What is the fastest single core CPU now adays?

[jshriver]

I'm guessing it's an i7 or AMD, but it seems like the CPU market is really kinda boring now adays.

Reason I ask this, is assuming money isn't an issue what is really the top of the line CPU out there?

I still have fond memories when the P200mhz (or so) was out, yet DEC announced the 500mhz Screamer. Granted it wasn't designed for normal user use, but it was still a CPU out there that blew away commodity CPU's.

Sparc was also in that market for high end, then you get Cray, etc.

Seems like the entire market is either AMD or Intel. Am I wrong? Hope I am. Know Alpha is long since dead, think Sparc lives only in a modest amount if anything.

ARM seems promising for general computing use but no where near top speeds or high end. Though that might change.

Appreciate the commentary!
-Josh

[jdart]

AMD is not even close to Intel these days in per-core performance. Some of their chips have higher core counts than Intel, but if you are looking at single core, there is no contest.

With Intel it is a bit hard to say what fastest means because many of their chips are readily overclockable. The current top of the line consumer chip is the i7-3960X currently. But that's not on the latest architecture (Ivy Bridge) and some of those chips may possibly outperform it, especially if overclocked.

I don't know if there's anything faster on a different architecture. IBM is still shipping the POWER architecture, but they are out of the desktop market, so those are server chips.

--Jon

[mike_bike_kite]

Not sure you can buy a single core chip these days. Personally I'd go with an Intel i5 2500k and you'd want the latest sandybridge version. It has 4 real cores running at 3.4Ghz but the chip is totally overclockable - with reasonable air cooling people get around 4.5Ghz. Cost is about £160.

PS you'd also need a motherboard that supported overclocking and reasonably fast RAM.

[rbarreira]

Without going into overclocking (which depends on your skill and available materials), Intel has a 4.4 GHz dual-core CPU:

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/Inte ... 314AA.html

It's a Nehalem. It may not be the fastest since Nehalem is not as good clock-for-clock as the latest Intel CPUs, but if not it's still probably close to the fastest. However, it seems they don't sell it at retail, only to OEMs:

http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2011/2011 ... X5698.html

Then there's the 3.7 GHz Ivy Bridge which can turbo to 4.1 GHz in single-core usage, it could well be the fastest too:

http://ark.intel.com/products/65722

[rbarreira]

Not sure you can buy a single core chip these days. Personally I'd go with an Intel i5 2500k and you'd want the latest sandybridge version. It has 4 real cores running at 3.4Ghz but the chip is totally overclockable - with reasonable air cooling people get around 4.5Ghz. Cost is about £160.

PS you'd also need a motherboard that supported overclocking and reasonably fast RAM.

Sandy Bridge is last year's news

Check out the i7-3770K, it's not as fast as the Xeon I linked to, but it's probably the fastest quad-core desktop CPU out there.

Personally I use AMD because I don't like Intel's monopolistic practices and AMD provides good value-for-money, but if you absolutely need the best performance regardless of money then Intel's the answer.

[diep]

I'm guessing it's an i7 or AMD, but it seems like the CPU market is really kinda boring now adays.

Reason I ask this, is assuming money isn't an issue what is really the top of the line CPU out there?

I still have fond memories when the P200mhz (or so) was out, yet DEC announced the 500mhz Screamer. Granted it wasn't designed for normal user use, but it was still a CPU out there that blew away commodity CPU's.

Sparc was also in that market for high end, then you get Cray, etc.

Seems like the entire market is either AMD or Intel. Am I wrong? Hope I am. Know Alpha is long since dead, think Sparc lives only in a modest amount if anything.

ARM seems promising for general computing use but no where near top speeds or high end. Though that might change.

Appreciate the commentary!
-Josh

Fastest single core CPU still is the P4, as you can get it at 9Ghz with major cooling. Not the type of cooling you're used to i'd guess.

Single core cpu's aren't produced anymore so you are looking at a quadcore chip then from which you turn off 2 cores in order to clock it higher.

Intel sells a special Xeon quadcore line there of 4.66Ghz. That's production clock. http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2011/2011 ... X5698.html

Meant for traders i assume, in the financial world, who all have this outdated software.

Note that intel soon reaches its limits with i7 line, as 4.5Ghz is kind of the limit what you can get. Anything higher and the caches become too fast to serve the CPU, so there is 0 garantuees possible then on correctness of software.

The highest stable overclock we therefore see is somewhere 4.66Ghz, also the box from Hiarcs overclocks to 4.65 Ghz if i remember well - ask them or google as they will have posted it.

