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Centrino Duo, Buy or Wait?
pillageplunder writes "BusinessWeek Columnist Steven Wildstrom answers a readers question on whether or not to buy a laptop with the new Intel Centrino Duo processor. The reader wanted to know if the new chip would be up to handling the Graphic requirements of Microsofts new Vista OS, and whether or not it would cost more. His take? Regarding price, probably not, about performance, right now there is no real way to know for sure. He does a decent job of outlining bug issues with new chips, and what the various vendors say/feel about this chip."
"The reader wanted to know if the new chip would be up to handling the Graphic requirements of Microsoft's new Vista OS"
The Duo seems to do a fine job with OS X, why wouldn't it be able to handle Vista? It's not like Vistas GUI is more graphic intense then OS X.
How do you justify the closing statement of the article? While not technically wrong it seems vastly misleading. If the new Intel Graphics Adapter uses 128Mb (or let's say even 256Mb for arguments sake), wouldn't a simple corresponding increase in main system memory suffice? Why push a 1Gb memory upgrade for the purpose of better graphics then. Sure you can break a "windows" with a rocket launcher. But wouldn't a baseball bat suffice?
With Merom behind the corner, I wonder if the current Core Duo (basically Yonah) will be obsolete soon...
When the Meroms come out, the price on the current gen of Centrinos will fall. Snatch up a nice Thinkpad for $1000.
Rosetta can handle Altivec. Originally it was listed as unsupported, but right before the new machines were announced Rosetta got Altivec support.
-matt
The closest thing to a "killer app" for x86_64 is any kind of encoding or compression on a 64-bit linux, or anything with lots of floating point calculations:
/ 24/1747228&mode=thread
http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=05/02
On AMD processors, Povray seems to experience a 25% performance improvement by going 64-bit. If you were rendering lots of complex scenes, a 25% performance improvement merely by switching from a 32-bit to a 64-bit OS is incredible.
Especially if you are a POV-ray buff; the 64-bit version seems to work not only faster, but with higher precision. I'm not sure if commercial 3D apps work the same way. I do know if I had to spend more time in 3D rendering and Video encoding, I would be very, very excited about the performance improvement I got from switching to 64-bit SuSE (which is what I run). In general, however, I don't spend a lot of time on those activites, so its not a big deal.
Even gaming seems to experience some improvement, but not as much.
The question is, how much would you pay for a 25% faster system? On Linux, going 64-bit is painless; and in doing so, I've sped up things like video encoding, compression, and complex rendering by 25-30%. That's pretty amazing, if you ask me.
No, there's no 64-bit "killer-app", and to be honest, I don't think there ever will be. What you do get, however, at least with an AMD64 processor, is an average of 15-25% performance improvement on math intensive apps. That's a pretty big deal; think about the price delta between any given processor "X" and processor "X*1.25". By switching to a 64-bit OS, you get that free; or if you are at the absolute bleeding edge, you get performance not possible in the 32-bit world. *shrug*
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
"It can't run 64-bit Windows Vista"
Who cares, who has a retail copy of 64-bit Windows Vista laying around. Oh, who's that? Nobody? Well then. And who will have a copy in a year? Who's that? Hardly anyone? That's right. Face it, 64-bit will be slow to adopt until we truly hit the 4GB ram barrier (right now we're averaging right under the 1GB mark; most PCs ship with 512, most recommend 1GB), and Vista will help that push, but we won't likely see a need for 64-bit Windows/OS X arrive until 2008 or later, which by then your laptop would be rather obsolete (a generation+ behind Moore's law anyway). And by then we'll also have 64-bit Yohans and Meroms..
"and the Intel GPUs the Centrino Duo notebooks usually use are very poor."
You speak as if there are many Centrino Duo notebooks on the market. There aren't. In fact, there are so few on the market, that finding reviews for them yet is pratically impossible (Tom's hardware did a good one.. that's all I've seen). On the flipside, the major purchaser so far (Apple) has paired it up with an extremely powerful GPU (X1600 Mobile), and at this point, I'm pretty sure that'd be the standard.
So, I think this user's just being a fanboy and not really considering reality. 64-Bit Linux is about the only thing that will run, and "PHB" 32-Bit Vista will be running on 90+% of the computers that upgrade to Vista in the next year (conceeding that they have it done in this year).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I found the opposite with CRTs a couple years ago. My 19" $150 monitor died after a year, and was now going for $200. No sales or rebates involved. I thought it was maybe just a fluke, but other monitors of various sizes all went up around $50 as well.
