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Intel Officially Lifts the Veil On Ivy Bridge
New submitter zackmerles writes "Tom's Hardware takes the newly-released, top-of-the-line Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K for a spin. All Core i7 Ivy Bridge CPUs come with Intel HD Graphics 4000, which despite the DirectX 11 support, only provides a modest boost to the Sandy Bridge Intel HD Graphics 3000. However, the new architecture tops the charts for low power consumption, which should make the Ivy Bridge mobile offerings more desirable. In CPU performance, the new Ivy Bridge Core i7 is only marginally better than last generation's Core i7-2700K. Essentially, Ivy Bridge is not the fantastic follow-up to Sandy Bridge that many enthusiasts had hoped for, but an incremental improvement. In the end, those desktop users who decided to skip Sandy Bridge to hold out for Ivy Bridge, probably shouldn't have. On the other hand, since Intel priced the new Core i7-3770K and Core i5-3570K the same as their Sandy Bridge counterparts, there is no reason to purchase the previous generation chips."
Reader jjslash points out that coverage is available from all the usual suspects — pick your favorite: AnandTech, TechSpot, Hot Hardware, ExtremeTech, and Overclockers.
So, Intel, a company with no real competition right now in the market, has produced a product that offers only a very slight performance boost, and relied on tons of marketing to drum up anticipation for this mediocre offering. And then priced it the same as existing offerings as an apology to those who waited. Actually, that sounds about par for the course these days. The only real news in cpus and motherboards has been that they've gone multicore and continue to increase bandwidth. And now that they can't squeeze any more performance out of the designs, they're working on decreasing energy consumption.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
A roundup of reviews from the usual major sites as well as others not mentioned in the summary above: Overclockers Review, Anandtech Review, Anandtech Undervolting/Overclocking, HardwareSecrets, Bit-tech, PCPer, Tweaktown, Hard OCP, The Inquirer, Techspot, Computer Shopper, Tom's Hardware, ExtremeTech, PC Mag, Overclockers Club, and Guru 3d
Overclockers
In the end, those desktop users who decided to skip Sandy Bridge to hold out for Ivy Bridge, probably shouldn't have.
Well, that rather depends on how many Ivy Bridge recalls there will be, doesn't it?
The vast majority of users will use it. Intel integrated has been a good enough solution for most users for a long time now.
It would cost more to fab a chip without it, would you pay extra for that? Since they would be making so few.
This is a normal tick in the Intel tick-tock cycle. You will get that 50%-100% with Haswell.
Every technology that sees huge improvements over short timespans will begin to plateau eventually. There's only so much you can do before you start bumping into major constraints, such as the laws of physics.
If we put the cost aside for a moment, the new Intel CPU keeps the Moore's law standard and the power to compute ration is accordingly increased compered to the previous CPU. So I don't get why people complain.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
My current CPU is a Conroe architecture Core 2 duo E6700. I'm building an new PC with an Ivy Bridge i7 CPU in a couple months, and it'll definitely offer that kind of performance increase. Successive generations of latest and greatest have always offered marginal improvements at best, but it accumulates once you skip a generation or four.
It'd probably cost Intel more to make a separate production line that fabs chips without onboard video, they wouldn't even be able to sell them cheaper than regular CPUs. And if you're not using it the onboard graphics capabilities, it's not drawing any extra power, so no improvement there either.
Well, any machine at retail will. Retail is just to slim margins for the extra cost.
Graphics CAN'T be removed because they are built into the CPU-chipset combo... And nobody else is licensed to make chipsets. Intel is forcing OEMS to go back to "external" chips on the PCI-E bus... Which is 100% more circuitry and super complex firmware to get back to what you got from Nvidia. That adds $100-$200 to the wholesale.
Things like MacBook Air are forced to choose battery/size or performance... Which is why Apple stuck with C2D for so long as it was the last CPU intel allowed third party chipsets with.
