AMD Dual Core

[Alkiera]

For a more... likely... scenario, it allows you to task swap MUCH quicker, like from CoH to your webbrowser, or between windows in Photoshop and Primere or whatever.  Especially with AMD chips that use seperate RAM banks for each CPU(NUMA, Non-Uniform Memory Architecture, iirc only works on certain patched versions of WinXP), you won't get the hard-disk swaping as you tab in and out of a game or other heavy memory using application.

Typically, you won't see benefits of multiple CPUs(or cores, in this case) in any single application unless it lends itself, and is written to take advantage of, parallel processing... CAD programs, encoding programs like compilers, MP3/MP4/DVD encoders, that sort of thing are somewhat common.  You are much more likely to see the difference when running multiple apps, or in a multi-user(server) environment.

As a side note, I'm probably going to go to a Athlon 64 3200+ or so here in a couple months, my 1.4 Ghz socket-A Athlon is starting to feel a bit sluggish in games, and the bus and memory speeds supported will help alot too, I'd guess.  There aren't applications that use the 64-bitness, but the 32-bit performance is still superior to what Intel is doing, and I'll be at least some future proofed, if that's where things go.

Alkiera

[Lanei]

SMP (multiprocessor comptuing) offers no real benefit to doing any one thing at a time, including gaming.  If its solely a gaming rig, its not worth your money, no matter how little more it costs than a uniprocessor solution.  Depending on how you get your multiprocessor on, in most cases it may end up an un-noticable outside benchmarking few percent slower.

What SMP does let you do really well, is let you run more.  Given enough RAM that you aren't paging stuff to disk, multiprocessing lets you run more single or multithreaded apps, wether SMP-aware or not, without suffering the context swap overhead as badly when changing which application has the OS' focus.

Like Alkiera said, makes it much nicer and easier to swap back and forth between a game and something else, like a browser, or a chat program.  Also makes it easier, or even possible, to be usefully doing other things with the system at the same time as gaming.

[Trippy]

I use my PC primarily for gaming, and I'm still not sold on dual-core processors or SLi. I hope this SLi/Crossfire thing dies a quick death, because I'd rather not have to put 2 or more overpriced cards just to get a good framerate in <Game of the Week>.

For straight gaming, dual-core processors make no virtually no difference at all (Quake III is one of a handful of games that are multi-threaded). However what a dual-core processor does allow you to do is to play your favorite games while something else CPU intensive is going on in the background like video encoding. Another way to think about it is for the stuff you do on a single computer, if you had two separate computers would you be able do more stuff within the same amount of time? If so then a dual-core processor in a single computer would offer similar benefits.

I'm both a performance and a graphics whore. I would want as close to 100% of my CPU cycles as possible going to my game, so unless games that aren't written by Caramack start being written with dual-core/HT in mind I don't think I'm seeing the usefulness in terms of pure gaming.

Games for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are going to be multithreaded given their processor designs so I think you'll get a "trickle down" effect with the PC versions of those console games. Whether or not more PC-only games are written to take advantage of multi-core, multi-processor systems is harder to say. It's going to depend a lot on what the adoption rate of these multi-core processors and whether or not something like Microsoft's XNA initiative will minimize the development costs of writing multi-threaded games for the PC.

[Pococurante]

If history is any guide we'll see games benefitting within a couple of years.  Nothing about adoption that wasn't hashed out when the argument was VGA versus CGA.  But yeah no point shelling out the dollars when the tech is still at a premium.

My PC does a shitload more than just play games.  Otherwise I'd own consoles.

[Shockeye]

If history is any guide we'll see games benefitting within a couple of years.  Nothing about adoption that wasn't hashed out when the argument was VGA versus CGA.  But yeah no point shelling out the dollars when the tech is still at a premium.

Don't you forgetting EGA.

[schild]

More on iRam.

[Shockeye]

More on iRam.

I'm curious as to whether you can really boot off of it.

[Righ]

Photoshop disrepects hardware.

What you need is an OS and applications that aren't built on years of bloated templates and libraries.

