PC hardware: AMD sempron vs midrange Intel chips for Photoshop?

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Does anyone know of an evaluation of the AMD sempron (cheap 64 bit CPUs) vs the Intel chips of comparable cost?

This is for someone who does high-end photoshop work but it’s a hobby and the speed that a commercial PS pro might need isn;t necessary. At least a GB of memory and two fast disks will be part of the package.
Thanks

Irrelevant – AMD chips tend to be better all round chips for home users, Intel are business orientated fast number crunchers.

—
‘Mirror mirror on the wall who is the prettiest of them all?’ ‘Snow White you dirty bitch and don’t you forget it!’

Kingdom wrote:

:

Does anyone know of an evaluation of the AMD sempron (cheap 64 bit CPUs) vs the Intel chips of comparable cost?

This is for someone who does high-end photoshop work but it’s a hobby and the speed that a commercial PS pro might need isn;t necessary. At least a GB of memory and two fast disks will be part of the package.
Thanks

Irrelevant – AMD chips tend to be better all round chips for home users, Intel are business orientated fast number crunchers.

Actually even that’s not true; even in pure math and memory bandwidth tests, AMD 64bit CPUs out perform more expensive Intel chips. The only thing to watch with AMD is their heat profile is higher (they run hot!). Give PhotoShop doesn’t currently support 64bit instructions, so a 64bit processor is not essential – but if you are intending to upgrade to Windows Vista 9the next version of Windows) later this year, 64bit will make a difference .

In article ,
SpaceGirl wrote:

Kingdom wrote:

:

Does anyone know of an evaluation of the AMD sempron (cheap 64 bit CPUs) vs the Intel chips of comparable cost?

This is for someone who does high-end photoshop work but it’s a hobby and the speed that a commercial PS pro might need isn;t necessary. At least a GB of memory and two fast disks will be part of the package.
Thanks

Irrelevant – AMD chips tend to be better all round chips for home users, Intel are business orientated fast number crunchers.

Actually even that’s not true; even in pure math and memory bandwidth tests, AMD 64bit CPUs out perform more expensive Intel chips. The only thing to watch with AMD is their heat profile is higher (they run hot!). Give PhotoShop doesn’t currently support 64bit instructions, so a 64bit processor is not essential – but if you are intending to upgrade to Windows Vista 9the next version of Windows) later this year, 64bit will make a difference .

I/O performance is important for Photoshop and if AMD chips can do concurrant IO and CPU operations with less overhead than Intel, they’ll be better.

I believe that AMD’s I/O architecture for it’s 64 bit chips is superior, especially for multi-CPU systems. I base this on an engineering paper I saw a year ago which described Intel’s as seriously behind.

I don’t know if a user would perceive a different.

—
a d y k e s @ p a n i x . c o m

Don’t blame me. I voted for Gore.

"SpaceGirl" wrote in message

Actually even that’s not true; even in pure math and memory bandwidth tests, AMD 64bit CPUs out perform more expensive Intel chips. […]

For most of my work, doubling the overall speed of a Photoshop session would be necessary to make a difference. 5X would be better. That’s not happening with the small difference between high-end machines today. Heck, for digital video rendering, I’d need 10X faster to make things comfortably better. AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN.

So I stick to whatever high-end Intel solution is available and drink more coffee in the times in-between…. and get antsy as hell, like I am now as I await a 60 minute rendering that I needed ten minutes ago.

Back to the topic – anyone looking to something other than Intel had best consult with Adobe’s recommendations and pay attention to Adobe’s notices. Not everything is hunky-dory outside the Intel universe.

Now when is Adobe going to cut some inline assembler for the Hard Parts! Or have they already? THAT is where we will find considerable speed increases. Not in faster hardware.

"Al Dykes" wrote in message

I/O performance is important for Photoshop and if AMD chips can do concurrant IO and CPU operations with less overhead than Intel, they’ll be better.

How much better? If it’s a 50% increase in overall performance, then even that’s not enough.

I believe that AMD’s I/O architecture for it’s 64 bit chips is superior, especially for multi-CPU systems. I base this on an engineering paper I saw a year ago which described Intel’s as seriously behind.

Will my boss be happier if I hand him that paper to read while we wait and wait?

In article ,
ELSAN wrote:

"Al Dykes" wrote in message

I/O performance is important for Photoshop and if AMD chips can do concurrant IO and CPU operations with less overhead than Intel, they’ll be better.

How much better? If it’s a 50% increase in overall performance, then even that’s not enough.

I believe that AMD’s I/O architecture for it’s 64 bit chips is superior, especially for multi-CPU systems. I base this on an engineering paper I saw a year ago which described Intel’s as seriously behind.

Will my boss be happier if I hand him that paper to read while we wait and wait?

Wait for what? I/O completion?

—
a d y k e s @ p a n i x . c o m

Don’t blame me. I voted for Gore.

ELSAN wrote:

"SpaceGirl" wrote in message

Actually even that’s not true; even in pure math and memory bandwidth tests, AMD 64bit CPUs out perform more expensive Intel chips. […]

For most of my work, doubling the overall speed of a Photoshop session would be necessary to make a difference. 5X would be better. That’s not happening with the small difference between high-end machines today. Heck, for digital video rendering, I’d need 10X faster to make things comfortably better. AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN.

So I stick to whatever high-end Intel solution is available and drink more coffee in the times in-between…. and get antsy as hell, like I am now as I await a 60 minute rendering that I needed ten minutes ago.

That your choice, but given Intel is more expensive across the board, you’re wasting money that could be spent on more RAM or faster hard drives (which make ALL the difference to PhotoShop).

x

ELSAN wrote:

"Al Dykes" wrote in message

I/O performance is important for Photoshop and if AMD chips can do concurrant IO and CPU operations with less overhead than Intel, they’ll be better.

How much better? If it’s a 50% increase in overall performance, then even that’s not enough.

50% overall performance increase is not enough? 50% would be a huge amount.

"SpaceGirl" wrote in message

That your choice, but given Intel is more expensive across the board, you’re wasting money that could be spent on more RAM or faster hard drives (which make ALL the difference to PhotoShop).

You presume I don’t have all the RAM I can put into the machine. I do have max RAM. I also run two fixed discs on one, and four on the other, and have the allocations set to the ideal.

It’s going to be some time before 64-bit code is TRULY 64-bit. Schlepping a big word around has its own special overhead.

"Brian" <cooloox_at_optusnet.com.au> wrote in message

50% overall performance increase is not enough? 50% would be a huge amount.

Not for me. This reminds me of a situation we had twenty years ago in which the CFO was trying to get us to by a half-million dollar VAX upgrade. His argument was that his huge (and stupidly unnecessary) "overnight" job took 40 hours to complete, and the new VAX was "twice as fast". We saved a lot of money when we fired him.

50% ain’t squat. 500% might help.

What we need is a dedicated OS to handle the file-swapping. We need to get away from the OS’s mucking with the better way to do it. We need to cut some inline machine code for some of the spendy routines (if they are not already done that way.)

ELSAN wrote:

"SpaceGirl" wrote in message

That your choice, but given Intel is more expensive across the board, you’re wasting money that could be spent on more RAM or faster hard drives (which make ALL the difference to PhotoShop).

You presume I don’t have all the RAM I can put into the machine. I do have max RAM. I also run two fixed discs on one, and four on the other, and have the allocations set to the ideal.

It’s going to be some time before 64-bit code is TRULY 64-bit. Schlepping a big word around has its own special overhead.

Without 64bit, you’re stuck with 4gb of RAM. Switch to 64bit Windows and you can double that (and more, but most current 64bit motherboards dont support more than 8gb). However, PhotoShop wont see more than 2gb of it because it’s 32bit. If you have lots of other programs open at the same time it makes a difference. There are lots of games out there now that support "true" 64bit, and as usual it’s the games industry that’ll pull everyone’s desktop PCs along too. If I wanted the ultimate PhotoShop/Graphics rig right now, I’d get a dual-core 64bit AMD processor with 4Gb of RAM and two 10k SATA drives.

My current production machine is Intel based tho: Single-core 32bit Intel P4-Extreme, 2gb, and one 10k SATA drive for video and two regular
7.5k SATA drives (one for Windows/Apps and one for PhotoShop scratch).
It’s fien right now, but in a year it wont be 🙁

ELSAN wrote:

"Brian" <cooloox_at_optusnet.com.au> wrote in message

50% overall performance increase is not enough? 50% would be a huge amount.

Not for me. This reminds me of a situation we had twenty years ago in which the CFO was trying to get us to by a half-million dollar VAX upgrade. His argument was that his huge (and stupidly unnecessary) "overnight" job took 40 hours to complete, and the new VAX was "twice as fast". We saved a lot of money when we fired him.

50% ain’t squat. 500% might help.

What we need is a dedicated OS to handle the file-swapping. We need to get away from the OS’s mucking with the better way to do it. We need to cut some inline machine code for some of the spendy routines (if they are not already done that way.)

I think you’re right to an extent – at least for most things on a desktop machine, 50% wont make much difference. Computer games and video rendering, but not PhotoShop. How often do you sit around twiddling your thumbs while waiting for PhotoShop to do something? I never do… even my PowerBook G4 (1.6ghz, 1.5gb ram) is MORE than enough to make most PhotoShop CS2 operations almost instant – and even the most complex PS files are instant on my sort-of standard 32bit Intel desktop box. 50% improvement in speed when something takes a few seconds doesn’t make any REAL difference. Your argument and dedicated OS doesn’t wash tho; it’d be impossible to do given most of us DONT only use PhotoShop on our machines! 🙂

In article ,
SpaceGirl wrote:

ELSAN wrote:

"Brian" <cooloox_at_optusnet.com.au> wrote in message

50% overall performance increase is not enough? 50% would be a huge amount.

Not for me. This reminds me of a situation we had twenty years ago in which the CFO was trying to get us to by a half-million dollar VAX upgrade. His argument was that his huge (and stupidly unnecessary) "overnight" job took 40 hours to complete, and the new VAX was "twice as fast". We saved a lot of money when we fired him.

50% ain’t squat. 500% might help.

What we need is a dedicated OS to handle the file-swapping. We need to get away from the OS’s mucking with the better way to do it. We need to cut some inline machine code for some of the spendy routines (if they are not already done that way.)

I think you’re right to an extent – at least for most things on a desktop machine, 50% wont make much difference. Computer games and video rendering, but not PhotoShop. How often do you sit around twiddling your thumbs while waiting for PhotoShop to do something? I

OTOH, if you work in Photoshop all day and apply some slow filter countless times each day, you’ll get more done at the end. A much faster machine, or a dual core CPU will alloy you to do things like print in background while still having a responsive machine to to do something in PS.

Disk I/O takes CPU cycles and Photoshop tries very hard to overlap I/O with image crunching. A very fast machine (dual core or not) will allow both to happen at close to full speed.

Two CPUs and lots of RAM reduce context switching [1] which is overhead that eats into the time the CPU can do use useful work in PS.

In the Bad Old Days of online mainframe work we counted context switch events and IBM guidelines for the class of machine we had said that more that 25/sec caused by memory paging would hurt us. The other day I used perfmon.exe to look at my PC and I think I saw context switches of all sorts was a couple thousand/sec.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_switch

—
a d y k e s @ p a n i x . c o m

Don’t blame me. I voted for Gore.

"SpaceGirl" wrote in message

Without 64bit, you’re stuck with 4gb of RAM. Switch to 64bit Windows and you can double that (and more, but most current 64bit motherboards dont support more than 8gb). However, PhotoShop wont see more than 2gb of it because it’s 32bit.

32 bit, true
No more than 2gb, not always true

"If you are running Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, you can set the 3 GB switch in the boot.ini file, which allows Photoshop to use up to 3 GB of RAM. " http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/320005.html and "Important: The 3GB switch is a Microsoft switch and may not work with all computers." (which relates an earlier comment I made.)

Now all your speculation regarding _significantly_ greater performance will have be put aside until you actually try the machine in question in everyday work.