Remember when computers always got faster and cheaper

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Martimus
My point is that it did matter, since what Intel did was keep their market advantage with these tactics. They had 500% more resources, but kept AMD or any other competitor from gaining any market share. (Although at the time in question here it was only AMD, but that isn't to say they didn't use similar tactics in the past to kill of the other competitors; and since they did in fact die off it would seem quite feasible.) The immediate consequences were minute, but what it enabled was the long term consequences that AMD would be unable to sustain any advantage that it held (and they were unable) since they were unable to capitalize on said advantages with higher revenue which would have ate into that 500% advantage. The point I am making is that if these illegal activities did not take place, then AMD could have a higher revenue, which would mean that Intel's revenue advantage would be decreased regardless of how Intel did. This may have dropped the advantage to a 3-1 ratio, or a 4.9-1 ratio, or even possibly led to a disadvantage of some ratio, but my point was that this advantage that is the most likely source of dominance would not be assured without those illegal activities.

I am up way past my bedtime, so please excuse my grammar, or if I did not quite convey my point coherently.

Martimus I fully agree with the spirit of your post as I interpret you as having expressed it, but at the same I disagree with the rigidness that you are invoking in regards to the outcome being solely a consequence of illegal activity.

IMO Intel was quite capable of effecting the same outcome thru entirely legal actions on their behalf...again with my point here simply being that existence of the outcome itself does not explicitly require illegal activities and thus the outcome itself is not evidence or proof in its own right that illegal activities were involved in the creation of the outcome.

Let me expand on this - with 5x the resources surely Intel could have adequately suppressed AMD's marketshare efforts thru the use of a well-budgeted marketing and advertising campaign (Intel Inside) combined with leveraging their lower cost structure for manufacturing (volume baby, volume) to sell chips at pricepoints which would have still generated net positive profits and gross margins for Intel but would have decimated AMD all the same.

To put it differently, just how piss-poor and dumbed-down would we have to contemplate Intel's management to be in order for them to find themselves in a situation where despite their well filled coffers and resource flushed R&D teams (as far back as 1993 mind you, not 2003) that they had no choice but to engage in illegal activities just to merely maintain their marketshare lead over AMD for decades to come?

I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying I really have to paint a pretty dim picture of Intel management's ability to manage their business and their resources in order to convincingly argue to myself that the market outcome can only be explained by invoking illegal activities.

Now where you can convince me that perhaps illegal activities (as in abuse of monopoly position) came into play is not in the marketshare results but in the net profits and gross margins category. Sure Intel had the ability to put the hurt on AMD to effect the same outcome as we see today, but to be able to do that while maintaining >50% gross margins? Yeah now I start to become a tad suspicious.

But then again maybe that is just an unavoidable outcome of investing 5x the resources into R&D, you maintain not only a timetable lead over your competitors in terms of manufacturing nodes but you also generate a net positive offset in gross margins over your competition because of that timetable and the resources your are investing into its creation. 5x the resources allows you to do more things in parallel, as in "(1) create 130nm node with 8 month lead over competition, and (2) simultaneously engineer into the 130nm node the cost savings necessary for us to maintain a 30% GM advantage over the competition". From experience with building nodes that had to compete with the Taiwan foundries this is completely plausible in my mind.

So in closing, I agree with the logic you are using but only within the confines of some very strictly defined and seemingly unrealistic operating conditions for Intel's management. If they were operating under the self-imposed restrictions of not lowering gross margins as needed to put the hurt on AMD then we could make the argument that AMD would not be in their current situation if we stripped out the impact of illegal activities on Intel's behalf.

But there are many ways to skin a cat, and IMO Intel could have just as deftly put AMD into the intensive care unit by purely legal and traditional competitive methods so I can't really accept the argument that their condition could only have stemmed from illegal activities.

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: Idontcare
Martimus I fully agree with the spirit of your post as I interpret you as having expressed it, but at the same I disagree with the rigidness that you are invoking in regards to the outcome being solely a consequence of illegal activity.

IMO Intel was quite capable of effecting the same outcome thru entirely legal actions on their behalf...again with my point here simply being that existence of the outcome itself does not explicitly require illegal activities and thus the outcome itself is not evidence or proof in its own right that illegal activities were involved in the creation of the outcome.

