Intel’s technology leads the way when it comes to PC hardware today. Unfortunately, the company is also good at confusing consumers with its myriad brand names and labels. There’s the i7, Viiv, a range of “extreme” processors, as well as the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad. What does it all mean? Read on for some answers.
Q: What’s new about the Intel i7 chip, and is it worth paying extra for a computer that has one?
A: The Core i7, as Intel calls it, is the name of Intel’s new flagship processor. It succeeds the Core 2 line of processors, which will be phased out.
Core i7 processors are all quad-core chips, meaning that each unit has four processing cores. Among the many new features of the chips are support for high-seed DDR3 memory; a new QuickPath Interconnect interface, which replaces the front side bus interface of previous generations; and “turbo boost” technology, which is a type of built-in overclocking functionality that allows the chips to run faster than their rated speed during times of heavy processing.
The i7 chips also boast some impressive power-saving features, as well. Each of the four cores can go into a zero-power mode when it’s not being used, thus lowering power requirements of the chip and the system as a whole.
Right now the i7 is a desktop-only chip, but you can expect Intel to leverage the power-saving features of the i7 in an upcoming notebook processor.
In terms of price, the i7 does command about a 30 percent premium over previous-generation chips, but entire system prices of machines built around an i7 are roughly in line with mid- to high-end systems that used previous-generation chips.
Are i7 systems worth a price premium? In a word, yes. All other things being equal, i7 systems perform at least 30 percent faster than computers equipped with similarly clocked Core 2 Quad chips. And with an i7 system, you’ll have some measure of defense against rapid obsolescence. The new chips use a different socket than the older Core 2 Quad processors do, so processor upgrades down the road with an i7 computer are not out of the question.
Q: What’s the difference between Intel’s Extreme chips and its standard Quad Core chips?
A: The “extreme” moniker applies to chips in each of Intel’s desktop processors lines — Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and Core i7 — that are geared toward hardware enthusiasts. Accordingly, the “extreme” chips maximize what a processor in each line can do. They offer more on-board memory, or cache, than other processors in the same line, and they communicate with the rest of the computer’s components at top speed. Perhaps most importantly to those who use them, however, extreme processors offer an “unlocked” multiplier, which allows enthusiasts to overclock the chips — or push them beyond their rated speeds — by adjusting timings in the computer’s BIOS, or setup program.
Extreme chips also command an extreme price premium over other chips in the same product family. For example, the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770, which runs each of its four cores at 3.2 GHz and boasts 12 MB of cache, retails for close to US$1,500 — just for the chip. Given the rapid pace of change, and obsolescence, in the technology industry, the price premium of extreme processors makes them a questionable value for most people.
Q: What exactly is Intel Viiv? I have a digital video recorder that needs a PC with Intel Viiv to utilize a feature.
A: Viiv is the brand name that Intel chose to describe a combination of technologies that, together, are designed to allow consumers to work more efficiently with multimedia, including high-definition video. Thus, Viiv is geared toward media center PCs or units that can serve in some capacity as digital video recorders. A specific set of technologies — include dual or quad core chips, high definition audio, and certain Intel chipsets — combine to make a PC worthy of the Viiv logo.
Viiv is a marketing initiative that’s on the way out, however. Part of the reason is that many PCs sold today fully meet the specifications that used to be required for Viiv certification. If you have a device that supposedly requires a Viiv-ready PC and your computer is fairly new, try it with your computer anyway. It will probably work.
Q: I’m interested in purchasing a new laptop. Is there a difference between dual core processors and Core 2 Duo processors?
A: There can be. Intel’s initial dual core processors were called Core Duo. That brand name gave way to a new generation of chips dubbed Core 2, which come in two varieties: Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad. The Core 2 Duo is a dual-core processor, and the Core 2 Quad is a quad-core unit. The “Core 2,” then, has no relation to the number of cores on the chips; rather, you can look at it as the brand that denotes the second generation of multi-core processors from Intel.
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
The March/April volume of Foreign Affairs, long a purveyor of pro-China pablum, offered up another irksome Beijing-speak on the issues and solutions for the problems vexing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back From the Brink” rang the provocative title, by David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi (王緝思). If one ever wants to describe what went wrong with US-PRC relations, the career of Wang Jisi is a good place to start. Wang has extensive experience in the US and the West. He was a visiting
One of the challenges with the sheer availability of food in today’s world is that lots of us end up spending many of our waking hours eating. Whether it’s full meals, snacks or desserts, scientists have found that it’s not uncommon for us to be mindlessly grazing at some point during all of our 16 or so waking hours. The problem? As soon as this food hits the bloodstream in the form of glucose, it initiates the release of the hormone insulin. This in turn activates a switch present in every one of our cells, which is responsible for driving cell
RSS