| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| moongoddess |
idiots guide to processors pleaseCan anyone tell me in very simplifyed terms, the main differences / advantages to the different types of processors. I see words like Pentium M, Centrino, Sempron etc and I'm not sure how to make an informed choice because I don't know what they are.This would be for a laptop if that makes any difference. TIA mg x (sitting in the sun - yay!) |
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| jema |
For a laptop the main point of interest is battery life, which is somewhat dependant of the processor, but you are more interested IMHO in the result rather than the cause.
As such unless you have a reason to want a hell of a lot of CPU power, considerations like battery life, memory, hard drive, wireless networking are much much more important than all the CPU specs. I'm a geek  but gave up on bothering about CPUs once the speed got to about 2.5ghz, as at that point its going to be mostly idle for anything I tend to throw at it.
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| cab |
So what are the big processors for, then? |
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| jema |
Well they are hardly going to stop developing faster processors, and they do have their uses for games, video editing etc. Also at some point, the PC will cease to essentially single task for someone at a desk, but will be recording TV channels, whilst playing a downloaded video stream to a TV, at the same time someone is playing Doom53. At this point dual cores etc will be useful. |
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| bagpuss |
Things which actually use CPU like insentive graphics processing or proper algorithms. Much of the work we do here really uses cpu. It is easily to develop higher and higher spec and give it to everyone even though only a few need it than to stop increasing the spec of domestic machines and have to continue to manufacture lower spec and obsolete equipment and also potentially have 2 versions of operating systems and other standard software! |
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| jema |
Recenty I believe Intel have said they are stopping concentrating on promoting simple processor speed, and will focus on things like power consumption.
I think they have finally figured that for notebook users in particular, a faster more power hungry processor is actually a big disadvantage. |
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| oddballdave |
Re: idiots guide to processors please
There are two major developers, each fighting for the title of 'BEST'. Sadly there is no such thing as best. Long Long ago I upgraded a friend from a lowly 386 processor to a brand new 486 DX4/100. The processor was about ten times faster than his old. He marvelled at the speed of his machine. I told him that one day, maybe not that week, maybe not that month, but one day he would sit at his PC and curse the slow speed he was forced to suffer. He said this would never happen and went on to his business making signs for people to the designs he generated on the PC. I saw him six months later and he related the following. My wife came into the room last night and couldn't understand why I was laughing, tears down my face, unable to talk laughing. Eventually I managed to gasp that it was something Dave said. Even more confusion because Dave hadn't been round for months. Allan was finally able to explain that he had been working on a new sign, cursed the machine for being so slow, then remembered my prophecy. AFIAC the processor brand is irrelevant. the processor speed (over 1GHz) is irrelevant. What you really want is a method of plugging the computer into your skull so that it can perform the task BEFORE you even think about wanting it done. Obviously this is currently not possible, nor is it desirable. So the best advice is write down exactly what you want the machine to do NOW. Then think about what you might want to do. Now you say you want a laptop so you really need to go to a large computer store and look at the physical machines. You cannot change a keyboard if you don't like it, so you need one with keys to fit you. Are you a touch typist? Both hands? One finger hunt and pecker? This is more important than how fast your PC runs. How big is the screen? How good is your eyesight? A ten inch screen is acceptable to me, but none of my friends would even bother to look at it. How good is the battery? Will you be working mobile? or will you have access to the mains? How much is a second spare battery? How many charges will the battery take? How long will the battery last on a variety of tasks? ie play a DVD, will the battery last the length of the film? What attachments do you get? What sockets? Does it need to attach to a printer? Do you want to attach a mobile phone? Digital camera - memory card? MP3 player? How easy/desirable is it to connect to the internet? How easy is it to put your important information on some form of more permanent media? Be aware that laptops, are in a different development cycle than regular computers. The elements of a laptop are weight, battery life, keeping the components cool and ergonomics. Elements of a PC are raw speed, low cost, desirability and Hype. Sorry not to answer your original question but hopefully you will be able to come back with some new questions and you will get the machine best suited to you. Dave who in a former life has been:- a PC technician, computer programmer, systems analyst, business analyst and salesman![/u][/b] |
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| jema |
Re: idiots guide to processors please
Pitching that low and I think I would argue a bit, with the right operating system and not using bloatware office applications and you are right. I use Linux and barely notice the difference between my old 1.2ghz processor and the current 2.5ghz I am using 
