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Intel Takes Quad Core To the Desktop
Rob writes to mention a Computer Business Review Online article about Intel's official launch of the Kentsfield chipset. Their Quad Core offering, Intel is claiming, is up to 80% faster than the dual-core Conroe released this past July. From the article: "Kentsfield, a 2.66GHz chip with a 1066MHz front-side bus, is more for computational-heavy usage, including digital content creation, engineering analysis, such as CAD, and actuarial and other financial applications. Steve Smith, director of operations for Intel digital enterprise group, claimed rendering is 58% faster for users building digital content creation systems, for video, photo editing or digital audio. In other words, Kentsfield is for high-end desktops or workstations only. For the average office worker who uses their PC for general productivity apps, such as communications and garden-variety computing, Smith recommended the Core 2 Duo from 'a price point and performance perspective.'"
"Core 2 Extreme quad-core QX6700" - There's a mouthful. It's funny that Intel is continually trying to downplay the importance of this chip for the average user. They say it's best for "more for computational-heavy usage, including digital content creation, engineering analysis, such as CAD" ... sounds like gamers would flock to this. Maybe they realize it's a rushed product (to beat AMD to the punch), and it will be in short supply?
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
So how does Minesweeper run on it?
All I want to know is if QuadCore will make my World of Warcraft Elite battle load and display 4-times faster?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
First off, I'm not criticizing only AMD or Intel, I think they're both guilty of concentrating on perceived performance on desktop CPUs. They don't care how much power the chip consumes or how much heat it dissipates, they only care about what the average consumer sees as immediate performance. To me, performance can be multiple things and considering that you could fry an egg on my P4 no matter how big the heat sink is
What's next is simply that which is cheapest to research and develop while giving the user a higher number in some category that Dell or the sales people are sporting as bigger/better/faster/stronger. This is alright but I don't think the average consumer ever stops and asks themselves what the power consumption will be for such a CPU or what its expected time to failure is. I really hope that at some point, the chips are fast enough to run your basic operating system and the manufacturers split into two lines where one is aimed for longevity and power consumption (like some laptop model processors) instead of just speed.
My work here is dung.
4 cores is great and all, but I know they are still working on support for games such as many Steam offerings with only 2 cores in terms of multi-threading, so I'd have to imagine that game support to really take advantage of a 4-core system would be a long way away. I was still psyched about the low voltage powerhouses for laptops, and I'm wondering how much extra heat 4 cores are going to put out as well. How many apps are really geared to take advantage of 4 cores atm, really?
Missing a marketing opportunity. ... now with Intel Foursome!
What they need to do is make a Muti-Core NATIVE OS, so even single-thread apps can use more then 1 core, also why dont they just make dual-core processors faster! seems the only way we are going to get ahead in the field
After Effects Rendering. Final Cut Pro HD Rendering. Maya Rendering. Video Compression [Rendering}. If you've ever done what they target this processor for, you'll COMPLETELY appreciate any time NOT spent watching the growbar work. Bring it on, I've been waiting to replace several G5s doing this all day, every day.
Most of the stuff on
I know CPU power is a big factor in performance, but c'mon.. What about extending the rest of the motherboard? I bet things would run faster in dual/quad core mode if there were dual buses so that bottlenecks are reduced to peripherals and memory.
From what I've read about Intel's quad-core; it is not native like AMD's will be. They are basically are going to have two dual core's and they will communicate via FSB. That sucks compare to AMD's offering which will be native._ frontpage&Itemid=1&limit=10&limitstart=20
http://xstremehardware.co.uk/index.php?option=com
I eat Karma for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's why I don't have any.
We were issued laptops at the start of the project. Typical laptop is a Thinkpad T42p. They average somewhere between 1.6Ghz and 1.8Ghz.
Some people were complaining about performance (java is a hog, and they were using stuff that makes java look 'light'). so they requested new machines.
