Vini Engel wrote:
Keith G. Robertson-Turner said the following on 30/05/06 22:27:
Vini Engel wrote:
I got an Acer Ferrari 4005 WMLi months ago, and I can honestly say it's
the *best* PC I've ever had ... in fact it absolutely *screams*.
It rips my P4 Prescott system to utter shreds, even though the Turion
CPU is rated at 2GHz and the P4 is rated at 3.6GHz????
Do you think it will be even faster than a Core Due 2GHz?
Well the Turion isn't dual core; there's new AMD mobile processors that
*are* though, AFAIK. Check out their website.
SMP is only faster than uniprocessor *if* the OS and apps in question
utilize passing different threads to different cores - i.e. like having
two machines do the same job. It isn't really a direct comparison of
speed in the "clock cycles" sense, just "number of cores". Note: this
has nothing to do with "64 bit"; AFAICT the "Core Duo" is still 32 bit
with 64 bit extensions.
"I'm using an Acer 5672WLMI with the Duo Core processor and just tried
to boot a copy of Ubuntu 64Bit Live CD... Guess what! I get a message
saying the processor does not support 64Bit instructions."
- http://digg.com/hardware/Intel_Core_Duo_is_a_64-bit_chip
Basically, core for core, I'm willing to bet that AMD chips are faster
than Intel chips, based on the AMD's much shorter pipes, and the fact
that they are *true* 64 bit machines.
A dual core 64 bit AMD based machine would be something to behold indeed.
Running FC5 on the Ferrari, and loving it.
How much did you pay for it?
1300 UKP (about 2500 USD), including 2 year extended international
warranty with accidental damage protection.
Bear in mind, the UK prices for *everything* are extortionate. They
don't call it "Rip-Off Britain" for nothing.
You could probably get the same machine in the US for about a grand ...
or less even!!!
Haven't really looked at power management stuff, since I always just
shut down when not using the laptop, but everything else works -
including h/w accelerated OGL graphics (ATI X700), audio, Wi-Fi
(madwifi), etc.
Only caveat with 64bit OSen is no current support (for either Windows 64
or Linux 64) from Macromedia (flashplayer) nor Sun (Java ns-plugin).
That means you can use any of these things for the time being, right?
Actually I think you can ... by installing 32 bit versions of the
browsers and then 32 bit versions of the plugins (and framework, i.e.
JRE). Remember, you can still run 32 bit code on 64 bit architectures
(currently).
--
K.
