Comparing The Power/Performance Of A NetBurst Celeron & Pentium 4 To Broadwell's Core i7 5775C

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 23 July 2015 at 03:30 PM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 25 Comments.

With my Intel Core i7 5775C Linux review having gone out earlier this week, out of curiosity one of the other follow-up tests I wanted to run was comparing the performance and efficiency to an old Pentium 4 and Celeron Socket 478 CPU from the NetBurst era.

Last month for the 11th birthday of Phoronix, as part of a bunch of historical performance comparison tests, I dug out an old Socket 478 system with Intel 875p "Canterwood" + ICH7R chipset and some old CPUs from around the start of Phoronix: a Pentium 4 "C" 2.8GHz and Celeron D 320 (2.4GHz). With that old system and the two NetBurst CPUs, I compared the Linux performance and efficiency to some modern Intel hardware. With now having the Core i7 5775C socketed Broadwell CPU, I decided to run those same tests on this new configuration.

Thus for today's entertainment is showing how well the Intel Celeron D 320 2.4GHz and Intel Pentium 4 C 2.8GHz on the Abit IC7-MAX3 motherboard with 1GB of RAM compare performance and power efficiency wise to the Intel Core i7 5775C with an MSI Z97-G45 GAMING motherboard. Given the age difference, running with the same RAM, disk drive, graphics card, etc, weren't possible but even still these CPU-focused results should be interesting for showing how far Intel x86 performance has evolved over the past decade.

Another difference between the test systems is that the NetBurst benchmarking was done on Ubuntu 15.04 while the Broadwell testing was done under Fedora 22. This had to be done since running the i7-5775C on Ubuntu 15.04 was hitting problems that could be easily avoided by running Fedora 22, but at least the kernel version and compiler between Fedora 22 and Ubuntu 15.04 are close enough for this light-hearted article.

Alongside the few Linux CPU tests run, the system power consumption was measured using a USB-based WattsUp Pro power meter, with the Phoronix Test Suite polling that and also calculating the performance-per-Watt. All benchmarks on both systems were done in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using our open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


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