Inexpensive quad core?

[TurtleCrusher]

Why would you care what speed your browser runs at on an i5 or FX-8350? Chances are your probably don't even notice. And wouldn't you rather use Chromium that doesn't come with all the extra bloat then? Someone who owns small cores like Bay Trail or Cat Core and really old machines would be better to judge which is faster and more reliable from experience as they know all too well the pains that you'd probably never experience with any browser.

Which is exactly my point. If you're going to use a browser, let it use modern CPU architecture properly. Chrome on my baytrail performs far beyond expectations. It literally feels like a desktop class CPU up until those extremely intense webpages. From a 2w CPU/10hr battery life netbook, that's fantastic. When I have to use IE for work purposes it's nowhere near as quick.

Let me guess. With a "cheap-class" 5400RPM HDD? If so, then it doesn't matter what CPU you use.

I'd much rather use a Bay Trail-with-SSD then a Haswell-with-5400RPM HDD laptop.

Despite a 1700-900 disadvantage in passmark scores between the P8700 and Z3735F, the Z3735F is far better with an SSD than a decently clocked C2D and 5400RPM drive. Now that it has an SSD I can't really tell them apart though. I would still feel that way even if it was an i5. Those HDDs need to go!

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Despite a 1700-900 disadvantage in passmark scores between the P8700 and Z3735F, the Z3735F is far better with an SSD than a decently clocked C2D and 5400RPM drive. Now that it has an SSD I can't really tell them apart though. I would still feel that way even if it was an i5. Those HDDs need to go!

In my experience, even lowly eMMC-drives totally, completely, outperform HDDs (even the 7200RPM variety) in overall system "snappiness".

Agree totally on 2.5" 5400RPM HDDs. Those need to go, and it can't happen fast enough. They're good for mobile bulk storage, and that's it.

 

[ehume]

ASUS x205. The wife loves it and our roommate wanted it to replace her old MacBook. A very nice keyboard, screen, speakers, incredible battery life... There's nothing about it that I can knock. Especially for being $149 and $199 respectively for both.

Thank you.

 

[Yuriman]

A bit off topic, but I'm amazed at how difficult it is to find inexpensive Windows notebooks with SSDs, even small ones. There's the Stream 11, but... that's about it, and I'd strongly prefer quad BT over dual. Chromebooks, sure, all of them have eMMC/SSDs.

Give me a Windows notebook with the same hardware you find in a Chromebook, and I'd be thrilled. Atom quad or Haswell Celeron + small SSD = perfection.

 

[Abwx]

Atom quad or Haswell Celeron + small SSD = perfection.

After checking tons of reviews at Notebookcheck i ve come to the conclusion that the chips with the best efficency and global perfs are the Beema 6410 and 6310, seconds are a few Baytrails like the 3530 and above.

Lagging behind are Haswell and Kaveri wich are quite close contenders when looking cautiously at the numbers, each one has its own advantages but the mentioned low power cores are more adequate as minimalist solutions.

 

[ninaholic37]

edit: Invalid post for thread / modern tech forum

 

[Shivansps]

In my experience, even lowly eMMC-drives totally, completely, outperform HDDs (even the 7200RPM variety) in overall system "snappiness".

Agree totally on 2.5" 5400RPM HDDs. Those need to go, and it can't happen fast enough. They're good for mobile bulk storage, and that's it.

Yes, eMMC outperform even desktop 3.5" hard disks, and its not hard to see why, way better random access and the read speed are easily in the "+110 mb/s"

 

[Ramses]

eMMC must have come a long way. I don't think I'd trade a raptor for it.

 

[Shivansps]

A Raptor is far from the typical WD Blue/Black drives generally found on pcs.

Combining very low access time and a fast enoght read rate is key for eMMC to be better than HDDs for everyday tasks. As far i know none of them can beat a Raptor in brute force, but they can match a Caviar Black/Seagate Barracuda, now factor in the fast access times.

And thats with new HDDs, old ones are way slower than a modern eMMC. Every HDD i have in my pc is way slower than my tablet eMMC.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

eMMC must have come a long way. I don't think I'd trade a raptor for it.

You wouldn't need to. At that price-bracket we're talking full on SSDs, and those will outperform a raptor...

eMMC is all about reducing cost. Its basically a bootable SD card. The random I/O performance advantage is mostly a positive side-effect of using NAND.

If you haven't already you really owe it to yourself to try an SSD. Its night and day, even compared to a raptor.