More recently, I've been looking for a DVB-S card (satellite). It's incredibly annoying to read a post from 2 years ago about buying one for $40, when the cheapest is $80 now...
Things usually go down, but inflation exists, and technology progresses, so electronics do sometimes go up in price.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Actually, a new laptop will last quite a while. What I couldn't swallow was the idea that laptop users will upgrade their O/S. IOW, the whole 2nd part of the article was nothing more then fluff and FUD.
Laptops often use custom chipsets that require particular drivers. Often drivers that never get updated for comaptibility against newer O/S's. Upgrading the O/S in those cases becomes a fool's errand.
I'm still using a Toshiba Tecra from 2002 (4 years now). It has an upgraded hard drive and a full loadout of RAM (1GB). If I treat it well (and the backlight holds up), I could easily use it for another 3-4 years.
The only reasons that I'm considering upgrading:
- More RAM. I need more then 1GB of working memory (I'm constantly bumping up against the swap file most weeks). I can't put any more into this existing system. The Thinkpad T60s are supposed to support 2GB of RAM.
- Dual-core. The idea of dual-core in a laptop is extremely appealing. Better responsiveness is going to be the big winner. There are way too many times when system performance goes to hell on my existing laptop.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I've heard people say this before, and it always makes me mad. While it is true that computing power, storage, etc generally marches forward at a fairly predictable rate, there are definitely points along the way when the computer you bought yesterday is much "worse" than the computer that you could have bought today. Take the PowerPC -> Intel switch on the Powerbooks for example. The sucker who bought their machine in December is probably wishing they had waited another month or two. Conversely, the person who buys a MacBook Pro today probably won't be kicking themselves too much a few months from now, when at most Apple will offer a bit more ram/hd, whatever. Obviously if you REALLY need a computer today, there is nothing you can do about it. But if you're just looking to upgrade, and you can be a bit flexible, it pays to ask questions like "should I wait?".
My experience with Linux over the last two years has been that a full, modern DE (KDE, Gnome) consumes somewhat less RAM than a bone-stock XP does at idle, but it's not that much less. A fresh install of XP without an antivirus, firewall, or other stuff (and it's not online, of course!!) consumes about 175MB RAM on my laptop. A fresh install of SuSE or Ubuntu takes about 130-150MB. Once I added an antivirus, anti-spyware, good bidirectional firewall, XP's idle RAM usage is about 270-330MB vs. the about 130-150 for Linux. I have a gig of RAM, so XP's increase is not that painful.
The real difference is what happens once you start to use the OSes. XP generally uses in that 400-450MB range once you have a bunch of stuff open, and Linux is in the low 300s. Again, that difference is probably due to the antivirus, etc. But load up that CPU or HDD with I/O requests and Windows has a very hard time drawing, moving, resizing windows. Linux will slow down, but stays usable and responsive at a much higher loading than does Windows. So at least in my experience, it is not the increased RAM usage but the better division of computer resources that sets Linux apart as more responsive on older and less-powerful hardware.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Yes .NET falls into the "things like Java" category.
However, CLR does not have the potential to be as fast as Java on a multi-core processor since, due to it's native code interface and unsafe code, the GC can run less often in parallel with the other threads (it blocks significantly more often getting access to the pinned object memory). Also, CLR based applications have fewer opportunities for hotspot-like optimization due to its bytecode format being difficult to interpret efficiently; Java can run an optimizer on another core and get more use from the other processor in that way, and faster code. In addition, betas of the new JVM put temporary objects on the stack automatically (often detected as a result of optimization). This also allows the GC to run in parallel more often (.NET can only do this with value classes, ie structures, that the programmer has to explicitly declare... much like 'register' or other archaic attempts at optimization).
Curiously, most applications I have rebuilt under Windows XP x64 run around 25% faster than the 32bit versions running on the same hardware in 32bit XP. Generally, it seems to be because of the additional registers available coupled with colorizing and smaller stack frames (more params passed via registers). From the memory analysis, it looks like the wide pointers are compensated for by far fewer cache/memory fetches for reasonably tight code. On other platforms (e.g. MIPS/Irix) I would agree that 64bit tends to be slower for the reasons you mention, but breaking the common 32bit mode register starvation made a much bigger difference than I expected. :)
I do agree that games don't tend to see this kind of win, as sending data to peripherals tends to be bottlenecked by other issues.
BTW: its always cute to see a virus fail because it was expecting 32bit mode