Re: Intels new atomic chip and laptops

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

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

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.

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

yeah, pretty wild stuff but,..

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

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.

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

// Krister

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