AMD phenom II X6 hexacore vs Intel i7 quad HT

simple question, which chip is better in terms of PPD and power consumption? the price of the new 6core AMD chips looks really competitive and i'm considering buying one. i'm not looking for gaming, subzero, or rendering performance, it's solely to crunch with.

it's my understanding that an intel's HT makes each core ~50% more efficient, so a quad with HT is about equal to a a true 6 core chip with no HT. i'm assuming that the i7 will generally OC better and consumes lower power at the higher clocks, but i could be wrong. which chip has the upper hand in computational power and power consumption between 3.6ghz - 4ghz? and please, i do not want to turn this into a battle between fanboys that swear by either chip.

that's a tough question. intel is very good at crunching and both amd and intel chips currently OC well. overclocked i7s consume a lot of power though. using the wcg ppd calc amd's new 6 core phenom at 4GHz should get 26,400ppd. the i7 @4GHz is 30,360. you can probably get power consumption numbers off of some review site when NDA is over.

NDA? some people ordered these retail hexacore like a week ago and already received them.

i'll do some digging around, but if anyone has first hand experience on hexacore crunching, please post :)

lol no more debate on this. the hexacore wins, it's only $125 after rebate and cashback.

$200 shipped from tigerdirect (link)
$50 mail in rebate (link)
$25 bing cash back (link)

For crunching, the hexacore wins easily in price and power consumption ratio. It will basically have the same or slightly better performance. HT = app. 30% extra performance. 4 * 1.3 = 5.2 "real" cores where Thuban has 6.

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Originally Posted by v0dka

For crunching, the hexacore wins easily in price and power consumption ratio. It will basically have the same or slightly better performance. HT = app. 30% extra performance. 4 * 1.3 = 5.2 "real" cores where Thuban has 6.

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i just always heard it was 50% more performance for HT. how did you figure out the 30% figure?

How much performance increase you get is highly dependent on the load you apply. The worse a given thread is in terms of efficient cache usage and IO waiting time the better the improvement you'll get by having another whole thread "ready to roll". On the other hand, a highly efficient thread will lose very little time to being locked out waiting for cache refreshes, IO etc. In that case you'll gain far less from hyperthreading.
Some folks will remember a while back one of the projects, might have been the original HCC I'm not sure, was an absolute mongrel for cache misses (page faults). Having another thread to switch to, already in cache, was a great boost to those units. My Athlon XP2400+, on the other hand, suffered greatly due to lack of cache (256k compared to the P4 2.4 beside it which had 512k) which made the situation far worse.





Yes, I normally run older gear coz that's what I've got.

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Originally Posted by D_A

How much performance increase you get is highly dependent on the load you apply. The worse a given thread is in terms of efficient cache usage and IO waiting time the better the improvement you'll get by having another whole thread "ready to roll". On the other hand, a highly efficient thread will lose very little time to being locked out waiting for cache refreshes, IO etc. In that case you'll gain far less from hyperthreading.
Some folks will remember a while back one of the projects, might have been the original HCC I'm not sure, was an absolute mongrel for cache misses (page faults). Having another thread to switch to, already in cache, was a great boost to those units. My Athlon XP2400+, on the other hand, suffered greatly due to lack of cache (256k compared to the P4 2.4 beside it which had 512k) which made the situation far worse.

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lol excuse my ignorance, but is there a dumbed down translation of this? i have no idea how efficient HT is for WCG, and i see a lot of mixed performance on HT. so in summary, would a hexacore beat a quad with HT at the same clocks in terms of PPD?

You may not see much in the way of power savings with the Phenom. Anandtech just posted its article. These are the power numbers they got. This is total system power, not just CPU power consumption.

thanks for the chart sierra. although, that doesn't agree with the article that guru3d just published a few hours ago. they commend the phenom II hexacores for being power efficient (at stock clocks) and run very cool.

The better chip in terms of power savings is probably the 1035T which no one seems to have in stock yet. It's rated at 95W versus 125W for the 1055T and 1090T.

Yes, those results are much different than Anandtech's. I just happened to notice Anand Shimpi posted his article, so I took a quick look. He generally has a favorable impression of the X6.

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Originally Posted by WhiteFireDragon

lol excuse my ignorance, but is there a dumbed down translation of this?

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lol sorry. Yes there is, but it will take an hour to set up and explain the analogies to make them cover all the bases. If you want to know more do some searching on "memory hierarchy", "page faults", "turnaside lookup buffer" and possibly "memory paging".

Short short short version:
Good programming + big cache + big RAM + HTT = :up::up::up:
Good programming + big cache + big RAM + no HTT + moar coars= :up::up::up::up:
Bad programming + big cache + big RAM + HTT = :up: :up:
Bad programming + big cache + big RAM + no HTT = :up:
Bad programming + small cache + big RAM + HTT = :up:
Bad programming + small cache + small RAM + HTT = :down:
Bad programming + small cache + small RAM + no HTT = :shakes:

My bet is that performance-wise, they'll basically be even at identical clock rates.
HT gives about a 40% boost on WCG, along with the i7's slightly higher IPC, it should level out.
It remains to be seen how far the X6 can be OCed, and how power-efficient it is - price/performance is definitely in favor of the X6, considering the motherboards are about half the price of an x58.