They were issued Core 2 Duo systems that are 1.8Ghz, with 2 Gigs of ram. This machines are nice. They guy from IT Support comes up to replace the system and starts saying that he doesn't know why we would upgrade to the desktops, they are the same speed as the laptops.
Ok, I expect that from some guy off the street, but IT Support?
(Note: For this work there is a significant speed difference, it is obvious, and almost immediate.)
Never mind the differences between a single core from a Core 2 Duo, and the core used in a Thinkpad anyway...
Don't buy WoW Gold! Make it yourself!
.. since I am a journalist for a computer rag. Anyway, I would say it is a waste of money for most people at this time. Applications can barely use two cores properly, and games are still not as SMP aware as they should. On the other hand, if you run gentoo, THIS CPU IS KILLER :)
Dvorak on Doomtech
At work it's the same -- very few of our computers gets swapped because they're broken. Most gets swapped because it's bad business to have a $100/hour employee sitting around waiting for a computer worth $1000 to get around to doing it's thing. Especially when there's now a 3 times as powerful computer available for $1000.
This may change, but I doubt it. In my jurisdicaiton consumer protection laws ensure that consumers are covered against (non-abuse) defects for 5 years, so if a substantial fraction of computers start blowing up in less than 5 years, that'll be *really* bad business for Intel/AMD and friends. If they blow up *after* 5 years the consumer is out of luck. But most people are reasonably happy swapping computers every 5 years in any case.
Now power-consumption is a different matter. At work we care about this indirectly -- we demand silent machines, and powerhungry tends to equal noisy-fans (which disturb) At home I care too, even though many people don't. (or aren't aware that theres significant differences)
Two threats? You surely aren't running Windows, man...
where's "+1 amen"?
Sitting there watching growbars... grow is never fun. With luck, the question will soon be "how do I throw data at this processor fast enough to keep the pipeline full?" Depending on the application, I wouldn't be surprised if storage speeds are going to be outpaced by this generation of chips when proforming operations on static data, and precaching data in RAM or other fast storage sooner is going to have a big effect on render speeds for stored data in applications like re compression of video.
- MM
But seriously, as it gets harder and harder to make larger CPUs run faster the trend is going to be more, smaller processors per die. Each core is by itself slower than a huge monolithic one, but the sum is greater thanks to non-linear scaling. The trick is getting software to efficiently utilize them all.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
It's going like razorblades - the razorblade companies just try to outdo each other on how many blades that can be placed in a single razor. At this rate, expect as many processors as you can physically fit on, plus an extra processor for those tricky, hard to reach programs.
New Quad Core?
Earth warming more.
Or so says
The junior Gore.
Coolness to your every pore:
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Remember when one blade was enough?
I am about 50 percent faster on two cores -- I am guessing I will be maybe another 20 percent faster on 4 cores. If we get the Che Gueverra number (1, 2, many cores), I am not sure how this helps without a radical rethinking of how we write programs.
What? I thought EVERYONE used WinDVR to encode MPEG2 files of Battlestar Gallactica from their TIVO while playing F.E.A.R., and turn it into H262 for uploading as a a killer torrent while kicking but in Call of Duty 2? I suck the life out of an X2 4400 bitch, and I am NOT alone.
We cant all have a life, so I NEED that chip!
You insensitive clod!!!
Here's one from Toms Hardware.
Intel's right. On games it doesn't do any better. On video though, well, lets just say I know some architecture majors who would have loved these in their lab several years ago, when 1 frame took 10 minutes to render. And they had 300 frame videos to do.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
You want to know what consumers want?? cheaper.
They are happy with their new Dell 1.8ghz pentium M laptops and that horribly oudated and incredibly slow P4-1.8ghz processor they bought 3 years ago.
Consumers are happy now. computers have stagnated hard for the past 3-4 years and the performance gains offered by this new stuff is only marginal for them.
