Are High-End CPUs Worth The Money?

Rampaging Goatbert (aka Jeff Feld) has posted a story at Newsforge about something you may want to argue about with your boss or significant other. Specifically, whether high-end CPUs are worth their high prices. Personally, I look even lower on the processor food chain, but watching those price-curve inflection points makes the runner-up chips pretty tempting. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.

One crucial point

[RainbowSix]

Sure, for most of us, save for games, a 166mhz processor is enough. I use that example because I run my laptop's AMD K6-2 333@166 (vcore 2.2@1.8, I/O 3.3@2.5) and it runs Enlightenment as well as I need, and at that usually at 0% load. For games, there isn't much of a gain from 1.33ghz to 1.4, as stated in the article. However, they don't make mention of people who NEED the full 1.4ghz. People who do rendering and other CPU intensive applications are the people who need to pay the premium. If you were rendring a scene or movie for money, the difference between the 66mhz and $25 could potentially be hours, days, or profits. Nobody buys a 66mhz faster CPU for $25 more thinking how much faster they can compile a kernel, but leading edge has its purposes.

Of course, some people just like to brag, and ego can be worth $25

Re:Well Duh!

[cdlu]

Well, yeah. For people who actually do their research, this article doesn't much matter.

The point is, though, a lot of people simply don't. A lot of my housemates, for example, have been having an informal rivalry of who can get the fastest system, and one of my housemates decided he'd win in a hurry by buying two >1GHz systems and 2 19" monitors at a cost of well over CAD4000 (about US$2600). Was it a smart move? No. He claims he needs the faster computers for his genetic algorithm work, but the 450MHz system he had before did the job fine. It still takes most of the night for his programs to run, the only difference now is he's a long way from waking up when they're finished instead of just about to wake up.

Think about it this way, if this article didn't need writing, the hardware companies would not get away with the high prices they charge for their newest goods because everyone would be smart enough to see through the thin veil of little blue men dancing around a giant '4'.

For the record, I am typing this on a 233MHz P-MMX which does everything I need it to do and then some, and continues to thrive as my primary system, allowing my money to go to more important things like eating lobster. :)

Re:More to it

[wolf-]

I ran a PII-400 until about 30 days ago.
It still ran the new games I played, it still compiled my apps as quickly as I needed.

It did NOT however, lend itself to DV editing.
I finally broke down and bought a Athlon 1.4 with a new mb and memory (bundled got better deal).

No more funny audio quirks in rendered DV.

But I'm all for staying with the max speed you need.

3+ years on one processor made sense for me.

Kind of interested to see if this 1.4 will hold its own for another 3 years.

Re:Bureaucracy

[spyderbyte23]

My office's round of upgrades resulted in us getting 1 Ghz PIIIs with Geforce2 256 video cards.(We're a helpdesk at a university.)

My boss pointed out that she didn't know when the next time she was going to get to buy machines was, and so she figured she'd try and fight obsolesence as long as possible.

Re:Performance

[BigTimOBrien]

I agree.

Well, one nitpick, it is generally cheaper in terms of hardware cost, but this option is more expensive in terms of operational costs. Also, the rent associated with rack space at a commercial provider can start to be prohibitive.

So, three things start to add up here:

• Operational Costs - People who can manage machines are expensive.
• Rent - Renting space to house more smaller boxes may be prohibitive.
• Network Traffic - More boxes means higher bandwidth requirements between these boxes.

For some tasks, say a very large database with millions of transactions, it makes sense to pay the premium for even an extra iota of horsepower. For other task, such as web servers, it sometimes makes more sense to have many smaller machines. Also, if someone wants to start using this approach it usually pays to be able to autmatically configure a machine; otherwise, maintaining machines start to become unrealistic.

Re:Obvious answer:

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just ordered some bits 'n pieces for an upgrade and chose a 1GHz Athlon quite happily when there were lots of higher-speed options available.
Reasoning? It made more sense to put the money into a stable, non-flaky, motherboard (hope the Gigabyte GA-7DXR is as good as I've heard!), a faster hard drive and more memory.
Sure, more MHz means faster calculating but an awful lot of users' time can be spent waiting for windows to be rendered and dialog boxes to appear because the OS hasn't enough RAM to concurrently run all the programs the user may want to. Some programs (e.g. browsers, development tools, Windows) can be severe memory hogs and their perceived slowness may be a consequence of paging data to and from disk, rather than a shortage of CPU cycles.
My desire for a stable motherboard comes from (slightly) cruel experience with my last one, whereby bus problems caused delays or even hangs. I'm afraid I skimped on the fan - the one I ordered was barely adequate. My reasoning for this was, well, who knows what speed processors will be running at in a year's time? And what will they cost? There's a processor war and an IT hardware recession going on!
Personally, I don't see much benefit for most home users in high clock speeds and think they'd be better served with RAM increases than speed increases. In fact, the only task I can think of at the moment for which such a user might appreciate a faster processor (apart, of course, from gaming) is CD/DVD ripping...