Any requests?

by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 19, 2005 4:27 PM EST
As I sit here working on the next speed-bump CPU review, trying to somehow make it interesting for you all, I figured I'd just pop in and ask.

Are there any requests in particular for benchmarks you guys would like to see in a not-so-big upcoming CPU review? It won't be a dual core piece, and I've already beaten to death the idea that single core CPUs aren't so hot at multitasking so I don't see much of a need for more there. I was thinking about doing a few lighter multitasking loads to see what the difference in performance would be between a fast single core and a slower dual core with more moderate multitasking involved. Other than that, there's not too much else I've been able to come up with that may be interesting (outside of stuff I can't really talk about yet :)...).

I am also working on updating our benchmark suite (yes, with a new version of Premier as well) but that's not done just yet. So chime in with your thoughts and requests - I can't guarantee that I'll be able to address them all, but I'll do my best.
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  • RDX_fX - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link

    -Gentoo compile time benchmark.
    (default packages for a stage-1 install, scripted total compile time).

    -More Reference CPUs included in benchmarks.
    Perhaps one representative CPU at each milestone in common/recent CPU evolution; P3 1.0Ghz, P4 3.2Ghz Northwood, P4 Prescott, Pentium-M 1.6, etc(and AMD, of course).
  • anonymous2 - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link

    thursday, nvidia g70 7800gtx launch, just a guess.

    Consider reviewing Gigabyte's Ram-disk,(pci slot ddr-ram hard drive) I think this could load games very fast and work well with video editing.
    Also, the Antec P180 is an interesting new case that has many good features at a reasonable price. thanks


  • DMF - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link

    Imo, we dont see enough quake III based benchmarks anymore, even though some of the ore modern games, such as Jedi Knight Jedi Academy, are still widely played. Why not have a high res benchmark of something in quake 3 to see whether CPU impacts performance or not, after all, we dont buy an FX57 (im assuming) or whatever near $1000 dollar CPU this is in order to run synthetic benchmarks or games at low res, etc... Maybe you could save some people some money by pointing out in games at higher resolutions at what point a faster CPU becomes useless (3000+? 3500+? 1 meg of cache needed?) and its all graphics limited.
  • smn198 - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link

    Interesting. The anticipation exhibited by some people at the announcement of a soon to be released article becomes too great if the soon does not equal tomorrow. Maybe an email alert system upon completion of the article would help. Maybe not giving out information on up-and-coming articles too far in advance would help as well.

    It seems to be a similar situation to the HL2 release – many people anxiously waiting and perceived lack of information or unexpected delays turn into hostility towards Valve.
  • Mark Little - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link

    I would like to see more price/performance numbers and overall summary charts of all benchmarks in one graph. Something like xbitlabs has showing one CPU as the 100% baseline and then showing how much over and under the "next speed bump CPU" is compared to the baseline. Looking at pages and pages of benchmarks can be a hassle. Sometimes a table of percentages (Anandtech has used this in past) and a graph of all benchmarks on the x-axis and percents on the y-axis can be very helpful.
  • trbader - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link

    With the dramatic increase of AMD boards mostly using Nvidia chipsets, how about an article on the Nvidia chipset functions -firewall, active armor etc.- how to set up the firewall, what the settings mean, and how they affect real-world use like surfing, online gaming and even P2P. (Most of that set-up stuff is incomprehensible to "normal" folk)
    Then run benchmarks on the different setups.
  • ravedave - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link

    How about your own MS Office based benchmark?
    Like loading a 20,000 page word doc.

    How about distributed computing? Are there any of them still left that have work units that are always the same?

    How about PDF rendering? I know some of the large ones take a rediculusly long time to load.

    What about desktop searching? I know its proabably mostly a function of the disk speed but I wonder if CPU makes a difference how fast Copernic or Google desktop search indexes your disk...

    Why not write your own C# program that does something as simple as adding 1+1 100million times... is C# optimized for AMD/Intel...


    Dave
  • BBB - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link

    One thing I'd like to see in CPU gaming benchmarks is minimum framerates as in GPU benchmarks, rather than just averages.
    It would be interesting to see how Intel/AMD platforms affect minimum framerates, and whether these results differ from average framerates or not.
  • Matt C. - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link

    I wouldn't mind seeing some performance comparisons among recent CPUs. You mention faster single core vs. slower dual core, I think would be great across both X2 and Pentium D, a "mini-roundup" of a bunch of the latest CPUs would be very useful.
  • kafka - Monday, June 20, 2005 - link

    I'd like to pick up on what ViRGE said. I'd love to see some benchmarks of actual power consumption on various systems "as a whole", rather than just looking at the heat generation or performance of the processors. How many watts are consumed under various use scenerios by competing systems and what percentage of the total is attributable to the individual components? For those of us running our systems 24/7, the energy costs add up.

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