What sucks most is that these NEW computers are stuck with OBSOLETE graphics out of the box... Note how Apple's Mountain Lion has to drop all the old Intel Integrated because it just can't perform to iPhone or iPad standards anymore... Ouch!
Many consumers use onboard video. YouTube and casual gaming are okay on it. The lastest tests show that the 4000 is better or as good as the current generation of budget discrete cards. For the budget conscious consumer, there is no reason to get the budget nVidia or Radeon. Gamers don't care about either option anyways.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Okay, so I have been planning a long term computer strategy since 2006 when I got a decent first gen Quad Core.
So hopefully if I can hold out that long, I should wait for the Tock - Haswell architecture, at the same time waiting for the Post-Win8-Metro consensus, which might just be either a Tock for Microsoft or maybe even a paradigm explosion into Apple and/or Linux if by some Mayan Miracle Microsoft implodes as a company. Or, if there is no "Windows 9", then I'll have to think about what to do then.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
(I'm not compiling C++ or even Java most of the time.)
Telling us what you are doing is probably more likely to encourage helpful suggestions than telling us what you aren't doing...
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"For the budget conscious consumer, there is no reason to get the budget nVidia or Radeon."
Except for the fact that a An AMD llano A8 will blow an ivy bridge out of the water when it comes to games. Plenty of consumers
who buy $500 budget pcs never open the case.
I was thinking I needed to have at least a Core i3 because it supports Intel Virtualization Extensions (VT-x). But then I read that VirtualBox doesn't really use hardware virtualization much. So even a Dual Core B940 should suffice, right?
Correct, but it is still a good idea to have hardware virtualization. Virtualbox does use hardware virtualization but it is only required when virtualizing 64bit guests. If you are running 32bit guests, hardware virtualization can still be used and should allow for better performance. Hardware virtualization will also allow you to play around with KVM and other VM software. If you're getting a new machine, why limit yourself?
It avoids a problem many companies have of fighting with a new design and a new process, and having a product that gets delayed, has issues, etc. They either use a new design, on a stable process, or an untested process, with a proven design.
Sometimes a new process can give a moderate sized performance bump due to higher clock speeds, but that doesn't always happen.
It does reduce power consumption though and that is always nice.
Mostly web development (that's where the market is): including frameworks like Symfony, Drupal, etc. which have large codebases. Using Netbeans (Java-based) to step through and debug that code.
Running standard MySQL/Apache, etc.
Running virtual machines to simulate environments. Running MongoDB and Postfix for mail. Running unit tests. Running integration tests (like automated in-browser testing).
In addition, running standard productivity tools (email, office, etc.). Running light graphics tools (Inkscape, Gimp). Running a ton of browser windows and tabs including research and API documentation.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Intel's onboard GPUs are good enough to play games these days. No you won't be cranking up the graphics detail, but they'll do the trick to play many games. You might notice on the linked page it is running Skyrim in medium detail at a playable framerate. That is a modern game title. The other games tested are similar. None of them are running stellar, but they are doing 30fps at medium quality.
For non-gamers, well more and more is making use of the GPU. All that shiny UI stuff is done on the GPU, and all the major browsers are using GPU acceleration. It doesn't take a ton of GPU power, but it needs some.
Speaking of 64 vs 32, anybody want to say anything about 64 or 32 being faster?
I.e., if you don't have > 2GB or > 4GB datasets, 32-bit is faster because it doesn't have the overhead? (I.e., 64bit is pushing more data around in every single machine instruction because the addresses specified are longer.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
(I.e., 64bit is pushing more data around in every single machine instruction because the addresses specified are longer.)
No, it's not. In fact, you're less likely to require an address in an instruction on an x64 CPU because you have twice as many registers so you're not having to perpetually push values out to RAM and read them back in order to free up registers for other uses.
My HTPC is also using the same CPU as yours, and I am also thinking of upgrading to Ivy Bridge and getting rid of the discrete AMD Radeon card. If only Obama could bail me out!
