my box[computer] is a fairly decent one. decent for simple stuff anyway. i don't play high-end, uber-gobbler-graphics-cruncher type of games[read: fps] anyway. so i don't really need a blazing fast machine, for now at least. but i still poke around, keeping an eye out for an outstanding deal.
i'm currently running on a 5 year old amd athlon processor. its frankenstein. it underwent surgery countless time already. hard drives being swapped in and out, incremental upgrades of the video card, and a lot of mixing and mismatching peripheral cards. so yeah, i'm craving for a new box i guess. but i vowed not to go with an amd core, i'd like to taste the power[and silence] of intel cores once again.
now when you check out intel's processors and their descriptions, it can be quite overwhelming. there's just a lot of them. so, here's your guide to solve intel's puzzle, arranged from poorest to best performer. but first, a little processor history...
in the realm of computers, there's this law which says processor power will double every two years(yes, two years and not 18 months. that's from the horse's mouth himself). i am talking about Moore's Law of course. if that is so, then why oh why don't we still have pentium 5?! why are the "fastest" processors still running at somewhere around 3GHz?!
to answer that question, well they did try making processors run faster. however, there's this fundamental roadblock which prevented them from succeeding feasibly. to make a processor run faster, you have to put in more electricity. the more electricity, the more heat the processor generates. and therein lay the problem. a "faster" processor didn't become feasible because they became too hot and melted. so could they still be law-abiding processor manufacturers?
well, they figured that perhaps a "faster" processor is not the key. and so intel adopted the 40/40 mantra. that meant 40% more [processor]power for 40% less [electrical]power. you see, moore's law stated doubling of processor power, not processor speed, and processor power is determined by millions of instructions per second[MIPS] a chip can execute. so they did this by improving the architecture, and optimizing the instruction set. but of course, the major revision is that it uses the 65nm manufacturing process, whereas pentium 4[except the cedar mill and pentium d 900 series] uses 90nm.
this breakthroughs lead to the itanium class processors, or more commonly known as the "core" processors, the grandchild of the centrino. well, they did get the idea from centrino so it could be said that centrino was the very first core processor. actually, it is the first core processor. they were released sometime in 2003, with itanium 2[read: core 2] sometime late 2005. that means the next iteration is right about due by the end of the year. indeed, intel says that its next generation chips are on schedule for release by the end of the year, codenamed "penryn". so anyway, here goes...
note: a 'd' at the end means duo or dual-core. by default, 'core' comes as core duo, its hard to find a core solo because they're usually labelled as centrino[centrino and core is almost the same]. and its always core 2 duo, its almost impossible to find a core 2 solo.
pentium 4: try to stay away from this one. really. by the end of the year, its going to be four generations old.
celeron d: a celeron is a celeron, even if its dual-core.
pentium d: provides decent performance for the buck. however, it is still plagued by memory leaks[windows related of course] when multi-tasking heavily.
core: if you're thinking about buying core duo, you might as well as buy a pentium d and slap in more memory with the extra money. they don't offer that much additional oomph than the pentium d. but, you should go core duo over the pentium d if you're buying a laptop. that should stretch your battery life.
core 2: the entry-level core 2 duo e4300 will outstrip pentium d 3.2GHz in every possible way. mind you, each core of the e4300 runs at just 1.66GHz. that is how much more efficient it is. in fact, core 2 duo is oftenr referred to as the real dual core processor. also, intel migrated from its naming traditional convention of basing from the processor speed. the name is now based off the power consumption at peak usage, much like what amd has been using all-along. so if you have the money, go with core 2 duo for a lag-less computing experience.
and lastly of course, make sure that the rest of your computer can keep up to the speed of your processor.
so the next time you're out in the market for a computer, remember that by the end of the year, intel will release their next-generation chips[which, by the way, will be manufactured using the 45nm process] which means slashed prices on core 2 duos and a better deal on black friday. ;-)
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