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?

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

Re:which side of the what?

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?

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?

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

Re:which side of the what?

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.

Bang for the buck

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:Bang for the buck

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.

the isle

which isle would that be?

Penguin Isle?

Isle be going now...

Dontcha just love...

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...

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)

Yes, I can.

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...

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.

Constant Battle

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.

Back and forth

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

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.

965 chipset

Anyone got the SATA drives hanging off the 965 controller to be visible with Linux? I have tried Abit and Gigabyte Conroe boards with 965 (ICH8) controllers and neither show the SATA drives. And the PATA port isn't seen either :(

But what compiler flags to use?

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:But what compiler flags to use?

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

But have you actually tried to buy one?

>>> '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.

povray & oggenc single threaded? what?

These programs may not fork() but they probably pthread_create() so I wouldn't go around saying that they are single threaded, esp the ray tracer.

What I found to be the most interesting finding is the performance of athlon64 and core2duo in 32 vs 64bit mode. Athlon64 have better 64bit performance/price even if they have slightly slower benchmarks. Also I think we need more benchmarks for low cost processors, you know the ones that average users purchase. I'm sick of benchmarks of ferrari's vs lamborghini's if you know what I mean.

Seriously serious

The difference between the flagship AMD FX and the Intel EE is a full 28 seconds for video-enconding a sample video clip. I think these results are more pro-Intel than even the windows benchmarks.

Of course since AMD will hit back with 4x4, and Intel will surely follow up with Jet Propulsion, the only conclusion is: please move along. Nothing to see here.

P.S The photo of the processor is very funny. It's like a map of Egypt: civilisation on one side and desert for the rest. What's the empty area, electronics freaks?

Linux takes hardware advantage

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.

I'm impressed

I have a Conroe E6600 running FreeBSD. Those of us who use FreeBSD often use the 'make buildworld' process as a poor-man's benchmark. With -j2, I am now getting 20 minute buildworlds, which is, in my view, remarkable for both the power and monetary budget of the machine.

Intel's ahead... until September

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

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

Linux Computers

I'm interested in learning the linux os. I was wondering what would be a good computer to invest in to do this. I'm will be taking college classes to learn linux but i would like a head start. I also have a limited budget. So pricey ones are out of the question.

I'm still looking at AMD for my next CPU

So Intel and AMD are now tied in performance, power consumption, and heat. However, the caught-up Intels are brand new CPUs, so they cost more.

Re:Apart from gaming

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:Apart from gaming

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:Apart from gaming

"save money on hardware"

Especially iPods!

Re:Apart from gaming

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:Apart from gaming

You don't game on Linux? I have Steam running under WINE. And RCT3. I still use Windows for Eve Online and BF2 though.

Re:Yeah but..

What's forcing you to not just use 7.0?

Re:Not yet, but (closed source) drivers are coming

What drivers do you need? Really? I'm running an Intel D975XBX, Core2Duo E6400, 2GB DDR2, and a Geforce 7900GT. Guess what? It all works!! As a matter of fact, it flies! It's running Archlinux and I'm quite happy with it so far (trying not to go back to Gentoo).

The onboard high-def sounds is respectable, the Gigabit ethernet is Intel so of course it works, the 250GB SATA II drive is flawless, and my DVDRW works just fine with cdrecord and Nerolinux.