Do people know the difference between 2,3,4 and 6 issue CPUs

[TabrisDarkPeace]

Poll: Do people know the difference between 2,3,4 and 6 issue CPU cores ?

Do they actually know how this affects performance ?

eg: Do people know how many instructions the AMD Athlon 64 / Opteron can issue per clock cycle, compared to say the Intel Pentium 4, or Conroe, or Itanium - IA-64 ?

Do people know or not know how to calculate why a 90nm to 65nm transition doubles the transistor count of a processor (given the same 3 dimentional space) instead of only raising it 38% or so ?

I'll be running this poll for 21 days, until March 31th, as April 1st is when things settle down and also April fools day (although I'll be posting information on April 2nd so as not to 'fool' anyone )

Tip: March / April crossover is a good time to upgrade video cards each year, or 2nd year (depending on your budget and what you spent last time).

I have been very curious to find out of the members of the forums are really as familar with CPU microarchitecture as they indicate they are.

 

[Action_Man]

Yeah but I doubt peoples would admit it.

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

Perhaps you have a point.....

Still by April 2nd I hope to have a 'Introduction to CPU MicroArchitecture 101' sort of summary documentation with a few neat tricks and some basic math in it so Joe Average forum reader can figure out a few things in under 60 sec with basic Windows CALC.EXE, or a portable low end calculator.

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And now... an ice breaker:
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A hand held calculator from the early 90's:

Boots and ready to use in 25 ms
Easy to use
Requires basic schooling math to use
Can do mathematical stuff fast

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VS
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A quad-core processor computer from 2003 - 2007 era

Boots and ready to use in 25 minutes
(Exaggerated, but so many BIOS to load in max config if you have 3+ RAID adapters.... time to move from BIOS to something else)
Extremely Hard to use
Requires much technical knowledge to use
Can also do mathematical stuff fast

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My god we advance so quickly don't we ?
- Tabris.DarkPeace
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I propose we challenge AMD and Intel to a duel (not dual ) and see who can boot their machine and load a calculator and perform some basic math the fastest.

Betting Tip: My money is on the $2 handheld calculator

 

[psyno]

Do they actually know how this affects performance ?

I guess you're asking individuals whether they know or not, and not asking individuals of their opinion of the forum as a whole... Should come out to the same percentage, but of course it wouldn't.

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

Not individuals, just as a whole.

Was sort of expecting a 50 votes by now, as it is totally anonymous anyway , guess timezone differences might affect it.

Still over 21 days, so long as people see it, should get decent stats.

There are some f-ing smart people on these forums as I've seen from various posts over the years. (I am a very long time reader, back to the the original Cyrix / AMD / Intel artiles on TomsHardware) but only joined the 'new' forums recently after the website was totally changed around and is run by different ppl now.

Ironically Cyrix (with their very weak FPU) was good for business use and even cheap servers at the time, but National Semiconductor got them, then Via got NS. Still a few of their processors (say 8 on one board) would only use 112 watts, and performance per watt per cubic inch (space) they might give Sun UltraSPARCs and even the Intel Core Duo a run for their money. I've e-mailed Via to ask for their dual-processor C7M board, but they won't sell it to Australia. (Be awesome as an FTP box sort of thing).

I still remember when processors didn't even have a FPU integrated, let alone cache, and the lower end 486SX line lacked a FPU too.

Anyone remember the Weitek co-processors ?, they were the DEC / Compaq Alpha of their day in some respects.

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

Keep the votes coming in.

Totally anonymous, and my goal is to share information with everyone.

PS: Even if I do post and you read it on April 1st (time zone differences ?) it won't be an April fools joke.

I might try and post it a full 24 hours before or after just in case.... you know how ppl are.