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.'"

Bang for the buck

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

The Core2 E6600 seems to be a nice bang for the money as it is right around the middle of the currently available speed grades and is the cheapest iteration with 4MB of L2 cache. It also seems to be competitive with dual core AMD products (my usual choice) that are substantially more expensive. It's definitely a buyer's market these days...let the price war begin! :)

965 chipset

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone got the SATA drives hanging off the 965 controller to be visible with Linux? I have tried Abit and Gigabyte Conroe boards with 965 (ICH8) controllers and neither show the SATA drives. And the PATA port isn't seen either :(

But what compiler flags to use?

[MarcQuadra]

I'm going to buy an e6600-based desktop in the winter, and I'm wondering if GCC will add tuning for the Core 2 processors. My guess is that '-Os -march=pentium-m -msse3 -mfpmath=sse' is the way to do it now in 32-bit mode, but there have been enough changes in the Core 2 to make for a new DFA profile, no? I thought they radically revamped the Pentium3 core, adding execution units and such.

I just rebuilt my Core (1) Duo laptop with the aforementioned options and it seems to get me the most bang for my buck.

From what I've read, compiling and running in 32-bit mode is still the best choice for now, the Core 2 is a lot better than the EM64T pentium 4 at running 64-bit code, but still not as fast as just using the 32-bit code (stuff like video encoding is happening in the 128-bit vector unit anyway, and I don't need more than 4GB addressable space).

There's no good reason to use Vorbis

[October_30th]

Upgrade to Vorbis, save money on hardware

Yeah, right. Voluntarily limit how and where you can listen to your music. Really smart.

I regret the day when I decided, in a silly stroke of idealism, to encode all my CDs with oggenc. Later, after getting frustrated by the lack of support for the format, I had to encode them all over again.

Face it. MP3 is a de facto standard and even though it's patented, what difference does it make? Does it stop you from listening to mp3 encoded music at home? No. Does it limit your options when purchasing a player? No.

Unless you're a flaming idealist and are willing to go through the extra mile and look for ogg-friendly players, there's no good reason to start using Vorbis.

Re:Back and forth

[MrFlibbs]

A good point, but keep in mind that the performance and power differences between Prescott (90nm) and Cedarmill (65nm) were decidely underwhelming. The greater leakage current in Intel's 65nm process ate into most of the gains from the smaller process. It did make the die smaller and thus cheaper, but not much better in either performance or power consumption.

Perhaps the AMD/IBM SOI process will do better at 65nm in controlling leakage current and provide the needed performance boost. Intel plans to release the 45nm Penryn in 2H07, and claims to have greatly improved the leakage current situation. AMD needs to leapfrom Conroe's performance with their 65nm part to remain competitive. Schedule is critical here: if Intel is late, AMD will regain momemtum; if AMD is late, Penryn will make the 65nm AMD part unattractive.

Re:Back and forth

[MancunianMaskMan]

as someone from a related industry, I know thatr what intel calls '65nm' by virtue of gate length, is not 'as small' as your next fabber's '65nm'. It serves to impress the shareholders, though. Take these numbers with a grain of salt.

It would be even nicer

[labratuk]

if all Core2s didn't have built-in TPM.

'fraid that rules it out for me.

Re:Back and forth

[fitten]

Don't forget also that there are plenty of people who are getting 3.6GHz and higher on Core2Duo on standard air coolers (some hit 4GHz) and all this is on 65nm processes. Intel has clearly and obviously launched these at competitive speeds (just enough to trump AMD parts) while still having lots of headroom. As soon as AMD launches their 3.0GHz or 3.2GHz parts, Intel will release 3.33GHz Core2Duos... just enough to stay a little ahead of AMD. Intel has enough headroom to do this for the next year with current cores on their current process (65nm). The move to 45nm will just give them a little more headroom to continue the game.

Linux takes hardware advantage

[matt me]

Using Linux we're very lucky that we can build a kernel and applications optimised to our *specific* hardware utilising any special features and experience greater performance gains compared to users of most other operating systems say windows who are stuck with a generalised kernel that has to run on a majority of hardware from the last ten years and are stuck with a single set of binaries. Even with 64 bit windows most the applications you use will have to be run in emulation32 mode, so you won't get the same performance gains in the places you really need them, not explorer but video processing etc.