But a lot of people will use Microsloth office and find 1ghz slow. A moot point anyway as you cannot buy as low as that these days. Any current processor will be fast enough. It is much more important speed wise to get 512mb ram minimum, 1024 is even better. |
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| Jonnyboy |
Our minimum spec in the hospital for anything running WinXp and office 03 is 1ghz & 512mb ram. Less than that and we get complaints from users, especially when running 256mb ram. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| oddballdave |
Re: idiots guide to processors please
Lots of ex-corporate laptops are available. I know that VW have changed their IT supplier in the last year, meant that all their old kit was removed and replaced with new. Lots of PC's, laptops, fax machines, photocopiers, printers etc. some only 12 months old, some even NOS from the spares cupboard! Who can afford the latest Micro$oft Office? I am still using Office 2000, bought as a special deal for a heavily discounted price. Good point about the memory though. Even more important for a laptop to fill the box when you buy it. Memory chip for £30, same size memory for a laptop £60+ Memory for a PC available anywhere - memory for a laptop next to the rocking horse manure! Dave refusing to upgrade! |
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| oddballdave |
WinXp - does the XP stand for Xtreme Pants? Office 03 - generating rubbish faster than in 02 People will always complain. They want the answers yesterday. Dave |
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| moongoddess |
Re: idiots guide to processors please
Yeah - unfortunately I am very fussy about the keyboard . I love the IBMs for their keyboards.
small is good and I don't really want widescreen because I want a very compact machine.
Mobile use about once or twice a week and I want a good couple of hours out of it.
How do I find that information out?
the only things I tend to do mobile are Word documents
?? [quote]What sockets? Does it need to attach to a printer? Do you want to attach a mobile phone? Digital camera - memory card? MP3 player? [/quote printer, PCMCIA for backups, card reader for digi camera, perhaps a firewire for camcorder, external speakers
Gotta be good on a wireless network! and I want to be able to burn cd music compilations
At the moment I run a daily backup onto a flash card in the PCMCIA slot and I want to continue with this. For other larger things I dump it onto then network and burn Dvds on another machine.
Cooling is an issue I am aware of - my last laptop cooked
That's ok. My requirements then are: decent keyboard Build quality - I tend to treat my laptop like a work horse and I don't expect it to whinge As small and compact (but not necessaily light weight - present machine is 5.5kg and I happily sit with that curled up in my lap) as possible. I need a screen I can see in sunlight and I don't want widescreen if this adds a few inches to the overall width of the machine good touchpad - I can't stand using a mouse (prefer the nipple mouse thingies, but a good touchpad is acceptable) I need to multitask (say Word, live internet radio, photoshop, dreamweaver) and I don't want the machine grinding and cacheing all over the place - I want it to work A SECOND AGO!! (what me - impatient??!!) Amount of hard disk space isn't really an issue for me - I back up photos and large documents all the time onto cds, so don't keep much large stuff on the machine. I think that's all from my wishlist; I've got some notes jotted down somewhere so I'll fish them out and add anything else later. Thanks for all the replies thus far, mg x |
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| dougal |
Re: idiots guide to processors please
These words are BRAND NAMES for different product families, and from two different manufacturer, Intel and AMD. Just as Ford offer the Mondeo, Focus, Fiesta and Ka (OK and others), so Peugeot offer the 407, 307, 207 and 107 and you can have a range of power outputs in all of them. It makes little sense to compare a Mondeo with a 107. Just dealing with Intel: Once upon a time there was the Pentium, for desktops. A simpler, so cheaper and lower performance derivative was created and branded Celeron. Being simpler and lower processing performance it actually uses less electricity. So people designed laptops around it. But it still used up the battery quite quickly, so some people said 'sod it' and made laptops with proper Pentiums that barely ran a few minutes on their batteries, but provided desktop power in a portable box. A processor was specially designed for low electricity consumption and *Branded* "Pentium M" even though it was actually quite different internally. And cheaper, simpler, lower performance versions as Celeron M. These should run for at least a couple of hours on batteries. Intel found that Pentium M was surprisingly powerful as a processor. And that their Pentium designs were hitting their limits. So they developed new processors based on the Pentium M designs and *branded* them 'Core". (Solo and Duo). And plan to use them in both desktops and laptops. Mac CoreDuo laptops regularly achieve 3 to 4 hours of real use from their battery. Oh, and Intel built-in wireless local area network stuff into some of their processor support chipsets, and branded that arrangement as 'Centrino'. It actually makes naff-all difference to the user which chip the wireless networking is in. (The aerial arrangement is probably more important...) There's actually loads more detail hidden by thes branding terms - different guts (technically 'cores') are hidden by similar branding... AMD have their own story in parallel. But a Sempron is targeting the same market as a Celeron. And a Sempron M as a Celeron M. A bit like the 207 and the Fiesta... And there will soon be an all new car from Ford, but still called Fiesta. Marketing! Bah! I've left out Xeons for server use, but have I left out anything acually important? |
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| oddballdave |
Re: idiots guide to processors please[quote="moongoddess"][quote="oddballdave"]
How do I find that information out?
