  2008/05/10
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Last update 2004/04/14
 The Labs - Design & Functionality For The NetResources about Hypes and Realities of CPUs
Every 6 months new CPUs are released, the clock-frequency goes higher and higher,
the prices remain high, but what do you get really by this all? What it is
worth really to spend and when do I buy, and what do I buy?
Alpha 21164 Die Photo (inversed & colored)
- Overview
- Cache & Memory
- Benchmarks
- Resources
Recommendation: don't buy what is the best, buy the CPU which is sold since
3 months at least:
- Check DejaNews and search for "problems" people had, don't "Beta Test" for
the CPU manufactures (unless you like it).
- Don't pay for "best" & "newest" CPU, you are overpaying 30% (see the sales strategies from big CPU manufactors).
- New CPUs require also (not much tested) new main- / motherboards which often
haven't been tested much (or enough).
If you chose dual or multiple CPU mainboards, buy your 2nd or additional CPU immediatly or within a timerange of 6-8 months but
not longer otherwise you end up being able to buy anymore (as it happened to many people looking
for PPro 200MHz back in 1998).
"A CPU is only as fast as its memory", simple and important insight :-)
| Type of memory | Location | Access time (cycles) |
| Registers | on-chip | 1 |
| Data and instruction cache | on-chip | ~1-2 |
| Level 2 cache | on-chip | ~2-5 |
| Level 2 cache | off-chip | ~3-10 |
| Local main memory | mainboard | ~6-100 |
| Remote main memory | off-board | ~10-200+ |
| Secondary storage, networked systems | on-disk, on-network | ~100s-10000s |
|
So on-chip cache-size is very important, as well the main-memory matching the
bus-speed so no wait-cycles are wasted.
Here some UBench output of systems:
UBench CPU:
| SparcStation 1+/24M | 341 |
| Sparc4/70/64M | 1324 |
| i486DX2-66/32M | 1454 |
| P75/64M | 2734 |
| *) P100/64M | 3796 |
| P166/64M | 6461 |
| *) PPro200/256M | 9174 |
| *) PII-266/256M | 14167 |
| *) K6-500/256M | 21962 |
| *) PII-400/256M | 22627 |
| PIII-500/256M | 29113 |
| *) Celeron-700/128M | 39616 |
| *) Athlon-1000/768M | 43274 |
| PIII-800/256M | 45071 |
| *) 1) Athlon-XP-2600/1000M | 85914 |
| Xeon3066/3000M | 101724 |
UBench MEM:
| SparcStation 1+/24M | 323 |
| Sparc4/70/64M | 1742 |
| i486DX2-66/32M | 1728 |
| P75/64M | 3237 |
| *) P100/64M | 3745 |
| P166/64M | 5596 |
| *) PPro200/256M | 8399 |
| *) PII-266/256M | 13941 |
| *) K6-500/256M | 16420 |
| *) Celeron-700/128M | 19500 |
| *) PII-400/256M | 20325 |
| PIII-500/256M | 27223 |
| PIII-800/256M | 34713 |
| *) Athlon-1000/768M | 45683 |
| *) 1) Athlon-XP-2600/1000M | 93952 |
| Xeon3066/3000M | 116696 |
*) measured by our own machines
1) Athlon XP 2600+ is clocked at 2078.56MHz
Last update 2004/04/14
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