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Ars Evaluates Core 2 Duo in Latest System Guide

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the can-i-have-a-god-box-please dept.

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."

8 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Thoughts from a singulatarian by Cybert4 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Intel is doing a lot of things right. This is a common core from laptop to server. Keeping it simple--AMD has a lot to worry about. I wonder about what a giant leap in energy issues would do. For example, greatly reduce power reduction at the transistor level. The whole issue of power usage would go away--and you'd have Intel and AMD racing for performance as they did in the late 1990's. The Conroe is a great processor, but a lot of effort went toward being miserly.

    And I'm still waiting for an architecture change. How about finally retiring the byte as a base logical unit? In return, just use the bit, or whatever word length the machine is.

    1. Re:Thoughts from a singulatarian by tomstdenis · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Um, the laptop processors were the same as the desktop in the 754 pin category. And in the Socket A they were ALSO compatible with the desktops.

      And the move from K7 -> K8 brought about 90nm SOI which greatly reduced power and heat issues. A similarly clocked K8 would easily run 10-15C cooler than a K7 at idle.

      AMD has plans to move to 65nm and 45nm. I won't say when [cuz that's secret and frankly I don't remember anyways]. They're just not rolling out a completely new core every other month to avoid wasting time supporting really short lived products.

      Conroe seems like a decent design. Until I build a box with one I can't really say. If all the hype is true though it's a good competitor to AMD K8, not a replacement, certainly in a lot of server oriented computing tasks.

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  2. Re:PDP8 by tomstdenis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Newsflash: A lot of data is still 8 bits wide.

    And for your information: Processors like the x86 series are not byte addressable. They usually load a cacheline and the processor fetches the byte you want.

    So instead of doing

    movb (%rax),%bl

    You'd have to do

    movq (%rax),%rbx
    andq $255,%rbx

    Worse yet, if you want the [say] 5th byte of a 64-bit word...

    movq (%rax),%rbx
    shrq $40,%rbx
    andq $255,%rbx

    That's clearly a winning idea!

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  3. Losing respect for Ars... by Dr.+Zowie · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I thought it was pretty cool until I saw:

    Windows 2003 Server is an excellent OS for those seeking to use the full power of the God Box as a server.


    No, actually, to use the full power of the God Box requires something with fewer root exploits and journaling file systems...
  4. Soundcard by edbob · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I just checked out the system guide for the "Hot Rod". Since the Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard has Dolby 7.1 channel audio on board, why would one need to spend $110 on a separate audio card? Is there really a difference between on-board audio and the audio cards that are mentioned in this article?

  5. Re:you're out of touch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Your idea of "decent" in motherboards is crazy. You are talking a very high spec board here. These kind of boards will cost a lot, for any platform. I looked on Newegg, there are only two Conroe boards that cost over $250, and each includes a WiFi interface with built in access point! Similar boards to these for AM2 cost $200, so the difference isn't all that much anyway.

    You're out of touch. Most of the boards out there that say they support Conroe actually don't. They're either very unstable or have features that don't work with it, and/or require BIOS updates in order to run with a Conroe chip at all. Even then there's no indication of how stable they'll be. As someone else pointed out, you can buy very fully-featured motherboards for AM2 for about half the price of a Conroe board, and they'll be a lot more stable than most of them too.
  6. Re:Two things by MrNemesis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The crazy thing is that, despite being on a seemingly ancient 90nm process, the AMD chips still seem to consume less power at idle that the core duo, at least according to Anand. That's why I'm currently sticking with my AMD's in my 24x7 boxes, which spend 99% of their time idling away.

    --
    Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
  7. Re:NTFS by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Umm, what do you mean be "wasn't journalling until v5". It's always had a transaction log file from the initial release. Check here for NT 3.1.

    http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=101670

    The idea is it can rollback partially completed transactions and recover from bad shutdowns. Also it can do it quickly without searching the whole filesystem for inconsistencies. That's the whole point to NTFS.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;