the only things I tend to do mobile are Word documents
??
Ok so add to your 'considerations' a docking station. Permanently wired into your network, you can usually transfer data a lot quicker through a wired docking station than you can through a wireless setup. It would also allow you to have a 'proper' keyboard and screen somewhere. How many charges does the battery take? It should be written on the box! LOL. If you buy rechargeable batteries then not only do they tell you how to charge but how long that charge should last and how many times you can expect to recharge. It matters for a number of reasons:- How long do you expect to keep this laptop? I have just disposed of mine after 16 years! What do you expect to do with this collection of heavy metal poisons when you have finished with it? Mine went to a school, to be used for mobile notetaking since there was nothing wrong with it, I just hadn't used it in 15 months. Disposal of rechargeable batteries is a whole new thread, but you do not want to be replacing them every 12 months if you can help it. OK Dream weaver is one of those CPU hungry applications so you need loads of memory. No more than that! Are you sure that you can't squeeze any more in? Quick look at google shows max memory size to be IRO 2Gb, at £150 per Gb this will add a lot of cost to your machine, you will also need to take out the original memory chip/s. But it should prevent all that hard drive cache work. Try and get to a store and see a machine in action! Ask for a demo of internet radio from BBC, load a couple of word processing pages using the .txt files already on the machine and then try something else too. Laptops are really too personal to buy online. For a hint of what to look at try cNET reviews http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6603_7-5142378-1.html is the description of how they test a laptop. Search for Dreamweaver... They will recommend some brands/models for you to hunt down. |
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| tigger |
Thanks for starting this thread mg, it's taught me a lot, including just how ignorant I am!  
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| dougal |
Re: idiots guide to processors please
Umm CPU is processor. "Memory" presumably means RAM here. Different. Repeating my advice from the other thread - for professional graphics design (including web design), you should be using a colour accurate screen - which means *not* a laptop screen. I am also rather astounded at the wish to adopt the handicap of trying to use PhotoShop with an IBM/Lenovo joystick-style keyboard nipple, rather than a pressure-proportional tablet. I also mentioned that any laptop will have constraints (on processor power, maximum RAM expansion and disk speed, quite apart from the number of processor cores) that don't exist to the same degree with a mains-powered machine. If you intend entering the Grand National, no matter what help you get selecting the very best donkey for you, choosing *any* donkey is putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. You are handicapping yourself, restricting what you can achieve. |
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| Mat S |
Selling machines to people who buy things with big numbers on the label. |
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| moongoddess |
Even if I predominantly run off mains?
Can you explain that to me please?
That high ghz on a laptop is virtually unheard of isn't it? The ones I have seen tend to be around the 1.67 - 2 ghx range. Can you explain to me which bit (I'm Assuming it's the RAM??) enables me to swap between running prgrammes without the thing bumping, grinding and caching please? Thanks mg x |
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| moongoddess |
well that sounds to my untrained mind like a great idea!