On video editing, I can see the advances IF your app can take advantage of it, problem is current apps cant take full advantage of that processor until a new build or version is made to take advantages of it.
The consumer yawns and happily uses their old 3 year old PC or that cheapie from dell that cost them $299 with flat panel and is as slow. They dont care about 64 bit, dual or quad core.
at least until they buy a new OS and discover that the added bloat requires more processing power to display menus and movethe mouse cursor.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
you need your girlfriend's *what* on your daily commute???
/G
They don't care how much power the chip consumes or how much heat it dissipates,
Oh really? Now I can't say as far as Intel, but AMD has been very focused on power consumption for a very long time now. All of their literature is filled with benchmarks of power-per-watt and total power savings in the data center, etc. If AMD doesn't care about power consumption, then why would they specifically go to pains to offer CPU versions that are even MORE aggressive in their power saving if you pay a bit more for them? And with all of their power saving innovation and dedication what do they get? Intel now outperforms them and everyone jumps the ship and goes over to the Intel side (despite the fact that the lower power versions of AMD's CPU still use less power when the final weight with the chipset is done).
You know why they care about what performance the average consumer sees? Because that's all consumers care about. If it were otherwise you wouldn't be seeing your lights dim when your graphics card goes into high gear. Where are the "power conscious" versions of these graphics cores?
I've got a lot of Athons, and Athlon XP's running where I work. Some burn out but that's often because of their environment and due to the fact that the fan that comes with the heatsink for the OEM version is garbage almost guaranteed to burn out after a year in high dust environments. The Pentium 4 is history, even Intel admits it was on the wrong track. If you want more longevity, then get a robust heatsink fan (undervolted) and underclock your CPU. You DO underclock your CPU right?
I doubt intercore communication in the Intel design is any better than the Barcelona (it's impossible to say this far out in any event). What is known (I have worked with some of the quad core Intel stuff) is that the two dies produce a higher load on the FSB and require the FSB be clocked down from the equivalent dual-core model. This means that AMDs remaining advantage over Intel's offerings is made more drastic (aggregate memory performance, particularly in multi-socket configurations). I.e. an Intel that thoroughly spanks a high-end two socket AMD offering linpack wise (4 flops/clock), will offer as low as 33% of the stream performance as the AMD offering. So, particularly at the high end, there remains no clear answer about which solution to pick, as Intel currently far and away has the best performance once the data has reached the cache, but if the data set being operated on within small periods of time exceeds the cache, AMD can still win. This is one of the reasons hpcc has merit for measuring multiple aspects of a cluster (i.e. aggregate memory performance, node interconnect, as well as traditional linpack tests), it's not so simple to say what is the best unless an architecture allows for superior performance across the board.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
They still are, this isn't aimed at average desktop usage, RTFA.
For Minesweeper, you should have at least one processor core per game square.
It's the only way to play.
True, but I know at least with the Core 2 Duo Intel not only focused on improved performance, but also lower power consumption and heat generation. I was starting to get scared of Intel chips until that point, wondering if purchasing one might be akin to laying a lump of thermite on my floor, but they made a step in the right direction. I hope that they keep moving forward with cooler, less power-hungry chips.
It's still pretty scary, though. Sure, Core 2 Duo was focused on lower power consumption, but pick any Core 2 Duo notebook and do something that involves heavy computation on both CPUs and listen to the fans crank up. Feels like CPU makers are still walking a fine line between fast and actually usable in the kind of computers people want.
Personally, I'd like to see notebook makers focus on getting the kind of battery life you see in the Nintendo DS (but using a larger battery, of course). Even if speeds are knocked in half, that's okay.
For the price, I'd rather have 2 dual Woodcrest 2.6 Mac Pros to get 8 cores. A lot of rendering-intensive apps have diminishing returns per core after 4-way SMP, anyhow.
The Intel computer/rangetop will fry hamburgers faster than the AMD version, with no loss of computing power
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Actually both AMD and Intel have improved in heat & power consumption.
