Really? SNES Emulators? You're aware they run on Pentium IV generation Intel graphics, right? I have a Pentium M machine here that gets regular use as an SNES emulator...
Is it really faster though? I haven't gotten much real-time Win8 usage in (mainly because my day-to-day machines are still missing drivers), but the performance seemed pretty much the same during the short time I had it installed on bare-metal hardware (mostly using it in a VM).
What do you perceive as being better performing? Launching applications? Game performance?
Some are unrestricted, but many are limited to 120kph for certain stretches. Also, the speed limits change (they're put up on big LED displays hanging over the highway) depending on traffic and weather conditions...
... self-explanatory really. Just try 'em out. I'd recommend VMWare for Windows clients because the integration feels a bit more polished, but you can't really go wrong with either one.
Have you been keeping an eye on Cloverfield? The CPU performance pretty much kills the fastest ARM tablet chips, and power usage is similarly impressive - The first early adopters are reporting 10h+ battery life on the Samsung ATIV Smart PC, which seems to be right up there with all the ARM based tablets.
"I have wanted to have a 2560x1600 laptop display on my 15inch for a long time, since before the "Retina Display", but everyone I work with think I am crazy for wanting it. The screen real estate is precious to a developer. Yes the text is small, but I have the screen reasonable close to my face and could easily work on a smaller font if it was crisp enough for reading. I also want a 16 core processor and 64GB RAM in my laptop, at least until the broadband speeds allow me to run a private cloud at home that I can access from anywhere. I use virtual machines a lot and regularly exhaust my 16GB RAM and 8 cores on my laptop anytime I want to run end-to-end testing."
Well, since 17" laptops no longer have higher resolutions than 1080p, why not just go with a 15.6" device with a 1080p screen? I'm typing this on a Thinkpad T520 right now, which is more or less what you describe, and has a very standard keyboard as far as laptop keyboards go. Separately grouped F1-F12 keys, grouped Home/End/PgUp/PgDn block and most important: Fully centered due to the lack of a num-block.
Of course. Ivy Bridge's onboard graphics added support for 4K, IIRC, so anyone with a halfway modern PC should be good to go, even without a dedicated graphics card...
If you're talking about desktop monitors: Low-end 1080p displays cost $100 vs. the $400-500 that low-end 1920x1200 displays used to cost... I'd prefer 1200 pixels height as well, but for the price? I've found it's easier to just use the money saved to buy a third (or fourth) display for portrait mode.
Doesn't run Windows with decent battery life (no working Optimus, and the screen is quite inefficient), no add-on batteries (the slice battery underneath my Thinkpad right now has the same capacity as the Retina MBP's internal battery, and I have another one of the same capacity in the main slot), no trackpoint, easy-to-ding surfaces (who the fuck was it that decided all laptops need sleeves? Fuck sleeves, my Thinkpads look like new without 'em)... it's not really a viable option, unfortunately.
I'm hoping for a drop-in replacement TFT for Thinkpads at 2560x1440... 15.6" with a 40-pin connector would be just dandy. And the pixel density would be just about right for Windows 7 at 100% scaling (1080p on 15.6" is still far from small). Or maybe 3840x2160, though I'd probably need to crank the scaling up to 150% in that case:)
"Yes, it is true that the fastest chips are made by Intel, but when you look at the cost of typical (not high end) machine, AMD is hard to beat, especially when the graphics in and APU will work fine for you."
Interesting... care to give an example? In most cases, I feel I can spec out an Intel based machine for the same price (also using the IGP) that is fast enough for HTPC use and runs cooler and quieter while using half the power... unless you actually need the extra GPU power or the additional cores AMD likes to throw in at the same price point, what's the point in going with AMD? A Sandy Bridge Celeron/Pentium is more efficient and provides enough processing power for any HTPC I've seen.
I'd actually like to start buying AMD again in order to give them some support, but Intel's where the efficiency bang-for-the-buck is at right now... this may be different for those of you who don't pay your own power bill *cough*mom's_basement*cough*:p
tp_smapi works just fine. It's included with TLP (which reduces power consumption on Thinkpads significantly, BTW): http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/tlp.html
It's easy to use - if you know how to use a browser, you can use this. No fiddling with drivers or apt-get or anything else to make the input devices work properly/better, make battery life acceptable or get performance up to par - just open it and start working...
