At least it's better than "Xandros". Whenever I see that one I always think of a male potency product advertised in the back pages of Penthouse for some reason...
You are totally missing the point with this "performance per tic" business. The P3 beats the P4 in efficiency also, but so what? The P4 trades off efficiency for the ability to run at higher clock rates, and it was a good choice since the fastest P4 beats anything out there in integer performance (including the expensive 64-bit RISC chips, and the Itanium2) and has perfectly respectable floating-point performance.
Really, the AMD fanboys are starting to remind me of Apple zealots, always blathering about how a 3HGz G4 would crush a 3GHz P4. If we restrict ourselves to discussing parts that actually exist then there's no question that the P4 is fastest consumer-level CPU you can get.
If it really stores the output of the JIT compiler as claimed, then I don't see why you'd need the VM to run it. What would be the difference between such an executable and one that used MFC, for example? Neither have direct calls to the Windows API in their source code AFAIK, but I would call both of them 'native' executables.
I agree with you that Windows seems to be a lot more mysterious than OSX, in that if something doesn't work right it's pretty tough to figure out why. I hadn't used Windows since 3.11 until I bought this laptop just recently. XP is a big improvement over that but still far from perfect.
Your problem with skipping sounds to me like maybe your hard drive isn't using DMA properly. If it has to run through interrupts then you can see exactly the symptom you described. You might try poking around in the Device Manager and see if you can spot anything. On mine here, when I look at Properties->Advanced Settings for Primary IDE Channel it says that I'm using Ultra DMA Mode 5, and gives me the opportunity to set it to something else.
I just tried launching Word 2002 or Excel 2002 on my 1.3GHz Pentium-M laptop, running XP Home and Winamp 2.90. No skips whatsoever, either from local files or network streams. I think your machine must be misconfigured.
By way of contrast, I used to own a 500MHz iBook like your friend's. Playing MP3's in iTunes took ~30% of the CPU, which I think is utterly ridiculous.
Yeah, just think what they would have said about NFS, if any of them had been born when it was introduced. "You could just overwrite the kernel! OMG, M$ suXorz!"
This is bullshit and I should know, I've owned both a 500MHz original dual-USB iBook (now dead) and one of the new 800MHz ones (for two weeks). The 800 was much better than my 500 which I had grown to despise, but OSX is so heavy that it was still noticeably slow. I returned it and picked up an Acer TravelMate 800LCi with a 1.3GHZ Pentium-M and the new Centrino chipset and could not believe how much faster it was. Plus, I got built-in wireless (mini-PCI), USB 2.0, IEEE1394 (Firewire), a PC-Card slot, 512MB DDR standard, 40GB hard drive, 4-5 hour battery life, and a 15" 1400x1050 screen with Mobile Radeon 9000 64MB graphics. Upgrading the iBook with an Airport card and a 512MB SODIMM increases the price up to around $1550, while the Acer was $1700 with rebate. For the extra $150 I get a much faster processor, just about double the number of screen pixels, and a bigger hard drive. Plus, I can actually listen to an MP3 stream without the player sucking 15% of my CPU.
Also, I agree with Sulli that ClearType does a hell of a lot better than CoreGraphics at subpixel antialiasing, especially at small sizes. I too used to think iBooks were good deals for what you get, but compared to this TravelMate the iBook is an overpriced, underperforming clunker.
I think that's a litle optimistic. Perhaps an x86-64 Windows will be out by then and people will get that with their shiny new Athlon 64 machine, but they'll want to keep using all of their already-purchased applications which will be 32-bit. ISV's may eventually get around to releasing x86-64 updates but since the Athlon 64 will be a pretty small installed base for quite awhile I would think that would be a pretty low priority for them. I just don't think the Athlon 64 is better enough (or at all?) than the P4 or the Athlon XP that it will see that kind of widespread adoption anytime soon.
Of course, if you are planning to run Linux then this is all moot, you can recompile everything targetted to x86-64 and go nuts. The vast majority of people aren't going to do that, though, so the review was right to focus more on what sort of performance they might expect to see.
Maybe for the Opteron "server" chip that would be relevant, but this is the "consumer" version. They rightly tested it with the software that will be most-often used by potential customers.
