Processor Speeds

[killian6pk]

I have a question about processor speeds. I have a P4 HT at 3Ghz. If I bought an AMD Phenom X4 at 1.8 Ghz., what would be the relative speed differences? Are there any problems or reasons not to buy the AMD? I am currently running Windows XP Pro 32bit and the AMD is running Vista Home Premium 64bit. I understand that Vista is probably not as well thought of as the XP Pro.

[selldoor]

Re: Processor Speeds

AMD is running Vista Home Premium 64bit.

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[Rulycat]

Re: Processor Speeds

A 1.8GHZ Phenom II core will be way faster than the Pentium 4. What's the exact model number? You will have four cores which in multi-threaded applications will provide you with massive speed boosts. You will also have DDR3 instead of DDR2 which will also help performance. Also let us know the uses of the computer. If you play some games/watch blurays we can provide better advice. Intel's latest Core i3 options may be more suitable given that their cores have better performance than AMD's.

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES buy the Phenom I chips. They aren't worth any money, because they're crap.

I also recommend moving away from Vista as support is running out soon. (2013 IIRC). Windows 7 is a much better bet if you are using more than 3GB of RAM and wish to use DirectX10/11 for games. Avoid Windows 8 at all costs.

[killian6pk]

Re: Processor Speeds

..................

Hey no laughing. That's just what's on the system now. I can sub in my HDD with the XP Pro until I think there is something better.

[killian6pk]

Re: Processor Speeds

A 1.8GHZ Phenom II core will be way faster than the Pentium 4. What's the exact model number? You will have four cores which in multi-threaded applications will provide you with massive speed boosts. You will also have DDR3 instead of DDR2 which will also help performance. Also let us know the uses of the computer. If you play some games/watch blurays we can provide better advice. Intel's latest Core i3 options may be more suitable given that their cores have better performance than AMD's.

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES buy the Phenom I chips. They aren't worth any money, because they're crap.

I also recommend moving away from Vista as support is running out soon. (2013 IIRC). Windows 7 is a much better bet if you are using more than 3GB of RAM and wish to use DirectX10/11 for games. Avoid Windows 8 at all costs.

I don't play games. Just use the computer for watching ESPN games, Ebay, Email, and Badcaps. My life is generally boring. I just want it to be boring faster. I don't know anything about AMD processors. This system has 750GB HDD and 7gigs of memory. As I said above (between SellDoors laughing) I can always clone my HD to this larger one and run XP Pro until something better comes along. I think I saw where MS was going to support XP Pro until sometime in 2014. I just bought my wife a Dell laptop with an I5 and win7. Of course they did not provide any discs with it so if anyone knows how to migrate it from her system to mine fess up.

[mariushm]

Re: Processor Speeds

The number of Hz a processor has is not the final value in its performance.

Processors have one or more cores (processors by themselves) or use some technologies to simulate a number of number of cores even though they don't physically exist.

In this case, The Phenom X4 has 4 cores (processors) running at 1.8 Ghz each. The Pentium 4 HT has one core running at 3 Ghz but can fake another core running at the same frequency but this core will be able to do less work, depending on what programs you have.

So Phenom x4 is actually 4 processors at 1.8 Ghz and the P4 is one processor + a weaker processor, both running at 3 Ghz.

In a very simplified way, each core is like a human person... it can do several things almost at the same time.. for example you can use your feet to pedal on a bike while you talk on the phone with a friend. You can use a hand to take notes while you flip pages of a book with another hand.

The operating system manages several applications that run at the same time on your computer by giving each application a short amount of time where it can give commands to a processor. After the time expires, the next application gets time on a processor and so on.

But some applications like to do something very specific in their alloted time, which means the processor may not be used to the best of its ability. Think of it like the processor being a human person: it has several small components that are highly specialized...

So it's as if the application says "processor, walk 1 mile... i don't care what you do with your hands" .. so now the processor could do something with the hands but the application doesn't care about it... and until the operating system stops the application to give another application time on the processor, the hands are doing nothing.

So the guys at Intel thought about it and said... let's tell the operating system our processor is actually two processors. When the operating system gives an application time on our fake (second) processor, the main processor looks to see what it uses and if there's something available that the application assigned to the fake processor wanted it does it with the stuff that's not used in the original processor.

So the operating system can have two applications that want to do this :

application 1: "walk one mile for me" (use your feet)
application 2: "knit me a sweater" (use your hands)

In this case, the processor sees the first application won't use the hands, so the fake second processor receives the hands and the second application runs and for the operating system, it's as if there really are two processors.
This is the perfect scenario though, in most cases you have several applications that all want to "walk one mile", so in such cases it's as if the second processor is extremely slow, almost as if it's not there.

That's why HT doesn't mean the Pentium 4 has 2 cores or processors, but rather 1 and a quarter - 1 and a half almost all the time.

But let's assume you'll have perfect applications that make the P4 always behave like having 2 perfectly functional processors, in this case we have

Phenom x4 = 4x1.8 Ghz , P4 HT = 2 x 3 Ghz

The frequency is simply the maximum number of cycles in a second in which each processor can do something.
That something is instructions... like addition, multiplication, divide, various operations.

