The surge seen in the 80's and 90's with computers was almost sickening. Company giants like Commodore, Lotus, Gateway, and Sun were beasts in their day and most were making millions before the first reusable alkaline battery was available in 1992.
I remembered those decades having people spending entire paychecks on the absolute latest available hardware on the market. Software started coming out so fast that you would start losing blood from all the papercuts trying to thumb through Videogames and Computer Entertainment. Of course this was the 80's where people had a lot of that disposable income to just throw around. It was so bad that I began to believe R+D departments for most computer companies seemed like a viable and profitable place to have a job. Being too young to have a legal job I still was around enough older people to be able to enjoy, hate, and learn about all things computers.
It was a long ride that eventually got popped economically and today the champs that trained hard and sometimes with their evil jabs have sustained the computer market. Even if every change wasn't the most legitimate one, we still have come a long way from the LOAD "*", 8, 1 commands. The one giant that every person that places their fingertips near a keyboard or even watches television commericals will come across is Intel. Being the first company to develop a microprocessor, they've always been ahead of the rest and over the last 6 months have done it again. Their latest creation, i7, is another step into the direction microprocessors have taken. Without boring or confusing people, the i7 is based on the latest microarchitecture Intel has created called Nehalem. Many people know the large previous version of this known as Core Duo/Quad Core (not actually 4 so don't let it fool you) and both were the first steps in adding "cores" while interlacing and sharing input/output sites and caches. In layman's terms, instead of making a faster and faster single core, they took 2 central processing units and simultaneously allowed for both to process information thus allowing for much better multitasking and the illusion of double the previous speeds of single cores. Ok, maybe quoting Arnold will make sense of it; "My CPU is a neural net processor; a learning computer".
What's different about the i7? It is that Intel has made a true 4 core processor. Not touching the Quad Core debate, this time they have made a four core processor and clouded that by adding in the magic number three for shared L3 Cache or having 7 more SSE4 instructions. Either way it's a different design and outward looks can't tell you much more than the fact that it's different. Another change is the turbo mode operation which is much like the turbo mode on most cars kicking into a higher power output when needed. You can only use DDR3 RAM with i7 as well as other chippy intensive stuff that I'd rather not delve too much into and after reading up on the topic in depth, few would want to know about it all either. The real test and reward is in the use and abuse.I was fortunate enough to be able to play around with a new system containing the i7 chip as well as an Intel motherboard, 2 ati graphics cards, 3 GB of DDR3 and various other bells and whistles. Not being a paid reviewer of technology with hardware laying around to swap in and out for true testing, I can only compare what I noticed to other recent Dual and Quad Core systems I've touched. Each have a multitude of differing peripherals but all under the guise of a single OS: Vista.
I benchmarked multitasking of the i7 by pulling up a youtube video, playing a quicktime video, playing a non-intensive game in window mode, running a spyware removing piece of software, and doing a regular hard drive search all at the same time. Now most other systems I've ever tried, especially using Vista do not take multitasking lightly. Once you get to about three major tasks, Vista will put the kabosh to most of your efforts at least with initial loading of them. If you get them all started it starts to yield a bit to show multitasking and with the i7, pending a non-crashing Vista, can handle quite a bit. It seemed to be able to pull out 2 more tasks than a Dual but about the same as a Quad. Now I'm guessing with a Linux or Win 2000 operating system you'd see a real pull away with the i7 but that's even harder to compare to with my little stash of goodies.
But who gives a crap of multitasking when there's games to be played? Much like feeding the child before the parent, you've got to feed your inner child and feed mine I did. I tried Empire: Total War, Crysis, and Farcry 2 and found all three to be very impressive showoffs from the i7. Total War on an old Dual core with a good graphics card was pulling about 20 FPS where the i7 nailed 45+ easily (highest settings). Crysis and Farcry 2 were both played at highest settings and only Crysis had the tiniest bit of lag but never dropped under 20 FPS. It was truly a beautiful sight to be able to play these three games at their highest settings and not to worry about clipping, jipping or too many unit lagging. Total War, a game that has a loading screen saying "best played on an i7," doesn't lie about how it handled with lots of units all interacting and reacting at the same time. Battles played out as if they were straight out of the History Channel in HD minus all the Hilter propaganda. I enjoyed the system so much I spent extra days testing it to it's limits and found only Vista to be a cause of problems.Total cost of the system used was $1000. The primary components were about $500 and added peripherals could range from 100 - limitless depending how much you wanted to max everything out and every dollar spent felt like you were rewarded with a dollar in return.
Now this may not be the best time for most people to be shelling out cash on a loaded computer system with the economic developments the way they are. If you are lucky enough to be able to build something new however, this is the way to go. The i7 is a thing of beauty in its design and capability. And even if you don't buy anytime soon, this will probably be the chip to abolish all ideas of a single core design for good bringing us into a new era and eventually to the one we call Skynet.
Polecats - Make a Circuit with Me
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