Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 4977 from 2009/1/28
From: Delaware, USA
>As said, I doubt that more than 4 threads can be frequently saturated with common desktop computing tasks.
I would have to agree with you that more than four cores is rarely used on desktop PCs. I have one dual four core Xeon system and one 8 core AMD FX based system, and the overall performance of these in real world use is only marginally better than my older four core Phenom II based system.
But, if I am buying a desktop system, I want a minimum of four cores. Additional threading doesn't hurt.
However, without SIMD, the performance of P5020, P5040, and P2080 cpus is all fairly close.
So the primary differences between the P5040 and the P2080 once SMP is factored in are limited to price, additional threads that might not see much uses, and the slight disadvantage presented by the clock speed/performance issues we have discussed with the T2080.
As the T2080 was not available when the X5000 was designed, and since the performance of the P5040 model should be comparable to a T2080 based system, I am not going to denigrate the performance of this model.
>The question is if 100 USD really matter with a 2000+ USD board. That's less than 5% price difference.
Well...even with P50XX cpus, this price seems a bit high, but given that A-eon is not a charity or a community driven organization its certainly better than the cost of a development system.
>I'd be content with a comparison with pre-PCIe G5. After all, it runs MorphOS for better comparability, and single-core CPU performance wasn't increased significantly (2.7 GHz PPC970FX is probably faster than 2.5 GHz PPC970MP in single-core performance).
But the memory used in Late G5s is faster (DDR2) which does help performance.
My guess is that single thread performance in a 2.5 GHz late G5 will be a close match for the earlier 2.7 GHz PowerMac.
And, of course, if SMP is factored in the 2.5 GHz system should be close to twice as powerful.
Since we have no commitment to SMP (like the OS4 community), I am rebuilding my 2.3 GHz system with one cpu board from a 2.5 GHz quad.
That will have a speed advantage over the X5000, but with only one dual core cpu power draw will be lower (of course the P50XX cpus will have an advantage in this area regardless).
However, if we do get a four core X5000, I would still have to consider it.
After all, the 2.7 GHz G5 and the 2.5 GHz Quad G5 are serious power hogs.
"Never attribute to malice what can more readily explained by incompetence"