pdwyer wrote:Even better we can just run the "Official Twilight Scene - Bauhaus Lam"
I got 31sec with a cheap chip! I think I saw a 16sec with an intel but I wonder what it cost?
Then again, $500 buck is an expensive chip for some people and not others...
We should work out a ranking like 1/Sec/USD for the chip to get speed and price as an index, then my chip is 0.0001898 up from 0.0000571 on my last chip!
EDIT: Intel hyperthreading with twice the core count visible in task manager is not core for core twice as fast as an AMD core and never has been. An AMD oct will kick an intel quad with hypertheading to look like 8.
ie: I absolutely agree with "One big thing to note tho is that they are not comparable by looking at cores and clock-speed at all" The fundamental architecture is different and that's why I like this test as Twilight is probably the most intensive software I use that is multi threaded and this is a 'real' load not an artificial benchmark based on pure math. I think more than about 4-8 cores though, I'm looking more for power per core than more cores since some loads are single threaded. If AMD on the same architecture came out with a 16x2ghz I think that would be a step down and if they had a 4x8ghz that would be a step up as multi thread loads would be the same but single thread loads would be faster
I got the 16s I7-3930K (mind you OC @ 4,2 GhZ) its a 6-core and cost around the 500$ mark as you guessed, I was pretty surprised by its performance since it clocked on par with a "professional 8-core" Intel weighing in at 3x its cost
In a simple world you would just multiply the clock with the number of cores and come up with a number to compare, but in reality this is far to complex and involving so many hardware and software bottlenecks that its just not possible.
I agree with what you say that an hyper-threaded Intel core is or never has been "faster" then 2 AMD cores, but it is however more optimized and with current software and hardware works better then 2 AMD cores for most tasks.
At my home computer I'm running a 4-core i7 2600k @3,4 GhZ, and it clocked in on this test at something like 21s, while it does have a bit higher clock then the AMD its obvious that its 4 cores works better then 8 AMD cores
Here's a decent comparison of the 8-core and its contenders:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... Eight-Core
What this test tells me is that your 8-core AMD is amazing bang/$ and if anyone wants to build a cheap rendering computer/server sticking 2 of these into a 2-socket motherboard is going to give you the equivalent of my 500+$ rig at half the price!