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To: Rink who wrote (235843)	7/7/2007 3:37:26 AM
From: Sarmad Y. Hermiz	Respond to of 275872

>> How come I still want one privately too especially for video editing? because there is no accounting for what a person wants. What video editing job can possibly exist that barc is particularly suited for ? Or that can't be done just as well using a c2d system that will be similar (within a few percent) of your privately desired chip ?

To: Rink who wrote (235843)	7/7/2007 5:11:49 AM
From: graphicsguru	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Rink, For years, people have argued that computers have basically gotten fast enough, so that there's no longer a reason to pay a premium for a high-end CPU. Certainly, that argument is getting stronger. It's pretty amazing what a cheap computer can do these days. So, why do you want to pay extra? It's because something you do on your computer is annoyingly slow. What are those things? Are they multithreaded or not? It would be interesting to see sales figures for consumer apps, and actually see which ones are multithreaded. Certainly, you provide an example of one that is threaded -- whichever video editing program you use. Another would be video compression. But the vast majority of apps are not. The good news about excellent single-threaded performance is that it speeds everything up (unless the app is thrashing the memory/disk system). What slow programs are single-threaded? It's much easier to make a list of apps that are multi-threaded and say the rest are not. If you want a personal example, I've been doing a bit of Python programming recently, and faster single-thread performance means I can go further before I have to give up and recode in C/C++. In a way, you may be arguing for the design philosophy that led to the P4. My impression is that Intel thought P3 was good enough for everything consumers might want, except "streaming media" or something like that. So they built a core with very uneven performance, that was great for regular operations with predictable memory access patterns. It did other things pretty badly, but maybe those were things for which even bad performance was good enough. Would you be happy with a P4 if it could be made to work in a more reasonable power envelope? I find C2D far more appealing because it pretty much does everything well (the list of exceptions is short). To me, the 2Ghz Barcelona is like a P4. It will do some things exceptionally well. Video compression is probably one of them. It can use all its SSE units in carefully threaded, vectorized code. But to take a random example, it will run Illustrator slower than a cheap Venice K8. I never liked the fact that P4 performance was so uneven. That's part of what made me an A64/Opteron fan. And now the shoe is on the other foot. Barcelona at 2Ghz is the chip with extremely uneven performance. If you can somehow make use of the double SSE units and the (probably) better multithread scaling, you may win big. But for run-of- the-mill single threaded code, it's going to be beaten by an old Venice, and completely trounced by a C2D. Maybe I'm too quick to criticize the uneven performance. If Barcelona's strengths exactly match your performance needs, then perhaps its a good choice for you. With C2D, you don't really have to ask that question.