Basics of Modern Intel CPUs

Doggie Fizzle writes "For those who think you can drop a Xeon into your Celeron system for an upgrade... 'Although there are currently only two main players in the CPU market, AMD and Intel, the number of choices is still enough to make the typical consumer's head spin. Each manufacturer has a few different models to promote, and many of these models can be found in a few different form factors (namely, the "sockets" to which they connect) that exclude interchangeability. This two-part series of Tech Tips will look at a few details of each of the currently-supported CPU (Central Processing Unit) sockets and how they are all similar and different from one to another' "

Comments

IBM? Apple???

[Wizard Drongo]

What about the IBM Power series? They're a fairly small market share, ok, but they're still important. Almost every mac in the world runs on them, and they're the makers of the Cell. I'd say that's fairly important. I'm sick of this emphasis on x86-derived chips. They're not very good, and we can already see AMD moving away with their 64-bit systems. They resemble the power series quite a lot. Still not as good as a G5 though....

Re:IBM? Apple???

[skiflyer]

And if you want to upgrade your Apple processor you either buy a new Apple or you go the Apple store and give them your information and buy a new chip.

This article is designed to inform the DYI consumer for whom your concerns don't really come into play as they're automatically handled by either the Apple hardware lock in.

Re:IBM? Apple???

[curmudgeous]

I didn't RTFA, but I believe the intended audience are the do-it-yourselfers. PowerPC motherboards and processors are not generally available to the home market, and when you can find them they are prohibitively expensive, so there isn't much point in including them.

Only two ?

[alexhs]

Although there are currently only two main players in the CPU market, AMD and Intel [...]

Huh ?
What about IBM and all those embedded CPUS ?
Did you mean PC Desktop CPU market ?

Re:Confusion

[Eugene]

I've never seen a MB chipset that can handle more then 1 AGP bus. but PCI Express is a different beast. the current implementation is that you can have either 1xPCI-E 16lane or 2x PCI-E 8lane configuration, the ovreall *availible* bandwidth is the same. since current gen videocard does not utilize that much bandwidth. future chipset/GPU design might give you more PCI-E lanes to playwith. what I'm really concerned now is the lack of the standard, and forcing People to stick with either ATI chipset/GPU for crossfire, or Nvidia chispet/GPU for SLI.

there are videocards in the works that give you dual GPU on a single board, which might actually be the best solution IMHO.

of course, like people already stated, there are some geeks willing to pay bleeding edge price just to have the fastest FPS in the lan party.

Re:Confusion

[drgonzo59]

Well I care if they are on the same die or not. Being on the same die means faster communication between them it also means less heat, which means a smaller heatsink, less noise and less electricity consumed. Whether it should be called "dual core" or "2x" or whatever marketing lingo is irrelevant for me.

Re:Confusion

[timster]

I don't know what country you're from, but here in the US it's generally understood that an "average" person is far more likely to be drinking beer than working out.

Reversal of above analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

School SOLs: - Take a processor and benchmark it. If it performs poorly, try using less money on supporting components to see if that improves it any.

Re:Confusion

[Vellmont]

Some may think of it as a "cheap trick", but the reality is that
1) The result is the same

Absolutely false. CPUs aren't like cables holding up a bridge where you can twist two around each other and get double the strength. You can't just take two CPU cores on seperate dies and put them in the same package and expect the same peformance as a single die CPU. First of all there needs to be communication between the two cores. That slows down performance by quite a bit. If you look at the performance differences between the AMD dual core and Intel dual core the performance differences become readily apparant.

2) They went to market first with a working dual-core processor.

If by market you mean a paper release only, and not actually making dual-core P4s available to anyone but a select few. The truth is that Intel announced dual-core CPUs before AMD did, but you can actually get a dual-core AMD chip right now. A quick trip over to pricewatch.com has listings for dual-core opterons, but strangely no dual-core P4s. Are you really suggesting that it makes any real difference who announced dual-core first, but getting ahold of actual product doesn't?