For my needs a Macbook Pro 13 Retina is pretty near perfect. I haven't found anything from any other manufacturer which even comes close, no matter how much I am prepared to pay.
Are there other cases where there is no Mac which fits? Definitely. But for business use, coding and graphical work there tends to be a Mac for everyone.
If you don't care about price, you're generally right.
A 13" MacBook Pro starts at $1,300 for a dual core CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of SSD space.
That is insanely expensive for such a basic machine. If you like yours, by all means, enjoy... Just don't kid yourself, it is a massively overpriced machine with fancy packaging.
Core i5, 8GB, 256GB SSD, 1080p IPS touchscreen, etc.
That is very similar to the $1499 MacBook Pro in terms of features. Slightly lower screen res (but at 13", it is plenty), but it is touchscreen (the Mac isn't).
Price is $850, just over HALF the price of the Mac. Same weight (slightly less actually)
If you like your Mac, fine. Just don't kid yourself, you paid nearly double what you had to pay for the same machine from someone else.
Both the 650 Ti and the 950 are built on a 28nm process. Sure, that's not the only parameter that matters but I don't think it's a reasonable upgrade path at all. If you need more performance you should probably go for something bigger, or better yet, wait until 14/16nm becomes a reality for GPUs.
They are saying that to try and keep the money flowing...
For people at 1080p, I have a hard time imaging that a 650 Ti is "out of date" by any stretch. If it is, a 950 isn't the solution, a 970 would be.
Is the 950 faster? Sure... Is it "faster enough to be worth the time and trouble"? Probably not.
The Dell has a fan because it has a real CPU. The i3 is a lot faster than Core M is. Granted, Core M is enough for some people, but it isn't the same thing.
It might be more fair to compare the Dell XPS 13 to the MacBook Air, in which case, the Dell still wins that one.
This is all a moot subject, because you can buy a slightly heavier, bigger machine than either of those for half the price. $350 buys a lot of computer these days. I just ordered an ASUS off Amazon for $349, and while it isn't thin and light like the XPS 13 or MacBook is, it is a lot less money and actually more powerful than both machines, while still having a good battery life.
Different market, to be sure, but it brings us back to... "Macs are the best machine to run Windows", and that just doesn't hold up. It might be the case for a LIMITED part of the market, but for most people, it is not a true statement.
If you need more evidence, look at the Mac marketshare, it is barely over 5%. They are expensive and just not in demand, despite Apple's amazing ability to get people to talk about them.
I find this all to be a shame, I like the Mac and I'd like Windows to have real competition. But not at those insane prices.
If you are in this market, Apple has nothing to offer you, and it appears that they like it that way.
I could well be wrong, but I think Apple is leaving a LOT of money on the table by not offering a decent desktop choice. Likewise, they don't offer a reasonable laptop choice either, thinking their iPad fills that segment (it doesn't, but they probably think it does).
I just ordered another notebook, this time an ASUS:
Intel Core i3-5010U 2.1GHz 4GB RAM 500GB 5400RPM DL DVD±RW/CD-RW WiFi 802.11ac 2 x USB 3.0, 1 x USB 2.0, 1 x HDMI and VGA ports 15.6" Full HD (1920*1080) Windows 10
Is it the best built notebook? No. Does It weight the least? No.
For pete's sake, it is $350 bucks! Who fracking cares! That is a lot of computer for the money, Apple's MacBook might be nice, but it is more than triple the price.
i5, i3, to a notebook, they are mostly the same thing...
both dual core, both hyperthreaded... the only thing the i5 really has is turbo boost, but you likely won't notice any difference.
The Dell is $800, the Macbook is $1,300, it begins and ends there. Both machines are very close overall, with each having slightly higher something or other.
Mine is last year's model with the 2.5 GHz version of the i7 and the 860M GPU. It is rocket fast and smooth, if you think it takes a Mac to do that, then you haven't used a nice notebook, which this is.
The above machine is $1,200, it is heavier than the MacBook Pro, to be sure, but it has nice build quality (it is more solid than most consumer machines) and it has good cooling for the CPU and GPU. Battery life is great when not playing games (the NVIDIA GPU really eats into it for gaming).