Let me expand on this - with 5x the resources surely Intel could have adequately suppressed AMD's marketshare efforts thru the use of a well-budgeted marketing and advertising campaign (Intel Inside) combined with leveraging their lower cost structure for manufacturing (volume baby, volume) to sell chips at pricepoints which would have still generated net positive profits and gross margins for Intel but would have decimated AMD all the same.

To put it differently, just how piss-poor and dumbed-down would we have to contemplate Intel's management to be in order for them to find themselves in a situation where despite their well filled coffers and resource flushed R&D teams (as far back as 1993 mind you, not 2003) that they had no choice but to engage in illegal activities just to merely maintain their marketshare lead over AMD for decades to come?

I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying I really have to paint a pretty dim picture of Intel management's ability to manage their business and their resources in order to convincingly argue to myself that the market outcome can only be explained by invoking illegal activities.

Now where you can convince me that perhaps illegal activities (as in abuse of monopoly position) came into play is not in the marketshare results but in the net profits and gross margins category. Sure Intel had the ability to put the hurt on AMD to effect the same outcome as we see today, but to be able to do that while maintaining >50% gross margins? Yeah now I start to become a tad suspicious.

But then again maybe that is just an unavoidable outcome of investing 5x the resources into R&D, you maintain not only a timetable lead over your competitors in terms of manufacturing nodes but you also generate a net positive offset in gross margins over your competition because of that timetable and the resources your are investing into its creation. 5x the resources allows you to do more things in parallel, as in "(1) create 130nm node with 8 month lead over competition, and (2) simultaneously engineer into the 130nm node the cost savings necessary for us to maintain a 30% GM advantage over the competition". From experience with building nodes that had to compete with the Taiwan foundries this is completely plausible in my mind.

So in closing, I agree with the logic you are using but only within the confines of some very strictly defined and seemingly unrealistic operating conditions for Intel's management. If they were operating under the self-imposed restrictions of not lowering gross margins as needed to put the hurt on AMD then we could make the argument that AMD would not be in their current situation if we stripped out the impact of illegal activities on Intel's behalf.

But there are many ways to skin a cat, and IMO Intel could have just as deftly put AMD into the intensive care unit by purely legal and traditional competitive methods so I can't really accept the argument that their condition could only have stemmed from illegal activities.

I agree that the 5X advantage in in income is huge, but my point was that the activities they are accused of doing were directly made to keep AMD from increasing their revenue, and were not made to augment their own. It takes time to eat into a competitors market dominance, but it can be done as evidenced by the auto industry. (look at who the top manufacturer is now, compared to 20 years ago, and look at their relative market share now and then) These activities were done to enable Intel to keep their huge market share now, and not at the time the activities took place.

The problem during this time is that AMD had a processor that was cheaper, but yet had a higher quality than the Intel chip. Now why is that? Why would you sell something better for less than your competitor? Maybe there wasn't the name recognition associated with quality (which there wasn't in the early going), but that should pass with the first generation of superior products (with a 2-3 year product life cycle, you should see an marked increase in quality recognition sales at the 2 year mark of superior quality). This would mean that they should have been able to sell at a higher margin at the end of the first cycle, but reading the complaints (and the results of the different lawsuits already settled) and you can see that the actions Intel made were made directly to keep AMD from increasing their profit margins.

My point is that simply increasing their margins by 10% or 20% may not seem like it would eat into the advantage that Intel had very much, but it would eat into it. If they were able to leverage that additional revenue and increase their margins further, then it would eat into the advantage even more. We really don't know how they would stand today if the two sides had both been playing fair, but I know from experience that is is entirely possible for an underdog to slowly make headway when no-one is pushing your head underwater.

 

[Viditor]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: Martimus
My point is that it did matter, since what Intel did was keep their market advantage with these tactics. They had 500% more resources, but kept AMD or any other competitor from gaining any market share. (Although at the time in question here it was only AMD, but that isn't to say they didn't use similar tactics in the past to kill of the other competitors; and since they did in fact die off it would seem quite feasible.) The immediate consequences were minute, but what it enabled was the long term consequences that AMD would be unable to sustain any advantage that it held (and they were unable) since they were unable to capitalize on said advantages with higher revenue which would have ate into that 500% advantage. The point I am making is that if these illegal activities did not take place, then AMD could have a higher revenue, which would mean that Intel's revenue advantage would be decreased regardless of how Intel did. This may have dropped the advantage to a 3-1 ratio, or a 4.9-1 ratio, or even possibly led to a disadvantage of some ratio, but my point was that this advantage that is the most likely source of dominance would not be assured without those illegal activities.

