[clue-talk] new processors

[Nate Duehr]

Quick note: Sorry, top-posted because I'm on a webmail interface right
now... 

The speed difference between disk and everything else
(processor/RAM/video/etc) is being closed with SSD drives.  Still not
"100% ready for prime time" yet, looking over some of the errata on the
early drives, but... with a good brand name (meaning: Intel right now),
I'd trust one.  

(Some of the others have had some lovely bugs in firmware.  Kinda makes
sense, Intel's a chip manufacturer and the hard drive manufacturers are
learning how to do that, in a way.)

Having seen a couple of machines with SSD's in them doing various tasks,
I can unequivocally state that the spinning hard disk platter for
anything other than mass storage, is dead.  It just doesn't know it yet.

My next personal laptop will have an SSD for the OS's and swap, for
sure... and the data for whatever e-mail and PIM type client software
I'm using will also go on it to speed those common applications up.  

It's too big of a performance increase to ignore, from what I've seen.

--
  Nate Duehr
  nate at natetech.com

On Mon, 04 Jan 2010 09:18 -0700, "chris fedde" <chris at fedde.us> wrote:
> So as always the real answer is: "It Depends".  A "real world" desktop
> environment a few extra cores will make your experience a bit
> snappier.  A reasonably recent motherboard with a good built in GPU
> and a single modern multi-core processor will likely give good
> performance.  Consider that the performance gap between disk/network
> speed has grown so large that much of the time a modern processor is
> waiting around for L2 cache to be loaded anyway.
> 
> http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait
> 
> On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:
> > It gets crazier than that, since the newer Intel hardware/chips now "simulate" that they have more cores than they have to (supposedly) speed up things.  A "quad core" i7 "looks like" 16 cores to the OS... via "HyperThreading" technology...
> >
> > On Jan 2, 2010, at 9:43 AM, chris fedde wrote:
> >
> >> On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Louis Miller <miller106c at comcast.net> wrote:
> >>> Hello,
> >>>
> >>>       Could someone send me a hyperlink to an article that would explain how
> >>> it would be so much faster, please? Something for the non-computer
> >>> scientist, if possible. Or if someone wants to explain it and can through
> >>> e-mail that would be okay, too.
> >>>
> >>
> >> I realize that this is an older message but thought I'd respond and
> >> expand on some other responses.
> >>
> >> The 2.6 Linux kernels are written to take advantage of mult-core
> >> architectures.  This means that typical single threaded applications
> >> buy themselves will not see any speedup but since more than one time
> >> slice can be run at once the over all system performance improves.
> >>
> >> Here is a pointer to a white paper with excruciating detail:
> >> http://www.silicon.com/white-papers/components/2009/12/24/multi-core-and-linux-kernel-60295311/
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> >
> > --
> > Nate Duehr
> > nate at natetech.com
> >
> > http://facebook.com/denverpilot
> > http://twitter.com/denverpilot
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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