The Dual-Core Wars Begin

[Mephistopheles]

...<A HREF="http://www.overclockers.com/tips00764/" target="_new">article by overclockers.com</A>.

I found it to be an interesting read; thought I'd pass it along. What do you guys think?

 

[endyen]

He does seem to have missed the obvious though. Joe SP is on a long enough upgrade cycle that he will see the gains as being dual core related. Mean time, his old system could be made competetive, just by doing a clean OS install, without superfluous crap.

 

[Mephistopheles]

I don't know about the Joe SP upgrade cycles... I mean, sure Joe SP has a really long upgrade cycle, but there are like a million Joe SPs for every geek around... So even if the Joes upgrade once by the time a geek has upgraded like 5 times, that still means that at any given time there are 200 thousand Joes upgrading/buying for every geek...

I do understand what you mean though, and I agree that he doesn't quite go through all the details, but I think that he has some points that are important and quite correct and that we sometimes don't consider... And because of that, it's an interesting read. It's not the best article, it's not a prophecy, but it invites further thought, that's all....

Intel is fighting in quantity and AMD is fighting in quality... Intel will claim it's a win, because it's obviously easy for them to win in quantity, and AMD will claim it's a win, because they obviously have the superior technology for now and the near future...

 

[endyen]

I reread what I had written, and my point doesn't get across very well. What I was trying to say was that Joe Six Pack will indead say ooh and aah about the dual cores.
It's an easy sell to someone who has a system filled with spyware, and a start menu the size of the library of congress.

 

[Mephistopheles]

It's an easy sell to someone who has a system filled with spyware, and a start menu the size of the library of congress.

ROFL!! Indeed, there are lots of Joes around that do that. Heck, there were times I even had to convince my brother to leave less than 40 quick launch icons on his desktop!! By that time, his start menu had all sorts of scrolling and filled the whole screen when opened...

Now the true performance problem are the other sorts of crap that sometimes run in the background... antivirus, antispyware, schedulers, news and update managers for a few apps, MSN, ICQ, Creative sound blaster drivers, MSOffice's own quickstart menu, StarOffice's own quickstart menu, ... it goes on and on....

So when Joe complains about performance, he might just get a lot by simply running "msconfig" and not starting all useless processes by the time windows starts up. Or going dual-core... heh...

 

[endyen]

See, that's why we need dual cores. What a f,ing joke!!
Truth be told, Intel sells it, people will buy it.
Oh well, we are right in the middle of a provincial election so I may be a little cynical about the inteligence level of the average citizen

 

[Mephistopheles]

Well... in a certain way, though, Joe SP will notice the difference of being dual-core before he notices anything else that Intel or AMD implement in their processors in terms of single-threaded performance... So, even if for ridiculous reasons (10+ background processes), Joe SP can still reap more benefits from dual-core than, say, the 64-bit transition... I mean, the much better multitasking will give him much more than maybe 10% performance increase in a given application. That's Joe Sixpack, anyway... and that's for now...

I mean, if it does indeed give him more of what he wants, then it's automatically a good thing, right? Regardless of the fact that Joe doesn't know better and wants silly, stupid things... Will it work? Probably. Intel will probably manage to sell a dual-core 2.8Ghz pentium with ease and in big numbers. And overall, smithfield will be more important than A64 X2 for software developers, because there will probably be a bigger installed base of smithfields than of A64 X2s...

Let's face it: it's just plain good to have a dual-core processor accessible for US$250... even if it has 20% lower single-threaded performance...

I'm a big fan of multiple CPUs anyway. I think there are great benefits to be had from having 2 CPUs... For any computing-intensive task, anyway. I'm into research and I use computers as mathematical tools, so 2 CPUs is a great idea... And in a few years, I bet software that needs high performance (not Word or whatever, but sound/video editing, math software, and so on) will all be multithreaded. The benefits from dual-core will probably be explored in the next several years... Are there limits? Hell, yeah. But it probably offers more performance than other architectural features/improvements like SSE2 or even AMD64, because it truly kicks in in apps that really need speed...

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Mephistopheles on 04/27/05 02:23 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[HansGruber]

Im wondering why tomshardware has not tested those Opteron dual cores.
Too worried that Xeons get beaten badly ?