The Mac is just stupid expensive for what it is, other than perhaps for people who want light weight at any cost.
---
BTW, my main desktop is a Core i7 4770K and this notebook feels just as fast. I've also played with Macs, and I'll grant they are lightweight and works of art, but they aren't faster running Windows.
And that Dell XPS 13 2015 will cost a pretty penny, as soon as you deck it out to similar specs, if you even can.
Ahh, no...
The Dell is $800 feature complete with a nice Core i3. What does the MacBook have? Core M. Not even close. It is also $1,300, more than 50% more expensive.
The only thing the MacBook has is 256GB of SSD storage, to the XPS 13's 128GB. Otherwise the XPS 13 is a better machine. A 13.3" 1080p display, very light and tons of battery life.
Why anyone would buy the MacBook, other than to look "cool", is beyond me. You can buy three of the XPS 13 for less than the cost of 2 MacBooks.
My MacBook has a Core i7-5730k (3.2GHz 4MB cache), 32 GB DDR3 RAM, a 512GB SSD plus a 1 TB HD, an NVidia 880M and Intel 3000HD. It also was only $1600 sans the SSD I purchased afterwards.
Apple has the unique ablity to control their entire product from end-to-end and it shows.
Yes, but most people just don't care enough to pay the price Apple commands.
People that bitch about how much an apple costs while comparing it to a list of features from some random chinese OEM have never even seen an apple laptop in person.
Nonsense, I have and Apple notebooks are works of art, beautiful and everything you say they are.
So what? I'm typing this on an Acer V17 Nitro notebook that was half the price of a MacBook Pro while having twice the performance.
Yes, it is heavier, and yes it isn't as well built (but don't knock it, it is better than most notebooks), but so what?
It is half the price and twice the performance.
Apple isn't even in the ballpark, which is why their market share is nearly nothing. They do make a crap ton of money, I own their stock, so I like them for that reason.:) I don't own Acer stock, they don't make a crap ton of money.
So lesson learned, buy stocks of companies that make tons of money, but buy products from companies that don't.:)
I haven't read all of Intel's releases this week, but one area I'm interested in is seeing how eDRAM (embedded DRAM) aka Crystal Well technology is going to end up being available and utilized across the Skylake line. In memory intensive benchmarks eDRAM has already shown considerably improvement in memory constrained benchmarks in Broadwell mobile processors, wheere it acts as an additional level of cache.
The lag in DDR memory hasn't improved in a long time. The speed is faster, once you get a transfer going, modern DDR3/4 memory is rocket fast. The challenge is that the speed to the first byte hasn't improved for a decade, largely due to the latency and distance of the memory from the CPU, among other things.
eDRAM is a welcome change and frankly I expect to see more such improvements in the future as they run into various walls of physics, ranging from the size of atoms to the speed of light.
Something that hasn't changed in a long time is the overall design of the machine. Conroe was a throwback in many ways to the Pentium III, it was Intel admiting that Netburst was a mistake, without them saying it of course.
Nehalem was a change for the better and you can see it in the improved memory throughput and better design, but it is time for the next move. Skylake, for all its improvements, is just a beefed up Nehalem CPU in many ways.
Windows has changed a lot in the past 10 years. I have looked at what Intel talked about at the IDF and they see a future that I tend to agree with. The Internet of Things will actually cause a need for more CPU power, not less, due to having a hundred things connected. When your main computer is remotely talking to 10 things at a time, you're going to want more cores.
Something that I think Intel should look at is a Big/Little configuration. This will take support from Microsoft, it has to be baked into Windows so Windows knows what KIND of cores you have, but frankly having 4 super power cores and maybe 4 low power cores makes more sense for the use of silicon and battery life.
Not all these CPUs go into a desktop, I'd like a notebook with a 10 hour battery life (because it really isn't 10 hours when you use it and it is 2 years old).
Of course, while we're at it, can we get the weight down? My main laptop is a nice Acer 17" machine that is too heavy to really be called "portable". But it is nice with a true quad i7, 1080p IPS display, dual drives (SSD and HDD), and backlit keyboard (please, can we have all devices have that now?).
I love fast computers, personally I have a 6 core i7-5930K, and the performance difference for most home/consumer applications is so trivial that I don't notice a difference over using a 4 core i7-4790K except for in parallel benchmarks.
