Re: Hardware questions

On Mon, Sep 08, 2008 at 06:04:40PM -0700, Steven Kurylo wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 5:58 PM, Conrad Knauer <atheoi@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 4:29 PM, Chris Twa <support@saskaweb.com> wrote:
> >
> > Intel Core Duo 2 E8500 64bit Dual Core (2x 3.15Ghz, 1333FSB, 6MB
> > Cache) *** $217.00
> > Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 64bit Quad Core (4x 2.4Ghz, 1066FSB, 8MB
> > Cache) *** $215.00
>
> Then the lowest end chip you can get will be more than fast enough. Seriously.

Agreed. I have the E2180 (2x 2.0GHz, 800FSB, 2MB Cache), and except for
doing transcoding or image processing it's rarely maxed out. Save
yourself $135 and go cheap unless you really know you need the extra
horsepower.

> But between those two, I'd take more cores. Unless you're doing some
> serious games, video encoding, long running tasks, etc more cores is
> better. For my surf the net, write email, maybe some bittorrent, more
> cores is better.

I have to disagree. All the tasks you list except for video encoding
are primarily single threaded (so far), meaning they will only be using
a single core. As such, having a faster core speed is a bigger benefit
to them than having more cores. Having dual cores may help with
interactivity (X can run on one core while the app runs on another), but
going higher doesn't improve things much.

In the long run this will change, as more applications become
multi-processor (and many-processor) aware. Games have started moving
in that direction, as has video transcoding, but virtually all
mainstream apps that I'm aware of aren't there.

-- 
Bruce Guenter <bruce_at_untroubled.org>                http://untroubled.org/