On Tue, Jun 5, 2012, at 04:41 PM, Dr A. J. Trickett wrote:
> Either later this year or next year I may replace my 7 year old desktop
> systems. They are currently running first generation single-core AMD64
> processors with 2 GiB of RAM.
>
> Times clearly have moved on and I am well aware that Intel have caught up
> and
> overtaken AMD in the raw performance stakes but I'm not interested in the
> fastest, rather the relative merits at the mid to lower end of the
> market.
>
> Does anyone have data on the ralative perfomance of an Intel Core i3
> family
> and the AMD A6. For example all other things being equal (which they are
> not,
> but let's prenend they are) a PC with an AMD A6-3850 (quad core x 2.9
> GHz) and
> an Intel i3-2130 (dual core x 3.4 GHz) are the same price. Both feature
> on die
> graphics and can use the same DDR3 RAM upto the same maximum.
>
> On paper it looks like the Intel will be faster an single core tasks
> given
> it's higher clock speed but the AMD should be better when you can spread
> your
> tasks over processor cores.
>
> Just looking for approximate relative performance opinions on desktop
> computers CPUS againts regular tasks. I'm not playing lots of games,
> rendering
> 3D images or doing anything heavy duty, I just want a computer that is
> fast
> today and will remain fast running KDE4/Gnome3 type desktops for several
> years
> to come.
Just anecdotal evidence, but I just recently upgraded my 4 year old
Intel Core 2 Quad to a Core i5 3750k. My needs are a bit different to
yours as I do a lot of FPGA synthesis but I found best case my build
times decreased to roughly a quarter what they were before. However,
probably the biggest contributor to that was the switch from DDR2 to
DDR3.
While researching, I ruled out the current generation of AMD processors
as they apparently have a relatively long instruction pipeline which
compromises branch prediction a fair bit. There are some tasks where
they can perform on a par with Intel but they don't for the sort of
things I do.
I found the i5 Ivy Bridge to be a good compromise for cost as they are
currently about £80 cheaper then the i7 equivalents at the expense of a
little on board cache and support for Hyper Threading. (I also have a
dual-core Intel Atom with Hyper Threading and in my opinion, it has no
real impact at all on performance with the Linux Kernel.)
HTH
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