Stuff like a+b is very simple and takes one cycle to perform, so this means the processor could do 1.8 * 1,000,000,000 additions per second.

But other instructions can take a lot more cycles, 5 to 10 for example.

This makes the frequency a very bad way to tell what cpu is better, because you can run an application that does a lot of multiplications and then each multiplication could take 2 cycles on Phenom x4 and 5 on the P4 ... so even though the AMD processor has a maximum of 1.8 Ghz it can actually perform more multiplications compared to what P4 can do in 3 Ghz.

Also, each processor has certain specialities..I'm sure you heard of MMX, SSE and so on - these are simply sets of instructions the processor ca do faster than normal, kind of like shortcuts.

For example, add takes one cycle, multiply takes 3 cycles but if you use a special instruction, the processor could do (a + b) x c in 2 cycles (instead of 4 cycles.. one for add and 3 for multiply.

The P4 HT being older may not have these special instructions that act like shortcuts, it's just dumber, so it may be able to keep up due to its higher frequency or it may not.

There's lots of other factors that you have to keep in consideration... I'll only mention one more: the memory.

The processors can do a lot of computation, but they need to retrieve the data they compute from somewhere... which is the RAM.

P4 being older, it uses DDR1 memory, which means for example that the maximum speed is 400 Mhz (frequency) x 4 bytes per memory module ... meaning in each Hz, 4 bytes can be transferred to the processor.
So you have 400 x 4 x 1.000.000 = 1.6 GB/s

Phenom x4 can use 400-800 Mhz DDR2 modules (but they're double data rate so they're marketed as 800-1600 Mhz) which transfers 8 bytes on each Hz and in addition you also have dual channel feature which ties 2 memory modules as if they're one... so the transfer speed can be 800 x 1.000.000 x 8 x 2 = 12.2 GB/s

So you see, the P4 may very well have the opportunity to do more stuff in that 3 Ghz, but what good is that if it can't retrieve data to crunch from memory fast enough.

On the other hand Phenom x4 can get data fast and can also get data that's not wanted right away (but may be, so if it turns out to be needed you saved a trip)


Strictly from a benchmark point of view, see cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

This is not a perfect benchmark, it simply does some math and some computations on it. The rest of the components in the PC also matter.

You can see there

Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz rated at 489 points

I can't tell which Phenom x4 you talk about but I picked an old Phenom 9100e running at 1.8 ghz:

AMD Phenom 9100e Quad-Core 1951 points...

So you can see

100 % === 489p
? % === 1951

the AMD is 1951 *100 / 489 = 398% ... it's almost 4 times as powerful as that P4 HT 3 Ghz

Even the Pentium D805 (dual core @ 2.66Ghz) is:

Intel Pentium D 2.66GHz 668 points... at least 3 times slower compared to a new Phenom

[Uranium-235]

Re: Processor Speeds

wow, mar, I don't think you needed to go into such detail

lets just say, new processors run at slower clock speeds but are MUCH more efficient then the old P4's. And hyperthreading is kind of a fake dual core.

I would suggest you go with something phenom II and DDR3 though

[killian6pk]

Re: Processor Speeds

Thanks, that was extremely informative and put in a way a dummy like me could actually understand it. So the baseline is the Phenom is better by 4x than the P4. There is also the speed increase in the memory and I am guessing that there is a speed increase from the HD also since it is a SATA 7200rpm and my HD is an 80gig IDE or HIDE not sure.

[killian6pk]

Re: Processor Speeds

wow, mar, I don't think you needed to go into such detail

lets just say, new processors run at slower clock speeds but are MUCH more efficient then the old P4's. And hyperthreading is kind of a fake dual core.

I would suggest you go with something phenom II and DDR3 though

I thought the detail was very informative. I had a need to keep up with all this information when I had my business, but now that I am retired it has passed me by. This processor is a Phenom 9150e and from what I read it uses DDR2 memory. I can get this system pretty cheap. Since I don't need the gaming aspect sounds like this system will fulfill my desire for more speed. The most intensive thing I do is watching the games on ESPN and I have a 1gig Video Card (can't find the info on it now) that works well for the ESPN games.

[Rulycat]

Re: Processor Speeds

You will have more speed. mariushm is entirely correct. The 9150 is much better than the 9100. The original versions had a design fault in the part of the chip that handles virtualisation. This was disabled on motherboards at the cost of up to 20% of the performance of each core. The 9150 circumvents this. It's a shame it's not a Phenom II as this would be much faster and more power efficient, however, if you can get it cheaply, it would be an improvement.

I do not recommend XP Pro if you wish to use all 7GB of memory. 32-bit operating systems can only address up to 4GB of memory. Essentially any memory past that amount is useless under a 32bit operating system that does not support PAE (physical address extensions) such as XP. Windows Vista/7 64-bit (and ONLY 64-bit) will utilise all 7GB of memory. If you only have Vista then I will have to recommend this as it is the only operating system to utilise all of your memory unless you consider free alternatives such as Ubuntu. (I assume you are not willing to go to the dark side and burn yourself a disk...) otherwise only have 4GB at once or you're just burning up your RAM for no gain.

