Nero

I keep hearing about dual core processors in notebooks starting in 06. I am going to buy a laptop for christmas and am wondering whether I should wait. Are dual core processing notebooks gonna be really expensive? Cuz if their really expensive I will not wait.

Are they going to be alot faster than current products?

redford

Nimbus

Wow that things a monster...

anyways, from what I understand the Pentium M dual cores are coming in 2006, the Athlon dual cores you can already get. Problem is that you won't be able to find the dual core Athlons in many machines, and when the Pentium ones come out, they will probably be very expensive.

Augustes

So are you implying that I should just get one now since their gonna be too expensive? I want something thats light and I think a dual core would be 8+ lbs.

redford

Dual core is just coming out, right now the performance difference is neglegable. The dual core is much more future proof though, especially once Vista comes out. My thoughts are that you should either get something now or wait till holiday 2006/early 2007

Nero

I've noticed in various Yonah-related threads throughout the forum the suggestion that Vista is well-suited to dual-core setups.

To my knowledge there is nothing particular about Vista that would make it more suited to dual-core and/or multi-processor setups than XP, or even Win2K for that matter.

Multi-core processors benefit from multi-threaded applications and OS's - eg. WinNT, WinXP, Vista, OSX, Photoshop, 3DStudio Max, Maya, etc. - for the most part "Workstation-class" applications.

Nimbus

One of the major manufacturer will be shipping their dual-core laptop by the end of Dec with 15.4" WSXGA+, 1GB, 100GB, 256MB X1600, DVD-DL-RW, 6.6lbs with a stated 6 hours of battery life (so figure 4:30+ in real term) for about $2200.

Augustes

vista doesnt have any dualcore stuff in it. its just windows xp with a facelift really.

anyway, the dualcores coming out in january will be priced to replace the current cpu's, so they should not cost significantly more. But the main reason to get a dualcore in january is so that you can update it to the new cpu, merom coming out in late 06/ early 07. this will have 4mb cache, higher clockspeeds, much better battery life and will be 64bit. AFAIK, amd will also have dualcore 64bit turions coming out in march 06, so you might wanna look out for those.

Edit: damn you wiz, i was all excited till i got to the dollar sign. anyway, i want an nvidia card cause ati sucks in linux. however, do you happen to know how "castrated" the x1600 will be compared to the desktop version?

redford

I'm trying to get the 3dmark05 number from my contact but no luck yet as the engineering sample have not made it to the U.S. and is still in Taiwan. I think the price is very reasonable as that's the pricing for their current lineup.

Well, since I mostly play game on my PC and do my serious work on a Mac ;-). 64bit mean nothing for me as even the x1600 will be obsolete by the time we see games going to 64 bit.

Nero

vista doesnt have any dualcore stuff in it. its just windows xp with a facelift really. ...

Honestly, I wish people would stop with this kind of mis-information.

When it comes to multi-processor support, there are multiple levels of support.

There is the OS support - if the OS doesn't support it, it'll be pretty hard for the application to gain access to it. For example, Windows 9x (95, 98, Me) did not support multiple processors; so no matter how many processors you threw at it, it'll only see one processor. Windows NT-based OS's and beyond (NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista) do support multiple processors in the core. Of course, XP Home is a bit, err, limited - but it should still see multiple cores within a single processor (see recent licensing changes).

Then there is kernel support. Just because you can see and use multiple processors, doesn't mean you use them. Windows NT-based OS's do use them. They have a smart enough thread scheduling algorithm to try to spread the load between the available processors. This obviously applies to multi-core as well, since it is (at the logical view) an extension on multiple processors.

You also need application support. If you write a single threaded program, then no matter how badly the OS wants to split your program onto multiple processors, it probably isn't going to happen. However, that doesn't mean multiple processors won't help. If you run multiple single threaded programs, there's a good chance that Windows will split them over multiple processors, giving each a bit of a performance boost over running them on a single processor/single core system.

As for the comment that Vista is just Windows XP with a facelift, well, we'll see at the end of the day. If people keep comparing beta quality software to released software, then there's really nothing I can say.