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A 2nd Core to Keep Windows Chugging Along?
Eh-Wire writes "Almost every hardware junkie I know would give most anything to take a spin in the new dual core hot rods from Dell or one of the custom system builders. But what if you actually needed that second core to run your anti-virus, spyware detection software and firewall just to get a little gaming or Internet surfing done on the first core. Would that really be a good reason to bring home a shiny new machine? I can think of a couple of different things I could use a second core for but running an iron lung on it just to keep the machine chugging along just isn't one of them. Curiously enough, PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason."
Am I the only one who can't open the first link in a new tab in Firefox? It wants me to open it with "FirefoxHTML", which opens it in the current tab.
really, it is that bad.. take a look at some of these power consumption figures for intel's "dual module chip."
3 89
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Insane.. 244watts under full load. Should be interesting to see amd's numbers in this regard.. (which should be out very soon, the release date is the 21st IIRC.) This would be an expensive upgrade if you choose Intel's dual-module chip. You'll need a new motherboard & a pretty hefty power supply.
It's like having a seperate harddrive for all your apps and essentials than all your media. That way the core you are really using can do 100% what you want (ie play games) I don't know enough about the technology to really say for sure, but this seems like it is just a more efficient division of labor, and you could get excellent performance out of it. An another note, though, I can't believe people have that much bloatware that they actually NEED an ENTIRE second core to run it all. I hate modern software. I can't believe people waste their harddrive space and clock cycles on shit like virus protection.
The example of being able to play games smoothly with anti-virus scanning in the background was just that... an EXAMPLE of a situation where a dual core system might excel. The author mentions a ton of others, like encoding tv input in the background. I think it's rather sensational to say that the author thinks that's the only use or the primary use. The story submitter really needs to get a grip. The article was just trying to make the point that general responsiveness of a dual core system in the face of multiple tasks should be better, and I don't think anyone would disagree with that.
But Windows really does have truly horrific levels of fug (in the Pratchettian sense of 'air so full of toxic waste you can cut it with a knife') in it.
What's worse, though, is the people who think that kind of fug is inevitable and somehow desirable, and don't believe that other systems are less messed up.
Right on, RIGHT ON my brothah!!!
I have been heavily researching the construction of a dual Opteron box to become the main server in my house. The main reason I want two procs is so that I have enough power to run several virtual machines using the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor. THIS is what a dual core processor should be used for. If the CPU is powerful enough and you are a bit of a cheapskate, you could even use the second core to be a low end 3D accelerator for games using some kind of open source driver (if someone cooked up a project like that). The fact is that most standard CPUs these days are more powerful than the DSPs of the early 90s. So instead of using DSPs to do stuff, the second core would be of great use this way. Imagine being able to run a ton of audio plugins while recording and mixing your next album. THAT is what dual cores was meant for. Not for chasing down the problems of poor coders.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Wait a couple months til when you can buy the processor and motherboards and assemble yourself.
You will only be paying ~$80 more for the dual core CPU, and the usual price for the motherboard.
But if you're the kind of dumbass who buys crappy Dell systems filled with their borderline functional generic parts, with tremendous price markups, then maybe you deserve to be separated from your money.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
What was said was not FUD. FUD is what you try to instill in another's mind if you want to discourage them from choosing a competitor's product or service or point of view, even.
The original comment was about proper, concise coding. That doesn't happen often because programmers typically build upon older legacy code because there's no time, money or organizational will to start from scratch.
lol... The parent's website consumed 100% of my CPU resources (AMD K6-2 @ 500 MHz) for more than 6 seconds... With nothing else running besides IceWM and Firefox. Granted it was flash, but hell, my browser had to load the required libraries to load his/her website, much like a WP loads libraries. Oh, and Open Office actually loads faster (~4 secs). So who is wasting resources?
bash: rtfm: command not found
From my week of using OSX (the week after I got a Mini, before Gentoo and then Ubuntu went on it), I have to say that Safari started up first, but in rendering Firefox beat the pants off of Safari. It was shameful how slow the KHTML engine really is, or at least seemed to be in my experience.
Also, why the hell should a browser be using a video cards features? It's a browser. It should display webpages to w3c spec in a reasonably fast, secure, and easy to use manner. I don't see how having it rely on a video card is a feature that's overly valuable in this situation (or desireable in the case of firefox), especially since every major browser out there still needs work in other areas.
I mean, hey, you don't NEED a car that can go above 65MPH, but it's sure nice to have one huh?
Considering the speed limit on the freeway I take to work every day is 75mph... yes, I do need a car that can go above 65.
Also, running a car at its top speed isn't good for the engine. Running a processor at its top speed doesn't really affect it one way or another.
I don't mean to troll, but:
Mac OS X has been the only operating system that has been getting consistently faster for general workstation usage.
Perhaps that's because it started out so very, very slow.
