Curious if you used a
Hyperthread P4 on how it would compare in that test
From: amibroker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:amibroker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of b
Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005
12:37 PM
To: amibroker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [amibroker] Off-Topic:
AMD vs Intel CPU Speed Comparison
Due to recent purchases at work (where Intel
reigns) and at
home (where AMD has a fighting chance), I had the
opportunity to do a side by side comparisons of
how fast
each is for doing long optimization runs in
Amibroker.
For a baseline, I used my four year old
"workhorse"
computer with an Athlon CPU.
As best as I can tell all three computers are
about the
same except for the CPU and RAM. All are running
Windows XP
with SP2. All three use 7,200 hard drives.
They differ in ram size: my workhouse has 1.5 GB
of DDR
running at 266 MHz; the new Athlon 64 has 1 GB of
400 MHz
DDR in a dual channel set up; and the P4 at work
has just
512 MB of DDR. To make sure the size of RAM
is not an
issue, I made a special test database with just 30
stocks
in it. That way all the stock data would fit into
RAM
cache.
My test AFL code contained items usually found in
the type
of code I use. In particular:
3 - IIF statements
1 - Foreign call (I use an index for timing)
20 - EMA formulas (a bit more than my typical
code)
10 - AND calls
3 - comparisons "<" or
">".
15 - Portfolio size
1 - Positionscore
plus a few "SETOPTION" statements
0 - ApplyStops
For those still reading, here are the times in
minutes for
a 4,000 cycle optimization run.
Athlon.......(1.4 GHz)....65 minutes..... 1.00x
Pentium 4....(2.93 GHz)...35 minutes..... 1.86x
Athlon 64....(2.0 GHz)....28 minutes..... 2.32x
Notes:
- The final column gives a score to each with the
Athlon
1.4 GHz being the baseline of 1.0x
- To make sure hard drive speed was not a factor,
the
optimization was started and stopped after a
couple of
cycles. That gets all the stock data into RAM
cache so hard
drive speed no longer matters. Then the
optimization was
restarted and the time remaining was recorded
after 100
cycles were completed.
Observations:
For my type of AFL code, the Athlon 64 is about
25% faster
than the P4.
AMD continues to give the most bang for
buck. Both the new
P4 and new AMD computers were within a few dollars
of each
other with virtually identical features except for
the CPU.
Moore's law (processing power doubles very 18 to 24 months)
appears to no longer be working. If it were, the
Athlon 64
would be 4 to 5 times faster than my four year old
Althon.
However, maybe Moore's law still is working: the new Athlon
64 computer cost about half what my four year old
one did:
Twice the speed for half the cost is the
equivalent of two
doubles in four years.
AMD's model numbering appears to understate its
power. The
Athlon 64 (2.0 GHz) has a model number of 3200+
which is
supposed to indicate it is approximately equal to
a Pentium
4 running at 3.2 GHz. However, since the Athlon 64
is 25%
faster than the 2.93 GHz Pentium, the AMD model
number
could have been 3660 (at least when running my
type of AFL
code).
Conclusions:
- AMD is still the best deal for for number
crunching work
(like AFL code).
- AMD is not as far ahead as expected in number
crunching(I was expecting more like 33% or 40%
faster
instead of "just" 25%).
- If someone were planning to use a computer for a
lot of
multi-media and video work (as well as running
Amibroker),
they might consider Intel. Giving up 25% on AFL
code might
be a reasonable trade off to get 25% faster video
rendering. Tests by Tom's Hardware seem to give
about a 25%
edge to Intel CPUs over AMD: in a test using
DviX5.2 to
encode MPEG video, a P4 at 2.4GHz was about equal
to an
Athlon 64 "3000" at 2.0GHz. But
the speed for price ratio
for multimedia still might put AMD on top.
- AMD is still my favorite.
b
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