The fact that the developers don't know exactly what hardware people will try to run a game on also hampers them. If the minimum system requirements say that it will run on a K7 Athlon...then there are no SSE enhancements at all, even though most gamers will have P4s and A64s that support at least SSE2. The same is more or less true with other optimization flags on the compilers as the developers do not want have a game not play on a CPU that could possibly be used to play it AND they don't want to compile and have to distribute separate binaries for different chips. Making a few CDs for each the Athlon K7, Athlon 64 SSE2, Athlon 64 SSE3, Pentium III SSE, Pentium 4 SSE2, Pentium 4 SSE3, Pentium M SSE2, Pentium M/Core SSE3, oh, and let's not forget SMP support for Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2 chips would make for one HUGE retail box. So performance is un-optimized and certain portions of games' processing (particularly anything involving floating-point math) is slower than it could be. I know- I code some C and do a lot of iterative math functions. Optimizing the binary with the -march=pentium4 -msse2 -O3 -ffast-math makes a HUGE (in some cases 2-3x as fast!) difference versus just using the gcc defaults. But in others, it barely makes a difference.
Maybe if everyone simply downloads games instead of buying CDs we will see optimization. I bet that will only happen with a boat load of DRM or if the game is open-source.
Eh, most Linux users I know use KDE (as do I), and I am about as in the middle of America as you can get. I do know Gnome users too. The overarching reason for somebody to pick one over the other is because they want to use $DISTRO and $DE is the native one on $DISTRO.
Nope, my P4-M laptop does not do 64-bit. But I would not expect it to as the only chips that WERE 64 bits when I got my laptop were Alphas, Itaniums, and Sun boxes. The Athlon 64s and Intel's EM64T chips were a year or two off still.
P4-M != P-M. The former is a low-voltage version of the Pentium 4 desktop chip and has two frequency settings (1.2 GHz and then the max speed.) The P4-M has 512kb cache and sit on 478-pin packages and are 130nm chips. The P-M is based on the P6 architecture and have many frequency scaling settings. They are made on the 130nm and 90nm processes and have 1MB or 2MB L2 cache.
Yeah, I noticed that Intel hardware works better than non-Intel hardware with Linux. It took a while for my laptop to be fully supported under Linux (it is a P4-M chip on a 845 chipset, bought in 2002) but the Intel LAN and motherboard resources worked great off the bat. Well, so did my sound (ESS integrated) and WLAN (Orinoco 802.11b) but it was because those components had been around a while before my computer was made. The ATI Mobility M9000 took a long time to be supported, and in the end, the stock XFree86/Xorg drivers supported it better and before the ATI fglrx drivers did.
But when I popped a Ubuntu live CD into my brother's new Dell 700m (P-M 755@2.0GHz, 855 chipset, 855GME graphics, Intel 2915 WLAN, Pro/1000 NIC) everything worked right from the get-go. I have not been able to test an AMD laptop yet, but Intel certainly has good Linux laptop support.
A 3GHz P4 with HT has to dissipate something north of 65W. That is no mean feat, especially in a laptop where you can't have several 120mm fans blowing all the time to keep it cool like you can in a desktop. The hamstringing in that case is the use of a barely-modified desktop chip in that laptop.
And yes, Toshiba laptop HDDs suck. The one in my Gateway died right at the 3-year mark.
I bet those old-stock Pentium Ds and Pentium Ms lead to some very good deals from the vendors. I bet we'll start seeing a bunch of $500 Pentium D desktops from Dell in not too long.
There are five reasons you'd stick with AMD on this one:
1. You want to use 64-bit apps on your notebook. (I know, you can't stuff more than 2GB RAM in notebooks today, let alone > 4GB and the only fully-functional 64-bit OS is Linux/BSD, but...)
2. You can get AMD notebooks for a a couple hundred dollars less than an equivalent Pentium M notebook.
3. You have your heart set on one particular notebook model and it happens to have an AMD chip in it.
4. You want to use your notebook to encode video/audio with. The Turion won those benchmarks.
You're right as Linux has a much better load-splitting capability than does Windows, so you can kill the offending task well before it eats up all your resources. And yes, if you do one single-threaded task, a single-core CPU of equal speed will be a touch faster as the cache latency, etc. will be less as the non-existant second core will not have to snoop. But most people have several apps open at once, and that's where a dual-core system shines. Also, there are multithreaded apps out there that use both CPUs to execute code in parallel rather than the sequential method used by single-core CPUs. This leads to a much faster execution of all instructions.
That sounds about like my old Gateway. Its 2.2GHz Pentium 4-M starts out at about 57 C and will bounce between 57 and 65 C, which is where the fan on/off trip points are. On battery, it just takes about two hours to go from 57 to 65. When put a heavy load on it, it will creep up to the low 70s, and it has gotten as high at 79 C. When I release the load, it goes down to 57 C and then continues its bounce between there and 65 C unitl you shut it off.