Of course you don't, because you're at the bleeding edge...
The same was true when the Q6600 (Quad Conroe) launched, it simply didn't make a difference over the E6600 (Dual Conroe) due to the programs we were running at the time.
Windows 10 has much more potential than Windows XP did. Between OneDrive keeping it all synced, Cortana always listening, and the 20 other things running in the background, a core or 2 is busy quite often.
I have many machines used for production and testing, and I can now tell the difference between a dual core and quad core for general application use. In fact, the Q6600 that I have for older machine testing is actually faster in many cases than more modern dual cores, due to having 4 true cores. This doesn't mean it gets work done faster, rather it is SNAPPIER, which is what a lot of people relate a computer to being faster.
There is little done on a desktop that needs super high end single core performance, other than some games. Rather what is needed is to always have a spare core so the responsivness of the machine is instant. When I say "hey Cortana", I expect an instant response. A half second lag is noticeable.
AMD has a problem in that I think they are serving an ever smaller part of the market, the middle...
People either now want low power draw with "enough" performance, or they want "give me all you've got" performance, while not being totally stupid about the power.
Keep in mind that Haswell-E draws 30% less max power than the top AMD FX chip does, while crushing it in performance. Granted, it costs 5 times as much, but frankly if you're buying a machine for 3 years of use and you are using it to make money, the $1,000 cost of the chip is trivial.
Even the 6 core Haswell-E for $380 or so completely runs off from the best AMD has to offer, for not much more money.
It is a shame, I remember the days of Thunderbird from AMD, heck I remember the days of the 386DX-40, when you could get 486DX-25 performance for half the price. Those were days when a processor upgrade often doubled your performance, today it seems the gains are much smaller.
If AMD was pushing Intel, we might see $300 8 core Skylake chips for sale.
If there was ever a true multi-threaded application AMD would take the prize. As such Intel dominates because of single threaded applications.
Actually, it still generally doesn't...
An Intel Core i7 generally is faster than a 8 core FX chip, even in really, really well threaded applications.
The Intel chip is SO MUCH better per core and with the help of hyperthreading, it still wins.
Of course, this is all a moot point, if you're serious about such work, you're at least on Haswell-E with 8 true cores and 16 threads, or you're on a Xeon and this isn't even a conversation worth having.
There are embarrassingly well-threaded applications where AMD does well. The x264 encoder does a fantastic job and hammers all 8 of the cores in my FX-8320 at >90% utilization, and it was cheerfully faster at that than the i5 3570K I used to keep around. But IPC does ultimately win out, and Haswell's AVX2 support is sufficient to let an i5 4690K generally pull out ahead of my FX.
Try that same task on a i7 4790k and see even more speed... that is exactly the task that hyperthreading is for.
HOWEVER, what gamers want is a decent priced (sub 200 dollar) mainstream i5 with SIX true cores.
6 isn't enough of a jump over 4...
Give me 8 true cores and 16 threads, remove the IGP which I don't need for such a CPU...
Yes, yes, I know, Xeon and Haswell-E, but the reality is that the "need" for 8 core chips won't really happen until more of them hit the desktop market, and what AMD sells as 8 core doesn't count.
Of course efficiency is always the best option if there is low hanging fruit.
That is why I went ahead and replaced the HVAC system rather than repair it. I figured the system would end up needing another expensive repair in the next 10 years, making my true upgrade cost half of what it really was, 2 expensive repairs during that time (it was already 11 years old).
Looked at that way, the payback period is really 5 years, or perhaps 7.5...
Another consideration is the old system had a hard time cooling the upstairs during hot summer days, even running all the time, the new system does a better job cooling the whole house.
So it is a better working system, it is brand new with a 10 year parts and labor warranty, it saves me about 30% on my HVAC costs.
It is really a no-brainer.
I also replaced all my light bulbs with LEDs for a few hundred dollars. That payback is about a year, a bit more for the lesser used ones, but at the $5 or so a bulb I paid from Amazon, that one is the best decision yet.
