Linux Hardware Looks at Core 2

Penguin Lover writes "Linux Hardware has just posted a new story on how Intel's new Conroe performs under Linux. From the article: 'Now is a great time to be CPU shopping because no matter which side of the isle you look on, you have great choice for both CPUs and motherboards. Along with Intel's chipset offerings, keep in mind that NVIDIA has the nForce series for Intel CPUs which would give you SLI support for all your Quake Wars and UT2007 gaming needs.'"

which side of the what?

[njvic (614279)]

Isle? Come on /. editors! It's aisle!

Re:which side of the what?

[chrismcdirty (677039)]

Give them a little bit of credit. Maybe they live on a small island, and the only computer shops are on either side of the isle.

Re:which side of the what?

[njvic (614279)]

Actually now that I have RTFA, I see the spelling error is in the story, so the /. editors (or Penguin Lover) should then add [sic] to the quote.

Re:which side of the what?

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

You're assuming that Taco&Co actually have any real editorial experience and even know what [sic] means...

Re:

[wirelessbuzzers (552513)]

It's Latin for "such" or "thus". If you quote something with an error or otherwise weird construction, you write "[sic]" to indicate that the quote appears that way in the text you're quoting.

Re:

[pizza_milkshake (580452)]

..."how Intel's new Conroe performs under Linux"

Internal Server Error

so... not so well?

Re:which side of the what?

[skoaldipper (752281)]

Give them a little bit of credit. Maybe they live on a small island, and the only computer shops are on either side of the isle.

I heard the Skipper is trying to pass off the boat radio as a computer at his shop, while the Professor is selling a sweet beowulf coconut cluster running linux on the other.

Re:

[tverbeek (457094)]

I've always preferred shopping on the windward side of the isle. The leeward side of the isle always seems to have higher prices.

Bang for the buck

[Ritz_Just_Ritz (883997)]

The Core2 E6600 seems to be a nice bang for the money as it is right around the middle of the currently available speed grades and is the cheapest iteration with 4MB of L2 cache. It also seems to be competitive with dual core AMD products (my usual choice) that are substantially more expensive. It's definitely a buyer's market these days...let the price war begin! :)

Re:

[the_humeister (922869)]

Depends on the usage I guess. I can pick up a 1ghz duron at my local university surplus for next to nothing, and it will run MS Word and Mozilla just as well as the latest octa-core processors.

Re:Bang for the buck

[qortra (591818)]

Of course it won't run them as well. Clearly, you've never tried to open a large document (100+ pages) with pictures, tables, and indexes using Word (or especially OpenOffice which saves more money than a hardware upgrade would cost). It's a nightmare; imagine trying to drag an 18 wheeler with a Geo Metro. Even webpages can be a bit taxing these days. A sufficiently complex flash animation (yes, I hate flash too), or even AJAX webapp can bring a 1Ghz duron to its knees, especially when the rendering gets complex; Google fortunately has fairly simple AJAX pages, but others are not so kind.

Moreover, there is nothing like using an SMP system: either two processors or a single dual-core (hyperthreading is exempt from this comment). Having all those piddly little background tasks on one core means that the second core is available just to obey your whims. The latency in executing business and web apps with a dual-core is unparalleled.

Clearly you're cheap, and I can respect that (heaven knows I'm almost as poor as they get). Perhaps you have a point that the $350 processor that the grandparent spoke of is not in the optimal point of the price/performance curve, but even for people that just use Word and Firefox, you can't claim that a new $150 dual-core won't run stuff significantly faster than Duron; and you don't even have to blow that extra imaginary money on an octa-core[sic] processor to get the extra horsepower.

In either case, I consider your minimalist elitism offtopic.

Re:

[subsolar2 (147428)]

The Core2 E6600 seems to be a nice bang for the money as it is right around the middle of the currently available speed grades and is the cheapest iteration with 4MB of L2 cache. It also seems to be competitive with dual core AMD products (my usual choice) that are substantially more expensive. It's definitely a buyer's market these days...let the price war begin! :)

Actually if you include the motherboard price AMD X2 chips are more competetive since my looking around show Intel Core2 compatible MB cost

It would be even nicer

[labratuk (204918)]

if all Core2s didn't have built-in TPM.

'fraid that rules it out for me.

Re:

[FuturePastNow (836765)]

TPM is built into motherboards, not processors. And very few motherboards have it.

Re:

[Dwedit (232252)]

Hyperthreading is only found in the Pentium IV series of processors, the Architecture of core 2 duo can't support it.

Re:

[Ritz_Just_Ritz (883997)]

I just searched for "core 2 compatible" boards on newegg and got 5 results ranging in price from $50.99-$119.99. So the motherboard premium that's being bandied about seems to be largely nonexistent. Also, an E6600 is likely faster than an X2 4800 for most (all?) tasks. In order to step up to similar performance you need the X2 5000 or one of the faster AMD FX processors.

If I was buying a system today, I'd probably lean towards the Core 2 Duo. A few weeks ago, I'd probably have gone with an Athlon64 X2

the isle

[Anoraknid the Sartor (9334)]

which isle would that be?

Penguin Isle?

Isle be going now...

Re:

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

which isle would that be?

Isle of View, man.

Dontcha just love...

[MightyYar (622222)]

I like the "NOW is a great time to buy..." argument for anything that improves steadily over time. Can you point to a time in recent computer history where "NOW" wasn't the best time to purchase a new rig? It can't possibly be news to readers here that the processor-power-to-dollar-ratio is at its best point ever, can it? It would be like saying "NOW is the best time to buy a new car", as if there has been a point in the last 20 years where the general trend of car quality has dropped, but even more ridiculous because of Moore's Law.

Re:Dontcha just love...

[AcidLacedPenguiN (835552)]

I know a friend of mine got burned when buying his rig about 2 years ago, PCI-e had just come out, and he didn't expect it to kill AGP in a matter of days. So, I'd say that was a bad time to buy a midrange system. (PCI-e was at the expensive end at the time)

Re:

[Frumious Wombat (845680)]

386sx, 486SLC, P60-wienie-roaster-edition, early Intel-EM64T. I think those were points not to "Buy Now".

Re:

[MightyYar (622222)]

I guess I wasn't calling 1993 "recent". I had a similar experience, buying a $3000 Macintosh 68040 just before the PowerPC came out.

There is always bad hardware out there, but the prices for existing stuff have consistently trended down. When the P60 came out, it was expensive as all hell, but that was a great time to buy a 486 machine - there was serious competition between Intel, AMD, and Cyrix. The prices were at historic lows. Yeah the Prescott with 64-bit extensions was crap, but that didn't make it a

Yes, I can.

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

Can you point to a time in recent computer history where "NOW" wasn't the best time to purchase a new rig?

Say it with me now: Itanium.

Re:Dontcha just love...

[Konster (252488)]

Yeah... 4 weeks ago the AMD 3700+ was $200.

Now it's $99.

NOW seems to be a pretty good time to pick up on decent processing power. NOW I can get a decent CPU for $99, a 320 GB drive for $95. ...and the list goes on. Silent 7600 GS for $110. Top name DVD recorders all day long for $28.

I just built that system for less than $600 and it uttlerly vaporizes the box I built last year at double the price.

But you are still on a 486 waiting for the right NOW time to upgrade.

Re:

[Iamthefallen (523816)]

But the Now two months ago was a pretty crappy Now to buy a computer in compared to the Now, that's well, Now.

Now is also not as good a time as the Now that will be in just another month or two when Core 2 motherboard prices drop. That Now is close enough to Now that it's probably worth waiting until then, ehr, the Now then.

Hmm, sounds familiar...

Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?
Colonel Sandurz: Now. You're looking at now sir. Everything that happens now, is hap

Re:

[Mr2cents (323101)]

The time where I bought a 16MB dimm for 400 Euro's and two weeks later they were selling at 50 Euro's in the same store? But that was so long ago that the Euro didn't even exist yet.

Constant Battle

[DarkNemesis618 (908703)]

This only extends the constant battle between AMD & Intel. Intel comes up with something better than AMD...shortly thereafter, AMD comes up with something that beats that out...and so on and so on. While I have not personally tested any of the Conroe chips, I do have 2 linux boxes, one using an Intel P4 & the other an AMD Athlon64. Both run Ubuntu perfectly. Pretty much what I'm trying to say is simply that in a month or two, or when AMD comes out with their next line of CPUs, the discussion will just restart.

