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I don't get why millions of people can't understand CPU logic...
- Thread starter Dammit Cubs
- Start date
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Except for all the other computers that ship with the same CPU, the slower 1.3 ghz Penryn-3M or slower Atom CPUs.
That generalization was false the first time it was posted, it's still false now. Guess what, it'll still be false next week.
Yep, they looked at all the other guys that were shipping these 1.4, 1.3 ghz machines and decided to join in for the Air to solve some of the heat issues.
Thank god we had Lenovo, Dell and Sony to show Apple that these ULV parts were good enough and that consumers wanted them.
Except for all the other computers that ship with the same CPU, the slower 1.3 ghz Penryn-3M or slower Atom CPUs.
That generalization was false the first time it was posted, it's still false now. Guess what, it'll still be false next week.
Yep, they looked at all the other guys that were shipping these 1.4, 1.3 ghz machines and decided to join in for the Air to solve some of the heat issues.
Thank god we had Lenovo, Dell and Sony to show Apple that these ULV parts were good enough and that consumers wanted them.
Except that those netbooks cost like $200 and not $1000. The only reason those netbooks were selling is because of their very low price.
Not really, alot of netbooks are 200-300. Most CPU's from netbooks are very cheap since they are old tech from a few years ago.
Uh ? You're not talking about the same computers I am. The MBA uses the same CPU (ULV Core 2 Duo) as things like the Lenovo IdeaPad U150 that sells for a base price of 799$. The Dell Adamo, the Alienware m11x (same base price of 999$, 1.3 ghz processor!)
Again, Apple, not the first, not the only ones to sell such a "pricy" (seriously, 999$ is dead cheap) computer with that kind of CPU. People that say Apple is ripping off customers are completely oblivious to the fact that this class of CPU is used in other products from other vendors at the same god damn price point.
The ULV Core 2 Duo part in the MBA 11.6" was released in September 2009. Do you even know what it is you're talking about ? I'd suggest you stop now before you lose anymore credibility by just repeating the non-sense the trolls keep spewing to piss off Air owners/buyers.
Get your facts straight, the cpu was released in 2008
Funny how you nitpick that one part of my post but don't actually acknowledge or reply to the other one. Is that you've finally understood that chewing out Apple on what is an industry trend was a waste of time ?
You're right, the September 2009 release was for consumer ulv parts, namely the SU7xxx parts for Core 2 Duos.
Funny how you nitpick that one part of my post but don't actually acknowledge or reply to the other one. Is that you've finally understood that chewing out Apple on what is an industry trend was a waste of time ?
You're right, the September 2009 release was for consumer ulv parts, namely the SU7xxx parts for Core 2 Duos.
What industry trend are you talking about? Nobody uses those CPU anymore in their netbooks. Only Dell and Lenovo seems to have them at this moment.
The industry trend is cheap netbooks, not $800+ netbooks. So if we're talking about the market of Ultra low voltage CPU's, that's what most people are buying.
*Sigh*. Are you ignoring all the models I've posted on purpose to elicit a response or are you seriously just arguing that "no one" uses those CPUs... except for the major industry players ?
Lets list out your "Netbooks" not over 800$ shall we ?
Dell Adamo, 999$ - 1.4 GHZ C2D
Alienware m11x, 999$ - 1.3 GHZ C2D
Sony Vaio X, 1299$ - Atom!
Lenovo IdeaPad U150, 749$ on special, MSRP 949$ - 1.3 GHZ C2D
Of course, all these except for the Alienware use the sub par intel graphics. Now what about the future generation ? The "current" technology of Core i3, i5, i7 ULV laptops ? 1.33 ghz parts, over 800$ price tags! Sony Vaio Y series, Alienware m11x "new model", Lenovo IdeaPad U160, etc.. etc..
These aren't the Netbooks you're talking about. Netbooks use mostly Intel Atom or Athlon Neo processors. These are "ultra-portables" as the vendors call them. The MBA is one of many such products.
You're seriously being dense here. Look, you got it wrong. That's fine. You just stop your credibility's erosion while you can though and just admit it. There is an existing industry segment for these processors, they are currently selling from many vendors. Apple didn't do anything special here except participate in this industry segment.
If you're not a buyer for this segment, why are you even bothering looking at the Air ? It's not for you, go look at the rest of the line-up or at another vendor's offering that is more apt for you.
So you are saying that a 1.4Ghz pentium 3 and a i7 1.4GHz are the same because they both 1.4GHz? Not considering BUS, cache, cores, virtual cores and threads?
