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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."
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.
The Ars Technica Core 2 Duo system guide reads as follows:
/obvious
"Buy a Mac."
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Let's hear the great excuse(s) from the AMD fanboys as to why this CPU is evil
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
But to save some money, I'm going to put linux on it.
Jesus Christ, under what circumstance would you build a desktop machine that powerful and use linux?
The PDP8 used the 12-bit word as its building block. It's not hard to see it expanded to 64-bits for the current generation. The byte is not the only way.
have an IRC client Why not? It's xquick
I love Core
Duo 2
Makes my pooter fast as foo
With a great big cache
O(N) becomes O(2)
My box won't need C Oh 2.
Slashdot prepare for lawyer assault!
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
We have a God Box (hideously old campus tour picture here) at IIT. It's the only building designed by "less is more" Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for purely religious purposes. It's not really for sale, though if someone would like to pay for the renovation, I'm sure we could work something out.
I'm set on getting a E6600, but am still unsure about what motherboard I should get. The Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP looks alright Seems like a lot of them aren't in stock yet, any other recommendations for one in the sub $300 category? thanks, Chris
Or did my recollection go down?
I seem to remember the Budget Box at $600, the Hot rod $1300, and the God box costing unholy amounts of money.
Otherwise, we all knew that the core2 duo would get the nod: Low Power, fast, x86x64. (does the last one sound like an old memory chip?)
$.02
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.
There isn't a decent board for the Conroe that's under $250.
Either they don't support DDR2800 (anything less is a waste), or they don't have SLI, or they're missing amenities like firewire or decent onboard sound.
A "budget" Conroe system is difficult to spec since unless you go DDR2800 you aren't going to have much over a DDR400/DDR500-based AMD K8 system (and I'm not talking AM2, but the same logic applies). Memory bandwidth is a bottleneck for performance and usability. Despite Conroe's advances in CPU power, most situations where you wait for the computer are not CPU bound (unless you are heavy into movie/music decoding/compression). An bus-overclocked low power K8 (like the Opteron Denmark) can still beat a Conroe system in memory throughput.
DDR2800 brings this to parity but then you are not talking about a cheap system anymore; it's everything EXCEPT for the CPU that costs too much.
Hopefully in the next few months we'll see price drops in DDR2 memory and more competetion in the Core-2 Duo compatible motherboards. This should make them more affordable and help to shake out the gold implementations.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
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
No, actually, to use the full power of the God Box requires something with fewer root exploits and journaling file systems...
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.
I'm not entirely sure i have faith in the 'This just ups the game for AMD' argument since their stopgap measure, the 4x4 platform just seems like a bad idea. The C2D looks great and is now at a very reasonable price, but do we really need it? Speaking as someone who is still on sktA, can we really expect businesses and home users to buy into it when a ~2 year old machine still handles pretty much most things you can throw at it. I'm all for progress, but i think that at this point Moore's law has outstripped our need.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
No, actually, to use the full power of the God Box requires something with fewer root exploits and journaling file systems...
Last time I checked, it was called NTFS, and it predates ext3 by almost a decade (1993 versus 2001.)
Please help metamoderate.
So instead of doing
... yeah. Clearly.
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!
Uhm
When I first saw the NForce 4 SLI boards for LGA775 it was on NewEgg, and I thought, that can't be right.
But apparently the NForce MCPs were quite readily converted into an SPP and are giving the stock Intel chipsets a run for their money (while being essentially compatible with your AMD64 Nforce drivers).
Your idea sounds pretty good. I'd probably aim for a 6300 or 6400 though, I hear they can hit 2.8, 3GHz without a voltage increase or water cooling. And while I'm too young to have experienced the Celeron 300/450 era directly (no job, no money), I read all the articles about it and that's what got me interested in this stuff.
It's too bad. I was all set to get a Denmark Opt 165 with some of that crazy ass +500 DDR and overclock the everloving shit out if it. I heard people were hitting 3.2GHz and it was getting me all wet. @_@
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I went on newegg this morning and happened to pick out almost the exact same hardware as in the article (the hotrod), I went back a few hours later to find out the motherboard is now out of stock. Thanks a lot!!!
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?
DDR2 is already cheaper than DDR. Go price 1GB of each on newegg.
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
But it isn't true. I priced the same mobos for both platforms. The AM2s aren't half price, they are $60 cheaper. These are top of the line boards, as the parent suggested, they are stable and the features work.
If you want to compare across brands, go ahead. We'll never settle that argument because you'll say that the comparisons I make aren't proper because the cheaper boards I suggest aren't stable but the cheaper ones you suggest are. I've been there before, done that argument.
I wouldn't buy an ASRock either, but there are plenty of affordable, well-working Conroe-capable motherboards out there whether the AMD fanboys see them or not.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95