Re:

[AcidLacedPenguiN (835552)]

I think the significance of the Conroe is that it is an entirely new architecture and it caught AMD off guard as their new architecture won't be out until next year. Because of this newer better chip by Intel selling at a moderate price and AMD has no product to counter it, the only defence they have is extremely reduced prices. Reduced prices means that it is a better time to buy, say an AMDx2 4200+ now than it was say, 3 weeks ago. I imagine that Intel is reducing prices on their current lines to counter

Re:

[fitten (521191)]

You realize that a 4x4 machine with cost several thousands of dollars (USD) and that there are only a couple/three games that are multithreaded, right? Not only that but from everything that has been released so far, the 4x4 looks like a panic stricken kneejerk reaction to Core 2 Duo and seems to be nothing more than a (potentially cheaper) dual socket, dual core Opteron that uses unregistered memory on a motherboard with two PCIe x16 slots on it... these already exist except for the 2xx(x) Opterons that u

Re:

[tomstdenis (446163)]

Well clearly I can't comment about future plans from AMD. Just that the next revision beyond F will address some of the Core 2 specific optimizations.

But also keep in mind benchmarks can say anything. You think Core 2 is the better processor? Ok, drop 8 of them in a HPC system and run 50 independent tasks on them from researchers all over the world. You think your 4MB cache helps when you have so much pollution? There are applications where K8 is STILL the better choice by far.

Most benchmarks Intel pic

Re:

[DarkNemesis618 (908703)]

pretty much just the competition between AMD & Intel

Back and forth

[LaughingCoder (914424)]

There was one really important point at the end of the article that should not be overlooked:

Also keep in mind that AMD has yet to go to a 65nm manufacturing process.

AMD remains competitive with Intel, even though they are still at 90nm. Speed goes up and power goes down with die scaling! Now, clearly the Core2 is the fastest processor you can buy today, and Intel is (smartly) offering speed grades in the mid-price range in order to try and "buy back" the enthusiasts. But AMD will get a nice speed bump when they bring 65nm on line. Of course Intel is not standing still either, as they are aggressively moving towards 45nm.

I love capitalism.

Re:Back and forth

[MrFlibbs (945469)]

A good point, but keep in mind that the performance and power differences between Prescott (90nm) and Cedarmill (65nm) were decidely underwhelming. The greater leakage current in Intel's 65nm process ate into most of the gains from the smaller process. It did make the die smaller and thus cheaper, but not much better in either performance or power consumption.

Perhaps the AMD/IBM SOI process will do better at 65nm in controlling leakage current and provide the needed performance boost. Intel plans to release the 45nm Penryn in 2H07, and claims to have greatly improved the leakage current situation. AMD needs to leapfrom Conroe's performance with their 65nm part to remain competitive. Schedule is critical here: if Intel is late, AMD will regain momemtum; if AMD is late, Penryn will make the 65nm AMD part unattractive.

But what compiler flags to use?

[MarcQuadra (129430)]

I'm going to buy an e6600-based desktop in the winter, and I'm wondering if GCC will add tuning for the Core 2 processors. My guess is that '-Os -march=pentium-m -msse3 -mfpmath=sse' is the way to do it now in 32-bit mode, but there have been enough changes in the Core 2 to make for a new DFA profile, no? I thought they radically revamped the Pentium3 core, adding execution units and such.

I just rebuilt my Core (1) Duo laptop with the aforementioned options and it seems to get me the most bang for my buck.

From what I've read, compiling and running in 32-bit mode is still the best choice for now, the Core 2 is a lot better than the EM64T pentium 4 at running 64-bit code, but still not as fast as just using the 32-bit code (stuff like video encoding is happening in the 128-bit vector unit anyway, and I don't need more than 4GB addressable space).

Re:

[Agelmar (205181)]

No, the way to do it is -march=nocona

Then, if you want to do 32-bit, just do -m32, and -m64 for 64-bit

Re:

[Agelmar (205181)]

Also, you should note that in 64-bit mode, there are more registers available. If you're running a native 64-bit environment, there's a good chance the same app recompiled as a 64-bit app will run marginally faster.

At least, that's been my experience. (Running core 2 extreme on gentoo)

Re:But what compiler flags to use?

[Agelmar (205181)]

I downloaded the 32-bit precompiled version of firefox, and was able to install the flash plugin into that.

Actually, for me, 64-bit is entirely convenient. I just type "emerge mozilla" and it works ;-) Haven't tried VMWare though

Re:

[MarcQuadra (129430)]

I thought 'nocona' would get you all the instruction sets you wanted, but the execution core and scheduling of the Core 2 are much closer to the Pentium-M. You might be better off specifying 'Pentium-M' and using switches to enable SSE3. The Core and Core 2 are much closer to the i686 (P3) than they are to the NetBurst (P4) under the hood, even though the Core series can chew on a lot of the newer SIMD instructions and shares an FSB with some Pentium 4s.

