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[Orange Wizard]

Surely the best computer would be a computer built within dwarf fortress itself.

No, that would just make the universe implode.

[Reelya]

CPUMark does inflate the difference. The top CPU is 4 cores with 8 threads, and CPUMark is about hitting all 8 of those with max. performance tests. DF is only taking full advantage of 1 core, 1 thread. So the marks for the top processor probably need to come down quite a bit compared to older CPUs for a "DFMark", probably need to drop the CPUMark by a factor of 6-8 times to be a fair comparision of DF performance.

If you have anything less than an i7, it's not getting that much more done per thread in each core than the single thread that a P4 3.8 GHz has.

[Orange Wizard]

Note that the single thread rating is 846 on the Pentium and 1838 on the i7.

Also note that the i7 uses a fifth of the power, has half the clock speed (turbo up to 3.3) and is a laptop processor, meaning that desktop variants are going to be vastly superior again.

[Reelya]

Half the speed of the most expensive processor now isn't that bad.

[Orange Wizard]

It's half the "performance rating", not speed. In terms of speed I guarantee it's garbage.

[Putnam]

Half the speed of the most expensive processor now isn't that bad.

That's not the most expensive processor now, that's a cheap-ass gimpy processor.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=1081&cmp[]=1473

Here's a more recent i3 in comparison. Again, the single-core power is much, much better despite being 2.8 GHz.

Here's a comparison to the actual most expensive processor you'll be reasonably using in a desktop:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=1081&cmp[]=2332

And to a reasonably-priced CPU:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=1081&cmp[]=2284

[Grimlocke]

I would just like to add that CPU Mark is... not one the more accurate benchmarks. Unless you encrypt data all day long.

That said the passmark site does at least give a vague idea of how technology has progressed, which is neat.

Which makes me wonder, did anyone ever make a DF benchmark setup? It wouldn't be very hard to do, all you need to do is pre-package a game with some typical DF 'workloads' and possibly have a script measure a start/finish time as the FPS counter might be tedious to work with as the games load constantly varies. You could even make it more detailed by making a separate scenario for things like fluid simulation, worldgen, adventurer and fortress mode.

[Reelya]

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

Well, fastest known processor on this list is 2.5 times the single-core performance of the P4 3.8 GHz, and we're talking raw performance measurements here, not GHz. That's not that much greater than the 2:1 for the gimpy i7. It just shows that the real gains have been in multi-core in the last 10 years, and that buying an expensive new processor just for DF will probably give a marginal performance increase at best. Plenty of cheaper CPUs with almost as much single-core speed as the top one.

In the 10 years from 1994-2004 there were much more significant gains in single-core speeds, with base speed increasing from ~66MHz to ~3800MHz, a speed-up of 57 times before you even consider efficiency improvements. So while it was true that from 1994 - 2004 effective DF performance would have increased by maybe a factor of 100, that's not true of the last decade.

So, going off CPU, I'd still say that a top-range P4 would run DF almost half as fast as the current top line CPUs. Also that would have 1066MHz memory, compared to 2400MHz memory at most if you're going with DDR3, which is in line with the CPU difference. None of the numbers suggest Dwarf Fortress would approach unplayable levels on a P4.

[Bloax]

I would be wondering whether or not CPUMark utilizes the newer SIMD sets that the newer processors have access to.

[iofhua]

I recently built a budget gaming system with a AMD FX-8320e Vishera processor. I know the Vishera CPU's are really unpopular but they get you some good bang for your buck. I paid $150 for mine, and it's the best CPU I have ever owned - I love it. I know an I7 would be better, but I don't want to shell out over $300 for my CPU.

While I know an I7 would beat the pants of of a Vishera in single-threaded applications, I wonder how they compare for multi-threaded applications? The 8 integer cores in the Vishera have to count for something. The annoying thing about benchmark sites is they want to reduce a piece of technology down to a single number, which isn't always accurate. I would love to see a site that does separate single-threaded and multi-threaded benchmarks.

IMO it's a shame that AMD gave up on desktop CPU's. The Piledriver architecture is a refinement of Bulldozer, which was a completely new architecture built from the ground up. Of course it won't compare to an I7 at launch - the Intel Core architecture was introduced in 2006 and has had dozens of generations of architecture improvements since then. I bet if AMD had continued to improve upon Bulldozer it would match or surpass the Intel Core architecture within a few more generations. But we will never know now.

I can understand why they made the decision to go all-in to APU's - there is a strong mobile market today, with cell phones, tablets, and laptops that could all benefit from a single chip with both CPU and Graphics on-board. However gamers would never buy an APU for a desktop - they are constantly upgrading their graphics for playing games and in order to upgrade the graphics in an APU you would have to buy a whole new chip! which is too expensive and too much hassle (removing and replacing the cooler on your APU just to do a graphics upgrade... seriously?) which is why to me, it's like throwing in the towel and waving the white flag on the desktop market.

Owning the last generation of AMD CPU kind of makes me feel like I own a piece of history. I really wonder how it would have turned out, if they had kept improving on it for another 9 or 10 years like Intel has for the Core architecture.

[Grimlocke]

AMD kinda bet on the wrong horse with their bulldozer architecture. It basically sacrifices single-core performance for more cores and counted on software developers to have just about every application under the sun with good multithreading support by now.

Which sort of didn't happen for games, most games actually have a similar CPU load as DF, with one thread that taxing 100% of a CPU core and a few more sitting well below there (physics rendering beside).

That all said the FX processors are not as bad as some people make them out to be, they generally beat an equally priced i3 processor in multi-threaded applications. Every actually decent tech site (anandtech, tom's hardware, guru3d, etc) runs a handful of benchmarks for a single processor by the way, which is why I recommended you don't put too much stock in the sites like cpubenchmark.net.

AMD did not give up on non-APU desktop processors by the way, they are releasing a new architecture somewhere in 2016.

[iofhua]

Wait, really? I have read on multiple sites that they gave up on pure CPU's and will only be making APU's from now on. I guess it must have all been nasty rumors.

[Grimlocke]

Yup, supposedly it will have a new socket with DDR4 memory architecture as well: http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/79966-amds-zen-arrive-summit-ridge-cpus-q3-2016/

[iofhua]

:drool:

I think I will have to build a new PC in 2017 or 2018. I don't like buying new hardware at launch - but I definitely want to get this after the price drops.

[Thief^]

Which sort of didn't happen for games, most games actually have a similar CPU load as DF, with one thread that taxing 100% of a CPU core and a few more sitting well below there (physics rendering beside).

A lot of game engines are three or less "main" threads thanks to the xbox 360, which effectively has a hyperthreaded tri-core cpu. It just wasn't worth redesigning for mass-threading when you could offload rendering and physics to other threads and use up all the available cpu power in the console. The PS3 was unhelpful in this regard also, despite being effectively an 8 core CPU its weird split architechture meant that code written for it wasn't ported to PC.

This is changing now, with the new consoles out the big AAA cross-platform game engines will restructure themselves to use 8 cores, as that's what both the XBOne and the PS4 have.

Incidentally they also both have an APU architecture, so I wouldn't discount APUs from PCs just yet, the high-end AMD APUs are already on par with the consoles (no surprise given the consoles contain AMD APUs). It wouldn't take much more advancement to render dedicated graphics cards obsolete for everyone except the "extreme" gamers. Graphics cards would go the way of sound cards...