The Glade 4.0

http://www.maxxpi.net/pages/result-brow ... -flops.php

It's cool how much better the latest processor is than a Pentium 4.

781.93 MFlops Intel Pentium 4 (3055MHz)
20,437.44 MFlops Intel Core i7 X 980 (4515MHz)

Interesting. Apparently they're using HT when counting cores, because that i7 really only has 6 physical cores, not 12. On that basis, you can break down the performance gains:

Core efficiency: 2.95 : 1
Core clock: 1.48 : 1
Core count: 6 : 1

Also, although the total FPU performance ratio is about 26.1 : 1, if we look at performance per watt, it's more like 16.4 : 1.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Yeah, they should not count hyperthreading when counting the number of cores.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

In a semi-related question; does anything used by home-users other than video-games even come close to utilizing any of that?

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IE8 probably does. *buh-dum-tish!*

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Well, if we're talking solely about FLOPs, audio/video encoding would. Decoding too, but that's much faster anyway. Compositing window managers (pretty much every contemporary OS GUI) would theoretically benefit. And certainly if you participate in any of the big scientific distributed computing projects (ex. folding@home), that will benefit a lot from better FLOPS throughput.

If we're taking a broader view, including increased parallelism, then lots of other things can/do benefit. Obviously any sort of multi-tasking benefits. But beyond that, a lot of common, time-consuming tasks like searching, sorting, and compression algorithms can benefit almost arbitrarily from parallelism if they're written accordingly.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Yeah, I've really noticed with my i7 920 that it really doesn't matter how many applications I have open. Performance doesn't degrade.

I'll regularly run WoW/LOTRO/PotBS along with Outlook, iTunes and multiple tabs of IE all running the same time and performance in game is indestinquishable between that and when only the game is running.

That would have not been the case with older computers.

Wait, you're playing PotBS?

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Kinda. When it went FTP, I recreated my old account and made a new toon to play with a buddy. He's all of lvl 8 atm I think. British privateer on the US server.

Bah. Another Brit.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades