New winners for HTPC? The Socket AM3 Sempron 140 at 2.7GHz with a 45W TDP. The replacement for Athlon / Sempron LE appears, and AMD has a new, top to bottom, 1 - 4 core line up again. Looks good to me...
New winners for HTPC? The Socket AM3 Sempron 140 at 2.7GHz with a 45W TDP. The replacement for Athlon / Sempron LE appears, and AMD has a new, top to bottom, 1 - 4 core line up again. Looks good to me...
CAT-THE-FIFTH (29-07-2009)
With this motherboard it will form the basis of a decent budget PC:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Sapph...-RAID-mATX-VGA
The motherboard has the SB700 southbridge too!
I'm not sure I still see the point of single core CPUs outside really tiny stuff like netbooks... :S
There's still plenty of software that's not optimised for multithreaded performance, and this hits a price point - show me another current generation processor for < £30. There's plenty of people who want to buy desktop computers just for email and web browsing, and these would serve that purpose perfectly. They'd also be a good option for a HTPC where most of the hard crunching can be offloaded to the GPU (stick one of these in a 785G motherboard, for instance, and you'll have a killer HTPC). I'll be interested to see how they perform when the reviews come out...
True, but whatever is said about multi-core CPUs beyond dual, the ability to multitask with a dual core compared to a single absolutely transforms performance. You certainly can't find a dual core for £27 but you can for £45. For something so fundamental to the performance of a PC, £18 doesn't seem much to pay. I'm willing to bet a lot of the sales of this CPU go for people who don't realise this. (and for ref, said £45 CPU has the same power consumption as the single core, so is just as worthwhile for a low power system such as an HTPC. I've also yet to see a low budget graphics card powerful enough to run full bitrate HD 1080p smoothly off an old single core CPU)
TBH, I have a notebook with a Pentium M 1.7ghz,1gb of DDR RAM,a 40gb 5400rpm hard drive and SIS integrated graphics and XP SP3.
I usually have an external display connected too(dual display) and have upward of 30+ pdf documents open, two word documents open and a few tabs of firefox at the same time. The main limitation is memory and disk speed and the CPU is certainly fast enough for this task. I also find the notebook is fast enough to play DVDs and 720p video too and this is with the SIS integrated graphics too. 1080p is a bit more of a struggle although modern IGPs are much better in offloading the video decoding from the CPU in this regard.
Desktops have the advantage of faster hard disks and can have more RAM too so I can see that a single core CPU is certainly fast enough.
PDF and Word only use memory, not CPU time
True but it illustrates my point that for word processing and internet it is fast enough - also I forgot to add that I usually have PowerPoint and Paint.NET open too for editing images too put into the word documents.
I agree for anything else that a dual core does have advantages but still single core processors do have a use!! I suppose it all comes down to how much you want to spend and certainly go for a dual core and above if the funds do allow it. I am a tad on the stingy side at the moment and the more I can get out of my computers the better!!
Perhaps, but none of my PCs would be as useful without dual core processors, the work PC, the fileserver or the gaming PC (which is actually a quad).
Hate to bump a relatively dormant thread (let alone one of my own ) but the announcement of Windows 7 XP Mode RC jogged my memory for another advantage of the < £30 single core Sempron: full AMD-V support. If I'm an SME and I require Windows XP for some of my legacy software, being able to base my new Windows 7 computers around a cheap single core Sempron and still get the hardware virtualisation support that XP Mode requires is a pretty big deal. Perhaps I should point this out to AMDs new EMEA Marketing manager...
CAT-THE-FIFTH (05-08-2009)
Fortunately, it would appear that AMD know that
CAT-THE-FIFTH (05-08-2009)
Anyway, now we've seen the first reviews of 785G and they look positive (particularly in respect to power draw), I've settled on a Sempron + 785G mobo for my new HTPC. I've finally persuaded my better half that the Q6600 + 8800GTX is just too power hungry for the job. The only question is what I do with that now...
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