So you are saying that the clock speed is what quantify the actual speed and performance of a CPU?
There is a difference between speed as in top speed and speed as in rotations/second of an engine. I mean CPU speed as in top speed.
And Hertz is a unit of frequency, not speed. Speed is velocity.
These terms are all wrong for describing a CPU anyway, but I'm trying to keep it simple here
The C2D has a good architecture and has been around for quite a while, but new C2D don't have the same performance of years ago.
Plus if Intel will not make a new CPU that doesn't has to be stuck with Intel's graphic this CPU will be around for even longer.
this was my old MacBook had 2 years ago:
T8300
Clock: 2.4GHz
L2: 3MB
FSB: 800MHz
TDP: 35W
This is what the C2D that the MBA has:
SL9400
Clock: 1.86GHz
L2: 6MB
FSB: 1066MHz
TDP: 17W
In 2006 the Core 2 Duo had 2MB cache and a TDP of 65W.
You forgot the most important point : Architecture. The best example I remember was the Pentium 200 vs the Pentium Pro 200 (P5 vs P6 architectures). It wasn't even a contest, those 2 chips weren't even in the same league. The Pentium Pro had many optimizations that the P5 architecture lacked, such as memory pre-fetching, out of order execution, and branch prediction.
It's all about instructions per clock.
*Sigh*. Are you ignoring all the models I've posted on purpose to elicit a response or are you seriously just arguing that "no one" uses those CPUs... except for the major industry players ?
Lets list out your "Netbooks" not over 800$ shall we ?
Dell Adamo, 999$ - 1.4 GHZ C2D
Alienware m11x, 999$ - 1.3 GHZ C2D
Sony Vaio X, 1299$ - Atom!
Lenovo IdeaPad U150, 749$ on special, MSRP 949$ - 1.3 GHZ C2D
Of course, all these except for the Alienware use the sub par intel graphics. Now what about the future generation ? The "current" technology of Core i3, i5, i7 ULV laptops ? 1.33 ghz parts, over 800$ price tags! Sony Vaio Y series, Alienware m11x "new model", Lenovo IdeaPad U160, etc.. etc..
These aren't the Netbooks you're talking about. Netbooks use mostly Intel Atom or Athlon Neo processors. These are "ultra-portables" as the vendors call them. The MBA is one of many such products.
You're seriously being dense here. Look, you got it wrong. That's fine. You just stop your credibility's erosion while you can though and just admit it. There is an existing industry segment for these processors, they are currently selling from many vendors. Apple didn't do anything special here except participate in this industry segment.
If you're not a buyer for this segment, why are you even bothering looking at the Air ? It's not for you, go look at the rest of the line-up or at another vendor's offering that is more apt for you.
Take a look how many netbooks there are that uses the SU9400. It's less than 10. That's nothing.
But take a good look around you how many people who own a Ultra low voltage CPU laptop, what kind of laptop it is. 9 out of 10 cases it's a cheap netbook.
Are you telling me you see many people with a Dell Adamo? Netbooks are outselling notebooks, and I see many more notebooks than those types of expensive netbooks like a Dell Adamo.
It's not the industry trend. Else they would be everywhere like the 13" MBP or cheap netbooks.
Take a look how many netbooks there are that uses the SU9400. It's less than 10. That's nothing.
But take a good look around you how many people who own a Ultra low voltage CPU laptop, what kind of laptop it is. 9 out of 10 cases it's a cheap netbook.
Are you telling me you see many people with a Dell Adamo?
If you believe that those expensive low voltage computers is the industry trend, keep believing what you want.
Welcome to my ignore list. I'm not taking the time to again prove you wrong.
Take a look how many netbooks there are that uses the SU9400. It's less than 10. That's nothing.
But take a good look around you how many people who own a Ultra low voltage CPU laptop, what kind of laptop it is. 9 out of 10 cases it's a cheap netbook.
Are you telling me you see many people with a Dell Adamo? Netbooks are outselling notebooks, and I see many more notebooks than those types of expensive netbooks like a Dell Adamo.
It's not the industry trend. Else they would be everywhere like the 13" MBP or cheap netbooks.
You are making a bad argument. Unfortunatly people are ignorant when it comes to buy computers. They want to take home something cheap (then they go home with a netbook) or they go by reccomendation (popularity) from the salesman, which most of the time gets a commission on the sale.
Netbooks have twice as much failure rate then notebooks.
Netbooks come with bad CPU and bad graphics small screen with low resolution.
"Ultraportable" have higher resolution screen, better CPU and bettergraphic.
