Over the next few weeks we'll be
releasing a three part series called “Core2 Dream Machines.”
Though we won't be revealing any of our preliminary results today, we
did want to share a bit of our thinking process with you. At the core
of any system build is the CPU and we've chosen Intel's Core2Duo
E6300 as the platform of choice. Why? Read on warrior of geek-dom, and
you'll soon find out.
What
is a microprocessor? A microprocessor, or CPU (Central Processing
Unit) is essentially the "brain" of a computer system, though
perhaps this is an oversimplification. A microprocessor typically
contains several specialized execution units (Arithmetic Logic Units
or ALU's, Floating Point logic Units or FPU's as examples) and other
functional units involved in internal and external communications.
SiS has rarely been known as the company to be reckoned with. For the last year or so, SiS has largely disappeared, when it comes to coverage on hardware review sites. The reasoning, primarily, has been that SiS's offerings have in the past been lackluster, highly integrated products, designed for the low end market. While there's nothing wrong with this (after all, someone has to do it), SiS's products typically have not had much appeal to the performance/gaming sector.
The IT world is abuzz about "Conroe" "Merom" and "Woodcrest", better
known as Intel's Core 2 Duo architecture. All three market segments
(desktop, mobile, and server) are transitioning to this new unified
architecture. You'd have to have been sleeping under a rock to miss all
the preview benches and tests of Conroe engineering samples being
flogged around the web. The performance numbers are quite astounding,
and definitely bring the fight hardcore back to AMD.
My last system was a dual AMD Athlon XP 1700+ modified for MP use and
clocked to 2600+ (2100MHz) on an MSI K7D Master mainboard. This served
me well for roughly a year until the K7D decided to blow some caps out
of warranty. Despite the cost savings on a used motherboard such as
this, I decided this was a mistake and rather than making it again I
unloaded on a shiny new Supermicro X5DA8.
What will the NV40 (NVIDIA) and the R420 (ATI) bring us? Will the
NV40 Finally close the gap between the two companies, and possibly
pull NVIDIA back ahead of the game? Will the R420 finally vanquish
the only real competition it has in one clean stroke? Only time and
message board rumors will tell.
About a month ago Intel upgraded its Pentium 4 processor line by adding 2 megabytes of L3 cache to the processor core. This new “Extreme Edition” sports just a slight performance increase over its predecessors, and as such Intel will have a hard time convincing gamers and enthusiasts to choose it over the AMD Athlon 64 FX. However, cache is an extremely important and often overlooked part of processor architecture.
Many of you may have read the recent article in the inquirer that
reports on a patent that was granted to Intel for an overclocking
detection and prevention device. With all due respect to our fellow
journalists (they did post the story first), this article was a little
lacking on the clear technical interpretation that we know our readers
crave. As an alternative, you could fight your way through "United
States Patent 6,535,988 - March 18, 2003", but to save you the trouble
we here at Fastsilicon.com have done it for you.
When the Pentium 4 was first released back in November 2000 it became Intel's fastest offering to date, although there were some specific circumstances under which it was outperformed by the Pentium 3 in some benchmarks. In addition, AMD’s Athlon became the choice for many computer enthusiasts during that time for many reasons. The Willamette core, the first variation of the Pentium 4 based on the .18 micron process, experienced issues due to the fact memory technology hadn't yet caught up with its enormous hunger for memory bandwith.
Let’s face it,
Intel has taken the lead in processor performance and AMD is falling
behind. Many AMD fans have switched over to Intel because AMD is unable
to offer a reasonable solution for hardcore users. Although AMD has
announced the Athlon XP 2700 and XP 2800 models, we are just now seeing
the XP 2400 in stores!