Dude, that was MY first computer too! IBM PS/1 model 2110 with 512k RAM, 12MHz 80286, a 9" 256-color monitor with an integrated power supply, a 2400-baud modem, and a 30MB HDD. I was about six at the time we got it, so I didn't do much coding besides little BASIC games and such. We lived out in the sticks, so dial-up was long-distance rates and thus not used.
We used that thing up until a few years ago as a word processor- retired it when we could no longer find ribbons for the dot-matrix printer.
What model of Gateway do you have? I have a late-2002 vintage 600XL and I get the same "Is that a hair dryer?" response when the fan kicks on to cool off the 2.2GHz P4-M chip. My girlfriend has a mid-'03 400VTX with a 2.0 P4-M and it has the same fan noise. However, my brother's VAIO V505 had a 2.0 P4-M but made about no noise. I wonder if Gateway just got a lot of noisy (but relatively effective- my 600 runs at 60C and his Sony ran at 70C) fans?
Apple aren't a computer company, they're a marketing company. About the only innovation you see from Apple is stealing products from other companies and repackaging them...
Hmm. That reminds me of somebody else, their name starting with an M or something. Can't think of it right off of the top of my head...
Well, it's faster than my P4-M 2.2 and 64MB Radeon 9000, so I would think so. Anyway, Xgl *just* got released, so you'l see it pop up in new distros in a few months. Then we'll see. I bet it's more driver support than anything.
That P2-333 with 256MB RAM is what, about 8-9 years old with a RAM SIMM stuck in it 5 years ago? Just that it *can* run a shiny new OS like SuSE 10.0 is pretty amazing. I run said OS on my 3-year-old laptop with a P4-M 2.2 and 1GB of RAM and it runs pretty well, especially since Windows XP and the latest anti-crap software doesn't run so well on it anymore.
You should expect that a computer as old as that is going to run new software slowly and either deal with it (put old S/W onto box or get newer HW) or accept it. If I remember correctly, that P2-333 is not that far north of the minimums to even *run* SuSE 10.0. I'd recommend 1GHz+ and 384MB minimum for acceptable performance with that OS.
Heh heh heh. You're right, at least with me and my VMWare XP install. My dad also runs his work PC with XP Pro in W2K mode. The "Luna" theme just chews up resources and looks ugly.
The "make it faster" is certainly apparent in the Linux OS department. The latest kernels/OSes always run a little faster than the previous ones. Ever used a 2.4 kernel machine right next to a similar-HW rig with the latest 2.6 one? The 2.6 unit is noticeably faster. The only reason that computers tend to get "slower" as they age is that the apps we run on top of the OS get bigger and require more horsepower to run.
You forget that lots of us in America live more than a few miles from a decent-sized mall or for that matter, a fair-sized town. You're not going to walk 50 miles into the city to buy your stuff- that's ludicrous. A 100-mile round-trip bike ride is a hell of a long one, too. But doing that in a car is about an hour and a half round-trip.
Also, for those who DO live in a city, if you don't live right downtown, you certainly don't want to have to walk to get there, unless you happen to walk only in the broad daylight and have a well-armed police escort surrounding you. Or you will end up as a bloody spot next to some lamppost as a thug shoots you for your wallet.
I used to live in the sticks. We had dial-up. Sure, it was crappy and 40kbps was smokin' fast (28.8 was the norm) but about every hole in the ground in the ten-county area around where I lived had a local dial-up number. You have to be REALLY far out there to not even get a local dial-up connection. I have yet to see any place like that this side of Montana.
You just have to do that stuff when most people are sleeping. 5am to noon on the weekends is great for me as I am a college student living just off campus and actually follow a normal-for-anybody-but-a-college-kid sleep schedule. No other college students are up, but if I download something huge like a Linux DVD image and let it go overnight, my bandwidth slowly starts to go to pot in the early afternoon and is about 10% of what it was at 10am at 10pm. It doesn't get much better until about 3am.
What about people who do things like back up their computers to online backup servers, use encrypted desktop sharing to do remote logins to work PCs and such? The former is a HUGE upload hog as I routinely sync some of my computer's important files with an SFTP server. And the latter causes a lot of random, encrypted traffic as something as simple as moving around program windows takes a few hundred KB/sec to sync the graphics between host and guest.
This is going to be a PITA for a lot of people who don't even do P2P stuff.