You can play Stracraft II, COD4 on the MBA, you can do photoshop and else.
A NETbook is ment for very simple task as Internet browsing, media and word processing and that stuff.
An Ultraportable let you do ANYTHING else on top of simple task; however, because of the portability power is compromise so is not ment to be stressed, but most of the time will be just fine.
Clock speed is how fast it works not how much it does, of course bus, cache, cores, and virtual cores matter
Take a look how many netbooks there are that uses the SU9400. It's less than 10. That's nothing.
But take a good look around you how many people who own a Ultra low voltage CPU laptop, what kind of laptop it is. 9 out of 10 cases it's a cheap netbook.
Are you telling me you see many people with a Dell Adamo? Netbooks are outselling notebooks, and I see many more notebooks than those types of expensive netbooks like a Dell Adamo.
It's not the industry trend. Else they would be everywhere like the 13" MBP or cheap netbooks.
Perhaps netbooks outsold them at one time. But netbooks sales are down ever since the release of the ipad.
KnightWRX makes more then a compelling argument. It does not matter that more netbooks sold then the higher priced ultra portable notebooks.
These computers specifications still put them in a different & higher category of their own then regular netbooks. Its In-between a netbook and a laptop.
C2D is a much better processor then the comparative atom or the AMD equivalent, along with the other improved spec's.
Take a look how many netbooks there are that uses the SU9400. It's less than 10. That's nothing.
But take a good look around you how many people who own a Ultra low voltage CPU laptop, what kind of laptop it is. 9 out of 10 cases it's a cheap netbook.
Are you telling me you see many people with a Dell Adamo? Netbooks are outselling notebooks, and I see many more notebooks than those types of expensive netbooks like a Dell Adamo.
It's not the industry trend. Else they would be everywhere like the 13" MBP or cheap netbooks.
So since your previous argument didn't pan out now you're altering it to say that this whole segment of the notebook market is no good and no one buys these machines?
I honestly have no idea what the sales of netbooks vs. the sales of ultraportables are, and it really doesn't matter to me. The fact is, some people like netbooks and will buy a netbook. That is fine. For others, netbooks simply aren't capable enough, but they still want an extremely portable computer, and so they look at the ultraportables that are available. From what I've seen, these range in price from ~$900-$2500 (and possibly more).
The facts are that Apple put out a nice ultraportable at a competitive price, with very similar specs to other computers in the same price range, and in fact with better video card specs than MOST of the competition (once again, the ones in the Air's price range).
Just give it a rest already, no one thinks the Air is the fastest most powerful computer ever, but it is stupid to compare it to machines running Atom processors, or to insinuate that it's a bad machine because "no one buys" machines in it's class.
I've studied CPU architectures back in Comp-Eng. in which I was researching the fundamental functions of a CPU. That also lead me finding out about mechanical CPUs such as the Analytical engines, Difference engine and the famous Z1 mechanical CPU which logic gates where made out of sheets of interlocking pieces of metal and rods.
In the early days of mechanical computing, calculating a simple equation, one must rotate a number wheel to set a value, then handcrank a wheel a couple of times to shift the mechanical gears around, then you can set the second value, handcrank the wheel, set your operation, hand crank one final time and the result will be displayed. Now this was tedious. So they improved the input and execution order, and now you only had to input once, hand crank the wheel to move the gears around and after 30-40 revolutions, you'd get the answer. At the same time you gain tendonitis/chrondritis in your wrist.
So the next logical solution to that problem was to replace the hand cranking motion to the wheel with an electric motor. That increased the calculation time greatly. But there was a bottleneck in the input. You can set the equation once, turn on the motor which will give you the result in 5 seconds before the motor becomes idle doing nothing. So they devise a way to input multiple equations at once and it lead to the creation of paper based binary toggler otherwise known as punch cards or long strips of paper with holes in them. This also lead to the creation of caches, storing a few bytes of data read from the paper. Now the motor based CPU has to fetch from the cache, decode, and store it back and even punch the result back to a roll of paper.
As time went on, we found an alternative to this and it is the transistor. It is doing the mechanical switches electricaly many times faster. As for the hand cracking I was talking about and also was replaced by the rotating motor, that is the clock speed that we know today in which is regulated by a quartz crystal (for pulsing) and voltages.
~~~
It a great misconception of relying on increasing clock speed alone. There are so many improvements on the CPU architectures:
Excecution has improved - Back then, operands such as ADD, MUL and especially DIVIDE take multiple passes to get to the final result. Now in 1 cycle out of 1 billion cycles(1ghz) you can calculate a cluster of 64bit data thanks to SSE,SSE2,3,4 and so on which as why you are able to watch movies that have to decode a block pixels and update many times in 1 second.
