting my foot into my mouth by weighing into this discussion and providing my unsolicited opinion, it appears to me that you two aren't seeing eye-to-eye on this because you are both talking about different things (for different reasons).
Atenra's comments are applicable IMO, but only for the purposes for which he is invoking them in the first place. From a product-lineup standpoint, the FX products were not meant to compete with Intel's iGPU (APU) products, that is what Llano and Trinity were for.
It just turned out that Llano and Trinity weren't as up to the task as AMD had hoped, so they had to dig into their server lineup and pull out the consumer-grade SKUs much as Intel does with their XEON EP microarchitectures for the extreme i7 products.
The comparisons and analogies are not invalid, these are valid comparisons to make. But making a valid comparison is not the same as making a relevant comparison because "relevance" is like art and beauty - the relevance of any product compared to another is in the eye of the beholder (the consumer, not the manufacturer).
So when speaking of relevance, the questions themselves must be carefully framed and robustly account for the specific conditions under which the comparison would be relevant (and not just simply valid, a much easier condition to meet).
Atenra's comparisons are valid IMO, but not relevant when contrasted to the specific end-user perspective with which you are framing your questions. However Atenra is of course viewing the discussion with a different perspective in mind, and within the confines of that perspective his valid comparison is also relevant.
In the same token, so too are your arguments regarding the relevance of the comparison with respect to the perspective of the demographic for which you are arguing.
In order for there to be constructive dialogue on the topic of relevance and validity, the parties involved must have some degree of agreement in terms of why it is they are talking about what they are talking about (including the specific perspective that is being entertained as a limiting condition that bounds the relevance of the otherwise valid comparisons).
I think I'll stop pontificating at this point, lmost sprained my ankle climbing up on this soapbox
EDIT: Just noticed that your blog's affected by a domain censor again. That sucks, but you've got it easy While you sometimes get affected by domain censors, I sometimes get affected by IP censors, meaning when it happens to me, I actually cannot access the forums at all! Try beating that
Keyword is "again"...we never bothered to address your situation, it remained broken (always and forever) and we decided we were OK with that being your lot in life But we actually cared enough, at one point in time, to spend the time and effort needed to fix Atenra's censor issue...only to then re-double our efforts by spending time and effort to break it "again".
You are the neglected step-child; whereas Atenra is being smothered with over-active misguided admin love from higher powers than my own
In the end just trust that we strive to treat everyone equally, and if we haven't found a way to dick around with any given member as of yet then rest assured you have a number and we will get to you eventually
I had high hopes on this one. I'm a bit disappointed, but it certainly could have been worse. I wonder what would happen if Thuban with a mild OC (say, 3.7?) were added to that graph? Just glancing at the dots of the Phenom II X4 and the y-axis figures and using 1.5 multiplier (best case, since multiple instances running), it looks like it could only reach a max of 20-22, no better than the FX3850 at stock (or are my eyes deceiving me?). It could be a worthy CPU swap, after all. I have similar use cases where I achieve MT workloads by simply running multiple instances, or in others by spawning multiple independent threads, each one computing their own data set with zero interdependence.
Thanks! :thumbsup:
Yeah this is one of those cases where, owing to the course-grained nature of the multi-tasking approach, we are reasonably legitimate in just taking the slope of the best fit equations (shown on the graph) and scaling for core count (or module, or HT pairs as it were).
A PhII quad-core scores 3.88 x GHz, which breaks down to 0.97 x GHz/core.
So in theory a PhII hexcore (thuban) would be expected to deliver (6 cores) x (0.97 x GHz/core) = 5.82 x GHz.
Looking at the MT-ST (mult-tasking single-threaded) graph, we see the slope for the CMT-enabled 8-core FX8350 is 5.14 x GHz.
Thus,
at the same GHz there is no question a thuban would best the FX-8350 (5.82 vs 5.14 -> thuban is 13% faster).
A 3.53GHz thuban would be expected to perform identically to a 4GHz FX-8350 in this scenario (both would churn out 20.55 passes per minute). A 3.7GHz thuban (21.53) would outperform a 4GHz FX-8350 (20.55 PPM).
Perhaps equally intriguing though is the fact that, as you noted, the performance of a 45nm hexcore thuban would actually come within striking distance of a 22nm quad+HT 3770K. 5.82/GHz vs 6.17/GHz (not that thuban stands any chance of scaling to the same GHz as the 3770k though, nor at the same power-consumption, but price/performance would be there)