Are you one of those people that claimed a 1.3 GHz Willamette + SDRAM didn't suck, because price is a moot point, its overall performance was still respectable, you shouldn't just compare to a Pentium 3 because no one said you should, prices would soon drop, and clock speed of P4 would increase ?
For gaming, Smithfield is to Prescot (and A64) what a 1.3 GHz SDRAM willamette was to a 1 GHz P3: ~10-20% slower, and ~50-100% more expensive.. therefore: crap.
>> If I add a second GPU, the first one won't become any
>> slower.
>That's entirely debatable in and of itself.
Not really.. as you pointed out yourself:
>In theory it won't be so long as you force the graphics to
>run as a single card system, but there's already a halving
>of the bandwidth
there is no halving if you don't use the second card. Bandwith halving per core (or per GPU) just results in sublinear scaling, but any scaling is good as long as its positive scaling, not negative scaling like for Pentium D.
>> If Intel or AMD add a second core to the package, the
>>entire chip, both cores have to be clocked slower to stay
>>within workable power limits.
>This is also debatable.
Indeed this one is. And that is the core issue. I'm not bitching about the theory of DC, but about reality. For intel, for now reality still is dual core is significantly slower than single core on single threaded code. If/when they work out the thermal problems to solve that, I'll stop complaining. Just like people stopped complaining when P4 reached 2 Ghz, got DDR and moved to 130nm.
>1) The undiluted performance loss from a slightly lower
>clock speed is still only a few percentage at absolute
>worst. Oh darn. <sarcasm>Three less FPS. God, that's so
>crap.</sarcasm>
Another way of looking at it, is that a 50% cheaper and cooler cpu will give you *better* performance. That makes the expensive one crap in my book (for ST code). Regardless if you are comparing SC with DC or A64 with P4. As it is, P4 is also a crap choice for gaming. Not because its absolute performance is so terrible, but because the same performance is achieved with a significantly cheaper (and cooler) A64. 10 FPS may not be much, but a couple of $100 is significant when choosing one CPU over the other.
>2) For someone who says "The end result matters" you don't
>really look at the whole picture of the end result very
>well. Theoretically for most people (since most people don't
> tune their system well) performance gain from freeing up an
> entire proc for running the main thread from all of the
>other running tasks (like software firewalls and antivirus
>products) will actually counteract the performance drop from
> running at a slightly lower clockspeed.
Horseshit. Back it up! Show me running an iddle AV, firewall, IM etc comes anywhere *near* a 15-20% performance drop while playing a game and that this performance drop would be "counteracted" by a dual core cpu. Any drop is much more likely due to running out of RAM, or harddisk access and it either case, second core won't do squat. I have 10+ background apps running, including firewall, AV, several IMs and what not..just ran perfmon for a while, and all combined, they average around 1.2% combined, most of which I assume was even running perfom itselve and redrawing the charts.
>3) It's still not even set in stone how expensive a dualcore
> CPU will be compared to the highest speed singlecore CPU.
>Likely after six months to a year of desktop dualcore this
>price argument will have completely gone anyway. Maybe even
>in less time than that.
Sure it is, intel Pentium D prices have been published.
Smithfield 820 (2.8GHz) - $240
Smithfield 830 (3.0GHz) - $314
Smithfield 840 (3.2GHz) - $528
Compared to (pricewatch prices):
Prescott 2.8 GHz - $149 (70% increase)
Prescott 3.0 GHz - $162 (93% increase)
Prescott 3.2 GHz - $197 (168% increase)
(note: pricewatch prices of Smithfield will likely be lower than offical prices, but P4E prices will also drop upon release of smithfield).
If single threaded performance is all you care about (like gamers) paying roughly twice as much for the same performance is a crap choice in my book.
That said, absolute prices for Smithfield are quite reasonable, and for a lot of people this chip *will* make a lot of sense, I never said anything else, but <b>not for someone only concerned about framerates</b>. Its either slower or more ecpensive or both. You seem to fail that I only say 'its crap for ST code'. It simply is. Just like A64 is a crap choice if all you care about is 3D rendering or video encoding speed.
> And, again, price is a completely different subject and
> IMHO
> moot. Anyone looking at the fastest SC or the fastest DC
> isn't concerned about price
fine, ignore it, fact still is that anyone looking for the fastest ST/gaming platform would be nuts to get a smithfield, even if it where given away for free. Compared to a single core P4EE (let alone any A64/FX) its gaming performance is absolutely crap. In fact, it won't be better than his 2 year old NW. Hows that for progress ? Smithfield will be great for a lot of things for the money, but gaming just isn't one of them, and isn't going to be for at least 2 years. Capiche now ?
= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by P4man on 04/14/05 06:53 AM.</EM></FONT></P>
<font color=purple>I express to you a hex value 84 with my ten binary 'digits'. 
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