If you increase the Bus speed, otherwise known as Front Side Bus, you have increased the access to the RAM reducing the time to fetch and write data.
Better yet, if you increase the CPU's cache, you have more to feed the CPU's execution bits, than having to fetch and traverse many lines and transistors to get to the motherboards RAM.
And lastly if you have more cores, you can kill two birds in one stone than having to hit, pick another stone and hit the other as fast as you can. That also saves you wasted energy.
Next time anyone judges CPU speed alone, try this simple equation:
(# Cores) x (Clock speed) x (Size of L2 Cache) x (Front side bus speed) = Raw performance (higher value is better)
SSD is just the icing on top since now that it fetches much quicker to RAM and also virtual memory(swap space) is much faster too.
In the early days of mechanical computing, calculating a simple equation, one must rotate a number wheel to set a value, then handcrank a wheel a couple of times to shift the mechanical gears around, then you can set the second value, handcrank the wheel, set your operation, hand crank one final time and the result will be displayed. Now this was tedious. So they improved the input and execution order, and now you only had to input once, hand crank the wheel to move the gears around and after 30-40 revolutions, you'd get the answer. At the same time you gain tendonitis/chrondritis in your wrist.
So the next logical solution to that problem was to replace the hand cranking motion to the wheel with an electric motor. That increased the calculation time greatly. But there was a bottleneck in the input. You can set the equation once, turn on the motor which will give you the result in 5 seconds before the motor becomes idle doing nothing. So they devise a way to input multiple equations at once and it lead to the creation of paper based binary toggler otherwise known as punch cards or long strips of paper with holes in them. This also lead to the creation of caches, storing a few bytes of data read from the paper. Now the motor based CPU has to fetch from the cache, decode, and store it back and even punch the result back to a roll of paper.
As time went on, we found an alternative to this and it is the transistor. It is doing the mechanical switches electricaly many times faster. As for the hand cracking I was talking about and also was replaced by the rotating motor, that is the clock speed that we know today in which is regulated by a quartz crystal (for pulsing) and voltages.
~~~
It a great misconception of relying on increasing clock speed alone. There are so many improvements on the CPU architectures:
Excecution has improved - Back then, operands such as ADD, MUL and especially DIVIDE take multiple passes to get to the final result. Now in 1 cycle out of 1 billion cycles(1ghz) you can calculate a cluster of 64bit data thanks to SSE,SSE2,3,4 and so on which as why you are able to watch movies that have to decode a block pixels and update many times in 1 second.
If you increase the Bus speed, otherwise known as Front Side Bus, you have increased the access to the RAM reducing the time to fetch and write data.
Better yet, if you increase the CPU's cache, you have more to feed the CPU's execution bits, than having to fetch and traverse many lines and transistors to get to the motherboards RAM.
And lastly if you have more cores, you can kill two birds in one stone than having to hit, pick another stone and hit the other as fast as you can. That also saves you wasted energy.
Next time anyone judges CPU speed alone, try this simple equation:
(# Cores) x (Clock speed) x (Size of L2 Cache) x (Front side bus speed) = Raw performance (higher value is better)
SSD is just the icing on top since now that it fetches much quicker to RAM and also virtual memory(swap space) is much faster too.
Yeah, okay .... everyone isn't buying a computer to IM someone or to update their Facebook status though.
A Simple Rule...
A PC (or MAC) is as fast as its slowest component.
Take a Windows PC for example, look at it's performance index.
- Fast CPU = 4.8
- Fast Memory = 4.8
- SDD = 4.9
- Lame Video Card = 2.8
Results => Performance Index = 2.8 = Blah!
And there are tons of people who have them...
MACs are engineered to have all its components work together and avoid bottlenecks as much as possible and to achieve great performance.
A PC (or MAC) is as fast as its slowest component.
Take a Windows PC for example, look at it's performance index.
- Fast CPU = 4.8
- Fast Memory = 4.8
- SDD = 4.9
- Lame Video Card = 2.8
Results => Performance Index = 2.8 = Blah!
And there are tons of people who have them...
MACs are engineered to have all its components work together and avoid bottlenecks as much as possible and to achieve great performance.
Thanks for letting us read Chapter 1 of your book. When are you going to publish it???
+1
I bought one, It does what I need it to do, I am happy, and I will probably still be using the air for what I bought it for in 5 years time even though by then I could probably buy a machine which would be 20 times as fast - why bother