Invisible wrote:

> In not entirely unrelated news:
> 




> 
> Um... ouch.
> 
> Clearly I will have to sit down and see how this equation computes for 
> various other platforms. (Core i5, Core 2 Quad, Phenom II...)

A similar bunch of stuff to run an Intel Core 2 Quad (specifically, a 


On the other hand, we have:

   AMD Phenom II X4 995: 3,770 PC Marks
   Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550: 4,178 PC marks
   Intel Core i7 920: 5,451 PC Marks

If you do an X-Y scatter plot, you'll vividly see that the first two 
systems are of approximately similar price and power, with the Core 2 
being slightly faster and slightly more expensive. The Core i7, on the 
other hand, is something like 45% faster but 65% more expensive.

Just for completeness, I asked Tom's Hardware:

   http://tinyurl.com/y97nhje

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to graph these numbers. 
Most of the benchmarks paint a picture similar to PC Mark (i.e., Phenom 
II and Core 2 are comparable, Core i7 is significantly faster). A few 
benchmarks show all three practically identical, and sometimes Core 2 is 
a tad slower than Phenom II.

(It appears that the Phenom II has greater memory bandwidth, but the 
Core 2 has greater ALU performance, so it varies depending on whether a 
given benchmark makes use of more of one than the other. The Core i7, 
however, is superior on both counts.)

As you can see, this conclusively proves... something.

(Now, if the Internet had become the searchable database that many 
people invisenged, I could just do an SQL query against the XML data 
holding the benchmark rules and plot the data in Excel. But nooooo...)

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