On Intel's side, the Core2Duo has a lower power consumption than the P4, despite having two cores. If you get the "smallest" version, the E6300, you should end up with a PC that has moderate power consumption combined with very nice performance.
AMD has recently lowered the prices on their "energy efficient" series of dual cores, and the availability has improved. If you buy an Athlon 64 EE 3800+ or an EE 4200+, you should also get a nice ratio of performance to power consumption, both at a somewhat lower level than with a Core 2 Duo. BTW, the higher-clocked models are IMHO overpriced when compared to the Intel Core2Duo.
C - the footgun of programming languages
For the price, I'd rather have 2 dual Woodcrest 2.6 Mac Pros to get 8 cores...
Ahhh... if only EVERYTHING was Xgrid aware, then that would work... I'd get a pile of Minis or the Xgrid agent for Linux. Hell, After Effects can't even use all the RAM in one machine, much less Xgrid.
More processors in one box is the only thing the current incarnation of After Effects can take advantage of... with diminishing returns on the processor count as you pointed out. Our Quad G5 is not twice as fast as a Dual G5 rendering After Effects - maybe 1.6 times faster.
However, the same Dual G5 2GHz was still 2 or 3 times faster than the Dual 2.4GHz Xeon under Windows doing the same After Effects work... and that software is optimized for Windows.
(oh god, I've just opened the flood gates for pimple faced gamers to flame me)
Most of the stuff on
My understanding was that these chip makers have actually been forced by chip manufacturers to watch power consumption and heat dissipation--by purchasers of laptops. We don't like our battery dying an hour into a meeting, and we don't like our computers to burn our laps in the airport, but we do like our computers to be fast (time is money; I can't afford for my laptop to take five minutes to turn on). I think they first addressed this really with the Pentium M Centrino application.
Also, I could be wrong, and I don't have any numbers in front of me right now, but my understanding was that the dual core chips generally did run cooler and were less power hungry than the high end single core chips.
Are you sure that the bookkeeping is the limiting factor in your program? It could also be that you simply run into a memory bandwidth bottleneck. When you have datasets that do not fit in the L2 cache, main memory simply cannot keep up with the amount of data that the CPUs chew through. With multiple cores that all share the same memory link, this problem is going to become only worse.
One more argument in favor of the AMD Opteron architecture, even though for single-threaded applications it is currently slower than Intel's best offerings. At least with the Opteron, you can have dedicated memory for each node.
"For the average office worker who uses their PC for general productivity apps, such as communications and garden-variety computing, Smith recommended the Core 2 Duo from 'a price point and performance perspective.'"
I admit it. I'm not as hard core as a lot of Slashdot. I'm not a hacker, a programmer, and I barely use linux (mostly for tivo modding..o.k. I'm a little bit of a hacker, but just a little). Still, when I see the new chips like these that are much faster for digital content creation and not for the "Average office user", I find myself scratching my head. Sure the cubicles running MS Office and IE don't need this power, but the "Average" home user may very well.
Think about it. What is the average home user doing? I think it has a lot to do with digital audio and video. We are making home movies, converting our DVD collection to mp4s and mixing our own music. Most of this can be done with iLife if you are a Mac user (for example) but the hundreds of gigs of video I have of my family requires far to much of my time to "Rip, Mix and Burn".
Am I so different? It seems to me that the high-end workstation and the "average" home pc user really want and need the same thing from a productivity standpoint. For those of us that want to move into the digital home lifestyle, processing power is still a limiting factor. I for one find myself setting up my computer to encode video overnight far too often.
Does anyone else see the top of the line high-end processor as a very useable tool for the real average computer user or am I expecting too much from the average user? Really, even my dad wants to make digital videos of the family from time to time but doesn't have the hours it takes to do it.
Yeah, that much faster on carefully selected software. And slower on some single thread applications that rely most of all on clock-speed and uncontested memory bus access.