[mariushm]

Re: Processor Speeds

If he doesn't mind using a pirated copy, he could go with the original Windows 2003 64 bit or even the 32 bit version which will detect more than 4 GB with no issues, as long as PAE is enabled in BIOS.

Windows 2003 will accept all the XP drivers and it's about as fast as XP with a bit of tweaking (stopping services that don't have to run)

The 7 GB value bothers me though... assuming you have 4 memory sticks, how do you even get to 7 GB? Maybe 1 GB is used (reserved) by the on-board video card?

[Rulycat]

Re: Processor Speeds

I presumed 3 x 2GB and 1 x 1GB. As for using Windows 2003 with PAE, I remember reading that graphics drivers have to be written to support it and AMD & NVIDIA's don't. This could pose a problem.

[mariushm]

Re: Processor Speeds

It worked fine on my system (had two systems, one with radeon 9200 and the current with radeon 4850), but in the end I didn't use PAE because my TV tuner driver ignored the option and was reading the image data from an empty memory space and all it would show was black.

Anyway, in the end I work just fine right now with an Intel Q6600 and 4 GB of memory so he most likely won't feel the difference between 4 and 7-8 GB.

I currently use a legal Windows 7 64bit version...

[severach]

Re: Processor Speeds

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

Intel Pentium 4 3.20GHz 522 (Low End CPUs)
AMD Phenom 9100e Quad-Core 1,951 (High Mid Range CPU's)

The upgrade looks good to me.

I migrate windows to new motherboards all the time. It's tricky.

[brethin]

Re: Processor Speeds

GHz of a CPU is more of a factor than having multiple cores more than most people think. If your software isnt written for multi core then more than 1 core is useless.

[ratdude747]

Re: Processor Speeds

GHz of a CPU is more of a factor than having multiple cores more than most people think. If your software isnt written for multi core then more than 1 core is useless.

Not quite. Two things:

1. Even before multicore/HT CPUs GHz wasn't the only factor. Anybody remember the Athlon Vs P4 wars? Both were single core but the Athlon was a slower GHZ but also could do more per clock cycle. This still applies in that anything based on netburst (Pentium4, Pentium D, etc.) while bearing a high clock speed is not very efficient per clock cycle compared to non-netburst CPUs. Bottom line: GHz isn't everything no matter how many real or virtual cores you have or are using.

2. Just because-- one particular program isn't written for multiple cores doesn't mean that multiple cores is of no benefit. There is always background stuff that can be unloaded to another core; it also helps when you multitask (like you have a streaming radio station playing while you are using a different program). Sure, it's less of a benifit, but it is something that could play a factor.

---

As for the 32bit RAM thing with XP- IIRC there is some way that one can unload the unusable RAM as a virtual storage drive (Mobo dependent?). In that case, the virtual drive could be used exclusively for the page file which isn't included in the RAM limit. By doing this you have pretty much reclaimed the RAM as usable memory (minus losses in the virtual drive setup).

[brethin]

Re: Processor Speeds

Not quite. Two things:

1. Even before multicore/HT CPUs GHz wasn't the only factor. Anybody remember the Athlon Vs P4 wars? Both were single core but the Athlon was a slower GHZ but also could do more per clock cycle. This still applies in that anything based on netburst (Pentium4, Pentium D, etc.) while bearing a high clock speed is not very efficient per clock cycle compared to non-netburst CPUs. Bottom line: GHz isn't everything no matter how many real or virtual cores you have or are using.

2. Just because-- one particular program isn't written for multiple cores doesn't mean that multiple cores is of no benefit. There is always background stuff that can be unloaded to another core; it also helps when you multitask (like you have a streaming radio station playing while you are using a different program). Sure, it's less of a benifit, but it is something that could play a factor.

---

As for the 32bit RAM thing with XP- IIRC there is some way that one can unload the unusable RAM as a virtual storage drive (Mobo dependent?). In that case, the virtual drive could be used exclusively for the page file which isn't included in the RAM limit. By doing this you have pretty much reclaimed the RAM as usable memory (minus losses in the virtual drive setup).

zzzbhm

[ratdude747]

Re: Processor Speeds

zzzbhm

And your point is?

(you replied to two of my posts that way... )

[killian6pk]

Re: Processor Speeds

And your point is?

(you replied to two of my posts that way... )

RatDude he's from Owensboro, you have to forgive him. The only thing they know over there is BBQ. Heck I think some of them even like Indiana Basketball.

Everyone thanks for the input. I will take the info on (64bit vs 32bit) operating systems and stay with the Vista for the time being. Next question how can I migrate all my programs and files from my old HDD to this new one that has Vista. I used Acronis True Image to clone from my 40gig to my 80gig HDD. Can I use that program to move the files?