AMD 6 core

[CoolColJ]

Well the AMD 6 core desktop chips are out now, and I can't believe how cheap they are!

So AMD 6 core 1090T BE vs i7 860-930

who will win when rendering?
Considering the AMD CPU is cheaper than both Intel offerings along with 2 extra cores....but Intel has hyperthreading...

[Zom-B]

I really look forward to upgrade my AMD Phenom II X4 945 (4x3Ghz) to a Phenom II X6 1090T!
selling the old CPU on eBay I will have a upgrade price of around 170€ and get +7.2Ghz of rendering power
with the option to overclock without any hassle

Everything still on my old AM2+ board ^^

Only thing to think about for me is if OpenCL support comes to Indigo, the 170€ invested in a ATI 5770 would be maybe a better speed up...
since my old 3750 doesn't support OpenCL

[lycium]

Intel have their 6 core 32nm monster too now, but it's "a little" pricey... coming down in price though apparently: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/18800

It would be really interesting to see these beasts benchmarked!

[Godzilla]

I was contemplating buying Intel's 6-core, but Thought it would be wiser to wait for the next series before upgrading.

[StompinTom]

I hate to overgeneralize, but in terms of what would be better for doing daily arch. viz/rendering, and considering all the speedups Indigo has in store, I'm getting the feeling that an Intel chip with an Nvidia graphics card would be the way to go for a new system... is this somewhat true?

[Zom-B]

If money isn't a issue I'm sure you are right Tom!
Since 3D work still isn't my main income source I stay with a cheap AMD/ATI combo.... but High-End belongs to Intel & Nvidia!

[lycium]

Tom's onto something for sure Not neccessarily nvidia tho, in the long term.

[CoolColJ]

Well for now the ATI Video cards are better IMO. Cheaper, quieter and cooler. If you don't mind the price, heat, power draw and noise then Nvidia is good

I try to build all my systems as quiet as possible and ATI wins here. A Powercolor 5850 PCS+ or 5870 PCS+ are both really quiet at idle or load.

Off course no Cuda for ATI. But ATI cards can use Cuda, it isn't locked to Nvida cards alone. ATi just needs to code a driver that's all...

[StompinTom]

At this point my highest priority is speed/performance (within a decent budget) Everything else is secondary. I primarily need a good workhorse and can deal with the heat and noise by turning up the music and opening a window

[pixie]

Well for now the ATI Video cards are better IMO. Cheaper, quieter and cooler. If you don't mind the price, heat, power draw and noise then Nvidia is good

I try to build all my systems as quiet as possible and ATI wins here. A Powercolor 5850 PCS+ or 5870 PCS+ are both really quiet at idle or load.

Off course no Cuda for ATI. But ATI cards can use Cuda, it isn't locked to Nvida cards alone. ATi just needs to code a driver that's all...

I though it too but I got to say that in GPPU apps my GTX 285 compares quite favorably with similar priced ATI such as an ATI Radeon 5870.

[lycium]

AMD have the better gaming card right now, though it's difficult to say which is better for compute applications such as ray tracing. They have major architectural differences (SIMD vs scalar, cache, branching, feature support) that make them difficult to compare in general, there's a whole lot to be said about this...

One thing that's quite well known is that the Radeons can't achieve their insanely high peak FLOPs rate without quite some tuning, which in turn means you don't usually see the peak power draw and heat output. Games probably come quite close, and some GPGPU applications can do so (eg. Mandelbrot fractal rendering), but a complex ray tracing kernel depends on many aspects of the architecture besides FLOPs throughput.

[neo0.]

CPUs are becoming less and less important imo. Most major renderers are recognizing the power of GPU rendering and will all shortly be making the move to it. Even ray tracing for games will be done on the GPU, with Nvidia's GF100s. ATI can't be far behind too. Encoding is also currently being done on the GPU.

[eman7613]

Currently, Both ATI and NVIDI perform about equaly on the GPU computing game, the exception being the new Fermi Cards from Nvidia. They are several times faster, they went all out for it on those.

Some numbers from my favorite site

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/nvid ... he-wait-/6

[Godzilla]

CPUs are becoming less and less important imo. Most major renderers are recognizing the power of GPU rendering and will all shortly be making the move to it. Even ray tracing for games will be done on the GPU, with Nvidia's GF100s. ATI can't be far behind too. Encoding is also currently being done on the GPU.

The industry won't fully transition to GPU accelerated renderers until either nVidia or ATI puts out a card with 8GB+ of VRAM.

[galinette]

Oops, I just bought a X4 965 two month ago