I am up way past my bedtime, so please excuse my grammar, or if I did not quite convey my point coherently.

Martimus I fully agree with the spirit of your post as I interpret you as having expressed it, but at the same I disagree with the rigidness that you are invoking in regards to the outcome being solely a consequence of illegal activity.

IMO Intel was quite capable of effecting the same outcome thru entirely legal actions on their behalf...again with my point here simply being that existence of the outcome itself does not explicitly require illegal activities and thus the outcome itself is not evidence or proof in its own right that illegal activities were involved in the creation of the outcome.

Let me expand on this - with 5x the resources surely Intel could have adequately suppressed AMD's marketshare efforts thru the use of a well-budgeted marketing and advertising campaign (Intel Inside) combined with leveraging their lower cost structure for manufacturing (volume baby, volume) to sell chips at pricepoints which would have still generated net positive profits and gross margins for Intel but would have decimated AMD all the same.

What you say would make sense in most cases, but in this case it did not fly. Intel certainly had and has an excellent marketing dept, and Intel Inside was in full swing. The problem was that the customers (OEMs, not Joe SP) had already had a taste of what it was like to only have a single vendor for their chips, and they really didn't like it...it cut their razor thin margins significantly, and Intel was practically forcing them to design systems the way Intel wanted.
Another point is that their cost structure wasn't that much lower (if it was lower at all, which I doubt). While volume is usually a huge cost reducer, in this case it turned out that efficiency and nimbleness were far more important. This was probably because the design changes were happening MUCH faster than anyone expected, so the ability to leverage volume was kept fairly minimal.
APM turns out to be the greatest invention AMD ever had...

To put it differently, just how piss-poor and dumbed-down would we have to contemplate Intel's management to be in order for them to find themselves in a situation where despite their well filled coffers and resource flushed R&D teams (as far back as 1993 mind you, not 2003) that they had no choice but to engage in illegal activities just to merely maintain their marketshare lead over AMD for decades to come?

To be fair to the Intel guys, they had never been directly challenged to anywhere near the degree AMD was doing when the Athlon came out. They had become used to the fact that when they told the PC community to change standards, the standards would be changed.
The biggest blow to Intel's AMD strategy was the Rambus fiasco...if the industry had just made the change to RDram when the Athlon was first introduced (as Intel had planned), AMD could not have afforded to change their designs quickly enough. And remember that JS had mortgaged the entire company on the Athlon...do or die.
As it was, the Rambus boards had design issues, and manufacturing the Ram had huge cost issues as well...

I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying I really have to paint a pretty dim picture of Intel management's ability to manage their business and their resources in order to convincingly argue to myself that the market outcome can only be explained by invoking illegal activities.

Now where you can convince me that perhaps illegal activities (as in abuse of monopoly position) came into play is not in the marketshare results but in the net profits and gross margins category. Sure Intel had the ability to put the hurt on AMD to effect the same outcome as we see today, but to be able to do that while maintaining >50% gross margins? Yeah now I start to become a tad suspicious.

But then again maybe that is just an unavoidable outcome of investing 5x the resources into R&D, you maintain not only a timetable lead over your competitors in terms of manufacturing nodes but you also generate a net positive offset in gross margins over your competition because of that timetable and the resources your are investing into its creation. 5x the resources allows you to do more things in parallel, as in "(1) create 130nm node with 8 month lead over competition, and (2) simultaneously engineer into the 130nm node the cost savings necessary for us to maintain a 30% GM advantage over the competition". From experience with building nodes that had to compete with the Taiwan foundries this is completely plausible in my mind.

So in closing, I agree with the logic you are using but only within the confines of some very strictly defined and seemingly unrealistic operating conditions for Intel's management. If they were operating under the self-imposed restrictions of not lowering gross margins as needed to put the hurt on AMD then we could make the argument that AMD would not be in their current situation if we stripped out the impact of illegal activities on Intel's behalf.