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The fact that the developers don't know exactly what hardware people will try to run a game on also hampers them. If the minimum system requirements say that it will run on a K7 Athlon...then there are no SSE enhancements at all, even though most gamers will have P4s and A64s that support at least SSE2. The same is more or less true with other optimization flags on the compilers as the developers do not want have a game not play on a CPU that could possibly be used to play it AND they don't want to compile and have to distribute separate binaries for different chips. Making a few CDs for each the Athlon K7, Athlon 64 SSE2, Athlon 64 SSE3, Pentium III SSE, Pentium 4 SSE2, Pentium 4 SSE3, Pentium M SSE2, Pentium M/Core SSE3, oh, and let's not forget SMP support for Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2 chips would make for one HUGE retail box. So performance is un-optimized and certain portions of games' processing (particularly anything involving floating-point math) is slower than it could be. I know- I code some C and do a lot of iterative math functions. Optimizing the binary with the -march=pentium4 -msse2 -O3 -ffast-math makes a HUGE (in some cases 2-3x as fast!) difference versus just using the gcc defaults. But in others, it barely makes a difference.
Maybe if everyone simply downloads games instead of buying CDs we will see optimization. I bet that will only happen with a boat load of DRM or if the game is open-source.
Eh, most Linux users I know use KDE (as do I), and I am about as in the middle of America as you can get. I do know Gnome users too. The overarching reason for somebody to pick one over the other is because they want to use $DISTRO and $DE is the native one on $DISTRO.
Nope, my P4-M laptop does not do 64-bit. But I would not expect it to as the only chips that WERE 64 bits when I got my laptop were Alphas, Itaniums, and Sun boxes. The Athlon 64s and Intel's EM64T chips were a year or two off still.
P4-M != P-M. The former is a low-voltage version of the Pentium 4 desktop chip and has two frequency settings (1.2 GHz and then the max speed.) The P4-M has 512kb cache and sit on 478-pin packages and are 130nm chips. The P-M is based on the P6 architecture and have many frequency scaling settings. They are made on the 130nm and 90nm processes and have 1MB or 2MB L2 cache.
Yeah, I noticed that Intel hardware works better than non-Intel hardware with Linux. It took a while for my laptop to be fully supported under Linux (it is a P4-M chip on a 845 chipset, bought in 2002) but the Intel LAN and motherboard resources worked great off the bat. Well, so did my sound (ESS integrated) and WLAN (Orinoco 802.11b) but it was because those components had been around a while before my computer was made. The ATI Mobility M9000 took a long time to be supported, and in the end, the stock XFree86/Xorg drivers supported it better and before the ATI fglrx drivers did.
But when I popped a Ubuntu live CD into my brother's new Dell 700m (P-M 755@2.0GHz, 855 chipset, 855GME graphics, Intel 2915 WLAN, Pro/1000 NIC) everything worked right from the get-go. I have not been able to test an AMD laptop yet, but Intel certainly has good Linux laptop support.
A 3GHz P4 with HT has to dissipate something north of 65W. That is no mean feat, especially in a laptop where you can't have several 120mm fans blowing all the time to keep it cool like you can in a desktop. The hamstringing in that case is the use of a barely-modified desktop chip in that laptop.
And yes, Toshiba laptop HDDs suck. The one in my Gateway died right at the 3-year mark.
I bet those old-stock Pentium Ds and Pentium Ms lead to some very good deals from the vendors. I bet we'll start seeing a bunch of $500 Pentium D desktops from Dell in not too long.
There are five reasons you'd stick with AMD on this one:
:D
1. You want to use 64-bit apps on your notebook. (I know, you can't stuff more than 2GB RAM in notebooks today, let alone > 4GB and the only fully-functional 64-bit OS is Linux/BSD, but...)
2. You can get AMD notebooks for a a couple hundred dollars less than an equivalent Pentium M notebook.
3. You have your heart set on one particular notebook model and it happens to have an AMD chip in it.
4. You want to use your notebook to encode video/audio with. The Turion won those benchmarks.
5. You are an AMD fanboy
You're right as Linux has a much better load-splitting capability than does Windows, so you can kill the offending task well before it eats up all your resources. And yes, if you do one single-threaded task, a single-core CPU of equal speed will be a touch faster as the cache latency, etc. will be less as the non-existant second core will not have to snoop. But most people have several apps open at once, and that's where a dual-core system shines. Also, there are multithreaded apps out there that use both CPUs to execute code in parallel rather than the sequential method used by single-core CPUs. This leads to a much faster execution of all instructions.
That would suggest a very small heatsink. A decent heatsink takes a long time to heat up and also a little while to cool off.
That sounds about like my old Gateway. Its 2.2GHz Pentium 4-M starts out at about 57 C and will bounce between 57 and 65 C, which is where the fan on/off trip points are. On battery, it just takes about two hours to go from 57 to 65. When put a heavy load on it, it will creep up to the low 70s, and it has gotten as high at 79 C. When I release the load, it goes down to 57 C and then continues its bounce between there and 65 C unitl you shut it off.
