Dual vs Quad

[Dimitriid]

The "95W" attached to a CPU name is only a thermal specification (TDP)-it does not define electrical load. It can imply it, but only imply it.

Wattage numbers don't tell you much on PSUs anyway-you have to look at the number and kind of rails, as well as their max amperage to know if you are in fact "upgrading".

You're right on both accounts I think.

[earthpigg]

may i suggest abandoning the optical drive and spending the money saved on a ssd?

i nearly purchased a dvd drive myself, then realized.... i havent used the optical drive on my old computer in forever!

i am an advocate of this:

one optical drive per household.... for that rare occassion that you want to play a DVD or some distant family member gives you a "Picture CD" from wallmart.

[3rdalbum]

one optical drive per household.... for that rare occassion that you want to play a DVD or some distant family member gives you a "Picture CD" from wallmart.

Don't come to my house, you'd faint. I have two DVD burners in my desktop, two in my father's desktop, and one in my server. I use most of them.

PS: Unless you're going to be doing a LOT of video encoding to H.264, buy a dual-core.

I'm putting all my DVDs into H.264 format on my server, which is why I'm using all those DVD drives, and why I wish I had a quad-core now (x264 supports multi-core encoding).

[hessiess]

^ Why not just store it on HDDs?

may i suggest abandoning the optical drive and spending the money saved on a ssd?

i nearly purchased a dvd drive myself, then realized.... i havent used the optical drive on my old computer in forever!

i am an advocate of this:

one optical drive per household.... for that rare occassion that you want to play a DVD or some distant family member gives you a "Picture CD" from wallmart.

Agree, optical drives are basically obsolite.

There is actually quite a lot of research going into automatic parallelization of non-pure code, but such techniques aren't going to be commonplace for a while. There are also other programming systems that are unpure, like Erlang, but offer more support for simple concurrency than traditional languages. I think that the concurrent programming paradigm will become commonplace over the next few decades but not with languages like Haskell because, as you alluded to, not many programmers want to use a language like that .

Where is this research that you speck of, a google search dident tern up anything.

[bruno9779]

quad core is AM2 while dual core is AM3
my money is on AM3.
and maybe you could consider getting what I have : PhenomII X3 blackedition. Really a good buy (I haven't managed to overheat it, and albeit! I tried!!)

[Simian Man]

Where is this research that you speck of, a google search dident tern up anything.

Google Scholar turns up a few. I attended a talk on this subject a while ago and considered it as a research area.

[iQuizzle]

I currently have a e5400/g43 setup. I am horribly disappointed with the performance of the g43 in linux (can't even playback smooth video). I think it might be a somewhat faulty chip though, as I can't even get the dvi port to work. I have to use the vga output.

I was thinking about moving over to a AMD X4 620/785g setup as well. It seems like a steal @~$170 for me because I don't game and I don't want to run/buy a separate graphics card.

Just curious about the SSDs. I started watching their performance about 2 years ago, but they were way too expensive at the time. It seems that you can get a reasonable 64GB SSD for around $180 now. Which ones have you guys purchased? How relevant is the read/write speed? Is it critical to spend more and get the 220MB/s drives or are the 170MB/s drives fine?

I was thinking that the most critical thing was the access times, but I wasn't completely sure.

[khelben1979]

quad core is AM2 while dual core is AM3

Don't you mean the opposite? AM3 is newer than AM2..

[MaxIBoy]

Don't you mean the opposite? AM3 is newer than AM2..

• AM2 supported dual-core processors and uniprocessors only.
• AM2+ was backwards compatible with AM2 but also supported quad-core and tri-core processors (i.e. the original Phenom series.)
• AM3 has quad-core support (Phenom II X4,) tri-core support (Phenom II x3,) and dual-core support (Athlon II.) I suppose it could support uniprocessors as well, but honestly, is anyone even making them anymore?

[Exodist]

I'd go with the phenom II X2. For what you say you wish to run on it, it will give you really good performance. Most programs don't make use of the multiple cores unless compiled for it, so unless you're going to be doing a lot of heavy data processing (like video conversion) a dual core will happily run your applications for you with horsepower ready to go when the OS does its stuff, or when you have several apps going.

Besides, I hear the original Phenoms have heat problems. Not sure about that, though.

I would like to piggy back on this.

Go with the PhenomII.
I have the AMD64 X2 6000+. Even tho my system kernel is compiled for SMP only about 1 in 8 programs are compiled or even wrote for SMP. Not to mention I have never seen BOTH cores topped out at 100%.