Intel Launches Low Cost Chips 51
schliz writes "Intel has announced a new quad core and dual-core processor at the bottom end of its price and specification range and a new Celeron chip. The Q8200 is a 2.33-GHz quad-core chip with 4Mb of level-2 cache, the lowest of any quad-core processor."
Re:How well the does that dual dual-core work with (Score:3, Interesting)
Is the CPU+motherboard cheaper than an Intel D945GCLF [logicsupply.com]? (i.e. 81.00 $USD).
Re:This is the stupidest launch ever. (Score:3, Interesting)
and the AMD Phenom X4 9950 is under $200 and it is unlocked with a true quad core better bus and built in ram controller 512 L2 per core + 2 meg l3.
The AMD Phenom X3 8750 is under $140 with true 3 core better bus and built in ram controller 512 L2 per core + 2 meg l3.
good MB for intel start at about $100 - $200 VS low end amd boards at 740g at about $60 780g about $70 780g + side port ram 128MB DDR3 $100 790gx about $100 64 meg side port 128+ meg $125 - $150 and there is even a board with 1gb side port at $160 and the 790gx boards are full atx with the sb750. There are a few 780g board that are matx but they still have the sb700.
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Most of the intel boards with on boards video are cut down ones that are matx and some don't even have a HDMI / DVI port with no side port ram and weaker video then the ati 780g boards that have no side ram as well.
You had 512 KB cache? Decadence! (Score:3, Interesting)
Bah, you had 512 KB cache and you thought _you_ had it bad? Bah, in my day we had 8 bits for the whole family, and they had to last us a whole week! And we had to load the programs into it with a wheelbarrow, and it was uphill both ways through the snow! And we _liked_ it.
Well, more seriously, if you started at the 512 KB cache Celerons, you're hardly in a position to call anyone a "youngin". Even the age of Celerons without any cache at all is less than a decade ago.
If you want a more proper "back in my days" story, catch this: I started on my parents ZX-81 computer with 1 KB RAM. Yes, RAM, not cache. You could upgrade it to IIRC 16 KB, but that was an extra module you have to buy, and dad hadn't.
It did have an 8KB ROM with BASIC, but the Sinclair BASIC was infamously slow. It also didn't help that the CPU was a 3.25 MHz (yes, M, not G) 8 bit affair. But the machine "cleverly" used some of the CPU signals for screen refresh. (We were not quite in the age of GPUs yet.) So you could either have the full 3.25 MHz or have it only during the blank bands below and under the image, or about 20% of the time. That latter mode was aptly called the "SLOW" mode. Effectively it was like working on a 0.65 MHz Z80.
Here I must also add that we're talking Zilog MHz, not 6510 ones. Those of you who had a C64, you might remember that it only had 1MHz, so no big deal. Well, it was because a Z80 did less per clock (but normally had more of them per second) than the 6510. If I remember the timings right, you could pretty much translate four Z80 cycles to one 6510 cycle, though the Z80 did have a few more tricks up its sleeve to make it run slightly faster than that. E.g., a lot more registers. At any rate, trust me, an effective 0.65 MHz worth of Z80 CPU was quite aptly called "SLOW" mode.
I got interested pretty quickly in how I can write something that runs faster, and my dad dumped a bunch of Intel and Zilog manuals on me and told me to try assembly. Except that machine didn't have enough RAM to actually run an assembler.
Welcome to the the world of writing those programs on paper and manually converting to hex. I had made my own neatly organized notebook, so I could quickly find the hex codes for any given opcode and operand combination. And if you wanted to write the equivalent of a loop or an "if"? Count the bytes and use a relative jump, boy.
Of course, there was no such thing as a debugger or protected mode on that thing. If you had counted the bytes wrong and took a jump off a cliff instead of to your intended destination, the machine would typically just lock up.
Oh yes, and it also had a very slow cassette interface, not hard drives like your Celerons, or even a floppy like those C64s.
Mind you, I don't feel much nostalgia about those days. But just saying, if you want "back in my day" willy waving, that's what a real "back in my day" story sounds like ;)
And actually I'm sure someone out there has a better story, possibly along the lines of, "you had cassettes and a whole 3.25 MHz CPU? You don't know how good you had it! Well I got to program an ENIAC by manually rewiring a switchboard!" Heck, both my parents got to enter programs via front panel switches occasionally, which makes even my entering hex by keyboard and with some minimal editing capabilities, seem actually pretty comfortable.