Mr Fedde makes a great point. While I went into detail about Intel specific architecture, I purposely made no mention of which CPU is best suited to which task. <br><br>I bought an upper end CPU for a couple of reasons. I am a gamer and I typically transcode video a lot. I have the VOB files from my DVDs and I transcode them for my PS3 or my iPod Touch and even my Blackberry. Moving from my Core 2 6600, where it took about 75 minutes to encode a 90 minute DVD, I am now able to encode a 90 minute DVD in about 15 minutes with my overclocked system. Adding two more cores, hyperthreading, a more efficient CPU really paid off for my workload. <br>
<br>In other news, Intel released their Clarkdale series of CPUs. These are very interesting CPUs, especially for the typical desktop user. The CPUs have a GPU integrated on the chip itself and Intel finally stuck a chip that decent in most tasks, even modest gaming. It definitely pays to know what workload you have in mind for your machine before you purchase a new one.<br>
<br>Dan Kulinski<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 9:18 AM, chris fedde <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:chris@fedde.us">chris@fedde.us</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
So as always the real answer is: "It Depends". A "real world" desktop<br>
environment a few extra cores will make your experience a bit<br>
snappier. A reasonably recent motherboard with a good built in GPU<br>
and a single modern multi-core processor will likely give good<br>
performance. Consider that the performance gap between disk/network<br>
speed has grown so large that much of the time a modern processor is<br>
waiting around for L2 cache to be loaded anyway.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait" target="_blank">http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait</a><br>
<div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Nate Duehr <<a href="mailto:nate@natetech.com">nate@natetech.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> 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...<br>
><br>
> On Jan 2, 2010, at 9:43 AM, chris fedde wrote:<br>
><br>
>> On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Louis Miller <<a href="mailto:miller106c@comcast.net">miller106c@comcast.net</a>> wrote:<br>
>>> Hello,<br>
>>><br>
>>> Could someone send me a hyperlink to an article that would explain how<br>
>>> it would be so much faster, please? Something for the non-computer<br>
>>> scientist, if possible. Or if someone wants to explain it and can through<br>
>>> e-mail that would be okay, too.<br>
>>><br>
>><br>
>> I realize that this is an older message but thought I'd respond and<br>
>> expand on some other responses.<br>
>><br>
>> The 2.6 Linux kernels are written to take advantage of mult-core<br>
>> architectures. This means that typical single threaded applications<br>
>> buy themselves will not see any speedup but since more than one time<br>
>> slice can be run at once the over all system performance improves.<br>
>><br>
>> Here is a pointer to a white paper with excruciating detail:<br>
>> <a href="http://www.silicon.com/white-papers/components/2009/12/24/multi-core-and-linux-kernel-60295311/" target="_blank">http://www.silicon.com/white-papers/components/2009/12/24/multi-core-and-linux-kernel-60295311/</a><br>
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><br>
> --<br>
> Nate Duehr<br>
> <a href="mailto:nate@natetech.com">nate@natetech.com</a><br>
><br>
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