Combining very low access time and a fast enoght read rate is key for eMMC to be better than HDDs for everyday tasks. As far i know none of them can beat a Raptor in brute force, but they can match a Caviar Black/Seagate Barracuda, now factor in the fast access times.

eMMC and SD cards have really come a long way in the last few years. Some of the best SD cards (UHS-II) on the market can actually read data fast enough to bottleneck some SSDs write performance. Not to mention HDDs.

 

[Ramses]

eMMC = SD card-ish last time I used one. It was in a netbook or something I think, might have been a bad example.
Cool they have improved though. I've had SSD's for years but the late raptors still hang in there for size and speed. I use em for loading games and such. Best spinny disk ever

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

eMMC = SD card-ish last time I used one. It was in a netbook or something I think, might have been a bad example.
Cool they have improved though. I've had SSD's for years but the late raptors still hang in there for size and speed. I use em for loading games and such. Best spinny disk ever

Heck, even the $20 10k RPM Hard Drives from Go Hard Drive are remarkable performers. I bought one just to see -- and most people usually think that particular computer is running an SSD.

10K Hard Drives do perform quite well compared to SSD's. Obviously, SSD's are faster but nowadays 10k hard drives are dirt cheap.

 

[Ramses]

I wish the raptor was dirt cheap. My only gripe with em. Least the 1tb.
I remember going from a 1tb raptor to an 840 EVO, it was faster but it wasn't like the
heavens opened up the way I suspect it was for folks with slower drives. I think winders uses hard drives a lot better than it used to.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

eMMC = SD card-ish last time I used one. It was in a netbook or something I think, might have been a bad example.
Cool they have improved though. I've had SSD's for years but the late raptors still hang in there for size and speed. I use em for loading games and such. Best spinny disk ever

Before the SSD revolution, I have fond memories of fitting dual Raptors (36.4GB WD360GD) in RAID-0. They simply blew everything away at the time.

I remember going from a 1tb raptor to an 840 EVO, it was faster but it wasn't like the
heavens opened up the way I suspect it was for folks with slower drives. I think winders uses hard drives a lot better than it used to.

The 840EVO might not be the best example of a performance drive. Its quite respectable though, and faster then a lot of the early generation drives.

I must admit I have a hard time waiting for the next generation PCIe SSDs. That Samsung SM951 sure looks nice, only thing it lacks is NVMe support...

 

[Ramses]

yeah I bailed on the m.2's for now again till nvme or whatever they settle on becomes more mature. my board has two lane m.2 and a sata express, hopefully I can do something cool with them eventually. Replaced the 840 with an 850 Pro, I really can't tell any difference in them, or the mx100. All fast. I miss u320 raid even if this stuff is faster, it's deff not cooler.

 

[Shivansps]

Cyberfox MT

Cyberfox ST

Chrome MT

Chrome ST

And there is no contest, Chrome feels way better.

 

[ninaholic37]

Firefox is truly the best browser out there. :thumbsup: Which is why big single core is still better, and will always be better, until Firefox incorporates multi-threading.

 

[soccerballtux]

why? I don't install any bloat or malware. Don't you believe me when I say Waterfox is single-threaded, and Haswell's arch is "snappier" than Core2?

I don't either but

well I guess it's possible it was the 8GB->32GB RAM upgrade, but my PC is WAYYYYYY faster now.

My theory is registry bloat.
when you uninstall, doesn't always remove everything. After 5 years, slow. Now? Fast.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Unless I was playing Starcraft 2, I'd choose the A4-5000 above the E8400 for everyday tasks or work.

I much more prefer to use my old dual 3Ghz Conroe (GK107 equipped) over this energy-efficient quad 1.5Ghz Kabini desktop. I do mostly web browsing, though. It's great for watching videos / downloading stuff, but other than that, it lags everywhere else.

In fact, Kabini is so slow, it's bottnenecking its good integrated graphics. Notice how the slower HD 4350 is over twice as fast on P4.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I much more prefer to use my old dual 3Ghz Conroe (GK107 equipped) over this energy-efficient quad 1.5Ghz Kabini desktop. I do mostly web browsing, though.

I'm certainly not going to argue personal preference, since it by definition... personal... ... ...

I'll just point out that all modern browsers use hardware acceleration, and in some cases (f.x. Chrome) multiple threads, so web-browsing is not a simple single thread performance question. To the degree I'm having a hard time distinguishing between my 3770non-K and the Atom Z3735G in my Stream7 for basic tasks.

