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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 real question is, will it last long enough to see vista? Given that the average laptop dies a natural death in one to three years, it's anyone's guess...
According to Microsoft, you will need around the following:
System Requirements:
Minimum system requirements will not be known until summer 2006 at the earliest. However, these guidelines provide useful estimates:
512 megabytes (MB) or more of RAM
A dedicated graphics card with DirectX® 9.0 support
A modern, Intel Pentium- or AMD Athlon-based PC.
So, I am guessing that a Centrino will fly.
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
Dell left an internal directory open to google's bots and accidentally leaked their upcoming Duo Core prices. Interesting how similarly priced they are to their single core brethren.
I wonder if apple would ever use a centrino, though... I doubt it.
Centrino != Celeron
The processor used with the Centrino chipset is a core duo, exactly what Apple is using.
Oh no... it's the future.
Short answer: Buy
Long answer: Wait
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
My answer to anyone who asks if now is a good time to buy x in computer hardware. My answer is always can you wait 6 months? IF you can wait then do if not then buy now. Things will always be better/cheaper in 6 months so if you can wait you get a better deal.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
OS X's GUI is very Open GL heavy, so it's less the CPU and more the GPU that matters. CPU can still make a difference, of course, especially when putting a high-end graphics card with a low-end CPU is nearly impossible in an Apple product, except for the PowerMacs, which generally come with high-end graphics cards anyway.
The Vista GUI (if I recall) is going to rely on DirectX 10 (or whatever version). In theory, so long as ATi and nVidia keep up and their cards have good DX10 implementation, the CPU shouldn't matter as much. Of course, it's may not just be a matter of how "graphic intense" the two OSes are - it depends on how efficiently they are implemented. OS X is well built. Vista, we'll have to see when it comes out.
As long as it'll still run Windows 2000 and Linux, I'm good. I haven't needed anything Microsoft put out since W2K, and I haven't had any need for anything faster than about 1.2 GHz. A bunch of people at work bought tricked-out new 3+ GHz machines in the last couple of months, and I asked them, "Why so fast" or "Why did you buy the $300 graphics card update?" Basically people have become so conditioned that they HAVE to buy the FASTEST and BEST thing out there or their computer is already obsolete before they even start. It's a bunch of crap anymore. Most of these people are just browsing the web, doing email, writing documents, editing photos. A $400 PC or Mac Mini would have been plenty for them. They spent $1500, and threw away a bunch of money.
I had someone say that a Dell rep told them that they really should get that Hyper-hot $350 GeForce ultra-platinum video card, because she'd need it to retouch photos on the computer. That's pretty reprehensible IMHO. A $30 graphics card or mainboard graphics would have done just fine. I say they practically stole $300 from her.
Sorry for going OT.
RTFA, the /. headline is stupid and misses half the facts. The article is about the i945M integrated graphics, not the Core Duo itself, and whether the integrated graphics will be able to handle the load of Vista.
The iMac/x86 are bundled with ATI's X1600 and the Macbook pros have an ATI Mobility X1600, they're not using integrated graphics from the chipset.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
I've got a dual-core and it doesn't really help much since pretty much all the software I use regularly is single-threaded. Occasionally the disk io happens in another core from other processing, so for example rar'ing might be say 5% faster than on a single core. It is nice that I can rar huge file without impacting performance of the 'main' thing I am working on, but that doesn't happen very often.
Overall, the only thing I've really noticed that is significantly faster is Java. Most Java apps use threads, and if nothing else the GC seems to run on the 2nd CPU. For example, the graphics demo takes 100% of both cores if you set the delay to 0ms between frames. That's about the only program I've seen actually use both cores.
As a side note, I predict with more cores we will see greater use of things like Java. It may run at say 80% C speed, but 80% + 80% is still much more than 100% on one cpu and 0% on another.
You've got it backwards ;-)
OS X uses some OpenGL stuff; a lot of 2D compositing. It doesn't totally bury the system, however, and it can move a lot of that to software rendering as well; that's why it works just fine on my Powerbook with a GeforceFX 5200, 32 MB ram.