The windows need to go next, but damm those are expensive. I looked into it last year and when the price passed $20K I said never mind.:)
Plus, there's about 8c/kwh that I'm paying for "Conservation Incentives" and another 1c/kwh for "Electric Public Purpose Programs." If all I had to do was pay for fscking power, my bill would be a factor of three smaller. Just saying....
That is insane, my total power cost for my office is less than your "Conservation Incentives" charge.
Wholesale power costs about 3 cents per kWh, give or take a bit. Transmission costs vary, but shouldn't do much more than double that. Then add something for profit and admin overhead.
Anything over 10 cents per kWh has something really wrong with it.
Hell, there's a charge on my bill to pay off bonds that the California government used to buy power at exorbitant, extortionate rates more than a decade ago during the "energy crisis" created with the "help" of Enron. - that's an extra half cent per kwh that we'll have to pay for freaking ever because politicians got bought out by corporations' "free market" bullshit and overpaid for power for less than a year.
In fairness, the people in California keep electing those same politicians, so I'm not sure what to say, other than move somewhere else.:)
I lived in California for 7 months in 2005, never again...
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough, if those are the points you value, then I can see why you made the choice you made.
IMHO, it is an expensive choice, but it is yours to make and it sounds like you made it with thought rather than randomly.
Fair enough, if you value those points, then buy a Macbook Pro...
All I'm saying is that most people clearly don't value those points, or Apple would be selling more machines...
For my needs a Macbook Pro 13 Retina is pretty near perfect. I haven't found anything from any other manufacturer which even comes close, no matter how much I am prepared to pay.
Look harder next time. :)
http://www.amazon.com/Zenbook-...
43% less than the Mac for the same basic configuration, same weight and size, plus a touch screen.
Are there other cases where there is no Mac which fits? Definitely. But for business use, coding and graphical work there tends to be a Mac for everyone.
If you don't care about price, you're generally right.
A 13" MacBook Pro starts at $1,300 for a dual core CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of SSD space.
That is insanely expensive for such a basic machine. If you like yours, by all means, enjoy... Just don't kid yourself, it is a massively overpriced machine with fancy packaging.
Example:
ASUS Zenbook:
http://www.amazon.com/Zenbook-...
Core i5, 8GB, 256GB SSD, 1080p IPS touchscreen, etc.
That is very similar to the $1499 MacBook Pro in terms of features. Slightly lower screen res (but at 13", it is plenty), but it is touchscreen (the Mac isn't).
Price is $850, just over HALF the price of the Mac. Same weight (slightly less actually)
If you like your Mac, fine. Just don't kid yourself, you paid nearly double what you had to pay for the same machine from someone else.
The OP of this whole thread stated that the Mac was the best machine to run Windows, as did the submission. That is why I said it.
Both the 650 Ti and the 950 are built on a 28nm process. Sure, that's not the only parameter that matters but I don't think it's a reasonable upgrade path at all. If you need more performance you should probably go for something bigger, or better yet, wait until 14/16nm becomes a reality for GPUs.
They are saying that to try and keep the money flowing...
For people at 1080p, I have a hard time imaging that a 650 Ti is "out of date" by any stretch. If it is, a 950 isn't the solution, a 970 would be.
Is the 950 faster? Sure... Is it "faster enough to be worth the time and trouble"? Probably not.
The Dell has a fan because it has a real CPU. The i3 is a lot faster than Core M is. Granted, Core M is enough for some people, but it isn't the same thing.
It might be more fair to compare the Dell XPS 13 to the MacBook Air, in which case, the Dell still wins that one.
This is all a moot subject, because you can buy a slightly heavier, bigger machine than either of those for half the price. $350 buys a lot of computer these days. I just ordered an ASUS off Amazon for $349, and while it isn't thin and light like the XPS 13 or MacBook is, it is a lot less money and actually more powerful than both machines, while still having a good battery life.
Different market, to be sure, but it brings us back to... "Macs are the best machine to run Windows", and that just doesn't hold up. It might be the case for a LIMITED part of the market, but for most people, it is not a true statement.
If you need more evidence, look at the Mac marketshare, it is barely over 5%. They are expensive and just not in demand, despite Apple's amazing ability to get people to talk about them.
I find this all to be a shame, I like the Mac and I'd like Windows to have real competition. But not at those insane prices.
