Liquid nitrogen, 8GHz and plenty of putty: the world’s fastest processor

Monday, September 26th, 2011

It’s rare that we see a review system that doesn’t pack an overclocked punch, but the launch of AMD’s Bulldozer-powered FX processors saw the firm use gallons of liquid nitrogen to break the world record for the highest frequency computer processor – previously held by a Celeron – and run its new FX-8150 at a ridiculous 8.429GHz. (more…)

Will Intel scratchcards unlock a new business model?

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Yesterday I returned from the Intel Developer Forum to be greeted by some interesting news that definitely wasn’t mentioned at IDF. In case you missed it, the CPU Goliath has started selling upgrades to its low-end Pentium CPUs in the form of scratch-cards – in the US, at least.

It’s a simple idea. The processor ships at a low price with some of its capabilities disabled, and these cards – which sell for $50 – reveal a code to download a software tool that unlocks those extra capabilities.

Not everyone approves. Some commenters (on more hysterical forums than ours) see this as an outrageous way to treat customers. “They’re selling deliberately crippled parts!” they cry. “They want to charge you twice for the same thing!” And, to an extent, they have a point. (more…)

Taking the hype out of Hyper-Threading

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

In my recent review of AMD’s six-core Phenom II X6 1090T processor, I noted that, although this CPU has the same number of physical cores as Intel’s Core i7-980X, Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology lets the Core i7 service twice as many concurrent threads.

This prompted one commenter (giving his name as Wilbert3) to raise an insightful point. Hyper-Threading is great for everyday multi-tasking: for example, it lets a dual-core Core i5 CPU service four concurrent processes. But it works by presenting each core’s spare execution capacity to the OS as a virtual second core. Under heavy load, where there is no spare capacity, it would seem unable to offer any benefit. In such cases we shouldn’t expect to see a Core i5 achieve performance anywhere near what a true quad-core architecture would provide.

That analysis sounds persuasive, but is it borne out by the evidence? (more…)

The building begins in earnest

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

After all of the shop-scouring, penny-pinching and quibbling over precisely which CPU, GPU and PSU to buy, all my parts have finally arrived and I’ve begun to put my rig together – a process which, so far, hasn’t been fraught with problems. Although, saying that, I’ve probably just jinxed it, so I hope that my colleagues don’t use eBay and the Internet to come up with vastly superior machines.

My final shopping list – after taking suggestions from the helpful comments of Grimer, E and Ian Devlin, among others – looks like this:

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Technological progress: lost on the masses

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

I loaded up Steam for the first time in a while last night and was promptly asked to participate in Valve’s ongoing hardware survey. I’ve done this before, and the results are always fascinating, so I jumped right in. A few clicks later, and a quick scan of my cobbled-together PC, and I got to see the breakdown of nearly 1.8million gamers’ systems – with some surprises.

Just 41% of polled users have made the much-needed step to a dual or quad-core processor – the norm in pretty much all new PC systems sold today – and 38% have shelled out on 2GB or more of RAM. Assuming a correllation between the two, that leaves a huge proportion of PC players who are still trundling along on 1GB of RAM or less and a single-core CPU.

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The inexorable bang-per-buck conveyor belt

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

While I was packing away after last month’s CPU Megatest, I came across an old Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955, left over from a previous Labs. It runs at a blazing 3.46GHz, and when we reviewed it back in Issue 146 it was one of the fastest processors around. At around £650, it was also one of the most expensive.

I was curious to see how well this veteran CPU had aged (and it’s not like I had anything else to do this week), so I dropped it into our testing rig and kicked off the benchmarking process. A few hours later, the results were in: the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 had scored 1.19. That’s far from disgraceful, but today, you can get a CPU that achieves that sort of score for as little as £90. To put that into context, I’ve tweaked our CPU graph (click for full-sized version) to show how the 955 would fit into the mainstream market if it were launched today.

If you take any sort of interest in computing – and let’s face it, you’re reading the PC Pro blog – you’ll have seen similar scenarios play out many times before. I remember my father paying £100 (around £350 in today’s money) for our first family computer, a Sinclair ZX-80. A year later, the ZX81 appeared, costing half as much and bringing numerous technological advances, including floating point arithmetic and a screen that didn’t go blank every time you pressed newline.

A more recent example: three months ago, I reviewed the Samsung 1TB Spinpoint F hard disk. I liked the drive, but felt that at £185 it was too expensive. Today that drive is selling for £96. Now it looks like a bargain – but of course in another few months we’ll be looking back at the days when we used to pay £100 for a terabyte drive and laughing at how naïve we were.*

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