Numbers game

RE: Numbers game

Nope, doesn't matter at all to most consumers. Desktop software is getting bloatier in the face of faster CPUs for the simple reason that they can; a desktop computer is meant to do the same thing now that it was meant to do 10 years ago, so having a 100x faster CPU doesn't offer anything except for eye candy and the cheaper software development that produces a lot of bloat.

However, Opterons and Xeons aren't general consumer products at all. These are for servers, workstations, HPC applications, so the extra speed is welcome.

Gamers also happen to like fast computers.

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RE: Spec numbers

I really don't think you understand any of the numbers you're looking at.

First off, (I can't believe I'm having to explain this to somebody), clock speeds don't mean anything between brands. Period. I have a 400mhz MIPS R12000 workstation that renders 80% faster than my 466mhz G3 (IBM 750).

That is perfectly, completely normal. Clock speed simply does not translate to performance once you're comparing unrelated chips.

The other thing is that you ~are~ looking at different chips even though the brand name is the same. The article talks about the new 'Barcelona' AMD processor and the 'Core' architecture based Xeon.

The chips you're talking about are the older 'P68' architecture Xeon, and the pre-Barcelona Opteron. There is a huge, huge difference.

There is no distortion field here, just a lack of context sprinkled with ignorance.

For future reference, don't ever bother using clock speed as a performance metric unless you're comparing a chip to itself, like when overclocking.