If you are in this market, Apple has nothing to offer you, and it appears that they like it that way.
I could well be wrong, but I think Apple is leaving a LOT of money on the table by not offering a decent desktop choice. Likewise, they don't offer a reasonable laptop choice either, thinking their iPad fills that segment (it doesn't, but they probably think it does).
I just ordered another notebook, this time an ASUS:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
For $349, you get:
Intel Core i3-5010U 2.1GHz
4GB RAM
500GB 5400RPM
DL DVD±RW/CD-RW
WiFi 802.11ac
2 x USB 3.0, 1 x USB 2.0, 1 x HDMI and VGA ports
15.6" Full HD (1920*1080)
Windows 10
Is it the best built notebook? No. Does It weight the least? No.
For pete's sake, it is $350 bucks! Who fracking cares! That is a lot of computer for the money, Apple's MacBook might be nice, but it is more than triple the price.
Fair enough :)
Mind you, I did say that Apple makes a pretty machine, does that count?
It is just expensive for the hardware in it, you're paying a premium for having a Mac.
Which is fine, if that is what you want. But don't say that it is the same price or cheaper than a Windows box, which it isn't.
i5, i3, to a notebook, they are mostly the same thing...
both dual core, both hyperthreaded... the only thing the i5 really has is turbo boost, but you likely won't notice any difference.
The Dell is $800, the Macbook is $1,300, it begins and ends there. Both machines are very close overall, with each having slightly higher something or other.
My Acer V17 Nitro has similar specs and was a lot less money.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
That is a newer version of what I have.
Intel Core i7 4720HQ (2.60GHz) (quad)
16GB Memory
1TB HDD
256GB SSD
17.3" 1080p IPS display
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5
Mine is last year's model with the 2.5 GHz version of the i7 and the 860M GPU. It is rocket fast and smooth, if you think it takes a Mac to do that, then you haven't used a nice notebook, which this is.
The above machine is $1,200, it is heavier than the MacBook Pro, to be sure, but it has nice build quality (it is more solid than most consumer machines) and it has good cooling for the CPU and GPU. Battery life is great when not playing games (the NVIDIA GPU really eats into it for gaming).
The Mac is just stupid expensive for what it is, other than perhaps for people who want light weight at any cost.
---
BTW, my main desktop is a Core i7 4770K and this notebook feels just as fast. I've also played with Macs, and I'll grant they are lightweight and works of art, but they aren't faster running Windows.
On this old MacBook Pro I'm currently using... Apple Menu -> About This Mac: First line says "MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011)"
Yeah that was difficult.
How do I do that when looking at MacBooks on eBay?
Once you have the machine in hand, it is a bit beside the point.
And that Dell XPS 13 2015 will cost a pretty penny, as soon as you deck it out to similar specs, if you even can.
Ahh, no...
The Dell is $800 feature complete with a nice Core i3. What does the MacBook have? Core M. Not even close. It is also $1,300, more than 50% more expensive.
The only thing the MacBook has is 256GB of SSD storage, to the XPS 13's 128GB. Otherwise the XPS 13 is a better machine. A 13.3" 1080p display, very light and tons of battery life.
Why anyone would buy the MacBook, other than to look "cool", is beyond me. You can buy three of the XPS 13 for less than the cost of 2 MacBooks.
Yes, the Best Windows machines are Macs
"best" is a subjective term... best in what way?
Not only are they less expensive for the lifetime of ownership
I'm sorry, I can't stop laughing at this. Apple is anything BUT less expensive... They charge a lot of money for what they offer.
---
Apple does have its uses, but for most people, they are not the way to go.
As proof, Apple is in the middle single digits for desktop marketshare.
My MacBook has a Core i7-5730k (3.2GHz 4MB cache), 32 GB DDR3 RAM, a 512GB SSD plus a 1 TB HD, an NVidia 880M and Intel 3000HD.
It also was only $1600 sans the SSD I purchased afterwards.
That is impressive... link?
Apple has the unique ablity to control their entire product from end-to-end and it shows.
Yes, but most people just don't care enough to pay the price Apple commands.
People that bitch about how much an apple costs while comparing it to a list of features from some random chinese OEM have never even seen an apple laptop in person.