 

[Magic Carpet]

@Insert_Nickname

I am using several computers, doing routine things and whenever I am on Kabini, I can feel how sluggish it is (to the point, of thinking to retire it), doing a page render, opening a fb flash app, etc. It is clearly visible. Who cares if it has 4 cores, when the stuff that I do, takes 3-10 seconds (ya, web browsing w/ Chrome) longer on Kabini to complete. For modern GPU acceleration, Direct2D bench is important but it needs some CPU power as well to make for a balanced, responsive system. SSD helps but not in CPU-limited cases and with Kabini, you are pretty much CPU-limited all the time. Other than watching videos, playing old games, it is annoying to use, well at least for me. Luckily, I have other boxes to move myself to. But if I had to live with this 100% all my time, I dunno.. what I'd do to it. Certainly, "low power / going green" idea would be one of the last thoughts crossing my mind. Performance does matter more to me.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

@Insert_Nickname

I am using several computers, doing routine things and whenever I am on Kabini, I can feel how sluggish it is (to the point, of thinking to retire it), doing a page render, opening a fb flash app, etc. It is clearly visible. Who cares if it has 4 cores, when the stuff that I do, takes 3-10 seconds (ya, web browsing w/ Chrome) longer on Kabini to complete. For modern GPU acceleration, Direct2D bench is important but it needs some CPU power as well to make for a balanced, responsive system. SSD helps but not in CPU-limited cases and with Kabini, you are pretty much CPU-limited all the time. Other than watching videos, playing old games, it is annoying to use, well at least for me. Luckily, I have other boxes to move myself to. But if I had to live with this 100% all my time, I dunno.. what I'd do to it. Certainly, "low power / going green" idea would be one of the last thoughts crossing my mind. Performance does matter more to me.

As stated earlier in the thread, the highlighted part simply cannot be overstated. A reasonable SSD takes even a Brazos system (my C70-based XPbox) from being painful to use, to tolerable. Of course everyone's opinion of "tolerable" will be different so its kind of hard to make an objective statement on this...

My experience with the Stream7 is that even flash-heavy sites pop-up pretty much instantly. I'm kind of privileged with regards to my internet connection (fiber), but still.

 

[Yuriman]

I much more prefer to use my old dual 3Ghz Conroe (GK107 equipped) over this energy-efficient quad 1.5Ghz Kabini desktop. I do mostly web browsing, though. It's great for watching videos / downloading stuff, but other than that, it lags everywhere else.

In fact, Kabini is so slow, it's bottnenecking its good integrated graphics. Notice how the slower HD 4350 is over twice as fast on P4.

Depends on how you define "good integrated graphics". 128 GCN cores, in terms of raw speed, are slower than Haswell GT2. In most of the reviews I've looked at, Kabini's iGPU often sits between HD3000 (Sandy Bridge) and HD4000 (Ivy Bridge) integrated graphics, sometimes slightly ahead of HD4000, even when you take CPU performance out of the equation as much as possible. So, half as fast as HD4600. You could say that Kabini actually bottlenecks even 2-3 generation-old Intel integrated graphics.

What I haven't been able to deduce is how it compares in terms of raw performance to Haswell GT1, which comes with Pentiums and Celerons. There isn't much media coverage on these, but it's probably safe to assum Kabini is around the same or maybe very slightly faster, because though in terms of raw flops it's slower, AMD's GCN cores are generally better balanced and have better drivers.

I'm constantly surprised when people assume that just because it has GCN cores, it's fast.

 

[NTMBK]

You rang?

 

[ehume]

I am using several computers, doing routine things and whenever I am on Kabini, I can feel how sluggish it is (to the point, of thinking to retire it), doing a page render, opening a fb flash app, etc. It is clearly visible. . . .

Scholzpdx uses an ASUS x205. I am totally unfamiliar with AMD terms since the K6 days. Does the As.s x205 use Kabini?

 

[VirtualLarry]

@Insert_Nickname

I am using several computers, doing routine things and whenever I am on Kabini, I can feel how sluggish it is (to the point, of thinking to retire it), doing a page render, opening a fb flash app, etc. It is clearly visible. Who cares if it has 4 cores, when the stuff that I do, takes 3-10 seconds (ya, web browsing w/ Chrome) longer on Kabini to complete. For modern GPU acceleration, Direct2D bench is important but it needs some CPU power as well to make for a balanced, responsive system. SSD helps but not in CPU-limited cases and with Kabini, you are pretty much CPU-limited all the time. Other than watching videos, playing old games, it is annoying to use, well at least for me. Luckily, I have other boxes to move myself to. But if I had to live with this 100% all my time, I dunno.. what I'd do to it. Certainly, "low power / going green" idea would be one of the last thoughts crossing my mind. Performance does matter more to me.

Quoted for truth. Kabini does suck.