Linux Hardware Looks at Core 2

Penguin Lover writes "Linux Hardware has just posted a new story on how Intel's new Conroe performs under Linux. From the article: 'Now is a great time to be CPU shopping because no matter which side of the isle you look on, you have great choice for both CPUs and motherboards. Along with Intel's chipset offerings, keep in mind that NVIDIA has the nForce series for Intel CPUs which would give you SLI support for all your Quake Wars and UT2007 gaming needs.'"

Re:Apart from gaming

[fabs64]

To run a decent sized lcd at native resolution would be a start... but in all seriousness for anything other than gaming you're right, there's no real need to keep up with the cycle

Re:which side of the what?

[njvic]

Actually now that I have RTFA, I see the spelling error is in the story, so the /. editors (or Penguin Lover) should then add [sic] to the quote.

Dontcha just love...

[MightyYar]

I like the "NOW is a great time to buy..." argument for anything that improves steadily over time. Can you point to a time in recent computer history where "NOW" wasn't the best time to purchase a new rig? It can't possibly be news to readers here that the processor-power-to-dollar-ratio is at its best point ever, can it? It would be like saying "NOW is the best time to buy a new car", as if there has been a point in the last 20 years where the general trend of car quality has dropped, but even more ridiculous because of Moore's Law.

Constant Battle

[DarkNemesis618]

This only extends the constant battle between AMD & Intel. Intel comes up with something better than AMD...shortly thereafter, AMD comes up with something that beats that out...and so on and so on. While I have not personally tested any of the Conroe chips, I do have 2 linux boxes, one using an Intel P4 & the other an AMD Athlon64. Both run Ubuntu perfectly. Pretty much what I'm trying to say is simply that in a month or two, or when AMD comes out with their next line of CPUs, the discussion will just restart.

Re:which side of the what?

[gEvil (beta)]

You're assuming that Taco&Co actually have any real editorial experience and even know what [sic] means...

Re:Bang for the buck

[the_humeister]

Depends on the usage I guess. I can pick up a 1ghz duron at my local university surplus for next to nothing, and it will run MS Word and Mozilla just as well as the latest octa-core processors.

Re:Dontcha just love...

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

I know a friend of mine got burned when buying his rig about 2 years ago, PCI-e had just come out, and he didn't expect it to kill AGP in a matter of days. So, I'd say that was a bad time to buy a midrange system. (PCI-e was at the expensive end at the time)

Back and forth

[LaughingCoder]

There was one really important point at the end of the article that should not be overlooked:

Also keep in mind that AMD has yet to go to a 65nm manufacturing process.

AMD remains competitive with Intel, even though they are still at 90nm. Speed goes up and power goes down with die scaling! Now, clearly the Core2 is the fastest processor you can buy today, and Intel is (smartly) offering speed grades in the mid-price range in order to try and "buy back" the enthusiasts. But AMD will get a nice speed bump when they bring 65nm on line. Of course Intel is not standing still either, as they are aggressively moving towards 45nm.

I love capitalism.

Re:Dontcha just love...

[Frumious Wombat]

386sx, 486SLC, P60-wienie-roaster-edition, early Intel-EM64T. I think those were points not to "Buy Now".

Re:Constant Battle

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

I think the significance of the Conroe is that it is an entirely new architecture and it caught AMD off guard as their new architecture won't be out until next year. Because of this newer better chip by Intel selling at a moderate price and AMD has no product to counter it, the only defence they have is extremely reduced prices. Reduced prices means that it is a better time to buy, say an AMDx2 4200+ now than it was say, 3 weeks ago. I imagine that Intel is reducing prices on their current lines to counter AMD's counter, thus it is a better time to buy a computer now.

I imagine things will balance out once AMD releases the 4x4, and the difference in competitive performance is smaller.

Re:Dontcha just love...

[MightyYar]

I guess I wasn't calling 1993 "recent". I had a similar experience, buying a $3000 Macintosh 68040 just before the PowerPC came out.

There is always bad hardware out there, but the prices for existing stuff have consistently trended down. When the P60 came out, it was expensive as all hell, but that was a great time to buy a 486 machine - there was serious competition between Intel, AMD, and Cyrix. The prices were at historic lows. Yeah the Prescott with 64-bit extensions was crap, but that didn't make it a "bad time to buy", just a bad product to buy. It would not have been a bad time to buy an AMD 64-bit rig.

Re:Constant Battle

[fitten]

You realize that a 4x4 machine with cost several thousands of dollars (USD) and that there are only a couple/three games that are multithreaded, right? Not only that but from everything that has been released so far, the 4x4 looks like a panic stricken kneejerk reaction to Core 2 Duo and seems to be nothing more than a (potentially cheaper) dual socket, dual core Opteron that uses unregistered memory on a motherboard with two PCIe x16 slots on it... these already exist except for the 2xx(x) Opterons that use unregistered memory. In other words, 4x4 is just a marketing brand for something that is very expensive to entice rich fanbois to buy their kit.

Re:Bang for the buck

[qortra]

Of course it won't run them as well. Clearly, you've never tried to open a large document (100+ pages) with pictures, tables, and indexes using Word (or especially OpenOffice which saves more money than a hardware upgrade would cost). It's a nightmare; imagine trying to drag an 18 wheeler with a Geo Metro. Even webpages can be a bit taxing these days. A sufficiently complex flash animation (yes, I hate flash too), or even AJAX webapp can bring a 1Ghz duron to its knees, especially when the rendering gets complex; Google fortunately has fairly simple AJAX pages, but others are not so kind.

Moreover, there is nothing like using an SMP system: either two processors or a single dual-core (hyperthreading is exempt from this comment). Having all those piddly little background tasks on one core means that the second core is available just to obey your whims. The latency in executing business and web apps with a dual-core is unparalleled.

Clearly you're cheap, and I can respect that (heaven knows I'm almost as poor as they get). Perhaps you have a point that the $350 processor that the grandparent spoke of is not in the optimal point of the price/performance curve, but even for people that just use Word and Firefox, you can't claim that a new $150 dual-core won't run stuff significantly faster than Duron; and you don't even have to blow that extra imaginary money on an octa-core[sic] processor to get the extra horsepower.

In either case, I consider your minimalist elitism offtopic.