Core 2 Duo on steroids

Handruin

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Interesting adaption of utilizing idle cores. This reminds me of the usefulness of hyper threading (though they are different technologies).

If the OS keeps the second core busy with polling, how often will the other make use of this boost? Is the boost dependent on temperature? If so, will we actually gain benefit from making the CPU is cool as possible to trick the core into running faster all the time? I still have a lot of unanswered question with this.
 

ddrueding

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My thoughts exactly. If the reason they can't run both cores at the faster speed all the time is because of "power/heat requirements" (as he said) than I can take care of those power/heat requirements right here ;)
 

sechs

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So basically, this is just a way to turn your Core 2 Duo into a comparably priced Core 2 Solo? Why not just get that chip in the first place?
 

ddrueding

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Because when running a Core 2 Solo (didn't know they made those), it can't dynamically change to a Core 2 Duo when multi threaded apps are run.
 

sechs

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I think that you've confused threading with SMP-awareness.

And, if you think about it, a reasonable operating system is still going to switch a single-threaded application between the two cores anyway, so there won't be a lot of gain going on.
 

Mercutio

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It's not like Intel hasn't developed a largely useless technology for marketing reasons before.

E.g. Viiv, Hyperthreading, Centrino
 

MaxBurn

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I rather like the idea that they are admitting that the chips have some decent headroom and are doing something official with it while still staying within the constraints that system builders impose. Or maybe self imposed.
 

CougTek

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With the devise convertion, I pay less for C2D than you would thru Newegg, but they beat my supplier for the Q6600. It is now 659U$, that's a huge drop. Don't rush to buy one yet though, as it will drop near 500$ qute soon and to the mid-200's $ by September.

It's insane the computing power we can now get for cheap.

A box with a 3600+ A64 X2 on an Asus M2A-VM with 2GB of DDR2 667MHz RAM and a 250GB HD/18X SATA DVD-RW, all this fitting inside a good enclosure with a decent power supply can be purchased for 400U$.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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An E4300 is $117 at mwave.com right now, for the USians who want some of that old time Celeron 300A feelin'.
 
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