Note that latencies to RAM from the quadcores overclocked is significant faster than from the sixcores and with less cores enabled it's even faster. Latency to RAM matters for financial world of course.

Such 8 core Xeon machine you can buy for a $40k+. It has 2 Xeons inside.

For a correct functioning chip, you need to move to IBM. Power6 moved towards 5Ghz and Power7 is a production clock of 4.25Ghz.

No other CPU beats it (note that a CPU isn't a GPU, so read what i wrote carefully).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER7

The most expensive hardware is high clocked hardware simply. In general IBM always wins it if you really want something fast shared memory.

That's no surprise. Note that these power7's consume a ton of electricity.
They all liquid cool those systems. I had the honour of seeing that for power6, they had opened a box when installing the new supercomputer here and showed how it looked at the inside.

You get what you pay for.

In every price segment there is some maximum you can achieve. In general if you want an overclocked chip that functions well, go to an overclockers forum and order from an overclocker his 'old rig'.

Don't try it yourself - not all cpu's overclock that well.
Only a few make it stable to that 4.5Ghz without too many bitflips.

[diep]

Not sure you can buy a single core chip these days. Personally I'd go with an Intel i5 2500k and you'd want the latest sandybridge version. It has 4 real cores running at 3.4Ghz but the chip is totally overclockable - with reasonable air cooling people get around 4.5Ghz. Cost is about £160.

PS you'd also need a motherboard that supported overclocking and reasonably fast RAM.

Sandy Bridge is last year's news

Check out the i7-3770K, it's not as fast as the Xeon I linked to, but it's probably the fastest quad-core desktop CPU out there.

Personally I use AMD because I don't like Intel's monopolistic practices and AMD provides good value-for-money, but if you absolutely need the best performance regardless of money then Intel's the answer.

If what you care for is computerchess i'd not try a sandy bridge to overclock. More interesting is an i7-990x or something.

Not sure what prices they go for nowadays.

http://forums.pureoverclock.com/cpu-ove ... -club.html

Of course as i also crunch prime numbers here, Sandy Bridge is interesting as it has AVX.

[rbarreira]

Not sure you can buy a single core chip these days. Personally I'd go with an Intel i5 2500k and you'd want the latest sandybridge version. It has 4 real cores running at 3.4Ghz but the chip is totally overclockable - with reasonable air cooling people get around 4.5Ghz. Cost is about £160.

PS you'd also need a motherboard that supported overclocking and reasonably fast RAM.

Sandy Bridge is last year's news

Check out the i7-3770K, it's not as fast as the Xeon I linked to, but it's probably the fastest quad-core desktop CPU out there.

Personally I use AMD because I don't like Intel's monopolistic practices and AMD provides good value-for-money, but if you absolutely need the best performance regardless of money then Intel's the answer.

If what you care for is computerchess i'd not try a sandy bridge to overclock. More interesting is an i7-990x or something.

Not sure what prices they go for nowadays.

http://forums.pureoverclock.com/cpu-ove ... -club.html

Of course as i also crunch prime numbers here, Sandy Bridge is interesting as it has AVX.

I think this thread was only asking about single-threaded programs, that's why I didn't talk about those 6-core CPUs like the i7-990x or i7-3960X or even more expensive 8/10-core Xeons.

[diep]

Not sure you can buy a single
Personally I use AMD because I don't like Intel's monopolistic practices and AMD provides good value-for-money, but if you absolutely need the best performance regardless of money then Intel's the answer.

If you don't like Intel Israel then you can always go for United Arab Emirates owned AMD which of course produces as cheap as possible, so their R&D and helpdesk seem nearly fully moved to India, though they also have plans to move it to China.

That's why all those codenames are Arab and Indian and Pakistani names.

In itself bulldozer should overclock higher, yet you really need capable overclocking gear as it eats more power. You need to keep the CPU around a 15-20C then you can reach maximum overclock. Not sure what liquid you need to overclock that much nor which motherboard. Google will help you.

Note the CPU is having a very slow L1 and L2 cache, so it should allow way further overclock than intel.

Yet the pain as usual is obtaining a cpu that CAN get this huge overclock. Here in Europe this is a problem for both intel as well as AMD.

The cpu's that can overclock well, they already are sorted out prior to reaching continental Europe as it seems.

[rbarreira]

Not sure you can buy a single
Personally I use AMD because I don't like Intel's monopolistic practices and AMD provides good value-for-money, but if you absolutely need the best performance regardless of money then Intel's the answer.

If you don't like Intel Israel then you can always go for United Arab Emirates owned AMD

The reasons I don't like Intel are purely business-related, nothing about the countries they're related to.