People bitch about the 20% or so worst case overhead for a secure microkernel, and then they want to tie up a processor running anti-virus software. This is like dealing with a roof leak by install a sump pump.
Yes, but office 97 ran just fine in a non-laggy way on my old p166. Now that developers have 20 times the clock cyles (and probably 100 times the effective speed) my PC runs about the same. Now, what features can account for that? New style browsers? New exporters? The ability to track changes? I mean, I know that Office XP has a metric assload of new features, but I can't account for any of them that should make it slow down so much... probably its just the process of loading all those unused features into memory and keeping track of them.
You know what I hate? When a flash ad bogs your computer down. I have an o/c Barton equal to 3000+, and this one site (rpgamer I think) had an ad for a game... An Eq Playstation one... It was maxing my CPU usage to almost 100%!!!!! I couldn't even scroll w/o having massive speed problems.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I refer to having a pair of ~75mb dwg's open in ACAD 2004 while having ArcGIS 9 (ArcView and ArcCalogue), plus all the usual background programs (Outlook, Firefox, textpad, etc) running.
It takes 3 or 4 minutes for it to save one of those ACAD files, even though the actual saving only takes 5-10 seconds. The delay is before it actually saves. Switching back to ACAD from ArcGIS leaves me with a non-responding ACAD for upto 10 minutes. Switching between the pair of ACAD files or even simply copying and pasting features from one ACAD file to the other takes a similar time.
If I could get by running just ACAD with just one file open, its not a problem, the delays disappear.
This is on a 2.4ghz P4, 1gig ram, crappy video card.
read the reviews at www.anandtech.com. I will benefit plenty from dual core. (admittedly along with the rest of my machine being replaced as well)
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Well, at least I know what you mean even if the other two people that replied have no clue.
I've installed a lot of software that insists on putting something in startup. Network tools that want to put a menu in the systray, adobe software (like photoshop) that puts all this Adobe stuff in startup, and even a video encoder I have (a very nice one too) drops something in startup. Most of the media players do it, too.
It's not necessary, for the most part. While some applications have an option to turn these features on and off, most don't. It's silly.
On my workstations it's not really a big deal, but it does make startup slower and you never know what kind of instability these programs can cause while using the computer.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I work regularly on a real SMP system, I and consequently I've been drooling for dual core since I first heard the x86 CPU vendors were (finally) getting around to adding it.
SMP makes a massive difference on a system - if your workloads benefit. Mine do - I spend a lot of time compiling things, and the compiling (on the right codebase) tends to scale in an almost linear way with number of CPUs. Not only does SMP make this vastly faster, but it leaves your system so much more responsive that it's hard to believe.
Even if dual core CPUs have only half the benefits (I imagine the Intel ones will, given their memory bandwidth needs) I'd still be really tempted. The power consumption is a nasty issue though.
Yes. It is true. I have a dual p-pro 200 and a pIII-450. The 450 is clearly a champion sprinter on any given task, but using NT on the dual P-pro's was noticeably smoother. In some ways, I saw it as a the P-III 450 was a sport coup, and the dual p-pro was luxury sedan, not nearly as fast, but a lot smoother operation, a lot less bumps in the road so to speak.
That being said, that was a long time ago I tested it. I had windows on my dual opteron machine for a week while I played tron 2.0, and then nuked it. I never compared it to single processor operation, but I can say that it flew(windows2000) and ran very well. I can tell you this though, Linux also kicks butt with dual processors. Gentoo users will especially appreciate the second proc.
This is good news for everyone, provided you're not using a non-dual processor aware OS. This, combined with 64bit, the next version of windows, and some new killer apps coming down the pipe might just give a nice jolt of life back into the tech industry, at least for a while...
I've never seen a Flash website that didn't suck. I've seen good animations and simple games done in Flash but not websites.
I agree that a word processor should not need much CPU power but I think websites should need even less as they usually do practically nothing and the best websites have practically no frills.
You can create decent looking websites without Flash. I might argue that you cannot create a decent website with Flash.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
My experience is that it's less to do with how computer literate you are and more to do with how tasteful you are. If you think McDonald's decor is fun then you'd probably like Flash. If you think Radio Shack is the bomb then you'd probably like a plain website with no images or CSS or anything.. just paragraph aftyer paragraph of raw unadorned text. The rest of us like a few functional images and some CSS on a website that is actually functional and easy to navigate. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
"An obsolete 400mHz machine doesn't run any modern desktop apps on any OS well"
;-)
Ahem, my setup is a Cube 450Mhz, running the latest OS, and I'm looking forward to upgrading to Tiger.
Of course I *want* a faster machine, but to be honest, I don't *need* it. I do video, CAD, graphics, pictures, music, telephony and of course a lot of other things.
And no, it won't run Doom III very well. But I knew when I bought it five years ago, that it wasn't a gaming machine (although I've logged quite a few hours of Quake III).