RAD:    Device = ramdrive.device
              Unit   = 0
              Flags  = 0
              Surfaces  = 2
              BlocksPerTrack = 11
              Reserved = 2
              Interleave = 0
              LowCyl = 0  ;  HighCyl = 79
              Buffers = 5
              BufMemType = 1

So lets just forget all this Photoshop stuff and start back at DPaint... oh look.

[Yegolev]

So lets just forget all this Photoshop stuff and start back at DPaint... oh look.

Are you saying this doesn't take a hammer to system resources?  I suppose a test is in order but such things are bothersome.

[Alkiera]

Unlike DRAM-based main memory, the iRam card doesn't lose data when the PC is switched off, said Thomas Chang, a product manager at Giga-byte. As long as the PC is plugged into a socket, a very small amount of current continues to run through some parts of the system, including the PCI slots. This provides enough power to make sure that no data is lost, he said.

If the PC is unplugged, the iRam has an on-board battery for emergency power that can last up to 12 hours, he said.

As was guessed, it apparently DOES use the ATX standby power to keep the RAM alive.  They also discussed installing WinXP on it in order to get boot times measured in seconds, not minutes.

Alkiera

[Viin]

Sweet!

[Trippy]

As was guessed, it apparently DOES use the ATX standby power to keep the RAM alive.

Huh, I wonder why motherboards don't do this then.

[Trippy]

AnandTech review of i-Ram

[Murgos]

Tell me why you don't just buy a lot of RAM (6 or 8 gigs) and designate some of that as a RAM Drive?  Less cost (no extra card), faster (on the memory bus itself instead of the PCI bus) and a tried and tested solution?  Leave your computer on and with a decent UPS and some decent power saving options you have the SAME EXACT THING except better.

[Pococurante]

Summary seems to be the SATA emulator reduces throughput to where there is no real performance benefit.  Despite Anandtech's performance numbers I still think it makes for a good paging store since there is no impact on disk fragmentation.  I definitely like the idea of using it as a boot store but again we're back to the SATA throughput limit.

Good idea, not a new one, not yet time.

[Trippy]

Tell me why you don't just buy a lot of RAM (6 or 8 gigs) and designate some of that as a RAM Drive?  Less cost (no extra card), faster (on the memory bus itself instead of the PCI bus) and a tried and tested solution?

Cause most copies of Windows in use today have a 4 GB RAM limit?

Leave your computer on and with a decent UPS and some decent power saving options you have the SAME EXACT THING except better.

That's a big waste of electricity assuming you don't normally leave your computer on all the time for other reasons.

[Murgos]

Right.  If you turn off the hard drives and the montior with, you know, standard power saving options like I mentioned, the drain due to the other solid state devices is going to be fairly minimal.  Complimentary MOS design and all.

Interestingly the most power hungry device after hard drive and monitor is, wait for it, RAM.  So good luck with the daughter card full of RAM and your power conservation efforts.

Also, I would be willing to wager that 2gb as a RAM drive on the memory bus would net you better results than 4gb on the PCI bus.

[Yegolev]

Most of my power bill goes to heating and cooling.  I leave the rig on all the time.  I know from experience that they break most often when powercycled.

I run 1.5GB of RAM and am pretty sure I don't ever hit the limit, since I don't let Azureus run five torrents while playing Thief III in a window and starting up OpenOffice.  The only reason I actually have a pagefile is because I'm a pussy.  So, if I were to run 4gb, I could make 2 of those gb a ramdrive with room to spare.  However, putting a page file on that ramdrive would be stupid.  I'd just eliminate the page file.

[Strazos]

Um, my PC boots up in about 20 seconds...is that just Too Fucking Long to deal with?

[Murgos]

Um, my PC boots up in about 20 seconds...is that just Too Fucking Long to deal with?

The problem is installing to the RAM drive.  It's not just cut and paste.

[Miscreant]

City of Heroes/Villains supports dual core. It helps a lot.

 http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2005/11/02/city_of_villains/6.html 

[Viin]

Too bad the game sucks.


..


Ok ok sorry! I mean, too bad it's the same as CoH but with different costumes.