Vista, on the other hand, uses boatloads of 3D, everywhere. Lots of texturing. The main issue with Vista is not having enough graphics ram. For the full "Avalon" "experience", you'll need 256 MB in a 32-bit environment, and possibly more in a 64-bit environment. Fill rates will also be important, in order for you to keep your windows flying around the screen in 3D.
God knows why so much is needed; Project Looking Glass provides a similar display with far more modest requirements, and thats a JAVA window manager. Not to mention that Xorg is getting really, really close to alot of these things. Xgl is currently running with all kinds of interesting shader/geometry effects, and KDE's got the window manager refraction/reflection (take a look at the CrystalGL, the big cousin of Crystal, which does it in software).
Ultimately, Linux will get there, but the problem is integration; most of these features are avaliable on X, but few of them play nicely with OpenGL, and they often don't play well together. We'll have to see a big, combined push between the KDE 4 effort, GNOME's next generation Metacity, the freedesktop XGL/Xorg 7+ people, and NVIDIA/ATI. As I understand it, much of this is occuring now; but we probably won't see releases till near the time Vista is released, and we won't see proper integration into distributions till late 2006/early 2007.
The best part is, however, that once it DOES get into Linux, it'll run just fine on 32/64 MB cards, and most likely will degrade much more gracefully than Vista; there'll be a finer set of non-functional options, rather than 3/4 main settings.
I have no fear that we'll see plenty of desktop eye candy in the near future on Linux; this is mainly attributable to the freedesktop people, who have saved X with Xorg, a product that is making progress now after years and years of stagnation.
I'm much more worried about DirectX 10 (WGF 2.0). Will OpenGL keep up? I hope so, otherwise we'll see the few Linux/Mac gaming houses there are out there (in addition to Transgaming) fail completely as they become unable to port over Windows graphics features. NVIDIA, ATI and Apple seem to be keeping the OpenGL group moving, though.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Rapidly? Wow, I'm blindsided by this. As long as I've been alive I've ran a 32-bit Operating System, and I saw Alpha claim the 64-bit crown, I've seen Sun's offerings claim to be the best thing since sliced bread, and I'm now seeing AMD do the same thing. Guess what?
RAM will be the deciding factor for when we move to 64-bit processors.
Don't believe me? Ask yourself this: why is it all of the big room server clients wanted a 64-bit chip years and years ago? So that they can saturate their servers with multiple gigs of ram; CPU archetectures might change day to day almost, but RAM archetectures usually last a long, long time, and as time passes, prices go down. So that big iron server that you purchased with 4GB of extremely expensive ram at the time, you can now saturate with 16GB of dirt cheap ram and still be in the top 80% performance bracket.
How does this translate to home users? When home users hit, and can no longer exceed the 4GB limit, then and only then will we see a desktop push to 64-bit. And we've still got a lot of ground to cover until then; some top end computers are running 4GB now, but by and large 512MB is the standard, with 1GB now being the recommended ram total. Ram scaling-wise, I predict we won't hit that "need for 64-bit" number until 2009, but by 2008 or earlier, all desktop CPUs will be 100% 64-bit anyways.
How does that tie into today's discussion? Perfectly; by 2008, your laptop will be obsolete, that's a given. So that means purchasing a system now will likely carry you until the 64-bit revolution. All and all, this means that 64-bit is a non-selling point to a Laptop consumer at this date.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Yeah, the thinkpad is a really nice and tough notebook. So is the Fujitsu Lifebook and the Panasonic Toughbook, I have heard good things about Dells, but haven't experienced it first hand (and I am a former Dell Tech) I find their fans die slowly (they spin, but not enough) at about 9 -18 months and burn the thing out... but the laptops that last seven years aren't the average notebook, are they?
It was a joke, with a grain of truth. Basically a laptop's life expectancy is 1 - 3 years and more realistically a year of serious professional duty. How long does your battery last? Over 4 hours, still? That's usually the first to go... How about the optical drive and floppy? Can it read every burned disk you throw at it? In my experience, and I have a shelf full of old laptops, these things probably don't work too well. Laptops die young. This is why most manufactuers have never given them a long warranty. It's probably great for hobbist stuff, but would you still have your job if you tried issuing 7 year old laptops as standard corp. issue?
