Athlon X2 much faster? CS2 Benchmarks?

I'm considering an upgrade from my Athlon 3500+ to a Athlon X2 4200+ or similar, but first I want to know if it'll make much practical difference. The only apps I care about are CS2 bridge and Photoshop proper, anything else I figure will be faster than what I have and good enough.

Based on some of the benchmarks I've seen you can expect to gain around a 33% speed increase over your existing CPU.

For photoshop running a filter in 4 seconds instead of 6 might not seem worth the expense - but if you're batch processing hundreds of images then 4 hours instead of 6 can make a lot of difference. But that's probably best case as a lot will depend on your ram and HD performance.

Ah if it's only a 33% I won't bother, thanks.

I don't think you can limit to just a speed increase; it allows you to do many operations simultaneously. I recently upgraded to a dual core processor and am very happy. I matched it with 2gb of memory too. It is very much like having two processors. I've noticed speed increases in video editing, burning CDrs and DVDs and photoprocessing. I like to have several web browsers open at once-even while editing. It never misses a beat.

One thing that would be handy is to be able to be using bridge to batch RAWs to JPG at the same time as using it to browse raw images. With a dual core processor will the batch processing run at a similar speed to a single core chip, and still be responsive to me using it interactively? At the moment the UI's very slow if i'm using the bridge to batch images.

Both Intel and AMD are having big problems making faster CPUs, which is why they both are throwing in 2 processors into one chipset. If they make them run faster, they get too hot.

Actually, believe it or not the faster personal CPU made is only 200Mhz - that's right. They just add "pipelines" which is the BUS. So a 200Mhz processor with 16 pipelines to take data in and out of the processor is called a 3.2Ghz (200*16). So Your data isn't processed any faster, it just gets in and out of the CPU faster.

Which is why new computers don't seem much faster than the one you replaced, unless your old computer is 5 years old.

If you are doing computation intense applications - like applying corrections, functions to a large image you'll notice better speed performance since there is a lot of data going in and out.
But if you compare say opening Word or opening JPGs, you won't notice much different from a new computer compared to an older one since there isn't much computation going on.

So if all you're doing is word processing, email, and web surfing - stay with an old computer!

Moer pipelines is only one of the issues, you have issues like pipeline length too. The Intel architecture has long pipelines, because they're so long and memory's so slow (in comparison) they use a prediction algorithm to work out what code will come next, and they execute it out of order. If the prediction is wrong they have to throw away a bunch of pre-executed code, flush the pipeline, and start from scratch on the next actual instruction. AMD has shorter pipelines so the issue isn't so important. This is all really deep down inside the processor, and not really relevant to end users.

Having more pipelines is good for highly parallel tasks, multithreaded software benefits from it, just like it benefits from multiple cores. Other issues are cache size, levels of cache before you hit memory (L1, L2, L3 are all in use), etc.

I don't know of any 200MHz processors around right now, even bus speeds are faster than that. I agree that highly parallel computers running the right software on the right problem will be quicker on that sort of machine than a PC. Places like Cray made (and may still make) vector supercomputers that process massive amounts of data in parallel, doing the same thing to each.

My processor theory is a little rusty, so there could be things that aren't quite right in there.

What's really important these days is that what you need to do runs as quickly as you need. On my 3500+ it's not as fast as i'd like, I know a dual core would be better for doing multiple things at once, I wonder if single threaded software will run as fast on an X2 processor as on a standard single core. So it's really the "in practice" stuff i'm wondering about.

3500 venice or newcastle? anyway it has smaller L2 cache than some of the 754's it was supposed to surpass.

the 4200 has the same L2 per core, same bus speed - almost like 2 3500+ cores on the die. you won't see a decrease in single threaded apps. obviously, going forward, Photoshop and other apps are going to take advantage of dual cores. anyway, you would see a relatively decent increase, however you should look at the 4400 - 2x1mb L2. or if you're an overclocker, the 3800 seem to be the cpu of choice.
i assume you already have lots of low latency memory? if not and you're looking for a project, you could also look at an Opteron 175 with low ultra low latency registered ECC - it's still 939, so it would work with maybe a bios flash.

btw, don't knock branch prediction - that's how a few of the old cray research boxes worked... but you're right, forget the intel method.

I currently have 1GB of these - "
Kingmax 512MB, DDR-SDRAM, DIMM, DDR433". I will upgrade to 2GB this week too, it's dual channel so it'll go quick enough. I was told that it wasn't worth spending a lot of expensive memory, and the benchmarks i've seen indicate at most a 10% increase in performance if you spend about 5 times more on fast RAM.

ah yeah, that'll be fine. some people like to be very aggressive with ram timings and a 10% can sure feel like more overall...
you will definitely want more than 1 gb i bet you'll notice when you upgrade, especially in CS2!

I leave the RAM settings in the BIOS on their defaults... I value stability more than a few percent speed improvement. Thanks for the help, i'm ordering the RAM now

blackviolet wrote:
ah yeah, that'll be fine. some people like to be very aggressive with ram timings and a 10% can sure feel like more overall...
you will definitely want more than 1 gb i bet you'll notice when you upgrade, especially in CS2!

CS2 uses approx 3 to 5 times ram as image size.

eg. if your image size is 12mb - CS2 uses approx 36mb to 60mb to process each open image.

as of CS2, the 3 to 5 times formula no longer applies. there are several documents on Adobe's site for tweaking RAM usage on both PC and MAC under CS2.
for me - a typical 1dmk2 image taken into photoshop is about 25 megs (.psd size) , and it increases the memory usage by about 55 megs. different functions, such as ACR, filters, plugins, etc. use up more and more memory and the history state saves a full copy of your image. a typical session will take memory usage to about 320 or more megs and it doesn't release much at all when shutting down images. i have my system set to 75% usage - above that things go nasty. i have found that 3gigs on PC and 2.5 on MAC are about the most RAM that is useable.

At the moment I have 100MB of images open, and a bunch of history in each. Photoshop's using 450MB RAM, which is actually more than i've set it to take. Hopefully more RAM makes things a bit quicker!

I'm not a memory expert type of guy, and most of what I use is from other sources - that being said some cs2 training videos are still using 3 to 5 as a ratio, and I think its in S. Kelby "CS2 Book for the Dig Photog" that CS2 handles ram in a diff. way so you should keep your CS2 percentage at about 50-55% percent of physical ram - allocating too much actually slows things down.