Oh, so if you're setting up a virtual machine (either for testing locally or for production on a VPS somewhere like Rackspace), even it's only a 1GB machine, it should be 64 bit? I'm assuming 512MB should be 32bit.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
You mean Apple's AMD 6630M, 6750M, 6770M, 6750, 6770, 6970 will be beat by AMD's 6350/6450. I don't see that happening. You can get discrete graphics on Macs if you want. For budget PCs, integrated graphics has always been a cost saver for Mac and PC. The only models that don't offer discrete are MacBook Airs which have been heavily optimized for weight and power savings. Adding a discrete card makes no sense here.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
For those of us who need a reminder:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Bridge_(microarchitecture)
Yeah, it's Wikipedia. But it's short and to the point.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Why? If you've waited this long, just hold out for Haswell. Intel has already confirmed they're changing the socket, so really that gives you the best odds of an upgrade path in the future should they decide to keep LGA1150 around for Skylake (the successor to Haswell). At the very least you're stuck with yet another obsoleted socket, but with a likely impressive performance upgrade over Ivy Bridge. By buying in now, you've already lost 1 year on current performance levels going forward... the best time to buy in would have been with Sandy Bridge.
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I'm curious about this too - I do mostly Java development, so I'll be developing with Eclipse, running a full stack (Apache, JBoss, MySQL and perhaps some other smaller servers), might be doing some GWT development (which at least used to require very fast single-threaded processes, so multi-cores didn't help much - not sure if that's changed).
My current home dev laptop is a Core 2 Duo, so a couple of generations behind. I was wanting to upgrade, but wondering if putting it off until Haswell is available would be worth it, since performance gains (and getting trigate debugged, if necessary) seem like they will be pretty damn significant with that generation.
Or do you think soon-to-be-released Ivy Bridge mobile processors will suffice for that kind of thing?
- Tim
This is cheaper for you, it would cost more to fab a separate unit. Also motherboards are now also cheaper.
You have no real complaint.
There is little to no demand for more CPU processing power. Even with Web/DB servers, most of the bottleneck is the IO or memory. Reducing power consumption is what everyone wants. They could easily slap on 8 cores and claim it's 2xs faster for the same power, but why. In the end it would just cost more, consume more power, and not add value.
Don't worry about the CPU and spend your money on a big SSD & lots of RAM.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
You're not seeing the big picture.
GPUs are no longer "graphics" cards, but co-processors. Not much takes advantage of them yet, but in the near future software will.
Microsoft, AMD, Intel, nVidia, ARM, IBM, and some others, are all working on taking advantage of the massive number-crunching power of modern GPUS. They want to make it easy for programmers to use them and let the OS interface in a simple manner.
These frameworks mostly just look at throughput vs latency. They plan to make it easy to not just make use of local GPUs, but also remote computing nodes. They break up work loads into "tasks"(or whichever term the framework uses), then the OS load balances across the different available computing interfaces, which can be x86 CPUs, GPUs, Larrabee, Networked computers, Cloud, etc. You just tell the OS what kind of latency you need to work with and it will do the rest. It may not give the best performance, but it will give you good performance with little effort. the 80/20 rule.
Right now it looks like wasted transistors, but really they're just setting the stage for a massive revolution. Anyway, what else would you do? Removing the GPU doesn't really reduce the price much and adding more cores isn't beneficial because most software can't take advantage of them anyway, even high end servers are having a hard time with the amount of general computing power these multi-core beasts have.
Ha! I remember waiting for KDE4 to "do the switch". Still running Windows :D
When building a new PC I went for the Pentium G620. It's pretty much the lowest-end Sandy Bridge CPU in existence. I've been running this model for a while now.
With Ivy Bridge coming out, hopefully the prices on Sandy Bridge CPUs will come down. Maybe I could move to an i3 on the cheap, then. Or perhaps I'll even wait for Haswell; Sandy Bridge CPUs will probably be dirt cheap by then.
:(){
If you care about CPU performance and you aren't already running a Sandy Bridge CPU, then yes, you should get an Ivy Bridge system.