Would be nice for once to have headlines read something more honest like:
Speed improvements range from -20% for 50% of your software, up to +80% for 10% of your software.
There could even be a nice graph of how much software is improved (or degraded) at each 5% bin of performance. Otherwise it's no more honest than saying that your new Ferrari is capable of speeds up to 220mph, without mentioning that this can only be utilized during .01% of your driving.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You can now sweep mines out of four oceans simultaneously.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm sure Pixar is pissed that processors keep get faster.
Actually, they care very much how much power the chip consumes, because this matters in both the server markets at the top and the laptop markets at the bottom. If I recall correctly, AMD's quadcore chip will be able to put individual cores into low power mode when they aren't needed. Of course the highest clocked AMD or Intel chips require their own nuclear reactor to power them, but that's because they're targeted towards the hard core gamer market and it's the hard core gamers who don't care how much power the chip consumes.
Only if you have 4 disc drives to feed the four cores simultaneously.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
1.8GHz ... is ... slow?!
*slaps you with his 40mhz sparc workstation*
That's odd, the compositing/NLE apps I've dealt with (Vegas, Combustion and Fusion) farm out different frames to different render nodes. I had assumed AE did the same. I also think something might have been wrong with your Xeon box (hyperthreading on, perhaps?)
"...digital content creation systems, for video, photo editing or digital audio. In other words, Kentsfield is for high-end desktops or workstations only"
That sounds like a Mac user to me. The Article says "New systems boasting the CPU set to be announced today", and it's a Tuesday, the traditional launch day for new Macs. Do I see a pattern emerging here?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
scenario. Just a decent OS like OS/2 or BeOS. The best write up of OS/2 I ever saw talked about being able to compile an application, format a floppy and perform local database queries all at the same time and still be able to edit a column with no response issues. No multi core required. BeOS coudl do the same with many, many video playing back muliptle video streams simutlaneously. Again no multi core. I still can't do that in Windows without running into issues.
Ditto. I'm writing this msg from my main computer for the last couple of weeks which is a p3 tualatin 1.13 laptop that usually underclocks itself back to 731MHz and I'm really happy with it. I read my emails & rss feeds, listen to and occasionally transcode music, see movies, browsing etc. perfectly well with it. I'm using Ubuntu, but from my limited experience (on this computer) the same is true with windows xp.
I'm receiving a new laptop from work in two weeks, but I wouldn't care to keep this laptop for myself - the only caveat (and a I admit that it is a biggy) is that it does not include wifi, but thats really a question of platform and not CPU technology.
Sure, I'm playing Oblivion on a desktop with Geforce 6800 but for corporate and day-to-day use thats already more than needed.
I will finally be able to produce in 96Khz sound without having my cpu break a sweat and begin to stagger and lose instruments/timing/audio clarity after using CPU intesive plugins like Sytrus.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
... now I can run 4 infinite while loops at once!
Kentsfield is a processor, not a chipset as the parent states. According to other articles, the Kentsfield processor will work with Intel's 965 and 975 chipset-based boards that are running Core2Duo's, providing a super-sweet upgrade path.
Why, does the app saturate the IO bandwidth?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Wait, wait, wait... it's only 80% faster despite having 100% more cores? Where's that extra 20% going?
games journalism blog
Vista will solve that little "problem"
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
It's the overhead of maintaining communication between cores and the shared cache.
Vista will solve that little "problem"
W indows%20Vista_Ultimate_English_36d0fe99-75e4-4875 -8153-889cf5105718.pdf
So... Is the quad core considered 4 processors? or just one?
I ask because the Vista EULA says:
2. INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS. Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device (physical hardware system). That device is the "licensed device." A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a separate device.
a. Licensed Device. You may install one copy of the software on the licensed device. You may use the software on up to two processors on that device at one time. Except as provided in the Storage and Network Use (Ultimate edition) sections below, you may not use the software on any other device.
