WTF? Intel Pentium 4 630 vs intel core i7 950

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DataHD

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Hello,
Yeah today I'm asking the community about what's the differences between the Intel Pentium 4 630 and Intel Core i7 950. Firstly, I know their both processors and one is like a newer model(right?) :D . Well, I'm getting a new pc (cause my old one broke) but the computer i'm on (yeah not mine; from asia) has a processing speed of 3000.0 mHz; is this freaken even possible? As, if I know my maths right and my computers, 3000.0 mHz = 3.0 gHz. Yeah and the computer I'm getting has about 3.0 gHz as well (i'm talking about the intel core i7 950 here people!!!). 3.0 gHz, dude...? WTF! Why would people buy an intel core i7 processor for like 300 bucks wehn they can get an Intel Pentium 4 630 for like $100? I know ones a newer model than the previous but $200 is like an ipod touch 4, 8gb! Yes, I count in computer appliances. Well, Please tell me the differences ASAP (as soon as possible) incase I have to cancel my order on this intel i7 processor. Thanks.

Ideas that drew me to this post(you guys are probably wondering, is this guy an ultra noob? doesn't know different between i7 n intel pent... but yeah..): I was cataloguing the newspaper and saw an intel pentium doing 3.2 ghz and next to it was an i7 computer doing the same core speed. I went wtf so went on google and typed in, "how to i check my core speed". Yeah, they told me to download CPU-Z, downloaded it and then I checked my core speed. 3000 mHz!!! WTF? Cause I don't want to get a new computer thats performance is similar to this one. Why would I, save 2 grands?

ANOTHER QUESTION: THE HIGHER THE CORE SPEED? THE BETTER THE PERFORMANCE?

I JUST KNOW INTEL I7 HAVE QUAD CORE WHILE PENTIUM HAS LIKE ONE OR TWO (THIS PC HAS ONE)

~DataHD

EDIT: GRAMMAR
 
Solution
an analogy to help: a man eats an apple every 5 minutes (pentium4) so he will eat 12 apples in an hour. 20 men eat an apple every 5 minutes (core i7), thats 240 apples! so even though they both eat apples at the same rate (just like your p4 and i7 have the same clock rate) if you have more men eating, it will process more apples (the i7 has 20 men eating apples in it where the p4 only has 1)

soloby

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Well, first of all, the architecture of the chips are different, and clock by clock the i7s are much faster than the old pentium 4s.

Second, the i7s are a quad-core processors which means it has 4 physical cores compared to the single core of the pentium 4. Having multiple cores help a lot in multi-tasking (with a good amount of ram)

Also, why the i7s are so expensive is because of Intel's fairly new technology called hyperthreading, which basically enables multi-threaded software apps to execute two software threads in parallel to decrease the amount of time it takes the app to execute.

I haven't even gone through the technology like turbo boost and the differences in the chips' caches, but you should get the general idea.

hope i answered your question,

cheers :D
 

txsouthpaw

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(1) of the (4) cores of the i7 950 will probably double the performance of the P4 630. P4s are based upon the NetBurst architecture, which remains horribly inefficient in turms of clock for clock performance, power consumption, and heat generation. This was mainly caused by it's incredibly long pipeline. The Core architecture that followed it was a massive leap forward and Nehalem chips increase Core's performance by at least 20% clock for clock. Also, the way the processor interfaces with the RAM and chipset are both greatly improved with much higher bandwidth and lower latencies. The switch you are contemplating will be more than well worth it and you will probably increase your compute capabilities by 6-8 fold, maybe more.
 
an analogy to help: a man eats an apple every 5 minutes (pentium4) so he will eat 12 apples in an hour. 20 men eat an apple every 5 minutes (core i7), thats 240 apples! so even though they both eat apples at the same rate (just like your p4 and i7 have the same clock rate) if you have more men eating, it will process more apples (the i7 has 20 men eating apples in it where the p4 only has 1)
 
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4745454b

Titan
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Not bad crowe, but that implies perfect parallelism. The Core series is faster even in single threaded apps like Itunes. Not sure how you would tweak that.

