What is the fastest single core CPU now adays?

[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.

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.

This is probably not the question, as of course the P4 overclocks higher than any other CPU, reaching 9Ghz in fact and the core2 duo's with just 2 cores also clock real high, they also get the 7Ghz or so.

The worst to overclock cpu is of course Sandy Bridge, for several reasons.

So best IPC of 1 core for $50 will be a core2 duo cpu in such case.

Of course a power7 blows it away yet you'll need many threads then to maximize the IPC

[mike_bike_kite]

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.

I thought there wasn't much of an improvement between the ivy and sandy bridge designs. I know they went down to 22nm from 32nm but this didn't really seem to bring any major advantages (speed etc). I guess which is better depends on which review you read and how much you are willing to pay. You are correct though that the ivy bridge is the newer product. The i7 also has more cores but the original question was what was the fastest single core so I suggested the cheapest good chip.

I'll admit it makes me suspicious when a manufacturer seems to make it almost impossible to distinguish between their own products (cores and threads, i7 or i5 or i3, sandbridge or ivybridge, clockspeed or turbo or overclocking). I guess the only real number I fully understand is the price so when I build my next PC it will probably just have an AMD 3870k as it's cheap, quad core and has great graphics included on the chip. It's also overclockable if I ever needed a little more ooomph. Whatever I go for will be a huge jump over the ancient Celeron CPU I'm currently using.

[diep]

I thought there wasn't much of an improvement between the ivy and sandy bridge designs. I know they went down to 22nm from 32nm but this didn't really seem to bring any major advantages (speed etc). I guess which is better depends on which review you read and how much you are willing to pay. You are correct though that the ivy bridge is the newer product. The i7 also has more cores but the original question was what was the fastest single core so I suggested the cheapest good chip.

I have been considering a new build myself but was just going to use an AMD 3870k as it's cheap, quad core and has great graphics included on the chip. It's also overclockable if I ever needed a little more ooomph. Whatever I go for will be a huge jump over the ancient Celeron CPU I'm currently using.

Well intel added AVX of course.

So the $500 or $620 on ebay you pay for a i7-980x respectively i7-990x,
those cpu's do not have that much floating point logics in the CPU like the Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge has.

In itself 22nm should allow higher overclock for the same design, yet all this SIMD they added to it, that's really limiting overclock.

Additionally intel took some measures to avoid overclocking, so it is not very easy to overclock with todays cpu's. Maybe the Xeons still are fully unlocked, the E5's.

In short overclocking a sandy bridge is far more tricky and puts more stress onto other components than the older i7 9?0x did do.

In general spoken if you want a fast machine now for computerchess, getting a tad lower clocked cores yet many of them, that's the way to go.

Having a built in GPU in the cpu's is not an advantage to me, as that just avoids overclocking and it consumes power for nothing, whereas all the multisocket machines have a built in GPU anyway in the motherboard.

[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

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

I don't like it either how they monopolize, but let me ask you a serious question. Would any other company have done it different if they would've been in intels position?

I doubt it.

In some hardware worlds the problem is patents. Intel has used patents as a mean to avoid others from getting into the business of selling cpu's that can work for windows.

Of course world changes now thanks to mobile phones taking over and intel is a relative small player there.

So their CPU monopoly is less of a problem now to the masses

The thing i don't understand from intel is why they didn't buy Nvidia some time ago. Nvidia was cheap and Nvidia's Tesla's go for dirt cheap money as compared to their achievement.

Would tesla have had an intel sticker and achieve that 0.5 Tflop, with the new card maybe moving towards close to 2 Tflop, intel would charge $10k a card or so.

Nvidia cannot do that, yet if intel would have taken it over, intel could enforce that. That's a whopping $8k extra for each card.

That pays back within 2 years for intel for whatever price they pay for Nvidia.

[jdart]

As I'm sure you know, processors cannot be compared by clock speed, across architectures.

The P4 has a very long instruction pipeline and while it can reach very high clock speeds, it generally does much worse in real-world performance vs. the Core architecture and its successors, even when those are at lower clocks.

Similarly, a POWER chip at 5GHz will not necessarily be better just because it has a high clock.

--Jon

[diep]

As I'm sure you know, processors cannot be compared by clock speed, across architectures.

The P4 has a very long instruction pipeline and while it can reach very high clock speeds, it generally does much worse in real-world performance vs. the Core architecture and its successors, even when those are at lower clocks.

Similarly, a POWER chip at 5GHz will not necessarily be better just because it has a high clock.

--Jon

Let's not discuss all problems of P4, it is however highest clocked processor

Power6 has bunch of cores on each 'motherboard' and can execute a ton of instructions

If you'd optimize a chess engine for that i'm sure it will be fast

One would need to work around its branch prediction which by default
won't work great for chess engines.

A way to do it would be combining floating point with integer instructions. This isn't a problem for a chessprogram.

However all those IBM power6 and power7 processors, they're too expensive for toying at home, besides that a single box will eat a 6 kilowatt or so...