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4 Cores? 6 Cores? Do You Care?
An anonymous reader writes "Intel has updated its processor price list earlier today. Common sense suggests that Intel may not care that much anymore whether its customers know what they are actually buying. One new six-core processor slides in between six-core and quad-core processors – and its sequence number offers no clues about cores, clock speed, and manufacturing process. If we remember the gigahertz race just a decade ago, it is truly stunning to see how the CPU landscape has changed. Today, processors carry sequence numbers that are largely meaningless."
What about telling him the truth ?
The sequence number is assigned by the marketing department in order to confuse you. By making it harder for you to know what you're buying, they decrease your bargaining power which allow them to charge you more.
You may not be alone in that but you, along with those who think like you, certainly are not the majority. Joe Six-pack doesn't know the difference between a megahertz and a megabyte and he has much more important things to do than waste his time learning boring stuff such as the difference between SSD HDs and the traditional spinning disk HDs, let alone learn what a processor core is and what importance, if any, it has on his computing needs.
He just goes off to buy a computer and spends his money on what appears to be the best possible product he could purchase on his budget. He just chooses whatever product has the biggest e-penis he can afford. That means he chooses the one with more megahertz, the one with more HD memory, the one with more RAM, the one with more cores, the one with the bigger processor number... Heck, joe six-pack may even end up choosing a computer just because it comes with more RAM chips. "see? it has more rams, which is good."
The sad thing about it is that this behaviour is perfectly natural. When you decide to purchase something, you end up purchasing the best option according to the information that you were able to access and digest. Some of us may be better informed than others but we all do this. Some of us are better informed to the point of being able to see pass Intel's marketing bullshit but others aren't quite so fortunate. Nonetheless, the decision process is the same.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Now this is something I've not been able to find an answer for. Do sound cards actually matter with modern hardware? Mostly I've just seen a difference in the number of channels they handle, and the post processing the driver does.
If that's all, one can just use a USB sound card with an appropriate number of channels, and use FFDShow to distort the audio however you wish. Does the more expensive hardware more faithfully reproduce the audio (higher SNR)? I know cheap portable devices (and Intel HD Audio) have excellent audio output, over 100 dB in SNR, so surely there are diminishing returns... Or does it merely save the negligible CPU usage, much like offloading network IO?
Either way, even the cheapest integrated sound card is much higher quality than most speakers and headphones, so you'd see a far greater gain in audio quality with $200 headphones plugged into a $5 integrated sound card than vice versa. You have to know what's bottlenecking your performance if you hope to improve it.
Many boards now come with digital outputs, so I really don't care how bad the analog outputs might be.
When it comes to bang for your buck a dedicated D/A converter with an integrated headphone amp is probably the best upgrade you can make. One of my co-workers has one, and it blows any integrated headphone amp out of the water.
The D/A on my box's integrated sound might be good in theory, but the interference it picks up... just abysmal. So taking the sound out of the computer digitally and using a dedicated converter (or a USB sound card) does make sense.
Pro audio sound cards to still matter though. My M-Audio Delta 1010 is still amazing compared to most hardware. If you need a lot of channels in and out you still need dedicated hardware. For games and movies? Not so much IMHO.
.: Max Romantschuk