Its not all about clock speed. If it was a 2.4GHz Celeron would be as fast as the 2.4GHz Pentium. If they have the same clock speed why is the Pentium faster? There is so much more that effects CPU performance then just the clock speed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth
 
"Hertz" is a measure of how often the CPU operates on instructions. It is NOT a measure of how many operations a CPU is capable of performing per Hertz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_speed

instruction rates are different from clock frequencies, usually reported in Hz, as each instruction may require several clock cycles to complete or may be capable of executing multiple independent instructions at once. Additionally, the number of cycles required for instructions to complete is dependent upon the instruction being executed

Because of this, Hz alone is not sufficent to give a measure of how "fast" a CPU is. These days, a better metric is "Millions of Instructions per Second", or MIPS.

For comparison:
Pentium 4 EE @ 3.2 GHz: 9,726 MIPS
Since a Pentium D is basically two Pentium 4 EE's wired together, we get: ~19452 MIPS
i7 920 @ 2.66: 82,300 MIPS

So an i7 920 is approx. 4x as fast as a Pentium D @ 3.2 GHz.
 

cadder

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It is hard to quantify how much faster the i7 is than the core2 or pentium or whatever, because it depends on other factors such as what job you have the cpu doing. I did some crude comparisons when I built a few i5-750's and tested them with superpi. At equivalent clock rates, the i5-750 was about 15% quicker than the core2. This is a very simplistic comparison because it is only doing one thing with one core. The i5 might be even faster at other things. My understanding was that there was a big leap in improvement between the single core pentiums and the new core2 chips, then some improvement between the core2 chips and the first i5 series, and now another improvement between the first i5 series and the new i7 series.
 

Haserath

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What makes the i7's so much better than the P4 is that they can keep their execution pipelines full of instructions more often then the P4 ever could.

The thing that made the P4 so bad was that it had a huge pipeline, and the branch predictor wasn't the best at predicting. Each misprediction would totally wipe out every instruction in the pipeline thus killing IPC.

The hertz the processor is running at only implies the speed that the transistors switch at(3ghz= 3 billion times per second). There are many other factors to performance of a processor: branch prediction, pipeline length(only with an imperfect branch predictor), cache misses, cache size, load/store capabilities(kind of like a cache), instruction fetch width, amount of ALU/AGU, amount of cores(with parallelized programs), etc.

So a 3ghz i7 vs a 3ghz pentium means they are at the same 'speed', but the i7 is able to process more instructions in the same amount of time due to being able to keep the execution pipeline fed.

I don't think we'll be seeing a jump like the P4 to core 2 anytime soon, because, I believe, that was mostly due to branch prediction improvement and pipeline shortening.
 
Since the time of the Intel® Pentium® 4 630 a number of things have changed that can make a huge difference on performance of the processor. Some of these have been mentioned before on this threat but to make things clearer.
-The architecture has changed and then changed again, each time greatly improving how information is handled.
-There has been 2 die shrinks since the Intel Pentium 4 630, going from 90nm to 45nm. A die shrink does a couple things including helping the processor run faster, cooler and with less power than it did before.
-The FSB (front side bus) or the speed on which information can enter the processor on the Intel Pentium 4 630 is 800 MHz. The bus for the Intel Core™ I7 950 is 4.8 GT/s or somewhere around 6 times as fast.
-The Intel Pentium 4 had 2mb of cache and the Intel Core I7 950 has 8mb of smart cache (it is able to be directed around the processor as needed).
-SSE 3 vs. SSE 4.2: SSE Streaming SIMD Extensions is a group of instructions that are commonly used in software by placing these instructions on the processor you greatly speed how the processor handles these instructions.
There are more differences that I could go into here but let’s just say that time hasn’t stood still across whole wide range of technologies on the motherboard, hard drive, software and video cards that would also yield great deal of performance improvement on top of the processor.
In the end you are going to be very happy with the performance that you are going to get from the Intel Core I7 950 over your old Intel Pentium 4 630.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team
 

cburke82

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Well you could say the P4 is like having 3000 pennies VS the i7 having 3000 nickels. Both have the same amount of coins but the nickels are worth much more.

If you equate perfomance to dollar value based on that you could say a game might need $100 worth of performance. same ammount of coins but the P4 only has $30 worth of performance wile the i7 would take that $100 and have $50 left to run something else in the back ground :).
 



I like that analogy (is that the right word or is it metaphor - darn high school english classes)
+1
 

DataHD

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lol...then why catalogues always post about their processor speeds...it's stupid and confuses new pc buyers...Any suggestions for the best bang for buck CPU's
 
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