Congeries of cross connected concepts
I am upgrading my primary workstation and for the first time, my upgrade will have a slower CPU clock than the box it is replacing. That just seems kind of odd. When I purchased my current system just about 3 years ago, 3000Mhz was a top of the line processor speed. Today, 3000Mhz is a top of the line processor speed. Based on my experience with other, secondary hosts it seems that memory architecture and other support makes more of a difference than CPU speed. My primary system doesn’t seem much faster than an low end system I bought about a year ago. The new system will have a 2666Mhz CPU, but it’s a “Dual Core” with a bigger cache and a much faster memory system. We’ll see what the performance looks like when it arrives. Without a doubt, however, the graphics performance will be astoundlying better.
I want to also note that hyper-threading and dual cores may not do much for normal people, but as a software developer it’s been a big help. No more desperately trying to get control when the code goes in to an infinite loop, as the other thread context / core lets me easily go to the debugger and deal with the problem. The current IDE from the Dark Empire also takes advantage of multiple processors to run parallel compiles which is nice for big system builds.
| cjm Thursday, 09 November 2006 at 11:54 |  |
i just bought a dual core machine and it flies. don’t know if you do much ripping but there is a huge improvement there, as well. not only are individual tasks faster, but as you mention, even if one core is pegged, the other is available for use on something else.
the machine i bought has media edition on it, which is pretty cool too.
| Annoying Old Guy Thursday, 09 November 2006 at 12:14 | |
I went with XP Pro. No good reason except for habit, as I don’t have a domain controller (although, hmmm, maybe I should get one). I don’t do a lot of ripping1 or media manipulation, so the media edition doesn’t do much for me. My current box is hyperthreaded, which is just dual register sets, not a true dual CPU cores.
1 I own on the order of 30 music CDs and buy 2 or 3 a year. Keeping up on ripping doesn’t pose much of a challenge even for very old hardware.
| cjm Thursday, 09 November 2006 at 13:08 | |
it sounds like you aren’t much into any media (tv, music, etc) so the media edition wouldn’t hold much appeal for you. but the built in tv tuner card allows one to create a media server for tv shows, movies, music, pictures, etc. it may sound like i am kidding, but the .5T of disk i have on my machine is not even close to being enough (for a movie collector like me). sometimes when the work i am doing is tedious, it helps to have a movie or something playing to keep me at the “forge”.
| Annoying Old Guy Friday, 10 November 2006 at 11:34 | |
Watching movies takes me too far out of the zone. If I need a break while waiting for a compile or test run, that’s what the blogosphere is for. Keeps the mind active.
| Jack Diederich Sunday, 12 November 2006 at 02:39 | |
I do like dual core (or processor) machines for their responsiveness but my platform and language of choice (linux and python) take a lot of the sting out of using single proc desktops. Since I work with *NIX compute intensive tasks happen on hosted machines via ssh (X-windows is very snappy even remotely if you have a non-dialup connection). Python doesn’t have a compile step so that isn’t a worry but back in ye-olde-nineties when I was at CDNOW all coding and compiling was done via ssh into a quad-proccessor Sun box (200MHz PentiumPros was the only consumer dual proc solution back then). You don’t want to be the guy to take out a box used by 50 devs with a fork bunny (I did while trying to do some load testing - I knew it was bad when an 50 heads started prarie dogging).
My needs are screen, screen, screen. From back in your February post: I still enjoy my triple 20” Samsungs and still envy your triple 21” guys (but not enough to shell out for the upgrade).
| Annoying Old Guy Sunday, 12 November 2006 at 08:48 | |
All the new graphics cards now have two dual-DVI connectors, so theoretically you could hook up two 2560×1600 monitors. I don’t know if the card will actually support that much screen real estate (I “only” got the 256M card, although there was a 1G on offer — sadly, I don’t have enough time for gaming these days to make it worth buying).
