On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 6:36 PM, Fritz Meissner <meissner.fritz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 5 September 2010 21:18, rosea grammostola <rosea.grammostola@xxxxxxxxx> > wrote: >> >> Thanks for the info. After some reading and discussion, the i3 or i5 seems >> to be good options indeed. >> After reading this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2901/7 and considering >> my budget >> It looks like I better go for a i3 540 or something close to that, >> compared to a i5... >> > My perspective on the processors is a little different. If you go for the > Arrandale i5-750 you get 4 cores (but no hyperthreading or GPU) instead of 2 > cores with hyperthreading plus on-chip GPU. You can see the equivalent > Anandtech review for Arrandale at http://www.anandtech.com/show/2832 . If > you compare the benchmarks in the review you quoted, the i5-750 has a > Sysmark score of 217 versus 204 for the i3-540, which is only a 6% > difference. However, if you look at multiple benchmarks (see Tom's hardware > comparison chart > http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-2010/compare,2414.html?prod[4483]=on&prod[4487]=on > (which is for i5-530, not i5-540 but is still relevant)) the differences are > often much greater. In particular, if you look at the Adobe Photoshop Image > processing benchmark, which is the only one that I know is definitely using > parallel processing on all available cores, then the 4 core processor is > twice as fast (unsurprisingly). My expectation is that as time goes on more > and more compute-intensive applications (such as audio and video encoding > and compiling) will start to use multiple cores fully, so it makes sense to > buy for the future. > > Another factor is memory bandwidth; assuming that some audio work is memory > intensive (in particular playback using large sample banks) then I think > this is important. The i5-750 has a memory bandwidth of 16.9 GB/s vs. 11.6 > for the i3-530 (from the comparison chart); this is a 46% improvement. > Compounding this is the fact that the onboard GPU is using main memory as > video memory, so that memory bandwidth is also being shared with all the > video data, which could eat up a large chunk of the capacity. So the i5 must > come out way ahead on memory bandwidth available for the CPU. Ok, but I when doing work with photoshop or 3D video, it's better to buy a videocard. This is also possible on a i3... An i3 is more energyfriendly afaik. But yes, more cores could be good, the question is from which point it's really a nice upgrade... I'm interested in more views on this topic... I have pretty little experience with hardware and interpreting benchmarks scores... \r _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