Your seven year old laptop is going to be hard pressed to run XP and I don't think any sensible admin is going to want to have a 98 book in the wild with sensitve data. How many minutes would it take me to own your computer if it's hooked up to the internet? If you really want to extend your laptop's life, get a copy of Solaris on the thing. I am running Solaris 8 for intel on an old stinkpad of the same vintage and it is as good as XP on a new machine with a gig of ram.
Now that I have explained the premise of the joke and expressed my sympathies with your concerns, I will continue with the punchline... How long has MS been telling us they are coming out with Longhorn, now Vista? A dang long time.
In reality it might come out this year, but it might be another year or two at the rate things are going. It's been delayed for easily a good three years now. See, that's why it is funny. If you bought a laptop for longhorn/Vista when it was supposed to be released it'd probably be dead right now especially if you bought a gateway, emachine, HP or sony. In anycase, it'd be slow and underpowered.
And yeah, you're better off waiting for the OS to be released and get a machine made for the OS because if the graphics card don't work, your not going to be able to swap it out... and there are a lot of components that might be questionable under the new trusted computing/closed A(nalog)-hole/DMCA/**AA design Microsoft is going for. Your best bet would be to wait. If you need a laptop buy a $500 Acer (they have a great warranty and build good gear) and save your money for the machine you really want.
And the name of my laptop? Why I use an Aristocrat!
Others have pointed out that you're wrong, but I wanted to explain why. The world is not rapidly moving to 64-bit except in the server space where memory is a concern. However, Intel chips since the Pentium Pro have supported 36-bit memory addressing which breaks the total 4GB barrier anyway. The reason 64-bit is not rapidly taking off is that 64-bit introduces a bigger pipe but offsets the gains with bigger pointers and more cache bloat. Most of the performance gains you see in benchmarks comes from the fact that in 64-bit chips, SSE3 is a baseline and so you can target it in your code, as well as the extra registers which are added by the vendor and not related to being 64-bit.
In 32-bit code where SSE optimization is implemented, a lot of 64-bit gains disappear. This is particularly interesting for the Mac since their baseline Intel spec will always have at least SSE3, so all apps can target it from now on. Doing 64-bit math doesn't require a 64-bit chip either, as SSE goes up to 128-bit. The real reason you'd want 64-bit is if you're running a server that needs a very high amount of memory.
64-bit gaming has been the most amusing to me, watching as CryTek and AMD teamed up to sell more chips and desperately advertised 64-bit Far Cry as better than its 32-bit version by adding higher-res textures here and there and tweaking the visuals, even though absolutely none of that has to do with being 64-bit and everything to do with your video card. 64-bit Half-Life 2 is actually slower than its 32-bit version according to the benchmarks. Slashdot has an article in its archives about how 64-bit gaming has been overhyped to gamers.
There are times I wonder if 64-bit will die as a fad this year and become an unused set of instructions that only server admins use. It's certainly got all the makings of a tech fad. I think the novelty is wearing off and people are realizing 32-bit is just fine and that there is nothing inherently better about being 64-bit, other than giving AMD and Intel a marketing reason to sell you new chips. I can't think of any reason a desktop computer user today needs a 64-bit chip. Microsoft, of course, is very vocal about wanting to put everyone on 64-bit chips, and the reason for that is that the majority of Windows sales come from pre-installations on OEM computers, so if they can convince people to buy new computers that have new chips in them, they sell more copies of Windows. I think they'll have as much success with that as they did with the XBox 360 launch. Ahem.
As a sidenote, Apple handled 64-bit in OS X Tiger by keeping the GUI 32-bit, but allowing 64-bit processes to be spawned in the background. This means your app is 32-bit but you communicate with a spawned 64-bit console process (it has to be a console process because the GUI libraries are still 32-bit code). It's so little used that it took a while for anyone to notice when one of the 10.4 updates accidentally disabled 64-bit support...
"Sufferin' succotash."