As an example as to the problems regular notebook users face, I've been noticing an alarming trend lately: The German language Thinkpad forum (thinkpad-forum.de), which is actually full of intelligent people - lots of engineers, IT guys, sound guys and so on - is starting to show that Windows 7 is too complicated and difficult to set up in a way that maximizes potential battery life. As I sit here and type this on a big 15.6" Thinkpad with the power-sucking FullHD screen, I'm seeing a power draw of, oh, 6.5W - I'm seeing 12+ hours of real-world use with the big 9-cell, usually leaving my power supply at home and coming home with 30% to spare even though the damned thing was on all day.
Other users with the same internal hardware (Sandy Bridge i3/i5/i7 on the same chipset, no dedicated graphics) and often smaller, more efficient displays, are reporting *much* higher battery usage. They're only getting 3-4 hours out of a 55Wh 6-cell battery, so 15-20W of average power draw, while surfing the web without Flash or just using Office applications... how does this happen?
Easy:
Forget to install a driver? Power consumption skyrockets. Let Windows update update a device driver to a non-manufacturer-optimized version? Power consumption skyrockets. Use the device manufacturer's update utility, which then proceeds to crash in the middle of a driver update? Power consumption skyrockets (if you're lucky enough to be left with a booting system). Forget to close CPU-hogging program X or a program with moving graphical elements (i.e. an animation of some kind that constantly repeats itself)? Power consumption skyrockets. Don't realize a program has crashed and has pegged a core of the CPU at 100%? Power consumption skyrockets. Device driver crashed? P C S!
And that's just the power usage aspect... there are all sorts of other finicky little traps when it comes to running a full-blown Windows or Linux machine. You and I are probably used to it, so we really don't notice all the little optimizations we use to make our machines run properly: NoScript, Adblock, Click-to-Flash, no background tasks that hog CPU or I/O, restarting browsers and other processes that are using more and more memory over the last week of uptime... we notice when our machines are running more slowly than usual, and can use tools like the task manager and resource monitor to determine what's causing the slowness...
And let's be honest: Which normal person wants to fuck with all that?
Even cut down Linuxes like Android exhibit some of the same symptoms - Even excluding third-party non-system-apps there are too many software components that can crash or misbehave, keeping the device awake during standby or draining the battery faster than usual during regular use. It's all too complicated for a regular user, and in the case of Android and Linux in general, I myself have trouble pinpointing many issues... often, the only thing I can do is just reboot the device.
That's why Chrome OS's approach is so awesome - bare-metal OS, browser, done. Nothing to fuck up, minimal processes to crash, hardly anything that can misbehave and suck down power... Of course, not being able to work offline means it's also completely useless for actual day-to-day use unless you get a version with a mobile data connection and never take it out of the country, but the concept is freakin awesome.
"Interesting, because I see a significant difference between my AMD with 3200 and an Intel with an HD 3000... and AMD wins hands down. Then again, I'm running windows8 on that laptop now. I didn't benchmark it before 'upgrading'."
In *video*? How do you tell the difference between smooth-as-butter and smooth-as-butter?:p
What I really don't understand is: Why is AMD, with an (unfortunately) inferior product, trying to compete with Intel? They should be undercutting them at every turn instead of putting similar-performance products on the same price level... to my eyes, AMD has a clusterfuck of different platforms, high power consumption and even a bit of a history of instability (OK, that's a bit of personal bias from my own days with AMD machines... i.e. my teens and early twenties) - in order to present a good value, they'd need to offer the same performance at half the price. Otherwise I'll stick with cooler, more efficient, faster and more hassle-free Intel parts, even if I get less cores or less MHz.
"I think you contradicted your own argument. You would (to reiterate my own words) likely notice aero being turned on a lot more than you would notice a 10% faster CPU."
You do realize I was referring to an 8+ years old mobile chipset-integrated GPU, right? Even many dedicated cards from that era won't run Aero...
"Again, the difference between an Intel HD graphics whatever and a Radeon 6000 series integrated chips are actually noticeable on these applications..."