From http://download.microsoft.com/documents/useterms/
(Emphasis added by me.)
In 2013, Intel will look back and say, "Four cores and seven years ago, our engineers brought forth on this continent a new microarchitecture, conceived in Santa Clara, and dedicated to the proposition that all men's wallets are created equal."
Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects. -Dave Barry
"They don't care how much power the chip consumes or how much heat it dissipates, they only care about what the average consumer sees as immediate performance. To me, performance can be multiple things and considering that you could fry an egg on my P4 no matter how big the heat sink is ... I don't think I'm going to get many years of use out of it. So heat & power consumption are steadily growing concerns of mine. I had an Athlon XP 2800 break after one year of use--last time I use the heat sink that comes with the processor!"
How the hell did this drivel get modded "+5 Insightful"?! No, I'm not going to do your freaking homework for you to provide exact numbers. You clearly haven't been paying attention to what Intel has been doing for the last several years.
In a nutshell, their Israeli team took some ideas from both the P3 and P4 line and came up with the Pentium-M, which was originally for use in notebooks. They realized how effective the architecture was and continued developing it, eventually dropping the P4 line.
It eventually evolved into the Core microarchitecture, the architecture they've been pimping for the past year or so. You know, Core, Core 2, Core 2 Duo, etc.
I strongly recommend taking a look at the thermal characteristics.
Some of us remember when processors cost $600 and their clock speeds would DOUBLE every 6 months? Now those were depressing, then exciting, then depressing times.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
I wish I had mod points to give.. lol... I'm thinking of getting a super fast video card, just so I can underclock it, and get decent frame rates, for when I game, without having to hear the noise... the noise... arrrgh! ...It's actually difficult to find motherboards that give underclocking options.. most of the ones I've used only allow you to set the base to as low as factory default, and no lower.. :(
I wish there were some underclocker friendly sites... Living room pc's and sff pc's that sit on your desk, near enough to your ears, are *not* the places for loud fans.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
So, what about AMD's architecture? I'm assuming that rendering is read intensive, but not heavy on writes or interthread comms, and AMD provides separate memory banks and, I assume, a more advanced caching setup.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Funny you should post that as I was just considering upgrading my laptop from a Dell 600m with a 1.3 Pentium-M to something beafier, but then i realized, for what? Instant messages, email, and word processing? no need, ever again. I'm going to ride this thing until it dies and then pick up another one for $500 and be able to salvage parts from this one.
Personally, I'd like to see notebook makers focus on getting the kind of battery life you see in the Nintendo DS (but using a larger battery, of course). Even if speeds are knocked in half, that's okay.
Lenovo's "ultraportable" X60s series gets 8 hours of battery life if you get it with the bigger battery option. It's using a Core Duo, dunno if it'll get Core 2 soon or not (it's more a business notebook, so not much holiday upgrade pressure).
If Lenovo is too expensive for you, or if the X60s is too barebones (it doesn't have an optical drive, for instance), there are some Taiwanese notebooks with VIA C7-M chips. The C7-M is anemic (except for crypto, where it has an accelerator), but the 1.2GHz version draws 0.1W at idle, scaling linearly up to 7W at full load. The scaling supposedly handles bursty loads better than Intel processors, too.
In any case, remember that the CPU is only a ~30% slice of the notebook power consumption pie. The biggest slice is the display with its backlight. Wireless, HD, chipset, RAM and video card (if you have one) are significant as well.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
_OR FOR COMPILING_
Why can't anyone ever, EVER? remember that somebody out there somewhere actually creates software?
Cannot they comprehend that somebody does something besides Media Encoding?
Who do you think wrote the media encoder, and had to sit there waiting for it to compile?
They can't even post a single make -j8 benchmark, ever? Is it really so far-fetched that someone might be a programmer?