Sandy Bridge is a very fast architecture, so if you already have one, then it makes more sense to wait for Haswell. Even users who care about speed are unlikely to appreciate the improvement made by Ivy Bridge over Sandy Bridge.
Meanwhile, nobody who cares about graphics on the desktop is going to want an on-die GPU, regardless of the CPU it's attached to. Ivy Bridge is really only needed on laptops that need to run high-end games.
Actually I've found during socket change is usually the best time to buy on both Intel and AMD as the previous socket units drop like a stone and you can get some crazy deals. I recently built my oldest a Thuban X6 and after MIRs I got the whole shebang for $460 with an HD4850 AND Win 7 home throw in, and that is for a machine with 6 cores, a 640gb HDD, 8Gb of RAM, and a 24x DVD burner.
Lets be honest folks, the games and programs simply haven't kept up with the cores so any of the units on the market today will be more than plenty for the vast majority of tasks and a good hexacore or quad sold today should last you easily until 2020 barring some new "killer app" unless you are literally pounding the living hell out of the CPU but if he was doing that he wouldn't still be on a Core2. So unless you must have the absolute bleeding edge waiting for a socket change can save you serious cash while giving you some pretty nice performance bumps.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If you are expecting to upgrade and actually wanting to *plan* on retaining a motherboard, Intel is actually a pretty poor choice. Socket AM2 (first out in 2006) can still run the latest Bulldozer based AMD processors. Meanwhile, LGA1155 was released in 2011 and is already hitting the end of the line with Ivy Bridge. Given that he waited this long to upgrade conroe (my desktop is still conroe), there is nearly zero chance that his next round of reasonable upgrade will be within the life of LGA1155 or LGA1150, though it probably will be within the life of AM3 or maybe FM2.
That said, it's not necessarily a wise idea to pin a lot of hopes on retaining the motherboard on an update. It's just another component and when someone is looking to upgrade, they'll probably also be interested in PCIe generation increases, memory speed and size (e.g. DDR2 is now a liability of AM2), and assorted other nice things that come with newer motherboards. I wouldn't keep the motherboard from my Conroe system even if the latest intel processor would work in it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I have set up several machines using 2gb and 3Gb with a 64bit OS for future proofing and can tell you that you can see the difference thanks to the 64 bit registers. Although personally with RAM as cheap as it is anybody would have to be nuts to hamstring performance by going with less than 4gb of RAM, especially if you are planning to use it as a desktop replacement. hell even my netbook has 8gb simply because the upgrade was so cheap it was rather pointless to go less.
Now since i don't know your budget i'll just give you a couple of suggestions, if money is not tight an i5 with an SSD as an i5 is currently the sweet spot on the Intel side when it comes to price/performance whereas if money is tighter then go for an AMD A6 or A8 again with an SSD. For what you are wanting to do the SSD along with plenty of RAM will give you the biggest performance increase, something like this with an SSD in place of the HDD would probably be the best bang for the buck.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Besides, whatever plan Intel currently has for Haswell, I wouldn't be surprised if they slow down a bit. When they only face 'real' competition from themselves, they tend to get a bit more sluggish and unimpressive with their product line enhancements. Sure, they'll be hammering on Medfield sucessors to try to make inroads into the ARM dominated mobile space, but desktop and server lines don't have a lot of pressure to force them to be aggressive in product development right now.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Maybe with AMD. Intel seems to keep their prices about the same or only slightly discounted to discourage the practice you describe. Core2Quads seem to be gone from inventory now, but last I checked a Q9650 was *still* more expensive than a Sandy Bridge i7 2600k, and an i7-860 is still ~$300 where you can find it. And DDR2 is now twice as expensive now as when I bought it last. And if any of those last-gen components fail, you're up the proverbial shit creek without a paddle overpaying for replacement old components or buying into a new architecture with a shortened lifetime. The best long-term strategy seems to be to buy the first of a new socket change, which has the *potential* to yield >1 tick-tock cycle. Sometimes it won't work out, but buying the old socket (and RAM bus, and IDE bus, and graphics bus) over the newer is *guaranteed* to not work out, and you won't get stuck trying to find old components at a reasonable price if anything breaks. Also FWIW, LGA775 was around for quite a while, as was AMD's previous socket (forget what it's called). While a LGA775 P4 motherboard wasn't forward compatible with a C2D, C2D was forward compatible with C2Q, which was nice.
