Every six months or so, Sonic Foundry, a software maker based in
the USA, gives each of its 70 developers a new workstation
equipped with the fastest processor on the market. Typical cost:
US$4,000 a piece, or US$280,000. That's every six months. But it's
worth every cent. Sonic Foundry designs programs for editing and
encoding digital multimedia. Much of its developers' time is spent
compiling and recompiling the raw code used to build these tools.
"In an environment like ours, the less you have developers sitting around waiting for a program to compile, the more money you save," says Caleb Pourchot, Sonic Foundry's director of engineering. At the other end of the spectrum are people like Joe Ehrenreich. "I use a word processor and Excel," the 35-year-old attorney says. "I also use a program that calculates my time sheets. And the Internet." Mr. Ehrenreich has had his machine for over a year and doesn't plan to upgrade in the near future. He couldn't even tell you the speed of the processor that's in it.
Between these two extremes -- niche professionals who need the most speed and business users who are happy with much less -- lies the universe of PC users. Figuring out what's right for each individual is no easy task. There's a jumble of chips -- Athlons, Pentium IIIs, and Pentium 4s for midrange and high-end desktops, and Celerons, Durons, and K6s for entry-level PCs -- and each is available at any number of speed levels. Mobile computers and servers are just as vexing.
We shed light on the current and future state of CPU speed. Is Athlon or Pentium 4 the fastest processor now? How about nine months from now? For entry-level PCs, is the Celeron or the Duron the better value? And in the mobile arena, can the Transmeta Crusoe (read review) live up to the hype? Our evaluations and performance tests of the latest desktop chips should help you determine exactly how fast is fast enough for you.
Desktop PCs: Two-Horse Race
P4: Whole New Ball of Silicon
Entry-Level Upstart
Mobile CPUs: Power-Pinching
Servers: When I'm 64 (bit)
The Sum of the Parts
Performance Tests
How We Tested
Pentium 4: How it Works
Transmeta Crusoe Processor
1%
4%
