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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."
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).