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I agree, but I've been displeased with AMD's performance per dollar when I was looking to upgrade. Additionally, within the lifecycle of DDR2, I was able to upgrade from C2D to C2Q without swapping motherboards. Graphics cards hadn't (and in most cases still haven't) come close to exhausting the available bandwidth in PCIe 2.0, so that was a non-issue. I agree that it's half luck, but nonetheless, buying an obsolete (or soon to be obsolete) architecture is dooming oneself to failure.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
That's why we'll see a lot more tablets, netbooks and ultrathingies with AMD APUs. The rumor mill says that Trinity scored a lot of design wins.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I am currently running my main rig built on an Socket 1366 i7-920 (@ 3.8ghz), X58 chipset Rampage II Extreme, and 6gb of tri-channel RAM (Soon to be 12gb). For my investment, it seemed that Intel's "Enthusiast" socket 1366 made all the right choices. The tech was released early, prior to the mainstream socket 1156, was more advanced (tri-channel RAM and X58 allowed for tons of PCI-E lanes and CrossFireX/SLI without having to choose etc...), the X58 boards didn't have all the foulups necessitating multiple revisions and GEN2/GEN3 as in the mainstream, and the i7-920/930 both had similar specs to the 960 extreme edition save for clock speed and all were open to huge boosts when overclocking. Later, the hex-cores came about for those with the $999 to spend and incredible performance. This rig has kept me near the top performance-wise against the entire socket 1156, and 1155 lineup to date - competitive with Sandy Bridge and even Ivy so many years later.
I was actually looking forward to Sandy Bridge-E and the debut of Socket 2011 to be a second generation 1366 but sadly it seemed Intel flipped about-face with everything meaningful. 2011 based builds came out WAY after Sandy Bridge 1155, the processors were incredibly expensive starting at around $400 for a quad and a semi-decent hex was in the $700 range, X78 high end boards proved even more expensive than X58 at launch, leaving the platform a huge investment for the upgrade. Where was the Core i7-920 analog that had the cache, cores, and features of the extreme edition but was clocked lower (leaving plenty of room for OCing up to and beyond EE specs) for the $250-300 mark? Everything they seemed to do right with Nahalem and Socket 1366 as a whole, which has probably been the best platform investment I've made in years, they've scrubbed for what...? Does Intel just want me upgrading more frequently and paying more for the privilege? Do they not want to "hit it out of the park" anymore in favor of small base hits? It seems in bad taste, even more so if it is done because they aren't afraid of AMD's latest crop of CPUs so they figure they can choke out a few minor steps forward and ratchet the price skyward as there are no alternatives
Thus, I passed by SB-E which I hoped to be the next "big" upgrade and looked toward IB-E but things don't bode well. There seems to be little discussion of IB-E and what is mentioned suggests it wont' be launched until very late this year, leaving it to fall in right before Haswell. There are competing reports if Haswell-E will exist on Socket2011 and not require a new socket change as those who are enjoing SB/IB on 1155 will. I hear nothing about pricing, and if SB-E is any indication, it will be another expensive clusterfuck. If anyone as further information as to IB-E, Haswell's Enthusiast socket, or the future of the Enthusiast platform in general I'd appreciate it, but at the moment it doesn't seem promising. I truly hope that Piledriver can provide solid competition for Ivy Bridge in terms of both single/multithreaded performance at "enthusiast/power user" tasks like gaming, coding, content creation etc... as it would be nice to see AMD bring back the whole "5-10% less performance than Intel at a HUGE monetary savings for the processor and platform itself" that brought all my recent builds save my main rig onto Phenom II X4 or X6 BlackEditions, which serve faithfully.
