Core2Duo - How have you got it?

[kalniel]

Well a computer is only as fast as its weakest link......seems to me programs and hard drives have to catch up.

Heh.. misconception It's only bottlenecked when calling for that resource. Having a 320000rpm hard drive doesn't make your computer do maths any quicker, or draw 3d scenes etc.

[Gunney]

... a somewhat aged P3 550kHz, at time of purchase, a top spec Gateway PC costing in the region of £2000

I'd been looking lustfully at some of the more recent systems and came to an agreement with the Mrs to use some of our emergency fund to replace our existing systems.

A nice AMD powered Dell system for her and all the bit's to build a Core2Duo 6400 box for me.

Well the money was only sitting there generating interest

[rezen]

Moving from this damn SFF Athlon XP box... Yay for C2D and space for things like drives and fans!

[kempez]

Heh.. misconception It's only bottlenecked when calling for that resource. Having a 320000rpm hard drive doesn't make your computer do maths any quicker, or draw 3d scenes etc.

Aye but wouldn't it be nice to see some more advances in HDD's other than "wow 6squillian terabyte drives"??

Software could do with catching up too imo

[aidanjt]

Personally I could see solid state 'flash' drives replacing the good ole HDD at some point in the future.

[DanceswithUnix]

But I thought the performance lead per clock for Core 2 Duo was really quite high - a 1.86ghz c2d is about 2.6-2.8ghz AMD? Mostly that's down to the 4IPC of c2d vs 3IPC for AMD, and the fact that 32 bit instructions aren't all that big

The really impressive benchmarks are that high

Looking on Anandtech's recent 4300 bench, the 6300 is equivalent to
~2.3GHz X2 at Quake 4 (24%), Oblivion, Internet creation. Half life 2 goes up to ~2.5GHz equiv as do quiet a few others.

Office productivity test and most media encoding, AMD might as well not turn up, and you are right that a 6300 bests a 2.6GHz AMD part.

The extra issue helps very little. On average every 6th instruction is a conditional jump, and that gives a diminishing return after 2 issue.

AMD are addressing load reordering, SSE issue rate, L3 cache size, L1 cache throughput and basically every trick the Core2 is pulling bar the instruction merging. In 64 bit the core2 turns that off anyway.

I also remember lots of people saying the Core2 couldn't possibly make up all that ground as Intel were so far behind. It was possible, and both companies have plenty of bright people working for them.

[No.72]

Mine came last Friday

I like to have the latest stuff

plus my old amd 3200+ was grinding my gears

[excalibur2]

Heh.. misconception It's only bottlenecked when calling for that resource. Having a 320000rpm hard drive doesn't make your computer do maths any quicker, or draw 3d scenes etc.

Ah so people are dumb in buying faster and faster Hard drives and what's the point in programs in 64bit............

[scarbunny]

I thought after five years my Athlon XP+ 2000 could do with an overhall, as could my nVidia FX5200.

And I needed a project while i was recovering after a motorbike accident!!

That and my fun fund reached critical mass!!

[kalniel]

Aye but wouldn't it be nice to see some more advances in HDD's other than "wow 6squillian terabyte drives"??

Software could do with catching up too imo

Quite agree. Flash has turned out to be a damp squid so far, but I'm fairly sure it'll replace both optical and magnetic storage media before too long.

Software regresses as hardware progresses There are so many other things to be spending the time on that the gain from optimising performance is better spent elsewhere unforutnately.

[kalniel]

Ah so people are dumb in buying faster and faster Hard drives

Where are they? I don't see much evidence of that - I just see them buying bigger and bigger

[Clunk]

Quite agree. Flash has turned out to be a damp squid

Squib

[Thorburn]

Moved from a Pentium D 950 to Core 2 Duo as soon as I could.
Looking to upgrade that system to quad core either with the Q6600 price drop or when 45nm hits and move this one into my Media Centre.

Very keen however to ditch my Asus P5W DH Deluxe for a P965 based board.

[kalniel]

Squib

That too

[Clunk]

Aye but wouldn't it be nice to see some more advances in HDD's other than "wow 6squillian terabyte drives"??

Software could do with catching up too imo

Most definately, Im surprised there havent been more advances in recent times.

[chuckskull]

Most definately, Im surprised there havent been more advances in recent times.

Nothing has really changed since the 80's, everything has just gotten smaller and faster we're still using the same basic framework.