Slashdot Mirror
Ars Evaluates Core 2 Duo in Latest System Guide
RevDobbs writes "I always take a peek at the Ars Technica System Guides before white-boxing my next PC. Well, today I hit the site and see that they recently published their first post-Core 2 Duo System Guide." From the article: "The new Intel Core 2 Duo processors bring a swift change to the Hot Rod, making the lifespan of Socket AM2 very brief in the Hot Rod. Performance from the Core 2 Duo (aka, Conroe) appears to be excellent in all regards, from pure performance to heat output. Overclocking prospects also look excellent, with an overclocked Core 2 Duo being an amazingly fast chip for the money."
Jesus Christ, under what circumstance would you build a desktop machine that powerful and use linux?
Seems like, if you are building a god box... you simply want the very best.
The real question is: which Linux.
;-)
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
Laughable.
There is no dal Intel has that AMD wouldn't take in a second.
Evil...sheesh, how easy is someones life when there evil is a company trying to get exlusive contract.
And don't forget two rules:
The consumer rules
The 99% of user do NOT care what cpu they use, so it makes no sense to create a line of machine for more then one processor company.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
With the Core 2 Duo processor, there has been quite a significant leap in energy issues. While the current trend for the past 4 or 5 years has been to beef clock speeds and performance at the expense of power consumption, Intel's major stride has been to drastically increase performance while cutting power consumption in half. If AMD can match this power consumption (Intel's chips currently run at 40W according to their information), then we can concentrate again on having a speed war. The effort that went into being miserly had to be done at some point, and now it's up to AMD to catch up.
I remember not that long ago when socket 939 came out that AMD said that this was going to be the socket they were going to stay on for a looong time and that the sacrifices of obsoleting the 754 and 940 were totally worth it: when AM2 came out so soon after it really made me wonder, why is there a need for a new socket right now? It's not like X2AM2 chips are that much different from X2939 ones...
And btw, I can't believe they put only 8gigs on the highest-end box, I would think 16 would be the bare minimum, heck, I'm thinking of going to 4 gigs on my pedestrian x2-4800, you'd think that something of that calibre would be a bit better equipped.
-- the cake is a lie
1. Core Duo will be faster than anything AMD has released currently. That is primarily because it is manufactured with 65nm process unlike all of AMD processors which are made with the 90nm process.
2. The push to the socket AM2 architecture was to enable DDR2 support for AMD chips. Socket 939 could not support the faster memory that is hitting the market now, such as the DDR2 800Mhz (cheaper) or the brutal DDR2 1066Mhz (save your pennies).
AMD has stated that the AM2 platform motherboards will be able to support their next generation of chips. So if you are like me and made the plunge, your mobo won't be obsolete for a good long time.
snake
Here I am, here I remain.
Intel is already on 65nm. The last I read about AMD's move to 65nm on the tech sites was that it was next year, by the time Intel will already be moving to 45nm. AMD is officially a generation behind in that department.
I'm reading rumor and news leaks that say more along the lines of Q4/2006 for the 65nm production. The new Opteron socket F CPUs are due out soon and I'm not sure whether they're going to be 90nm or 65nm. And that could slip until 1Q/2007 or later of course. (I confess that I mostly scan the news looking for when AMD's next price cut is going to take place. Because we mostly buy CPUs in the lower half of the Athlon64/Opteron lineup.)
AMD is always going to be a generation behind on process size. It's the nature of being a smaller company (have to make do with less). So the downside is that AMD is always going to lag 6-24 months behind the process shrink of Intel. On the other hand, they've done very well with 90nm technology. So while the 65nm shrink won't be a magic bullet, it will hopefully at least narrow the gap (in terms of overall performance, power consumption and thermal output).
It's a good time to be a customer. For either side of the fence. Reasonably priced chips that are multi-core, hardware virtualization (making things easier to run multiple O/S instances), and increased competition between the two sides.
(We're mostly rolling out AM2 X2 3800+ CPUs in our desktops because it's reasonably priced. If they fire-sale the old 939 X2s, we may pickup a few more of them. Odds are low that we'll upgrade CPUs down the line, but it's a reason to favor AM2 over 939. The Core 2 Duos are still more then we want to pay for a desktop CPU and we don't want to buy end-of-life Pentium D 805/9xx dual-cores. If a low-end Core 2 Duo was $120-$150, I'd consider it for these particular machines.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?