Ivy Bridge being an incremental upgrade isn't necessarily a huge problem, but I worry more about overall pricing of Intel platforms, Socket 2011's IB-E still in question, Haswell,and the future of the Enthusiast socket/platform as a whole.
Core2Due (Q6000) here. Just found out my Asus P5B-Deluxe has at least one bad cap next to one of the PCIe slots. For me, Ivy-Bridge is the holdout. Besides, I prefer a mature platform over a new one. Microcode updates rolled up in the latest BIOS revisions not withstanding.
Life is not for the lazy.
I'm a little out of verse when it comes to these components, but I'm wondering what kind of memory bandwidth a dual channel Z77 board can use compared to my now old X58 triple channel board? A couple of the reviews suggested that at DDR 1600 they're both tied around 20GB/s, which baffles me. Can anyone explain how that could be? Wouldn't an extra channel of memory give you 50% more speed over dual channel?
Perhaps the next iteration, "Poison Ivy," will be the sexy version? The "Poison Ivy" movie girl and 'Poison Ivy' girl from the Batman movie were rather sexy. Or am I just wandering around a dark closet here by myself?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Well that was the nice thing about socket AM3, in that you could use AM3 chips in AM2 or AM2+ sockets., the other nice thing is one can still get AM3+ which will take AM3 chips and supports DDR 3 and SATA 6 so it isn't like you have to take older RAM to use the older chip on the AMD side, the one i built for the oldest for example has 8Gb of DDR3 while my X6 is running on a board with 8Gb of DDR 2 (since i already had the RAM I simply got a board to support it while taking the newer AM3 chip).
But on the Intel side...well since Core2 frankly they've been gouging IMHO, they know they have a big enough lead they can get away with it. Hell we are only now seeing socket 775 Pentium Ds in the $20 range whereas you can buy Phenom I quads for less than $60 in many places.
The big problem on the Intel side though is the socket roulette they have played of late, i mean for awhile there there were no less than 4 different sockets being supported! LGA 1155 seems to be the sweet spot ATM for Intel chips but frankly who knows how long that one will last.
In the end frankly if you want to go Intel you just have to bend over and get one of the more expensive units anyway so any price drops will be moot as most of the lower chips in Intel's line are crippled so you really aren't doing yourself any favors going for the lower SKUs unless you are just building say an office box. this is one thing that has really pissed me off of late with Intel, if you want to differentiate based on cores, speed, or whether it has HT or not? Not a problem with that. But killing important features like virtualization or enhanced speedstep really makes it difficult to know which chips are crippled in what way and makes it a PITA, as those that got bit by MSFT's first version of XP Mode found out.
But as long as the supplies hold i think I'll stick with AM3+ on the desktops, simply because the chips are dirt cheap and it has support for the latest features while still giving good bang for the buck. on the Intel side I'd probably wait until Haskell (I believe that's the name) or if I absolutely had to have one the Core i5 laptops seem to be a good value. But you are right that the Intel pricing frankly just isn't great, even when the older lines aren't doing so hot they simply refuse to lower prices.
I guess when you win most of the benchmarks you don't have to care, maybe they are doing it on purpose as another poster said to keep AMD alive to keep the governments off their ass, who knows. I'm starting to think that is the case the more i think about it, as with AMD stuck with faildozer it would be pretty trivial for Intel to take the entire low end just by selling the older line at a discount.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
it allows using smaller data size operations (for example, 16 bit) on an unsigned data element that is stored in a physically larger space (maybe 64 bit to allow for a large maximum size). Once the numbers in this field outgrow 16 bits, the code to deal with them can be changed to handle 32 and then 64 bit values without actually reformatting the numbers themselves. This is a minor consideration but it is there.
Low order bytes first is also the natural order for performing addition and subtraction (multiplication doesn't care either way). It is no use having the highest order byte in an addition until the lower order bytes have been processed to find the carry status.
To be fair, a reverse argument along those lines could be made - in comparisons, knowing the highest order byte might be enough to decide the comparison. I'm not sure, but division might also prefer high byte first.
As the other poster said, CPU speed is very unlikely to be a bottleneck for you. A lot of RAM is a lot more important. You're probably going to want 1GB for each VM instance, so 8GB to be able to run a small handful and still have enough on the host is probably a minimum. 16GB of laptop RAM is still pretty expensive, but if you can afford it then it will mean less time shutting down and starting up VMs.
An SSD may make a difference. It certainly does when compiling C-family languages, because you do a lot of random reads to get all of the headers and then do the write for the output. It's probably less important for things like PHP, although it will make a big difference when suspending and resuming VMs.
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Who exactly will use it?
How about corporate America, where not a single damn is given about Crysis frame rates?
Maybe anyone who buys one of the UltraBooks that will be made possible through the low wattage of these parts?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
There is only one long term strategy; If it still does the job, run it until it dies, then replace it. If it doesn't do the job, upgrade. My Q6600 still does the job; I boot to Windows 7 / Mint in under a minute, games perform well at my monitors native resolution. I don't sit idly by while video is transcoding / running long processes anyway, so how fast unattended workloads take makes no difference.
When it dies, I'll do the whole thing again. I'll keep the graphics card (replaced due to hardware failure), but the rest will be scrapped. I couldn't buy an LGA775 processor to replace it now if I wanted to.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I don't know what the yield on Intel's new 22nm process is like, but given the large area of the chip used by the GPU, I would have expected a significant proportion of bad chips to be caused by GPU defects. These could then be sold as processors with no onboard GPU. I guess marketing didn't want to confuse things, and in any case the marginal cost of making one more chip is not a big part of the price, so they are content to just throw away these defective chips.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Core2Due (Q6000) here. Just found out my Asus P5B-Deluxe has at least one bad cap next to one of the PCIe slots. For me, Ivy-Bridge is the holdout. Besides, I prefer a mature platform over a new one. Microcode updates rolled up in the latest BIOS revisions not withstanding.
Or, you can just replace the cap...
Neither socket AM2 nor AM2+ can run Bulldozer.
btw, I'm very happy with my AM2+ motherboard running a Phenom II.
Also comes with a NEW socket, 1150.
Thanks Intel Jerks. Can you not design a new socket every 2 years please.
Basically if I upgrade this year I am stuck with it. Owning a Desktop should make it easier to upgrade! When I have to buy all new MB, Ram, CPU, etc every couple of years you are kind of defeating the whole purpose.
Now I have to decide if I want to wait an entire year for Haswell to come out or not (assuming it isn't delayed etc...)
Oh, it's still doing the job.
This is my attempt to do some rough prelim research to have a strategy on hand when it DOES die. I consider myself fortunate that my custom built comp is going on 7 years now, that's pretty good for the life of a comp. Meanwhile in OS land, I'm seeing all the long brewing warnings of XP fading from support. And slow bits of feature-support are being nudged from XP.
That's why I don't trust Win 8 Metro, it's MS's version of Negative-Tick -> Positive Tock, my emergency plan is Win7 because at work I had the chance to thoroughly pound it and maybe excepting whatever weird DRM horror stories were going on with Vista back in the day, it will do. But since I totally don't trust Metro, and given MS's Now Now Now marketing, it feels at risk to be another Zune, I want to see what the Post Win-8-Metro fallout becomes, and that's about as good as I'll get. By then it will be some 2013, and I'll admit with anyone that's about time to get serious preparing for a successor path. I have a good chance of making it - my buddy who built this comp urged me to spend about another $300 in "invisible quality components" to avoid the cheap fail points known on the Dell/other Price-Slicer-Specials, and basically I'm satisfied. Lemme squeak another 2 years out of this beast and then I'll be fairly satisfied. ... But I DO need that 2 years perspective, I'm so feeling like on the Early-Zune Whitewash, I can't see what lies beyond Win-8 yet.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine