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."

Comments

Thoughts from a singulatarian

[Cybert4]

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.

Re:Thoughts from a singulatarian

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:PDP8

[tomstdenis]

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