But have you actually tried to buy one?

[JustNiz (692889)]

>>> 'Now is a great time to be CPU shopping... you have great choice for both CPUs and motherboards.... keep in mind that NVIDIA has the nForce series for Intel CPUs which would give you SLI support for all your Quake Wars and UT2007 gaming needs

Umm nope. Iv'e been trying to buy the bits to make a no-compromises gaming PC and can't get anywhere at all.
Products that have been actually reviewed, benchmarked and advertised for weeks but are still not available to actually buy include:
* a retail core2 X6800 CPU (I want the official fan too)
* any motherboard with Nvidia 590 sli intel ed. chipset
* the fastest memory (corsair 6400c3)
and finally not yet reviewed but:
* the new Nvidia GPU that will do directX 10 (for vista comaptability)
If you were to buy a non-directx 10 top-end GPU now you'd be crazy.

The worst offender is Intel. I don't know why even now about a month after the core2 launch you still can't find a retail x6800 extreme anywhere. I'm guessing intel are just letting the big builders like Dell grab the entire supply still. Intel shouldn't just feed those guys without putting some out on the street too.

Linux takes hardware advantage

[matt me (850665)]

Using Linux we're very lucky that we can build a kernel and applications optimised to our *specific* hardware utilising any special features and experience greater performance gains compared to users of most other operating systems say windows who are stuck with a generalised kernel that has to run on a majority of hardware from the last ten years and are stuck with a single set of binaries. Even with 64 bit windows most the applications you use will have to be run in emulation32 mode, so you won't get the same performance gains in the places you really need them, not explorer but video processing etc.

Intel's ahead... until September

[smilindog2000 (907665)]

AMD is apparently already making 65nm parts for Dell, supposedly available next month! See:

http://www.fabtech.org/content/view/1757/2/ [fabtech.org]

Re:

[fabs64 (657132)]

To run a decent sized lcd at native resolution would be a start... but in all seriousness for anything other than gaming you're right, there's no real need to keep up with the cycle

Re:

[LDoggg_ (659725)]

To run a decent sized lcd at native resolution would be a start

A card two or three generations before that(tnt1 or tnt2) wouldn't have a problem running at a 1600x1200
His Gforce2 probably has 32 or 64 megs of ram, plenty for even a large LCD panel.
I'd probably be interested in upgrading that CPU before the video card, but likely have to do both as newer boards are using pcix over agp.

Re:Apart from gaming

[MightyYar (622222)]

Compiling anything, encoding video, ripping CDs to MP3, large relational database queries, scientific computing, etc.

Oh, you meant for reading email and surfing the net? Yes, your hardware is fine.

Re:

[eddy (18759)]

> ripping CDs to MP3

Might be true, LAME isn't exactly a speed monster in high quality mode. On the other hand, oggenc/lancer [nifty.com] is so fast it's almost silly. Upgrade to Vorbis, save money on hardware :-)

Re:Apart from gaming

[MightyYar (622222)]

"save money on hardware"

Especially iPods!

Vorbis-players für alles.

[eddy (18759)]

Yeah definitely save the money on the iPods, the iAudios [cowonamerica.com] are much better anyway. I suggest the U3 if you want a good flash-based Vorbis-player.

There's no good reason to use Vorbis

[October_30th (531777)]

Upgrade to Vorbis, save money on hardware

Yeah, right. Voluntarily limit how and where you can listen to your music. Really smart.

I regret the day when I decided, in a silly stroke of idealism, to encode all my CDs with oggenc. Later, after getting frustrated by the lack of support for the format, I had to encode them all over again.

Face it. MP3 is a de facto standard and even though it's patented, what difference does it make? Does it stop you from listening to mp3 encoded music at home? No. Does it

Re:

[Mistshadow2k4 (748958)]

The new CPUs may be great, the motherboards available now are good and fairly cheap, the video cards are as expensive as ever, but memory has went up in cost by $20 [newegg.com] or more just in the last month. Now is not the time to upgrade to the latest & greatest. Get last year's (or even the year before that) best Linux-friendly hardware and buy used memory.

Re:

[MightyYar (622222)]

You'd buy generation-old hardware to avoid spending an extra $20?

We live in different universes. I think that I've been working too long or something and forget what it's like being poor.