I have both here (a Radeon HD6670 in a desktop and an Intel HD3000 in a laptop, to be exact), as well as a laptop with the 4500MHD and another older desktop with an HD5450... none of them show ANY performance difference whatsoever when putting out HD video. Even Youtube 1080p is accelerated perfectly on the multiple generations old 4500MHD.
"or anyone who decides they want to try and particular game before spending a couple of hundred bucks on hardware to play it properly. I make games for a living and Intel graphics cards have been fucking the PC gaming industry for years."
Let's see... the ability to *maybe* try a game that I might want to play some day, or two to three times as much battery life with the same battery capacity? Sounds like a no-brainer to me... and sub-50W desktop systems? Thank you Intel!
"SSD is a more complicated argument. The Core 2 (nehalem) processors, that are i5's i7's etc. don't support full SSD speeds, but are much older, the newer Sandy Bridge do, but an i3 sandy bridge or ivy bridge is usually more expensive than a comparable amd system, but not by much etc. etc. And the Intel parts have much better battery life. If you have a nehalem or older board and want cheap - AMD makes a compelling product, but if you have a little bit more money to spend the waters are muddied considerably, and both platforms support SSD's at full speed these days."
You're not making a lot of sense. Any old processor "supports full SSD speeds"... if you're talking about certain boards/chipsets being limited to, say, SATA or SATA II, then yes, some SSDs may not be utilized to their full extent, in that you may not reach the advertized sequential read/write speeds - but the important part that makes your system seem more snappy is still there: Reduced access times.
As for Windows 8 being faster (or "behaving better") on AMD parts: Do you have anything to back up that claim with?
LOL what??? Intel integrated graphics have pretty much ALWAYS been enough for basic office and internet stuff... hell, I have an Intel 945 something or other Pentium M based notebook that runs Windows 7 just fine with Aero turned off.
The only place you're going to see a difference is in games or other similarly graphics-heavy applications... and the world isn't filled with only 1. kids who can't afford proper graphics cards and 2. people using serious graphical applications. For the bulk of computer users, if it can play Youtube 1080p and Blu-Ray (rips), the GPU is more than fast enough.
Now if you'd replaced GPU with SSD in your post, I might be more inclined to agree with you...
If you're willing to live with the (much!) higher power consumption and less performance per clock, then sure...
As for overclocking a K processor being a time/cost sink... not really. If you've ever overclocked a regular old system in the last decade or so (with all the different clock speeds, voltages, multipliers and latencies that all interacted), overclocking a Sandy or Ivy K desktop processor will seem easier than flipping a light switch.
The initial generations of *cheap* SSDs were immature - as soon as Intel released the Postville, that was pretty much a thing of the past. These days, there's no excuse for buying OCZ/Verbatim/*CheapoBrand* when you can get a Samsung 830, Crucial M4 or Intel 320/520 for just a little more.
Except for the battery life... I get 5 to 6 hours on my Thinkpad convertible tablet, so the new device should hit at least 10 in order to make the upgrade worthwhile:-)
I'm hoping one of the Windows 8 based tablets will fit the bill, even if I'm not actually looking to run Windows8 specifically...
Not really... what I need is x86 hardware in a tablet form factor that uses the same amount of power (or preferably less) than current ARM tablets, with a decently bright high contrast display, a decent stylus and a big battery. I'll still be carrying my laptop (Windows 7) and smartphone (Android) around in addition though...
More specifics please. I've tried this with my Galaxy Nexus and found the virtual desktop (RDP via WiFi to a server connected to the same local network via GBit Ethernet) sluggish at best. Drove my efficiency way down compared to just using a Windows machine directly, even though I was using the same screen and input devices...
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Might be a graphics driver issue (Flash video is hardware accelerated on recent hardware). What kind of graphics hardware are you running?
Never had an issue like that myself on Youtube (other sites, sure, but not Youtube).
Really? SNES Emulators? You're aware they run on Pentium IV generation Intel graphics, right? I have a Pentium M machine here that gets regular use as an SNES emulator...
Is it really faster though? I haven't gotten much real-time Win8 usage in (mainly because my day-to-day machines are still missing drivers), but the performance seemed pretty much the same during the short time I had it installed on bare-metal hardware (mostly using it in a VM).