However, as soon as affordable Intel Hexas are available, the game changes again. They do 50% more than a Bloomfield, clock very high, and draw even less power.
Right now, 32nm Westmere is unbeatable when it comes to performance per Watt (Dual X5650: 72000 WCG PPD @ 300W from the wall)

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Originally Posted by jcool

However, as soon as affordable Intel Hexas are available, the game changes again. They do 50% more than a Bloomfield, clock very high, and draw even less power.
Right now, 32nm Westmere is unbeatable when it comes to performance per Watt (Dual X5650: 72000 WCG PPD @ 300W from the wall)

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The question is when will that happen. AFAIK Intel hasnt even anounced non EE hexacores yet.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...mgqKNUi_y.GNkQ

AMD 1055T for 125 no tax and shipping in CA after 50 dollars rebate + 25 dollars bing

What a steal!!!

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Originally Posted by v0dka

The question is when will that happen. AFAIK Intel hasnt even anounced non EE hexacores yet.

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Well there's DP hexacore xeons but well they ain't any cheaper than 980X

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Originally Posted by jcool

However, as soon as affordable Intel Hexas are available, the game changes again. They do 50% more than a Bloomfield, clock very high, and draw even less power.
Right now, 32nm Westmere is unbeatable when it comes to performance per Watt (Dual X5650: 72000 WCG PPD @ 300W from the wall)

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I have the feeling that this article might be true. Can't say how I know, and have no clue how affordable it'll be, but it'll be less then $1k;)
http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/17499/1/

as for the main question. Looks like for perf/watt/$ its a pretty close race between the Lynnfield i7's and the new phenom x6's. I look forward to seeing some results here. I am admittedly biased towards the i7's, but I think the performance of each will be about the same, but if I have to guess I would think that the platform power consumption of the P55/i7 8xx combo will be a bit better at comparable overclocks.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...916&CatId=5291

That barebones isn't a bad deal honestly, but I'm going to see if I can't come up with something more reasonably priced on Newegg (I'm partial towards Newegg, don't much care for TigerDirect). At the price of the Thuban chips, you can hardly resist. I hope they at least hold up to the i7s, would be interesting to see what they'll do.

the big question to me is which has the overall cheaper platform?

what's the lowest you can buy a hexacore setup for, assuming you buy the chip for $125?
-what's the power draw

what's the lowest you can buy a i7 platform for, assuming you can buy a 920 for $199?
-what's the power draw

basically, i7 mobos are $$$$$$, is it the same case for the AMD?

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Originally Posted by Tristor

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...916&CatId=5291

That barebones isn't a bad deal honestly, but I'm going to see if I can't come up with something more reasonably priced on Newegg (I'm partial towards Newegg, don't much care for TigerDirect). At the price of the Thuban chips, you can hardly resist. I hope they at least hold up to the i7s, would be interesting to see what they'll do.

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i just bought this case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-11154098-LC1C

and applied code: EMCYRNV34 for $4 off. comes out to $35.99 free shipping for what appears to be a pretty darn good case. i particularly like the cut out behind the cpu on the mobo tray. i think i'll be using that feature often with as much as i'm switching cpus around trying to find the best PPD :)

i'll chime in when i get it.

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Originally Posted by Rise

the big question to me is which has the overall cheaper platform?

what's the lowest you can buy a hexacore setup for, assuming you buy the chip for $125?
-what's the power draw

what's the lowest you can buy a i7 platform for, assuming you can buy a 920 for $199?
-what's the power draw

basically, i7 mobos are $$$$$$, is it the same case for the AMD?

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Very nice mobo 890GX/AM3 for $140 with free shipping on Newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128435

I just finished configuring what my ideal would be for a Thuban WCG node. Compared to an i7-860 it's about $100 more, but that's partly because I got the 1090T vs the 1055T, which was exactly $100 difference. I figured with the unlocked multi I might be able to push the clocks further (are there people doing 4.0 with these without unlocked multi? I can hit 4.0 HT on with the 860).

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Originally Posted by Rise

basically, i7 mobos are $$$$$$, is it the same case for the AMD?

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You should be able to find ~$60 boards that support Thuban (check for updated BIOS), running DDR2 if you still have any around. Overclocking range is the limiter on the low end boards.

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Originally Posted by Rise

the big question to me is which has the overall cheaper platform?

what's the lowest you can buy a hexacore setup for, assuming you buy the chip for $125?
-what's the power draw

what's the lowest you can buy a i7 platform for, assuming you can buy a 920 for $199?
-what's the power draw

basically, i7 mobos are $$$$$$, is it the same case for the AMD?

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Best buy is Asrock 890gx extreme3 (129$) and 1055T :up:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...asrock%20890gx

And the 890GX can unlock quads to X6 too.

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Originally Posted by v0dka

And the 890GX can unlock quads to X6 too.

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If the quad Thubans were forsale. :D