can you elaborate on this for me please? mg x |
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| moongoddess |
Re: idiots guide to processors please
that was my last buy and it was great. I had a machine that looked like it had barely been touched for an absolute bargain (and a years warranty )
I'll definately be looking at this route again. mg |
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| oddballdave |
Re: idiots guide to processors please
Yes CPU is processor measured in Hz 'Memory' is RAM measured in Mb or Gb (Megabytes or Gigabytes for the people who are following this thread trying to pick up a little learning.) Dream weaver use a lot of arithmetic calculations so requires a CPU of a certain speed, but to keep track of all the calculations, (remember a computer can only do one thing at a time, albeit very quickly) it has to move parts of the sums in and out of memory. A good example is working at your desk (you are the CPU) you can only work with things on the blotter pad (cache memory) but if you have a huge desk (lots of RAM) you can keep lots of pieces of paper handy. If you need to you can access the filing cabinet (hard drive) and swap things around (the swapping that mg mentioned earlier) I stand by my earlier contention that after 1Ghz CPU speed is largely irrelevant. A machine with a slow processor but lots of RAM can usually perform much better in a real world task than a super fast processor with the minimum of memory. This is due to the relative speeds of CPU, RAM chips, transfer bus, data rates, clock speeds and wait states. None of which matters a darn to 'real world' users. So the original question was why different processors, and what speed to get? My answer is 'Wrong question!' Any processor at any speed will do what you want. Other more ergonomic questions will have far greater impact. Hence my insistance that you get to a big store and actually touch the keys... Dave |
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| jema |
If you are runnong off mains, then okay battery is not than important, different processors consume different amounts of power and hence effect battery life. Even at 1.67 you will not have speed issues for most things if you have the memory (ram). Lots of memory means little swapping to disk which is very slow and makes the noise. |
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| jema |
can you elaborate on this for me please? mg x[/quote] Battery life and the sheer heat and cooling requirements caused by a power hungry processor. |
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| moongoddess |
Re: idiots guide to processors please
Horrah! An answer to my original question which I understand. Thank you for the clarification................
Great. Now I feel I am getting somewhere with understanding all of this. Until I have KNOWLEDGE I cannot make an informed decision. Plus some geeky salesperson on a nice comission could be feeding me a load of bull**** so I really need to know what I am looking for and what I am talking about.
Exactly. I'm trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff here and decide how much of it (erm around 99% no doubt) is just marketing.
well, it's helped me, so I don't think so. mg |
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| moongoddess |
you're welcome - join me as our ignorance gets slowly turned into enlightenment 
mg |
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| moongoddess |
Re: idiots guide to processors please
 did I indicate anywhere that I was doing this professionally?
Just stating my preferences............ thanks for your thoughts mg |
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| moongoddess |
Thanks for your last two responses Jema - I'm really beginning to understand things now....
mg |
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| oddballdave |
Hello again, laptops are purchased for one of three reasons:- 1) Ostentatious display of prestige - Hence the Sony Vaio put their logo upside down on the case so it can be read when used in front of other people LOL! 2) Lack of space in the workspace. A laptop takes up far less room than even a flat screen and wireless keyboard. They also have the advantage of security in that they can be put in the cupboard when not in use. 3) To be used 'out there', in the wilds in places where mains electric is not always available. Option 3 requires a decent battery life. You sound as though you will be more of an option 2 person so you really want a 'luggable' rather than a true laptop. Toshiba used to make some excellent luggables but they are out of fashion so are hard to find. Battery life depends on the processor because this is the component which is always drawing 'juice' from the battery. Different brands and models are designed for laptop conditions. For example, chips get hot in use. Chips work best when cold. This is why there are cooling fans everywhere on modern PC's. My friend runs a red hot games machine which has seven cooling fans and warms the room quite nicely when in use. A laptop does not have the physical space for lots of fans so other tricks have to be employed. Almost irrelevant here since no modern laptops would be built with a desktop processor. But it does explain why a laptop processor is 'slower' than a desktop CPU. The best real world example I can give would be a 2 litre engine. One petrol, one diesel. Either is a perfectly good engine, but do you want to drive a pick up truck or a formula ford racing car? This would influence your choice of engine. But if every manufacturor builds a diesel engine, does it really matter if it is Ford or Toyota? The answer is yes, what transmission are you using? Engines work better with a matched gearbox. The gearing can be adjusted so what sort of driving do you want to do? Taxi work? Bus Driver? Racing Driver? Drag Racing? This is why I said way back ^^up there work out what you want to do. Then go see a machine doing 'that'. And finally, the last point. See previous message. It is RAM which allows you to multi task more efficiently. Imagine the size of the RAM equates to the size of your hands. Bigger hands means you can carry more things without dropping them. Although there are practical physical limits, both for RAM and hands. fF your hands were big enough you could carry so much you would be unable to actually walk! But keep chatting, hopefully you are building a better picture of what you want. Dave |