Benchmarks for floating point performance

[galvanist]

I'm trying to identify the right processor to use for a particle physics simulation & analysis application. Budget is a primary consideration because we're operating on pocket change.

Our program is single-threaded, and very floating point calculation heavy. We'd be running 4-7 of these independent processes on a machine. Is there a way to see a graph of just the floating point performance of these processors?

Based on the single thread performance graph, the Intel Core i7-4770S @ 3.10GHz is looking very attractive to me. Am I interpreting that chart right? Does this chart reflect the performance of (multiple) single-threaded programs or the performance of just one thread on the entire cpu? Is the 4770S possibly a better choice than say the considerably more expensive i7-3970X? I know this is a bit apples vs. oranges.

More generally, does some company (passmark?) offers a way to test custom code on various processors to see which ones are the best for my specific application? Like a processor lab of some kind? I've had no luck with google.

[David (PassMark)]

You'll find the i7-4770S harder to get hold of as it is more for embedded applications. But the i7-i7-4770K has the same specs, for your purposes, and same single threaded performance. So at the moment this probably the CPU you want if you are running 1 thread.

The chart is for 1 thread running on the CPU. So an 8 core CPU has no advantage over a 4 core CPU (all else being equal).

If you are running 7 single threaded applications at the same time, then you aren't really running a single thread. You are running 7 threads. It doesn't really matter too much if it is 7 threads in a single process or 7 threads in 7 processes.

The only way to be sure if the i7-4770K or the i7-3970X is faster for your particular application would be to run your application on them. But we are not in a position to do this for you.

What I do know however is that the i7-3970X is three times as expensive as the i7-4770K. So I think you could buy two separate i7-4770K machines for the price of the i7-3970X. There is no question that two i7-4770K CPUs would crush as single i7-3970X (as long as your application can run on more than 1 machine at once).

[adam majewski]

Is it possible to join the lists of one cpu and multiple cpu systems to compare Price Performance of such systems ?

[David (PassMark)]

There is a list of all CPUs therel.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

[adam majewski]

Yes, but :
Results for Single CPU Systems and Multiple CPU Systems are listed separately.

From my point of view the performace/price valus is most important. I do not care if it is single or multiple cpu system. ( maybe I'm wrong ? )
If the list would contain both single and multiple cpu then I can check Price Performance
to choose what is the best choice for me

[David (PassMark)]

maybe I'm wrong

Yes, probably. Systems with multiple CPUs are typically not cost effective. The motherboards are way more expensive, the CPUs are way more expensive, they need expensive ECC RAM and the systems don't scale in the linear fashion. So you would typically only buy them if you didn't care greatly about the cost.

[adam majewski]

Now I do not have the evidence of that. Such list ( single and multiple together) should show some evidence . Right ?

[David (PassMark)]

Right

Only partially. We don't include motherboard prices nor RAM prices in the CPU charts.
But you can see the CPU value from the CPU value column on the page I referred to above.