comparison of cpus and graphics cards

[ironduck]

I'm looking for some longish term comparisons of cpus and graphics cards.. whenever I see a review with comparisons they only compare with very recent models. Does anyone know where I can find comparisons that span several generations, for instance geforce 5000-6000-7000-8000 and pentium 3-4-core2?

 

[Asher]

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html

 

[ironduck]

Those aren't bad, but they don't really go back quite long enough.. it would be great with some that really spanned a lot of generations

 

[Speedo]

You're not likely to find them, simply because the difference is so night and day.

What do you need them for, anyway?

 

[Zelig]

Those aren't bad, but they don't really go back quite long enough.. it would be great with some that really spanned a lot of generations

Check the links for the older ones, from older years.

It's difficult to compare cards from different generations, as older cards can't run new content at all, regardless of how slow it would be.

 

[ironduck]

They don't seem to go further back than 2004 on that site..

The cpus only seem to be about 3-4x faster today compared to 3-4 years ago, while the graphics cards seem to double in performance for each generation.. maybe that's the same as the cpus, but the product cycle seems shorter for graphics. I'm surprised that the cpus aren't showing more progress. I do realize that they're focusing on keeping down power consumption and do more calculations per cycle, but I still thought there would be a greater difference.

Oh, and I'm just curious and I'm getting a new computer so that only makes it more interesting

 

[Zelig]

The cpus only seem to be about 3-4x faster today compared to 3-4 years ago, while the graphics cards seem to double in performance for each generation.. maybe that's the same as the cpus, but the product cycle seems shorter for graphics. I'm surprised that the cpus aren't showing more progress. I do realize that they're focusing on keeping down power consumption and do more calculations per cycle, but I still thought there would be a greater difference.

Depends what you're looking at.

A little less than 4 years ago (September, 2003), the Athlon 64 was launched, the fastest CPU at the time was the 2.2 GHz Athlon FX-51.

Ignoring the dual-cpu 8-core Xeon beasts that Apple currently sells, the fastest current cpu is the 2.93 GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6800.

Although it's difficult to directly compare the two processors, in single threaded applications, the QX6800 is, on average, more than double the speed of the FX-51. Taking all the cores into account, this gives the QX6800 about 10x the processing power, although there are very few applications which will take advantage of 4 cores at a time.

 

[MarineCorps]

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=310&card2=443

 

[ironduck]

Depends what you're looking at.

A little less than 4 years ago (September, 2003), the Athlon 64 was launched, the fastest CPU at the time was the 2.2 GHz Athlon FX-51.

Ignoring the dual-cpu 8-core Xeon beasts that Apple currently sells, the fastest current cpu is the 2.93 GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6800.

Although it's difficult to directly compare the two processors, in single threaded applications, the QX6800 is, on average, more than double the speed of the FX-51. Taking all the cores into account, this gives the QX6800 about 10x the processing power, although there are very few applications which will take advantage of 4 cores at a time.

My last post was confused anyway.. if it doubles every 2 years then I guess it's in line with Moore's law (although that's about transistor count). I was just looking at a lot of comparisons that indicated only about a 2x performance leap, which didn't seem right. but a lot of those are probably harddrive dependent. The comparison I'm making is with my 4 year old computer which has a 2.6ghz P4, vs the new which will have a core2 duo 2.4ghz. They don't have my old cpu so I just took the closest I could find, and when running the photoshop comparison (5 pictures) it only shows a little less than a doubling in speed. Photoshop is my main use..

 

[ironduck]

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=310&card2=443

Very nice!

 

[Zelig]

Photoshop is my main use..

Photoshop also isn't multithreaded, so on a new quad core cpu, you're only going to get one of the four cores working.

 

[GVBN]

Photoshop also isn't multithreaded

Yes it is

 

[Asher]

Speaking as someone who owns a quad-core CPU, Photoshop is definitely multithreaded. It uses all four cores.

 

[Zelig]

Oops, my mistake...

However, photoshop doesn't really take advantage of more than 2 cores. Check benchmarks, going from Core 2 Duo, to Quad, to dual-Quad with equal clock speed gives almost identical results.