What do you perceive as being better performing? Launching applications? Game performance?
Some are unrestricted, but many are limited to 120kph for certain stretches. Also, the speed limits change (they're put up on big LED displays hanging over the highway) depending on traffic and weather conditions...
... self-explanatory really. Just try 'em out. I'd recommend VMWare for Windows clients because the integration feels a bit more polished, but you can't really go wrong with either one.
Now imagine if you'd bought a PC with Ubuntu preinstalled... do you really think there'd be less crapware on it?
Try a clean install of Windows 7. Very little nagging to be found. :)
Have you been keeping an eye on Cloverfield? The CPU performance pretty much kills the fastest ARM tablet chips, and power usage is similarly impressive - The first early adopters are reporting 10h+ battery life on the Samsung ATIV Smart PC, which seems to be right up there with all the ARM based tablets.
"I have wanted to have a 2560x1600 laptop display on my 15inch for a long time, since before the "Retina Display", but everyone I work with think I am crazy for wanting it. The screen real estate is precious to a developer. Yes the text is small, but I have the screen reasonable close to my face and could easily work on a smaller font if it was crisp enough for reading. I also want a 16 core processor and 64GB RAM in my laptop, at least until the broadband speeds allow me to run a private cloud at home that I can access from anywhere. I use virtual machines a lot and regularly exhaust my 16GB RAM and 8 cores on my laptop anytime I want to run end-to-end testing."
Are you my soul-mate? :p
Well, since 17" laptops no longer have higher resolutions than 1080p, why not just go with a 15.6" device with a 1080p screen? I'm typing this on a Thinkpad T520 right now, which is more or less what you describe, and has a very standard keyboard as far as laptop keyboards go. Separately grouped F1-F12 keys, grouped Home/End/PgUp/PgDn block and most important: Fully centered due to the lack of a num-block.
https://www.google.com/search?q=thinkpad+t520&hl=de&safe=off&client=firefox-beta&hs=hus&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=0kiSUKjiDsbLhAeltIHYDw&ved=0CGUQsAQ&biw=1002&bih=1025&sei=1kiSUP6eOM7Iswbm2YCYBA
The only thing that's missing is the higher-res screen - 2560x1600 on 15.6" at 100% (96DPI) scaling would be AWESOME...
Of course. Ivy Bridge's onboard graphics added support for 4K, IIRC, so anyone with a halfway modern PC should be good to go, even without a dedicated graphics card...
If you're talking about desktop monitors: Low-end 1080p displays cost $100 vs. the $400-500 that low-end 1920x1200 displays used to cost... I'd prefer 1200 pixels height as well, but for the price? I've found it's easier to just use the money saved to buy a third (or fourth) display for portrait mode.
Doesn't run Windows with decent battery life (no working Optimus, and the screen is quite inefficient), no add-on batteries (the slice battery underneath my Thinkpad right now has the same capacity as the Retina MBP's internal battery, and I have another one of the same capacity in the main slot), no trackpoint, easy-to-ding surfaces (who the fuck was it that decided all laptops need sleeves? Fuck sleeves, my Thinkpads look like new without 'em)... it's not really a viable option, unfortunately.
I'm hoping for a drop-in replacement TFT for Thinkpads at 2560x1440... 15.6" with a 40-pin connector would be just dandy. And the pixel density would be just about right for Windows 7 at 100% scaling (1080p on 15.6" is still far from small). Or maybe 3840x2160, though I'd probably need to crank the scaling up to 150% in that case :)
"Yes, it is true that the fastest chips are made by Intel, but when you look at the cost of typical (not high end) machine, AMD is hard to beat, especially when the graphics in and APU will work fine for you."
Interesting... care to give an example? In most cases, I feel I can spec out an Intel based machine for the same price (also using the IGP) that is fast enough for HTPC use and runs cooler and quieter while using half the power... unless you actually need the extra GPU power or the additional cores AMD likes to throw in at the same price point, what's the point in going with AMD? A Sandy Bridge Celeron/Pentium is more efficient and provides enough processing power for any HTPC I've seen.
