Shake It Don't Break It

I took delivery of a "new" laptop a short time ago and just recently gave it a much-needed hard disk upgrade from 100GB to 500GB. The machine is still a current model in Dell's lineup and it rather powerful. Dual cores and plenty of RAM. Just what I needed.

As I wrote before, the Dual P4 Xeon 3.2GHz system scored a Yafaray test render time of 10.5 minutes with four threads. I knew I'd have to try the same on the new laptop's T7200 Core 2 Duo. The results surprised me. It was a tie.

If you look at clock speeds, it doesn't make sense. But clock speeds don't mean what they used to back in the Pentium 4 days. The Core and Core 2 CPUs architectures are based on the Pentium M, which was based on the Pentium III Tualatin. The Pentium 4 was abandoned after the Prescott core turned out to be a space heater and little else.

I mention the lineages because it predicted the future. I had a Pentium M laptop of 1.3GHz speed that would outpace my 2.4GHz Pentium 4 laptop in everything but floating point math. That's almost double the operations per clock tick right there.

The Core Duo and Core 2 Duo don't support Hyperthreading. That was brought back with the Core i7. The 15 minute time on the 3.2GHz CPUs when run without Hyperthreading explains the tie. The 2GHz Core 2 Duo in my laptop should be equivalent to a pair of 4GHz P4 Xeons when memory bus fighting is taken into consideration since the Dual Xeon rig is dual channel PC2100 DDR while the C2D is Dual Channel PC2-5300.

At 4GHz, the Xeon rig would complete the render in twelve minutes with Hyperthreading disabled. That's within a minute and a half. Something else is at work here and I don't know what it is, but it says a lot about the improvements made with the Core Architecture.

On top of all that, the Dual Xeon rig cranks out heat like mad, nearly maxing a 380W power supply, while the laptop is hard-limited by an AC adapter brick with a 120W output. And I have twice the RAM in the laptop.

I have yet to try any of my cluster computers. I wonder how they will do.