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Re: Intels new atomic chip and laptops

. =A0 I understand the new ultra low power atomic chip from intel

> (called that because its conductor width is an atom wide apparently) > is going into cell phones first then laptops later. > > last winter some expected to see atomic chip laptops out by now.. I > think that was a statement from intel....but not yet, and so far no > noise about the atomic chips actually =A0in cell phones either. > > =A0 Does anyone have insight =A0on when it will be in laptops at a good > price... paired with atomic solid state hard drive over 120 gig? =A0 I > might hold out for that hummer if it wont be more than a year. > > Phil scott

Based on what I read in the articles below, I am not buying one for anything to run SolidWorks. Saving a few watts is not going to help me one whit.

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"We ran tests in Vista on the latter, the 1.6GHz desktop Atom 230 with

2GB of RAM, and as anticipated despite the hysterical hype, performance isn't going to set the world alight."

Bo

Reply to
Bo
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Phil, if it was me, I would simply get the high powered laptop and a couple solar panels that can more than charge up a spare battery.

I simply can't deal with an underpowered laptop that takes 2 minutes to rebuild a somewhat complex plastic part when a fast laptop can do it in 30 seconds or less. That is a total waste of my life. It is also the reason I will likely get an 8 core Mac Desktop so I can get those rebuild times down.

I just went through an optimization of a part design and must have done 100-200 rebuilds as I "fixed" various errors I did first time around, and added equations to keep features "together", and tried various esthetic & functional sizes. I probably added 2 hours minimum to my time on that part to get the design optimized.

Bo

Reply to
Bo

I use XP Pro with SolidWorks on my MacBook Pro just like I do on my Dell in native mode on an NTFS partition. No different. I've heard a SWks rep note running SWks 2008 on one of the virtualization programs with Vista on a MacBook Pro, but I've never tried that myself, though I have loaded up XP Pro in Parallels on it for general purpose work.

Both SE & NX are now on Windows, OSX, lInux & BSD if I remember right, and Macs can run all of those, so I figure I have everything to gain by sticking with Mac Hardware, in simplicity and lowest overall hardware cost for me.

If I remember right Intel & Apple are claiming that programming innovations have been made making programming for multi-core processors easier of late, so I think all intensive applications will switch to multi-core support within a couple years.

Bo

Reply to
Bo

Thanks for the links.

I do about 3/4 of my work on my boat or in my motorhome away from shore power. The more battery life I get the less i have to run a generator.

Phil scott

What good does an extra %50 battery life do you when your tasks take you %100 longer? More power to sit and wait I guess but I could see less overall progress actually being made.

Reply to
Raptor

Read Intel's & Apple's comments and reports on multi-core processing. I've read enough to convince myself they are doing the right thing for future speeds. An example was a recent "desktop" supercomputer which Univ of Antwerp put together using 4 high end nVidia video cards where they used the video card's multiple processors to do crunching work.

gizmodo.com=97fastra-desktop-supercomputer-built-with-4-nvidia-9800-gx2- graphics-cards

Multiple core support is coming. I am not a CPU design guy, but I can see the worthwhile nature of minimizing power use and scaling up the # of processors used to suit the application or multiple applications that are running. FEA is crunching intensive.

Bo

Reply to
Bo

yeah, pretty wild stuff but,..

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Reply to
zxys

I think you would be better off getting two slightly faster dual core chips instead of dual quad cores. You only get a little bit of usefulness out of a second core on SW rebuilds and I don't think you would get anything useful out of cores five though nine. (I haven't run any tests on a dual quad core machine though.)

Jerry Steiger

Reply to
Jerry Steiger

Intel has just announced new "P" series low power Core2 Duo processors. They will be available at speeds up to 2.5GHz and use a max of 25W power. Paired with DDR3 memory, they should extend battery life by about 50% over current Core2 Duo mobile systems.

Reply to
jimsym

Dell Precision M6300, 17" screen, up to 200Gb hard drive. Up to 8gb int mem

// Krister

Reply to
Krister_L

Phil -

Have you considered a Dell Precision M2300? If you configured it with the T9500 CPU, a single 2GB DIMM and a 5400rpm hard drive, you'd get excellent battery life and reasonable performance at a competitive price - and not have to wait for the Centrino2 Pros to ship.

The T9xxx series are 45mm Penryn parts with a peak power rating of

35W. At 2.5GHz, the T9500 is quite fast. The 360M graphics is certified by SolidWorks and draws only 17w power (compared to 50W for the 1600M.) A 5400rpm drive would be sluggish, but power consumption would be very low. (SSDs actually consume more power because they consume the same amount of power whether idle or running full bore). Having a single DIMM also reduces power consumption without a huge impact on performance. Finally, the 14.1" screen may require a little squinting, but it will draw much less power than a 15-17 screen would.
Reply to
jimsym

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