I'd actually like to start buying AMD again in order to give them some support, but Intel's where the efficiency bang-for-the-buck is at right now... this may be different for those of you who don't pay your own power bill *cough*mom's_basement*cough* :p
tp_smapi works just fine. It's included with TLP (which reduces power consumption on Thinkpads significantly, BTW): http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/tlp.html
Try the "Battery maintenance" button in the power manager's Battery tab.
It's easy to use - if you know how to use a browser, you can use this. No fiddling with drivers or apt-get or anything else to make the input devices work properly/better, make battery life acceptable or get performance up to par - just open it and start working...
As an example as to the problems regular notebook users face, I've been noticing an alarming trend lately: The German language Thinkpad forum (thinkpad-forum.de), which is actually full of intelligent people - lots of engineers, IT guys, sound guys and so on - is starting to show that Windows 7 is too complicated and difficult to set up in a way that maximizes potential battery life. As I sit here and type this on a big 15.6" Thinkpad with the power-sucking FullHD screen, I'm seeing a power draw of, oh, 6.5W - I'm seeing 12+ hours of real-world use with the big 9-cell, usually leaving my power supply at home and coming home with 30% to spare even though the damned thing was on all day.
Other users with the same internal hardware (Sandy Bridge i3/i5/i7 on the same chipset, no dedicated graphics) and often smaller, more efficient displays, are reporting *much* higher battery usage. They're only getting 3-4 hours out of a 55Wh 6-cell battery, so 15-20W of average power draw, while surfing the web without Flash or just using Office applications... how does this happen?
Easy:
Forget to install a driver? Power consumption skyrockets.
Let Windows update update a device driver to a non-manufacturer-optimized version? Power consumption skyrockets.
Use the device manufacturer's update utility, which then proceeds to crash in the middle of a driver update? Power consumption skyrockets (if you're lucky enough to be left with a booting system).
Forget to close CPU-hogging program X or a program with moving graphical elements (i.e. an animation of some kind that constantly repeats itself)? Power consumption skyrockets.
Don't realize a program has crashed and has pegged a core of the CPU at 100%? Power consumption skyrockets.
Device driver crashed? P C S!
And that's just the power usage aspect... there are all sorts of other finicky little traps when it comes to running a full-blown Windows or Linux machine. You and I are probably used to it, so we really don't notice all the little optimizations we use to make our machines run properly: NoScript, Adblock, Click-to-Flash, no background tasks that hog CPU or I/O, restarting browsers and other processes that are using more and more memory over the last week of uptime... we notice when our machines are running more slowly than usual, and can use tools like the task manager and resource monitor to determine what's causing the slowness...
And let's be honest: Which normal person wants to fuck with all that?
Even cut down Linuxes like Android exhibit some of the same symptoms - Even excluding third-party non-system-apps there are too many software components that can crash or misbehave, keeping the device awake during standby or draining the battery faster than usual during regular use. It's all too complicated for a regular user, and in the case of Android and Linux in general, I myself have trouble pinpointing many issues... often, the only thing I can do is just reboot the device.
That's why Chrome OS's approach is so awesome - bare-metal OS, browser, done. Nothing to fuck up, minimal processes to crash, hardly anything that can misbehave and suck down power... Of course, not being able to work offline means it's also completely useless for actual day-to-day use unless you get a version with a mobile data connection and never take it out of the country, but the concept is freakin awesome.
"Interesting, because I see a significant difference between my AMD with 3200 and an Intel with an HD 3000... and AMD wins hands down. Then again, I'm running windows8 on that laptop now. I didn't benchmark it before 'upgrading'."
In *video*? How do you tell the difference between smooth-as-butter and smooth-as-butter? :p
What I really don't understand is: Why is AMD, with an (unfortunately) inferior product, trying to compete with Intel? They should be undercutting them at every turn instead of putting similar-performance products on the same price level... to my eyes, AMD has a clusterfuck of different platforms, high power consumption and even a bit of a history of instability (OK, that's a bit of personal bias from my own days with AMD machines... i.e. my teens and early twenties) - in order to present a good value, they'd need to offer the same performance at half the price. Otherwise I'll stick with cooler, more efficient, faster and more hassle-free Intel parts, even if I get less cores or less MHz.
