Re: Advice on system purchase
Am Freitag, 2. November 2012 schrieb Stan Hoeppner:
> On 11/1/2012 11:42 AM, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> > Am Montag, 29. Oktober 2012 schrieb Stan Hoeppner:
> >>> For powerful laptops and power saving desktops I think Intel
> >>> Sandybridge/Ivybridge is best bet currently - except for the
> >>> political dimension.
> >>
> >> Sure, but 90% of users don't need "powerful". All the cores sit
> >> idle most of the time, and a faster CPU doesn't make Thunderbird or
> >> Firefox, IE or Outlook express, go any faster. Nor any of the
> >> standard desktop apps. 90% of users would benefit more from a low
> >> wattage dual or even single core CPU, with an SSD instead of a rust
> >> drive.
> >>
> >> But it's hard to sell people on the truth after you've been lying to
> >> them about the benefits of 4-8 core CPUs for many years...
> >
> > Yeah, as you pointed out its about peak performance.
>
> No, it has nothing to do with peak performance. What I said was that,
> in a nut shell, a 2.5-3GHz dual core CPU from AMD or Intel is more
> powerful than what 99.99% of users need. Yet AMD/Intel are only
> selling 4/6/8 core desktop CPUs today. It's a waste of cores and a
> waste of money.
Hmmm, then I misunderstood you.
I do think that a bigger peak performance on *one* core can make a
difference. If using a…
> > Whether thats noticable? Well, one would have to test it.
> >
> > I think to see any difference during application load times tough you
> > need to have a good SSD alongside.
>
> CPU performance has little to do with app load times, with most
> productivity apps anyway. Load time is dictated by disk latency. If
> the application's binary and libraries have been cached then CPU makes
> more difference, but it's a small difference.
… SSD and lots of RAM… and that this is why…
> > But I do believe that the kernel pings
> > between 800 MHz and turbo mode not for nothing.
>
> I have no idea what point you're making here.
"ondemand" scheduler tends to do it by give-me-everything-you-got or the-
least-you-can-provide.
As I experience the Linux kernel is using that turbo mode quite a lot. So
something has to benefit from it. How noticable it is? I think it can be
noticable with fast SSD and lots of RAM.
Thus I do think that it potentially gives the following benefits:
1) faster execution / lower latency on peak loads
2) less power consumption due to longer sleep periods.
And thus I say, that I better use a dual core CPU with higher peak
performance for typical desktop workloads, than a quad core CPU with lower
peak performance. A quad core CPU with as high peak performance might be
in order if something compiles software a lot.
And thats my case for using Intel CPUs at the moment. Given the additional
thing that at least from my perception anything Post-Nehalem from Intel
has really good power consumption to computing power ratio. Well already
Pentium-M has been quite good, while Pentium 4 was a joke.
That Intel i5 Sandybridge CPU on this ThinkPad T520 is really, really fast
together with that Intel SSD 320 + 8 GiB of RAM.
I had a machine with i7 Quadcore, but probably a bit slower SSD, for a
week and subjectively I did not notice a difference.
That said, in order to support the smaller company, an AMD CPU is an
option as well. I do think the difference won´t be that big. But I think
it needs to be one with a good power consumption versus processing power
ratio. And I did not follow AMD´s recent development there, in order to
really judge whether they have anything competitive in that field
meanwhile. Back then when I looked they had not.
So my question would be: What AMD CPU do you see as alternative to say:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2520M CPU @ 2.50GHz
dual core CPU or say the Ivybridge equivalent in its desktop variant (as
its a desktop machine being talked over here in this thread and no
laptop). Which one could compete?
Ciao,
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
Reply to: