Thanks.
Really just curious. It sounded like you had a Good Find and now it seems you bought at a dip in the market. I just blew >$500 for an Ultrabook and don't need to spend more this year.
Kids are MUCH more important.
Really just curious. It sounded like you had a Good Find and now it seems you bought at a dip in the market. I just blew >$500 for an Ultrabook and don't need to spend more this year.
One of the last things I worked on before retirement was trying to measure the thermal time constants going on inside the chip case. Seems these devices can be bursted in performance far above what any thermal solution can take the heat out of. So they were very interested in "Well, how long can we burst the performance one of these things then, without it collapsing thermally".
Remember they are masters at "data driven" everything. They lost the iPhone proc opp because the numbers didnt suggest a good gamble. If the data says this amount of proc perf is good enough, that's what they'll optimize for and that's what you'll get in the next gen. I'm sure they could do anything, but it's the shareholders, not the consumer, to whom the business caters. Though marketing of course tries to convince otherwise.
Supposedly, Intel has them by the shorthairs. They could crush simply by a price change, with little / no impact, but must let them survive for market competition purposes. Short of a miracle, all Intel has to do is adjust a few numbers to keep the market balance most favorable.
I recall we begged and begged them (on internal social media) to go after graphics hard; this was 5+ years ago. AFAIK, they made some strategic hires, but arent at the VR goggle ready state yet. Procs are their main business, graphics is an add-on, whether on the same chip carrier or as an independent card. Now here comes the part I just dont get. The graphics card is where all the "FPS" comes from, the proc has little to do with that, except maintaining a steady work-feed. Being what they want to hear, of course there were people who'd say the opposite "Noooo! The proc does a lot!!" You need all those 50k specmarks. In the last 5 years, maybe.
What, boot Windows from cold start like a TV turning on via the remote? I'm trying to imagine what suffering one would experience from the fastest possible SSD on the fastest possible bus, along with the fastest possible proc. Must be similar to that experienced driving a Civic type R vs a Beyron. The "enthusiast" levels in so many things; Cars, PCs, Audio - never cease to boggle the mind.
Someone we know here worked for a large cell phone company. They might have been handed one of the first iPhones in existence many years ago and told to tear it down and document it. It was a disaster from an engineering and manufacturing standpoint, and therefore deemed "not a threat." We know which one of those companies is still making cell phones.
I am not a gamer or an enthusiast, but I have been building computers ever since the previously mentioned SWTPC system in 1976. My first DIY PC was a 5 slot IBM PC made with parts collected from the dumpster at a large building in Boca Raton where the PC was invented. I was a beta tester for OS2 Warp which was the coolest PC operating system ever in 1995. How far can you overclock a 16 KHz Intel 80386 chip? The white paint peels off at 33 MHz but it runs fine at 40 MHz with a small heat sink epoxied to it. The MB itself wouldn't go to 50 MHz.
I ran the 7 year old core i7 4790K machine mentioned in post #31 as my daily driver PC until it was recently replaced by a core i7-7700T machine built from spare parts. It's still in use as a DIY synthesizer workstation mostly doing Arduino compatible software. I do not need fast graphics or 3D anything, so the old GT 430 does just fine as it satisfies the video card requirement for the soft synth and gives me 60 FPS which is the max for the synth program. Windows 10 goes from cold start to login faster than I can get in the chair with my glasses on and does anything I ask it, so why do I need anything faster. It would take a rather expensive machine to make even a small improvement given its use case. This concept is lost on the enthusiast crowd.
All CPU's from a given family are built on the same silicon, often several flavors come from the same wafer. Each individual die on a wafer is probed to determine the average yield and some other performance data. Bad die are identified and marked before the wafer is "sliced and diced." If the overall yield is not above the threshold, the entire wafer is scrapped. Once diced each die is packaged where it becomes a "chip." Each chip is then tested for performance. Some cores and peripherals may be bad, so this is where the core i3, i5, i7, i9 or scrap decision is made. The fastest chips remain unlocked and become "K" versions. Chips with dead video become "F" versions, and slow chips become "T" chips with the multiplier locked to a lower than typical number. The remaining chips get locked to the standard spec rate.
If you build your own PC's, yes underclocking saves power, AND reduces noise, so use a "K" chip and underclock it for audio player PC's. Some motherboards let you reduce the overall clock to something below 100 MHz. This can be another way to reduce power and noise but can cause weird behavior on some systems especially when using on chip video and a fixed frame rate TV for a monitor.
Many of the small form factor DIY pc case/ MB combos often cannot easily be underclocked. The power supply and vregs on the MB have a fixed maximum TDP. It is 65 watts on the Deskmini 310 that I mentioned. Dropping a "K" chip into one of those boards can cause a boot loop or even some dead parts since the CPU will suck far more than 65W on start up upsetting the power system causing a reset, or spiking 12 volts into your Vcore killing the chip. Yes, I learned this the hard way.
I had a pc start to play up.
It would blue screen or fully lock up at times.
I tried to re-download Windows in case it was corrupted. The pc would lock up at the same point each time.
I tried running memory and hard disc checkers but they said there was no problem.
In the end I was getting desperate so pulled a DRAM module and the problems went away.
So swapped DRAM modules and the pc still ran fine.
So got manual out and I had been running DRAM modules next to each other in slots and this wasnt recommended.
So offset them and the pc has been fine since.
I can only guess pc ran until second module was pulled in and then started having problems.
Strange the memory check didn't spot i though.
It would blue screen or fully lock up at times.
I tried to re-download Windows in case it was corrupted. The pc would lock up at the same point each time.
I tried running memory and hard disc checkers but they said there was no problem.
In the end I was getting desperate so pulled a DRAM module and the problems went away.
So swapped DRAM modules and the pc still ran fine.
So got manual out and I had been running DRAM modules next to each other in slots and this wasnt recommended.
So offset them and the pc has been fine since.
I can only guess pc ran until second module was pulled in and then started having problems.
Strange the memory check didn't spot i though.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...y-readily-available-raspberry-pi-alternative/
""Raspberry Pi boards are hard to get, probably also next year," says Andreas Spiess, single-board enthusiast ....he suggests looking in one of the least captivating, most overlooked areas of computing: used, corporate-minded thin client PCs.
"Spiess' Pi replacements,..., are Fujitsu Futros, Lenovo ThinkCentres, and other small systems ... the kind of systems you can easily find used on eBay, refurbished on Amazon Renewed, or through other enterprise and IT asset disposition sources."
Comments:
"ServeTheHome has a good series called Project TinyMiniMicro that reviews these machines for particular server/home lab/edge computing use cases."
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