Not too long ago, I surfed into some comments posted by an actual AMD engineer from their server division at amdzone.com. He was talking about Turbo mode, and said that since Turbo is a variable boost, it's more useful in a desktop environment than a server environment. He said server customer prefer more consistent, predictable performance. They don't want to start asking questions about why a particular task runs faster on a light server load, but slows down on a heavier server load. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but that's along the lines of what he said. [EDIT: Having found one of his original threads, I think I remembered wrong. He was talking more about power draw than performance, so never mind this part. ]
I don't really follow server CPUs all that much, so I simply shrugged and thought that he could be right, or he could be wrong, and I simply filed it away in the back of my head.
Yesterday, the Lynnfield NDA was lifted, and all the benchmarks from various sites were unleashed to us. I read or skimmed through most of them, and I saw how the Lynnfield processors excelled in nearly every test. In some cases, the addition of Turbo mode really helped out, such as in single threaded tests.
But then the stuff that the AMD engineer said started coming back to me and made me think: Sure these single threaded benchmarks look great, but if you (or the OS) is busy multitasking heavily in the background, you're NOT going to get the same level of performance. The problem is that readers who read these benchmarks don't naturally think that way. They see the single threaded benchmarks and will mistakingly think that Lynnfield will ALWAYS run that fast, instead of thinking that it CAN run that fast.
Though this issue only applies to Intel right now, since only they have Turbo processors, AMD might implement their version in a future CPU too, and once again, we'll have readers that could misinterpret CAPABLE performance for GUARANTEED performance.
So do you think tech sites should benchmark Turbo capable CPUs both with and without Turbo enabled?
My personal opinion is that they should. Benching without Turbo would give the reader the "guaranteed minimum" a CPU is capable of. Anything extra is a free bonus.
I don't really follow server CPUs all that much, so I simply shrugged and thought that he could be right, or he could be wrong, and I simply filed it away in the back of my head.
Yesterday, the Lynnfield NDA was lifted, and all the benchmarks from various sites were unleashed to us. I read or skimmed through most of them, and I saw how the Lynnfield processors excelled in nearly every test. In some cases, the addition of Turbo mode really helped out, such as in single threaded tests.
But then the stuff that the AMD engineer said started coming back to me and made me think: Sure these single threaded benchmarks look great, but if you (or the OS) is busy multitasking heavily in the background, you're NOT going to get the same level of performance. The problem is that readers who read these benchmarks don't naturally think that way. They see the single threaded benchmarks and will mistakingly think that Lynnfield will ALWAYS run that fast, instead of thinking that it CAN run that fast.
Though this issue only applies to Intel right now, since only they have Turbo processors, AMD might implement their version in a future CPU too, and once again, we'll have readers that could misinterpret CAPABLE performance for GUARANTEED performance.
So do you think tech sites should benchmark Turbo capable CPUs both with and without Turbo enabled?
My personal opinion is that they should. Benching without Turbo would give the reader the "guaranteed minimum" a CPU is capable of. Anything extra is a free bonus.