Nonsense, I have and Apple notebooks are works of art, beautiful and everything you say they are.
So what? I'm typing this on an Acer V17 Nitro notebook that was half the price of a MacBook Pro while having twice the performance.
Yes, it is heavier, and yes it isn't as well built (but don't knock it, it is better than most notebooks), but so what?
It is half the price and twice the performance.
Apple isn't even in the ballpark, which is why their market share is nearly nothing. They do make a crap ton of money, I own their stock, so I like them for that reason. :) I don't own Acer stock, they don't make a crap ton of money.
So lesson learned, buy stocks of companies that make tons of money, but buy products from companies that don't. :)
I haven't read all of Intel's releases this week, but one area I'm interested in is seeing how eDRAM (embedded DRAM) aka Crystal Well technology is going to end up being available and utilized across the Skylake line. In memory intensive benchmarks eDRAM has already shown considerably improvement in memory constrained benchmarks in Broadwell mobile processors, wheere it acts as an additional level of cache.
The lag in DDR memory hasn't improved in a long time. The speed is faster, once you get a transfer going, modern DDR3/4 memory is rocket fast. The challenge is that the speed to the first byte hasn't improved for a decade, largely due to the latency and distance of the memory from the CPU, among other things.
eDRAM is a welcome change and frankly I expect to see more such improvements in the future as they run into various walls of physics, ranging from the size of atoms to the speed of light.
Something that hasn't changed in a long time is the overall design of the machine. Conroe was a throwback in many ways to the Pentium III, it was Intel admiting that Netburst was a mistake, without them saying it of course.
Nehalem was a change for the better and you can see it in the improved memory throughput and better design, but it is time for the next move. Skylake, for all its improvements, is just a beefed up Nehalem CPU in many ways.
Windows has changed a lot in the past 10 years. I have looked at what Intel talked about at the IDF and they see a future that I tend to agree with. The Internet of Things will actually cause a need for more CPU power, not less, due to having a hundred things connected. When your main computer is remotely talking to 10 things at a time, you're going to want more cores.
Something that I think Intel should look at is a Big/Little configuration. This will take support from Microsoft, it has to be baked into Windows so Windows knows what KIND of cores you have, but frankly having 4 super power cores and maybe 4 low power cores makes more sense for the use of silicon and battery life.
Not all these CPUs go into a desktop, I'd like a notebook with a 10 hour battery life (because it really isn't 10 hours when you use it and it is 2 years old).
Of course, while we're at it, can we get the weight down? My main laptop is a nice Acer 17" machine that is too heavy to really be called "portable". But it is nice with a true quad i7, 1080p IPS display, dual drives (SSD and HDD), and backlit keyboard (please, can we have all devices have that now?).
I just wish it was half the weight it is now. :(
I love fast computers, personally I have a 6 core i7-5930K, and the performance difference for most home/consumer applications is so trivial that I don't notice a difference over using a 4 core i7-4790K except for in parallel benchmarks.
Of course you don't, because you're at the bleeding edge...
The same was true when the Q6600 (Quad Conroe) launched, it simply didn't make a difference over the E6600 (Dual Conroe) due to the programs we were running at the time.
Windows 10 has much more potential than Windows XP did. Between OneDrive keeping it all synced, Cortana always listening, and the 20 other things running in the background, a core or 2 is busy quite often.
I have many machines used for production and testing, and I can now tell the difference between a dual core and quad core for general application use. In fact, the Q6600 that I have for older machine testing is actually faster in many cases than more modern dual cores, due to having 4 true cores. This doesn't mean it gets work done faster, rather it is SNAPPIER, which is what a lot of people relate a computer to being faster.
There is little done on a desktop that needs super high end single core performance, other than some games. Rather what is needed is to always have a spare core so the responsivness of the machine is instant. When I say "hey Cortana", I expect an instant response. A half second lag is noticeable.
I agree with all of what you've said...
AMD has a problem in that I think they are serving an ever smaller part of the market, the middle...
People either now want low power draw with "enough" performance, or they want "give me all you've got" performance, while not being totally stupid about the power.
