Benchmark Results: Power Consumption
Idle power is lower with Hyper-Threading switched off, but the difference is negligible.
The peak power results are interesting. Our two setups with Hyper-Threading switched off are clearly lower on power consumption. Depending on the applications you're running, it could turn out that Hyper-Threading is better left disabled, from a purely by-the-numbers approach. Of course, even one threaded application should post up the sorts of performance gains that'd make HT worth enabling. Let's take a look at a full run through our benchmark suite for more detail.
Our efficiency run consists of all the applications we've skimmed through. First, we looked at total power used for the entire workload and the average power required during the workload. On the next page, we’ll calculate performance per watt with and without Hyper-Threading.
The total power used to complete our workload was lower on the six-core if Hyper-Threading was switched off, but it was lower on the quad-core with Hyper-Threading switched on. Clearly, Gulftown is running into bottlenecks from only a few applications making proper use of all its threads.
Average power is clearly lower when Hyper-Threading is switched off.
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- i7-980x
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Adobe creation is my primary use so it's 6 cores all the way for me, and with some careful rejigging of spec (i.e. dropping the 2nd 5870 I don't really need just yet) I can squeeze the i7 980X into my budget.
However, let's see how the i7 970 turns out send half of these year - I should image it'll be just as overclockable as everything else and we'll just have to do the Bclk/UnCore dance instead of cranking up the CPU multi.
Pff... This is so... I mean come on, who cares about the 7zip performance???
What I want to know is:
- does it make a difference with MS exchange?
- with linux/bsd servers like mysql, apache, samba?
- how does it influence virtual machine hosting? VMware? Linux KVM?
Hey, real world, are you there???
Is this tom's hardware or is this gaming-and-ziping-files-under-windows-hardware.com???
Pff... This is so... I mean come on, who cares about the 7zip performance???What I want to know is:- does it make a difference with MS exchange?- with linux/bsd servers like mysql, apache, samba?- how does it influence virtual machine hosting? VMware? Linux KVM?Hey, real world, are you there???Is this tom's hardware or is this gaming-and-ziping-files-under-windows-hardware.com???
it's a desktop processor, so they're doing desktop test. You want the server performance figures, wait til the Xeon comes out.
it's a desktop processor, so they're doing desktop test. You want the server performance figures, wait til the Xeon comes out.
Sorry but I second albert_einstein_22: not everybody uses server processors for servers... Some people (I am talking small companies of 1-9 people) happily use plain desktop PCs to run as servers...
Sorry but I second albert_einstein_22: not everybody uses server processors for servers... Some people (I am talking small companies of 1-9 people) happily use plain desktop PCs to run as servers...
Yeah OK, fair enough. But that's beyond the scope of the article - the i7 980X is a desktop CPU so Tom's are doing desktop CPU tests.
It's not rocket surgery.
And if Tom's reviews factored in every possible use for a CPU in their tests the articles would end up being more long-winded, unfocused and prone to perceived bias than they are already.
What this shows is that Intel are lieing and being disingenuous by showing threads as physical cores as the benefits are small and nowhere near the same as having extra physical cores.
or alternatively send that complaint to Microsoft and get them to change Task Manager to colour the logical cores in pink, not green.
Since when did Intel say this is a 12-core processor?
Very interesting read, Patrick and Achim. It's nice to know the current state of affairs regarding how well the desktop software is able to keep up with the latest hardware. The video transcoding tests certainly seem to be doing that..just wondered how fast, stable and accurate that task is when it's run on a GPU. Winzip..can't understand why those guy's haven't done some multi-threaded work, considering how popular that software is.
Hat's off to that as well..not everyone is jumping on the 'newer is better' bandwagon, and you made a reference to the AMD option, too. I'd be torn between the two, to be honest: Intel offering top-dollar performance and overlocking, and AMD offering first-rate bang-per-buck as well as decent overclocking together with more flexible system longevity.
Hello,
Good article. I have a question about the HT. How does it improve the home made computing programs? Can a usual user like a scientist to program a program that will HT efficiently?
Hello,Good article. I have a question about the HT. How does it improve the home made computing programs? Can a usual user like a scientist to program a program that will HT efficiently?
If you know how to write multi-threaded code and are up to speed on parallel computing then yes.
Thanks for the answer. I can write programs in Fortran. I was just wondering how advanced programming is it required ? Will suffice the usual parallel programming?
I have no idea - see what comes up in Google
Probably that would be enough since every windows applications goes through windows API to use multi-threading. CreateThreadEx, CreateProcess,...
Intel and AMD should develop turbo to a new level. I mean you disable cores when they are not needed and push the clock speed. When you need more cores and only then you enable dynamically HT. That would need the OS to develop some sort of cpu hot plug but it would not be very hard to adapt server OS code that already does that on the racks.
Be good to see some pro audio applications in these benchmarks - Ableton Live/Cubase 5 etc - tests of multi CPU hungry VST instruments and fx across enough audio tracks to bring a decent spec PC to its knees (easily done with such software...)