Dude, that was MY first computer too! IBM PS/1 model 2110 with 512k RAM, 12MHz 80286, a 9" 256-color monitor with an integrated power supply, a 2400-baud modem, and a 30MB HDD. I was about six at the time we got it, so I didn't do much coding besides little BASIC games and such. We lived out in the sticks, so dial-up was long-distance rates and thus not used.
We used that thing up until a few years ago as a word processor- retired it when we could no longer find ribbons for the dot-matrix printer.
I say outlaw 55mph speed limits. You ought to be able to go at least 70 or so on some of the 55mph roads here, and about 90 on the 70mph interstates.
Well, I didn't see them steal the design for the P4
What model of Gateway do you have? I have a late-2002 vintage 600XL and I get the same "Is that a hair dryer?" response when the fan kicks on to cool off the 2.2GHz P4-M chip. My girlfriend has a mid-'03 400VTX with a 2.0 P4-M and it has the same fan noise. However, my brother's VAIO V505 had a 2.0 P4-M but made about no noise. I wonder if Gateway just got a lot of noisy (but relatively effective- my 600 runs at 60C and his Sony ran at 70C) fans?
Apple aren't a computer company, they're a marketing company. About the only innovation you see from Apple is stealing products from other companies and repackaging them...
Hmm. That reminds me of somebody else, their name starting with an M or something. Can't think of it right off of the top of my head...
Well, it's faster than my P4-M 2.2 and 64MB Radeon 9000, so I would think so. Anyway, Xgl *just* got released, so you'l see it pop up in new distros in a few months. Then we'll see. I bet it's more driver support than anything.
That P2-333 with 256MB RAM is what, about 8-9 years old with a RAM SIMM stuck in it 5 years ago? Just that it *can* run a shiny new OS like SuSE 10.0 is pretty amazing. I run said OS on my 3-year-old laptop with a P4-M 2.2 and 1GB of RAM and it runs pretty well, especially since Windows XP and the latest anti-crap software doesn't run so well on it anymore.
You should expect that a computer as old as that is going to run new software slowly and either deal with it (put old S/W onto box or get newer HW) or accept it. If I remember correctly, that P2-333 is not that far north of the minimums to even *run* SuSE 10.0. I'd recommend 1GHz+ and 384MB minimum for acceptable performance with that OS.
Heh heh heh. You're right, at least with me and my VMWare XP install. My dad also runs his work PC with XP Pro in W2K mode. The "Luna" theme just chews up resources and looks ugly.
Almost all Linux users are ex-Windows users, except for a handful of people who used to run UNIX.
Now, I wonder how many people who are Linux users switch to Windows or Apple?
The "make it faster" is certainly apparent in the Linux OS department. The latest kernels/OSes always run a little faster than the previous ones. Ever used a 2.4 kernel machine right next to a similar-HW rig with the latest 2.6 one? The 2.6 unit is noticeably faster. The only reason that computers tend to get "slower" as they age is that the apps we run on top of the OS get bigger and require more horsepower to run.
You forget that lots of us in America live more than a few miles from a decent-sized mall or for that matter, a fair-sized town. You're not going to walk 50 miles into the city to buy your stuff- that's ludicrous. A 100-mile round-trip bike ride is a hell of a long one, too. But doing that in a car is about an hour and a half round-trip.
Also, for those who DO live in a city, if you don't live right downtown, you certainly don't want to have to walk to get there, unless you happen to walk only in the broad daylight and have a well-armed police escort surrounding you. Or you will end up as a bloody spot next to some lamppost as a thug shoots you for your wallet.
I used to live in the sticks. We had dial-up. Sure, it was crappy and 40kbps was smokin' fast (28.8 was the norm) but about every hole in the ground in the ten-county area around where I lived had a local dial-up number. You have to be REALLY far out there to not even get a local dial-up connection. I have yet to see any place like that this side of Montana.
You just have to do that stuff when most people are sleeping. 5am to noon on the weekends is great for me as I am a college student living just off campus and actually follow a normal-for-anybody-but-a-college-kid sleep schedule. No other college students are up, but if I download something huge like a Linux DVD image and let it go overnight, my bandwidth slowly starts to go to pot in the early afternoon and is about 10% of what it was at 10am at 10pm. It doesn't get much better until about 3am.
Yeah, I seed. It took five frigging days to upload the 3.6GB of SuSE 10.0 DVD image that I downloaded in about six.
What about people who do things like back up their computers to online backup servers, use encrypted desktop sharing to do remote logins to work PCs and such? The former is a HUGE upload hog as I routinely sync some of my computer's important files with an SFTP server. And the latter causes a lot of random, encrypted traffic as something as simple as moving around program windows takes a few hundred KB/sec to sync the graphics between host and guest.
This is going to be a PITA for a lot of people who don't even do P2P stuff.