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Re: quad cores?



 Mark J. Dulcey wrote: 

> Intel quads only offer so-so scaling, 4 cores are still better than two 
> if you can keep them all working. (On the other hand, the faster 
> dual-core will probably be better for gaming; an E6750 for $190 or an 
> E6850 for $280 look sweet.) AMD's new Barcelona will scale better, but 
> the baseline single-core performance isn't as high except perhaps in  that 
> scientific computing, because its floating-point performance is very high. 

Yup.  I just bought a E6750 (still in-flight).  I'm ever-so-slightly 
regretting it, because further research showed me that the 1333 front 
side bus is a bit of a funny numbers game (sorry I can't find the link), 
  and there's only a very minor performance improvement, but more 
importantly, it's severely limiting my already-limited selection of 
motherboards. 

Picking a motherboard, more than any other component, has been way too 
much like dating for me.  I found a great motherboard (Gigabyte 
GA-P35-DS3P), then newegg said it was out of stock til 10/01 (and most 
other vendors reported it as out of stock too). But now it's just listed 
as out of stock.  Nevermind... 

My problem is that I need 1333 FSB (for the E6750), but I also need a 
serial port (for my IR tranceiver), 3 PCI slots (1 for eth1, 1 or 2 for 
PVR-350 capture cards), and SATA RAID. 

I did find one serial card with a PCI Express x1 interface with a 
chipset that supposedly works with Linux, so maybe I can get away with 
no serial port.  Or I could buy a USB-based IR tranceiver that will work 
with lirc. 

And I guess I can use software raid instead of hardware raid.  I swear 
this is more stressful than actually building the box and installing Linux. 

> Intel will have true quad-core processors (four cores on one chip rather 
> than two chips in an MCM) next year, and those will be faster and scale 
> better. But isn't that always the way? 

True that.  But more and more, I find the "new shiny thing" is better at 
some things and worse at others.  The "win-win" is rarer and rarer. 



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