The Matrix may be a little overrated, but it's nowhere in the league of "Requiem for a Dream". I've never been so let down after watching a movie as I was after that one, after hearing people rave about it like it was God's gift to filmdom. It was skillfully shot but manipulative, shallow, and devoid of any recognizably human characters. Maybe someday Aronofsky will grow up and put that technical skill to good use but I'm not too hopeful.
I hope you're getting better than a 2% return, otherwise you won't even keep up with inflation. At that rate you'll have less real money at the end than you started with!
The rebates are supposed to come from the manufacturer, not from the reseller (i.e. Best Buy). The store really has no responsibility for it, but they made it up to the guy anyway to try and keep his business. Give them a little credit.
I read one of the other ones and it was anti-drug also. Something tells me they all are, that was a big deal back then. Thankfully, the "Just Say No" program worked so well we have no need for such propaganda anymore.:-)
That's nice that a 3 GHz G4 would whup a 3 GHz P4, but who cares? There's no such part. I agree that clock speed isn't everything, but Intel processors still whip any G4 that actually exists. Sure, you can go dual, but you could also go dual Intel with the same trick and we're right back where we started.
No way, dude! With Gentoo I can compile everything with the -supadupafast flag! It doesn't actually result in any performance improvement but the placebo effects are awesome!
Seriously, when you hear people talk about comiling with optimizations under Gentoo, doesn't it remind you of a Mac user claiming his machine "feels a lot snappier" after a minor OS update?
Yeah, Slackware was pretty much point-and-drool (well, maybe type-and-drool) compared to SLS or TAMU. The hard part back then was stealing 40 floppies from your school/employer to put all of the install disks on. These kids today, I tell ya...:-)
You can point Safari to whatever blob of code that implements the WebCore interface you want. Lots of people are grabbing new versions of the WebCore source, building it themselves, and stuffing it into one of the many (non)public Safari betas. It's just like updating a shared library on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
At least it's better than "Xandros". Whenever I see that one I always think of a male potency product advertised in the back pages of Penthouse for some reason...
...and look up the definition for 'comeuppance'.
You are totally missing the point with this "performance per tic" business. The P3 beats the P4 in efficiency also, but so what? The P4 trades off efficiency for the ability to run at higher clock rates, and it was a good choice since the fastest P4 beats anything out there in integer performance (including the expensive 64-bit RISC chips, and the Itanium2) and has perfectly respectable floating-point performance.
Really, the AMD fanboys are starting to remind me of Apple zealots, always blathering about how a 3HGz G4 would crush a 3GHz P4. If we restrict ourselves to discussing parts that actually exist then there's no question that the P4 is fastest consumer-level CPU you can get.
LOL, you're joke almost made me loose it their for a second...
If it really stores the output of the JIT compiler as claimed, then I don't see why you'd need the VM to run it. What would be the difference between such an executable and one that used MFC, for example? Neither have direct calls to the Windows API in their source code AFAIK, but I would call both of them 'native' executables.
I agree with you that Windows seems to be a lot more mysterious than OSX, in that if something doesn't work right it's pretty tough to figure out why. I hadn't used Windows since 3.11 until I bought this laptop just recently. XP is a big improvement over that but still far from perfect.
Your problem with skipping sounds to me like maybe your hard drive isn't using DMA properly. If it has to run through interrupts then you can see exactly the symptom you described. You might try poking around in the Device Manager and see if you can spot anything. On mine here, when I look at Properties->Advanced Settings for Primary IDE Channel it says that I'm using Ultra DMA Mode 5, and gives me the opportunity to set it to something else.
I just tried launching Word 2002 or Excel 2002 on my 1.3GHz Pentium-M laptop, running XP Home and Winamp 2.90. No skips whatsoever, either from local files or network streams. I think your machine must be misconfigured.
By way of contrast, I used to own a 500MHz iBook like your friend's. Playing MP3's in iTunes took ~30% of the CPU, which I think is utterly ridiculous.
Yeah, just think what they would have said about NFS, if any of them had been born when it was introduced. "You could just overwrite the kernel! OMG, M$ suXorz!"
From the photos at the site it appears that the "enter" key is not on the home row, but rather one row above it. Bah!
Nah, then instead of the DB people they'd have a bunch of pissed-off Jay-Z fans to deal with.