"I think you contradicted your own argument. You would (to reiterate my own words) likely notice aero being turned on a lot more than you would notice a 10% faster CPU."
You do realize I was referring to an 8+ years old mobile chipset-integrated GPU, right? Even many dedicated cards from that era won't run Aero...
"Again, the difference between an Intel HD graphics whatever and a Radeon 6000 series integrated chips are actually noticeable on these applications..."
I have both here (a Radeon HD6670 in a desktop and an Intel HD3000 in a laptop, to be exact), as well as a laptop with the 4500MHD and another older desktop with an HD5450... none of them show ANY performance difference whatsoever when putting out HD video. Even Youtube 1080p is accelerated perfectly on the multiple generations old 4500MHD.
"or anyone who decides they want to try and particular game before spending a couple of hundred bucks on hardware to play it properly. I make games for a living and Intel graphics cards have been fucking the PC gaming industry for years."
Let's see... the ability to *maybe* try a game that I might want to play some day, or two to three times as much battery life with the same battery capacity? Sounds like a no-brainer to me... and sub-50W desktop systems? Thank you Intel!
"SSD is a more complicated argument. The Core 2 (nehalem) processors, that are i5's i7's etc. don't support full SSD speeds, but are much older, the newer Sandy Bridge do, but an i3 sandy bridge or ivy bridge is usually more expensive than a comparable amd system, but not by much etc. etc. And the Intel parts have much better battery life. If you have a nehalem or older board and want cheap - AMD makes a compelling product, but if you have a little bit more money to spend the waters are muddied considerably, and both platforms support SSD's at full speed these days."
You're not making a lot of sense. Any old processor "supports full SSD speeds"... if you're talking about certain boards/chipsets being limited to, say, SATA or SATA II, then yes, some SSDs may not be utilized to their full extent, in that you may not reach the advertized sequential read/write speeds - but the important part that makes your system seem more snappy is still there: Reduced access times.
As for Windows 8 being faster (or "behaving better") on AMD parts: Do you have anything to back up that claim with?
LOL what??? Intel integrated graphics have pretty much ALWAYS been enough for basic office and internet stuff... hell, I have an Intel 945 something or other Pentium M based notebook that runs Windows 7 just fine with Aero turned off.
The only place you're going to see a difference is in games or other similarly graphics-heavy applications... and the world isn't filled with only 1. kids who can't afford proper graphics cards and 2. people using serious graphical applications. For the bulk of computer users, if it can play Youtube 1080p and Blu-Ray (rips), the GPU is more than fast enough.
Now if you'd replaced GPU with SSD in your post, I might be more inclined to agree with you...
If you're willing to live with the (much!) higher power consumption and less performance per clock, then sure...
As for overclocking a K processor being a time/cost sink... not really. If you've ever overclocked a regular old system in the last decade or so (with all the different clock speeds, voltages, multipliers and latencies that all interacted), overclocking a Sandy or Ivy K desktop processor will seem easier than flipping a light switch.
Sorry, but you're looking for Surface Pro, which is a few $100 more :(
The initial generations of *cheap* SSDs were immature - as soon as Intel released the Postville, that was pretty much a thing of the past. These days, there's no excuse for buying OCZ/Verbatim/*CheapoBrand* when you can get a Samsung 830, Crucial M4 or Intel 320/520 for just a little more.
Except for the battery life... I get 5 to 6 hours on my Thinkpad convertible tablet, so the new device should hit at least 10 in order to make the upgrade worthwhile :-)
I'm hoping one of the Windows 8 based tablets will fit the bill, even if I'm not actually looking to run Windows8 specifically ...
Not really... what I need is x86 hardware in a tablet form factor that uses the same amount of power (or preferably less) than current ARM tablets, with a decently bright high contrast display, a decent stylus and a big battery. I'll still be carrying my laptop (Windows 7) and smartphone (Android) around in addition though...
More specifics please. I've tried this with my Galaxy Nexus and found the virtual desktop (RDP via WiFi to a server connected to the same local network via GBit Ethernet) sluggish at best. Drove my efficiency way down compared to just using a Windows machine directly, even though I was using the same screen and input devices...