These reviewers keep sitting around and trying to figure out what Intel's new Quad-Core chip is good for:
"well, it's a good chip, but it might not be useful to you unless you're spending a lot of time doing media encoding."
HOW ABOUT FOR PROGRAMMERS DOING COMPILATION, AND DOING IT IN A BUNCH OF THREADS, IDIOTS?
"They don't care how much power the chip consumes or how much heat it dissipates" Actually, the Core 2 Duos barely use any more power consumption than their previous single core processors. Why? Simple. They underclocked the processors by 20%, which allowed them to have 87% performance while only using 51% as much energy. Stack two of these on top of each other, and you've got a Dual-Core system that runs 74% faster than a single core, while only using 2% more energy. http://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/press/cor e2/Rattner_IDFA_Final.pdf
in about 1984 when IBM released their new PC AT running at a staggering 6 MHz clock speed and capable holding of multiple Megabytes of RAM memory.
The funny thing about it is that they said it was for power workstation users running advanced applications and that no normal office worker would need such power.
It's the same story every time. But as long as I have to wait for anything this silly computer does, I need a faster one. As far as I am concerned, if anything takes more that 1/10th second, its too slow. Why would I want to spend my time waiting on a machine?
We've been waiting on these things to replace our "old" dual-core hyperthreading Xeons. They are pretty powerful, but spam is getting insane these days and when you're scanning a million messages a day through each mx server, then lots of cores will get a good workout, believe me.
I could test and profile and figure out the bottlenecks but I don't have the time to play with it right now and not having a 4-core computer, I won't see much benefit. Part of the problem may be figuring out what are expensive operations and bottlenecks in Java, but the point of all this multi-core stuff in my mind is that you can run Java and waste cycles.
Something as simple as taking a number-crunching task and making it parallel over threads on multiple cores is not enough. There obviously is some bottleneck, but finding it will take work.
Consumers are happy now. computers have stagnated hard for the past 3-4 years and the performance gains offered by this new stuff is only marginal for them.
That's pretty true, but inexpensive multi-core might change that.
The big issue since 2001/2002 is that processor power for a single-core CPU has only barely doubled over a period of about 4 years. Which means that a machine from 2002 feels slow, but not unbearably slow compared to a brand new single-core machine. (I should know, my laptop is almost 5 years old now and I use it daily...). That's a far cry from the rapid doubling of processor power every 12-15 months in the mid-late 90s when a 3-4 year old machine was 8x to 12x slower then a brand new machine.
However, now that inexpensive ($150 or less, the $300 price from last year was way too expensive) dual-core chips are here, I think we're going to see a large shift take place. Savvy consumers who have used a multi-core machine for more then a few minutes are going to notice the responsiveness compared to their old single-core machine.
Will they bury a dual-core CPU in work? No more then they buried their old single-core machine. But at least with the multi-core unit, they're more likely to have a free core available to respond to their input without lag or stutter.
(We switched over to buying dual-core CPUs this summer for all of our new machines at work. Even the low-end administrative people who only shuffle documents. A conservative guess is that we'll easily get 8 years out of these machines before they seem too slow to be useful. Maybe as long as 12 years if none of the parts fail.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,270 for growbar... http://www.google.com/search?q=growbar // Results 1 - 10 of about 1,400,000 for progressbar.... http://www.google.com/search?q=progressbar // Yea, that's as weird of a word as I thought it was.
A "progress bar" is just a growbar being watched by an optimist.
......
NEEDS MORE GROWBAR!!!
Most of the stuff on
If you can live with mediocre performance, I'd recommend something with passive cooling. Because the video card fans are often crap and there are far less replacements in the market than with CPU coolers. A passive heat sink will solve that problem altogether.
But note that you should have a well ventilated case for passive cooling.
C - the footgun of programming languages
1 core for Windows
1 core for your game
1 core for your anti-virus/anti-spyware realtime app
1 core for your registry cleaner/defragger
Sounds like a winner.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START