This is bullshit and I should know, I've owned both a 500MHz original dual-USB iBook (now dead) and one of the new 800MHz ones (for two weeks). The 800 was much better than my 500 which I had grown to despise, but OSX is so heavy that it was still noticeably slow. I returned it and picked up an Acer TravelMate 800LCi with a 1.3GHZ Pentium-M and the new Centrino chipset and could not believe how much faster it was. Plus, I got built-in wireless (mini-PCI), USB 2.0, IEEE1394 (Firewire), a PC-Card slot, 512MB DDR standard, 40GB hard drive, 4-5 hour battery life, and a 15" 1400x1050 screen with Mobile Radeon 9000 64MB graphics. Upgrading the iBook with an Airport card and a 512MB SODIMM increases the price up to around $1550, while the Acer was $1700 with rebate. For the extra $150 I get a much faster processor, just about double the number of screen pixels, and a bigger hard drive. Plus, I can actually listen to an MP3 stream without the player sucking 15% of my CPU.
Also, I agree with Sulli that ClearType does a hell of a lot better than CoreGraphics at subpixel antialiasing, especially at small sizes. I too used to think iBooks were good deals for what you get, but compared to this TravelMate the iBook is an overpriced, underperforming clunker.
Yeah, and tabbed browsing. Don't forget about that.
I think that's a litle optimistic. Perhaps an x86-64 Windows will be out by then and people will get that with their shiny new Athlon 64 machine, but they'll want to keep using all of their already-purchased applications which will be 32-bit. ISV's may eventually get around to releasing x86-64 updates but since the Athlon 64 will be a pretty small installed base for quite awhile I would think that would be a pretty low priority for them. I just don't think the Athlon 64 is better enough (or at all?) than the P4 or the Athlon XP that it will see that kind of widespread adoption anytime soon.
Of course, if you are planning to run Linux then this is all moot, you can recompile everything targetted to x86-64 and go nuts. The vast majority of people aren't going to do that, though, so the review was right to focus more on what sort of performance they might expect to see.
Maybe for the Opteron "server" chip that would be relevant, but this is the "consumer" version. They rightly tested it with the software that will be most-often used by potential customers.
The Matrix may be a little overrated, but it's nowhere in the league of "Requiem for a Dream". I've never been so let down after watching a movie as I was after that one, after hearing people rave about it like it was God's gift to filmdom. It was skillfully shot but manipulative, shallow, and devoid of any recognizably human characters. Maybe someday Aronofsky will grow up and put that technical skill to good use but I'm not too hopeful.
I used BabelFish to translate it and here is how the title came out:
Power in Mac the up-to-date USB 2.0 internal organs?
It's alive!
I hope you're getting better than a 2% return, otherwise you won't even keep up with inflation. At that rate you'll have less real money at the end than you started with!
The rebates are supposed to come from the manufacturer, not from the reseller (i.e. Best Buy). The store really has no responsibility for it, but they made it up to the guy anyway to try and keep his business. Give them a little credit.
I read one of the other ones and it was anti-drug also. Something tells me they all are, that was a big deal back then. Thankfully, the "Just Say No" program worked so well we have no need for such propaganda anymore. :-)
That's nice that a 3 GHz G4 would whup a 3 GHz P4, but who cares? There's no such part. I agree that clock speed isn't everything, but Intel processors still whip any G4 that actually exists. Sure, you can go dual, but you could also go dual Intel with the same trick and we're right back where we started.
No way, dude! With Gentoo I can compile everything with the -supadupafast flag! It doesn't actually result in any performance improvement but the placebo effects are awesome!
Seriously, when you hear people talk about comiling with optimizations under Gentoo, doesn't it remind you of a Mac user claiming his machine "feels a lot snappier" after a minor OS update?
Yeah, Slackware was pretty much point-and-drool (well, maybe type-and-drool) compared to SLS or TAMU. The hard part back then was stealing 40 floppies from your school/employer to put all of the install disks on. These kids today, I tell ya... :-)
That's a good idea. I'm picturing a long line of microwave ovens and cordless phones, as far as the eye can see... :-)
"Mites crawl up, tights fall down"
so sayeth Del on Deltron 3030, which I sentence you to go out and buy right now. Seriously, do it, it's a great CD.
You can point Safari to whatever blob of code that implements the WebCore interface you want. Lots of people are grabbing new versions of the WebCore source, building it themselves, and stuffing it into one of the many (non)public Safari betas. It's just like updating a shared library on Linux.