Keep in mind that Haswell-E draws 30% less max power than the top AMD FX chip does, while crushing it in performance. Granted, it costs 5 times as much, but frankly if you're buying a machine for 3 years of use and you are using it to make money, the $1,000 cost of the chip is trivial.
Even the 6 core Haswell-E for $380 or so completely runs off from the best AMD has to offer, for not much more money.
It is a shame, I remember the days of Thunderbird from AMD, heck I remember the days of the 386DX-40, when you could get 486DX-25 performance for half the price. Those were days when a processor upgrade often doubled your performance, today it seems the gains are much smaller.
If AMD was pushing Intel, we might see $300 8 core Skylake chips for sale.
If there was ever a true multi-threaded application AMD would take the prize. As such Intel dominates because of single threaded applications.
Actually, it still generally doesn't...
An Intel Core i7 generally is faster than a 8 core FX chip, even in really, really well threaded applications.
The Intel chip is SO MUCH better per core and with the help of hyperthreading, it still wins.
Of course, this is all a moot point, if you're serious about such work, you're at least on Haswell-E with 8 true cores and 16 threads, or you're on a Xeon and this isn't even a conversation worth having.
For pure speed, it is all Intel.
There are embarrassingly well-threaded applications where AMD does well. The x264 encoder does a fantastic job and hammers all 8 of the cores in my FX-8320 at >90% utilization, and it was cheerfully faster at that than the i5 3570K I used to keep around. But IPC does ultimately win out, and Haswell's AVX2 support is sufficient to let an i5 4690K generally pull out ahead of my FX.
Try that same task on a i7 4790k and see even more speed... that is exactly the task that hyperthreading is for.
HOWEVER, what gamers want is a decent priced (sub 200 dollar) mainstream i5 with SIX true cores.
6 isn't enough of a jump over 4...
Give me 8 true cores and 16 threads, remove the IGP which I don't need for such a CPU...
Yes, yes, I know, Xeon and Haswell-E, but the reality is that the "need" for 8 core chips won't really happen until more of them hit the desktop market, and what AMD sells as 8 core doesn't count.
Seriously, anyone thinking of actually voting for this guy is an idiot. Trump may be good for a laugh but he is not presidential material.
Well then, would you prefer Bush or Clinton? Neither of them qualifies either...
Sadly, the type of person who is actually qualified won't run and can't win anyway.
Of course efficiency is always the best option if there is low hanging fruit.
That is why I went ahead and replaced the HVAC system rather than repair it. I figured the system would end up needing another expensive repair in the next 10 years, making my true upgrade cost half of what it really was, 2 expensive repairs during that time (it was already 11 years old).
Looked at that way, the payback period is really 5 years, or perhaps 7.5...
Another consideration is the old system had a hard time cooling the upstairs during hot summer days, even running all the time, the new system does a better job cooling the whole house.
So it is a better working system, it is brand new with a 10 year parts and labor warranty, it saves me about 30% on my HVAC costs.
It is really a no-brainer.
I also replaced all my light bulbs with LEDs for a few hundred dollars. That payback is about a year, a bit more for the lesser used ones, but at the $5 or so a bulb I paid from Amazon, that one is the best decision yet.
The windows need to go next, but damm those are expensive. I looked into it last year and when the price passed $20K I said never mind. :)
Plus, there's about 8c/kwh that I'm paying for "Conservation Incentives" and another 1c/kwh for "Electric Public Purpose Programs." If all I had to do was pay for fscking power, my bill would be a factor of three smaller. Just saying....
That is insane, my total power cost for my office is less than your "Conservation Incentives" charge.
Wholesale power costs about 3 cents per kWh, give or take a bit. Transmission costs vary, but shouldn't do much more than double that. Then add something for profit and admin overhead.
Anything over 10 cents per kWh has something really wrong with it.
Hell, there's a charge on my bill to pay off bonds that the California government used to buy power at exorbitant, extortionate rates more than a decade ago during the "energy crisis" created with the "help" of Enron. - that's an extra half cent per kwh that we'll have to pay for freaking ever because politicians got bought out by corporations' "free market" bullshit and overpaid for power for less than a year.
In fairness, the people in California keep electing those same politicians, so I'm not sure what to say, other than move somewhere else. :)
I lived in California for 7 months in 2005, never again...