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We need a new metric—P3

With the introduction of ATI’s and Nvidia’s new AIBs, and the lack of a really killer app, other than perhaps Crysis and/or FSX, we really can’t see much difference in the products anymore.

I was asked recently what do gamers look for in a board, and I came up six items:

• Performance per Pixel (dots)—Max res and max performance.
• Performance per Price (dollars)—Max performance per dollar.
• Performance per Pressure (decibels) —Max performance quietly.
• Performance per Package (dimen­sions)—Max performance in a small form factor
• Performance per Pins (doubling)—Crossfire/SLI.
• Performance per Power (Watts).

Table 1: P3 scores for recently introduced AIBs.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Figure 1: Compound percentage difference of three parameters: Price, Performance, and power—P3.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Not all those parameters can be easily measured or obtained, but three of them can: Performance per pixel, price, and power. But which one is the most important, because they are all in different units of measurement and will have to be scaled? I decided that’s the individual’s choice and so made up a model with them weighted equally.

I generated a table of values, applied a weight to them, multiplied all of them and came up with a score.

Then I normalized the data to the lowest score and generated a chart. The performance data came from our testing using Futuremark’s Vantage and running on the Intel Skulltrail PC.

There was a great temptation to call this the PeddieMark, and play more on the Ps in the parameters, but as you can see I’ve resisted doing that. I’d much rather a useful metric actually used than my name in lights.

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