Processors

[bobmatino17]

i was wondering if anyone knew the difference between all the major processors?

like the Intel Pentium, Celeron, Centrino, Xeon, Atom, i7, and Core Duo. and the AMD Athlon, Phenom, Turion, Turion Ultra, and Opteron.

[Skripka]

The difference is in how much power they suck up, what socket type they use, cache sizes, FSB, multipliers, number of cores, architecture, process, and how much coin they cost....amongst other things.

[fistfullofroses]

i was wondering if anyone knew the difference between all the major processors?

like the Intel Pentium, Celeron, Centrino, Xeon, Atom, i7, and Core Duo. and the AMD Athlon, Phenom, Turion, Turion Ultra, and Opteron.

The pentium processors were 32bit, the p4 had a max fsb speed of 433mhz iirc. The celeron was cheap pentium, that usually produced less heat, drew less power, and while having similar processing frequencies, had smaller cache sizes, and slower front-side bus. The intel Atom is an amazing processor. It requires very little power, produces very little heat, and the newer models of Atoms are 64bit. The multi core processor variants of intel and amd architectures are normally 64bit (which means you double the amount of data that can be sent at one time) but are backwards compatible to 32 bit architectures. The Turion and Centrino are similar to Semprons and celerons in that they typically are not as powerful overall due to limitations in cache bus speed, but have similar to processor clocks.Athlons are single or dual core, and are the middle ground AMD processor. Phenom and Opteron would be the high end models.

Don't spend too much time killing yourself over all of this. I run a 1.6ghz Sempron with 4gb DDR2 800mhz RAM, 1.2ghz FSB, and hypertransport 1. The performance is comparable to the exact same machine with an Athlon. The only real performance increase I have seen with my setup (using same mobo and no added graph cards/sound cards) is when using a multi core processor (which is obvious because you then have 2 to 4 processors instead of one. if you then use symmetric multi processing or some other load balancing features.... yeah fun stuff). If you are running Linux, you will not require that much power. If, on the other hand, you are using Windows, I would highly recommend finding an AMD Athlon X2 and setting one core to system tasks and processes, and using the other core for user space apps. I would also recommend at least 4gb of RAM. Vista and 7 require a lot of machine resources as do MS Office, IE, Firefox, and most games.

[bobmatino17]

what about the i7's?