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CPU Competition Heating Up In 2012?
jd writes "2012 promises to be a fun year for hardware geeks, with three new 'Aptiv-class' MIPS64 cores being circulated in soft form, a quad-core ARM A15, a Samsung ARM A9 variant, a seriously beefed-up 8-core Intel Itanium and AMD's mobile processors. There's a mix here of chips actually out, ready to be put on silicon, and in last stages of development. Obviously these are for different users (mobile CPUs don't generally fight for marketshare with Itanium dragsters) but it is still fascinating to see the differences in approach and the different visions of what is important in a modern CPU. Combine this with the news reported earlier on DDR4, and this promises to be a fun year with many new machines likely to appear that are radically different from the last generation. Which leaves just one question — which Linux architecture will be fully updated first?"
Fast CPU and Ram is great but we are still limited to slow crappy Hard Drives (SSD's too expensive) and OS's / Software that don't take advantage of current technology, let alone next generation.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
slow crappy Hard Drives (SSD's too expensive)
SSDs aren't too expensive if you don't need to keep your library of videos available at a moment's notice at all times. There exist affordable SSDs that are big enough to hold an operating system, applications, and whatever documents you happen to be working on at a given time.
Why do people keep saying AMD can't keep up? because they don't compete in a market you care about?
My wife's laptop has an AMD E-350.. its got an ATI video card built onto the cpu.. it sucks down a whopping 9 watts, making her super light 10.6" laptop last about 7 hours.. 4GB of ram, 500GB hard drive, can stream HD video without a hiccup, and it was $350.. about what you would pay for a nice video card.. I would say AMD is competing rather well..
In the server space, were ditching Intel as fast as we can.. because for our loads, a 16 core Opteron runs oracle at the same speed as a 12 core Intel (CPU usage is not our limiting factor, disk IO is for our databases) and the difference in price last time we looked was about $7k for a Dell R815 spec'd the same as a Dell R810 with dual CPU's.. That difference is a Fusion IO card, or almost another tray of drives.. which would really help IO.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?