And yes, I think Windows sucks, but I'm mature enough to recognize this is a personal preference and not a fair assessment. Although I'm fed up with maintaining Windows boxes, it becomes far too esoteric. I have to download SP's on my mac for fear of turning the machines into zombies just by connecting them freshly installed on the internet.
BTW, how much *does* Microsoft pay nowadays?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
- Develop software. Building Mozilla will quite happily consume most of your CPU for the good part of an hour.
- Burn CDs or DVDs. Burners are very CPU sensitive. I've burned a DVDs before now, absent mindedly launched something like OpenOffice, and discovered the act has turned the DVD into an expensive coaster because the buffer was emptied.
- Run a virus / spyware / Norton system check. Damn, these things are slow on a modern OS with a large disk and drag down everything else while they running.
- Run a VMWare / QEMU / DOSBox / CoLinux session. By design these things simply eat the cycles while they're running.
- Run Seti or other distributed computing apps. Two CPUs mean these things are less frequently pre-empted.
- Play or rip music. Especially Ogg format, but it applies to anything else too.
- Recode DVDs. Another CPU intensive and very long operation.
- Play games. Yes, believe it or not games often spawn secondary threads for the background music, networking and housekeeping operations.
- Run any kind of multi-threaded intensive application whatsoever. If your machine runs a Firefox, a DB, Apache, Java for example. Even a seemingly innocuous Java app like Puzzle Pirates spawns 20+ threads and consumes > 100% CPU on my dual CPU mac.
If you do any of these things more than occasionally you would benefit from a second CPU or core. Does that mean I'd pay the prices that a dual core Intel costs now? No chance. The prices are a rip off. But once the cost becomes more realistic, I'd certainly pay some more if it effectively doubled the performance of my machine when doing any of the tasks above.I'm tired of hearing the argument that no one NEEDS this much computing power. If we went by need, Intel would've stopped developing new chips about 3 years ago. Besides, the definition of "need" changes as people find new ways to use the extra power. Games get better looking. We can put more widgets on the desktop. We can quickly manipulate those LARGE uncompressed photos. And if we can do it all the same time? Why the hell NOT?!
Also, often times, technology progresses forward just because we CAN do it; we CAN create it. We'll figure out how to utilize that power later. But sometimes just having it is...fun! Do we really need a better reason?
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
Um an AMD64 2.2Ghz is for the most part faster than a Prescott P4 3.2Ghz [the cpu Intel currently makes a lot of].
...
In fact doing builds of LibTomCrypt I had to enable HT and only then would I get build times similar to my AMD64
So it takes an extra Ghz and HT to get close (well without HT it takes roughly +7 seconds or so) to and AMD64....
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
get perpendicular perhaps?h ead/pr/
c one/. Please try to bear in mind the audience it was intended for. this leans towards the idea that the web is leaning towards ending up to be a replacement for tv, or 'surfing from the couch' as I've recently heard it put.
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_
attacking flash for being useless is like attacking tv for being useless. 90%or so, of the time you are right, but to someone else it's quite important.
I think soap operas are not worth the tape they are recorded on, some people can't live without them. personally I feel most websites would benefit by having little to no advanced formatting, much less flash as, for the most part, I am looking for the information in the page rather than the joy of lookng at it. and I definitely agree that flash should not be used as a place where information should be searchable or bookmarkable.
That said, for those who wish to make pretty moving pictures for their website, flash makes it very easy to create. bearing in mind that the flash is there to attract a different sort of person than you. By all means, avoid that site, or advertiser. there is a flash ad on this site that has a couple of horn blasts, and If I ever meet the marketing manager who thought that was a good idea, I will blast an airhorn in their ear.)
dhtml and css, though possibly more proper, are not easy by comparison, if they were, something like google maps would have arrived sooner.
as for another counter example, I was recently introduced to someone from ben and jerry's, who created thishttp://www.benandjerrys.com/fun_stuff/cow_to_
we who tend to treat the web like an encyclopaedia will rue this, but we are a regrettably small minority. tv has annoying commercials, now movies do, and so will follow, or lead, the web.
one can only hope that there are more instances of things that are really good, (like school house rock) than really bad.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
The same number of miles as my your horse. Except your horse is wearing a dress, and a hat, and clogs. And sometimes you have to feed it more hay because the clogs are icky.
For all the claims of "Techno luddite" he isn't talking about that scale. If word processors want to add AI to do predictive work (markov chain type prediction ala itap) that is FINE with me, but enough with the translucent flyaways -- it isn't so terrible to have them, but allow us to disable them.
The problem is not when I fire up word/ooo/staroffice, the problem is when I fire them up when I have 123123 other things running -- if they ran like they were on a 300 mhz celeron [i.e. conservative with resources] the system wouldn't bog down when I'm trying to add a note to some documentation.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Optimizing too early is seen as a mistake because you will most likely optimize where optimization has almost no effect. When you optimize later you can use a profiler to get hard facts about the location of the performance problems and get much better results.
Linux is not Windows
That's funny. I have a dual processor machine and the one thing I love about them is related to what you said: a misbehaving app that consumes 100% CPU does not make the machine unusable, because the UI can run on the other (which I promptly use to send a SIGKILL). You do not also feel those 100% bursts that some apps do.
Sure, if a two threaded app does that, you're screwed. Then again, an app that misbehaves like that will probably be erased ASAP (programmers that do that should be ahot).
All in all, dual processors (and dual cores I guess) make very "smooth" machines.
GPG 0x1B479C78
Meh, I regularly make spreadsheets that are full of calculated cells that depend on another spreadhseet. . . the idea being that since I generally only need to perform XXX analysis on a spreadsheet once, I can set up a system where I give the original some pre-defined name, open the analysis spreadhseet, wait for it to do the calculations, then copy and paste the analysis to save it.
Only problem is, to do, say, seven calculations per row (simple ones, like "=B2-C2" and "=LEFT(D4, 10)" ) on an external spreadsheet that has maybe 500 rows can literally take a full minute.
I shudder to think what the formula-evaluating routines in Excel must look like in order to make such a small number of calculations take so long on a computer that can theoretically perform ~three billion operations per second with the pipelines full.
Sorry I always take an unpopular position:
If Office, Outlook, and Explorer all ran as well as they should on a 1 GHz machine no one would buy a 2 GHz machine. The only commonly used applications that really require today's processors are games; as someone previously pointed out to me, PC games are not popular enough to really drive the market.
If software didn't get progressively more bloated it would put a lot of hardware people out of work and possibly destroy the hardware industry. They need it, or need someone to come up with a commonly used app that by its nature sucks up system resources (like "true" 3d monitors or something, key is that it has to be something everyone will use.
Personally my solution is to use a Mac. Apple is small enough that it doesn't matter, so every-time a new OS comes out it actually runs faster then the last one while incorporating new features -its amazing. The problem is MS Office (mac version) it runs like hell, regardless of the platform. Luckily there is Open Office and Neo Office (though Neo has stability problems still).
Apples non-OS software is pretty bloated too, to be fair. Its not quite to the same extent (across the board) in my opinion, but certainly iTunes could lose some fscking weight. Luckily there are lighter versions available to replace all the i-whatevers. You don't have to use them and they aren't like Office where they use horrible proprietary formats that you can't function day to day without.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
I'm not a kid; I've been using computers since 1977. I edit and do DTP for a living, so your assumption is wrong, and I'll thank you not to be so patronising.
There's a lot there that Word and OpenOffice Writer can do for you - advanced formatting, template based styles, automaticlly adjusting contents and indexes, liking to other documents, linking to other applications... plus a whole crap load of other things.
I know how to do all that. But when I need to, I use a real DTP app. One that does them right, not in the fucked up way Word does.
Tables of contents and indices aren't advanced; the were standard in DOS word processors.
That's totally fine, but there's a lot of folks that do use the stuff.
No one I've ever met in the last 10 years. I get dozens of Word files every year that I have to edit and turn into books. The style feature alone is impossibly fucked up. Because some users found the concept difficult, it's been made "friendly" and "intuitive", so that style definitions change automatically, when Word thinks you might want to WITHOUT ASKING YOU. Maybe you know how to turn this off, but it's certainly not the default behaviour. I spend hours removing the cruft before I can expose the structure in a file and export it to a sensible format when I can forget about Word till the next time someone sends me a file.
Thus my deep hatred for Word. I use it, I know how to, but I do so only from necessity.
A modern word processor has a lot more features that you'd find in a desktop publishing application, and one of the great things is that you can seperate the content from the formatting.
I've been doing that with Ventura and PageMaker snce about 1989.
And while theoretically you can separate content from presentation, in Word it gets harder every year. I also see the awful results when people actually do use Word for publishing.
Do you think that these people spend money and/or time to add features to the software that absolutely nobody wants?
They add features that look good in the reviews. Not in real life. It's a truism (I think Gates said it) that features sell, not fewer bugs and more efficiency. And I'll say that the quality of writing and the documents produced has not improved one iota despite all these vaunted improvements.
I subscribe to that same belief but damn it's hard. And unfortunately, even when you charge (unless you're really mercenary) it's still far cheaper than what a consultant/shop would charge so most of the time friends/family just go "Cool. Here's your cash now fix it."
Interestingly enough the one person who I've been "teaching to fish" and has actually been absorbing it is a mechanic. I believe they have the logical mindset needed to memorize instructions and follow procedures - unlike the family who are housewives, clerks, dogwashers, managers, chemists etc.