But there are many ways to skin a cat, and IMO Intel could have just as deftly put AMD into the intensive care unit by purely legal and traditional competitive methods so I can't really accept the argument that their condition could only have stemmed from illegal activities.

I think that one thing you're forgetting is that while Intel did indeed have 5x the R&D budget, they also had to spread it over 5x the number of products...
That wasn't proportional of course, so Intel did indeed outspend AMD on CPU R&D. However, much of that was spent in a direction that turned out to be a poor use of the money...P4, Rambus, etc..

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: Viditor
I think that one thing you're forgetting is that while Intel did indeed have 5x the R&D budget, they also had to spread it over 5x the number of products...
That wasn't proportional of course, so Intel did indeed outspend AMD on CPU R&D. However, much of that was spent in a direction that turned out to be a poor use of the money...P4, Rambus, etc..

It is amazing that when you have a lot of money to spend, how you end up spending a lot of it on wasteful things (the AT&T article that Idontcare posted also showed this). When you don't have much money to spend you end up being far more conservative with your spending and research the possible risks more thoroughly.

 

[exar333]

Originally posted by: Martimus

Originally posted by: Viditor
I think that one thing you're forgetting is that while Intel did indeed have 5x the R&D budget, they also had to spread it over 5x the number of products...
That wasn't proportional of course, so Intel did indeed outspend AMD on CPU R&D. However, much of that was spent in a direction that turned out to be a poor use of the money...P4, Rambus, etc..

It is amazing that when you have a lot of money to spend, how you end up spending a lot of it on wasteful things (the AT&T article that Idontcare posted also showed this). When you don't have much money to spend you end up being far more conservative with your spending and research the possible risks more thoroughly.

That's an extremely shallow statement.

Is Intel's R&D budget larger than AMD's for CPUs? Most certainly! Is it 5x? Definitely not. Do you consider the best chipsets around, flash memory, and GPUs wasteful? They may not have had the success they wanted with GPUs, but their marketshare is still huge. Their chipsets have consistently led the entire market both in consumer and server areas.

Intel could probably be more frugal, but I don't know if "wasteful" is the best word. You can't succeed in every product venture you make, and the tech world is notoriously hard to predict where it will go. Itanium was an example of a "good" product in performance, but it never caught on and therefore it's benefits were never realized.

Edit: What exactly is the purpose of this thread? The OP clearly doesn't want to hear anyone else's point of view. A blog probably would have been more appropriate...

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: ExarKun333

Originally posted by: Martimus
It is amazing that when you have a lot of money to spend, how you end up spending a lot of it on wasteful things (the AT&T article that Idontcare posted also showed this). When you don't have much money to spend you end up being far more conservative with your spending and research the possible risks more thoroughly.

That's an extremely shallow statement.

Is Intel's R&D budget larger than AMD's for CPUs? Most certainly! Is it 5x? Definitely not. Do you consider the best chipsets around, flash memory, and GPUs wasteful? They may not have had the success they wanted with GPUs, but their marketshare is still huge. Their chipsets have consistently led the entire market both in consumer and server areas.

Intel could probably be more frugal, but I don't know if "wasteful" is the best word. You can't succeed in every product venture you make, and the tech world is notoriously hard to predict where it will go. Itanium was an example of a "good" product in performance, but it never caught on and therefore it's benefits were never realized.

Edit: What exactly is the purpose of this thread? The OP clearly doesn't want to hear anyone else's point of view. A blog probably would have been more appropriate...

I don't know if it is shallow, but it is definitely a very generalized statement. I have seen it in my own life, where I can get by almost exactly the same with half the income I had at one point, just because I become better at buying things that are needed and will actually fulfill the purpose they were intended for. I wasn't trying to portray that having more money will always make you waste some of it, but it does make you more likely to waste it, since it isn't as big a deal if you do. (you are less likely to do as complete of due diligence as you would if you knew that you couldn't afford to lose said investment)

 

[exar333]

Originally posted by: Martimus

Originally posted by: ExarKun333

Originally posted by: Martimus
It is amazing that when you have a lot of money to spend, how you end up spending a lot of it on wasteful things (the AT&T article that Idontcare posted also showed this). When you don't have much money to spend you end up being far more conservative with your spending and research the possible risks more thoroughly.

That's an extremely shallow statement.

Is Intel's R&D budget larger than AMD's for CPUs? Most certainly! Is it 5x? Definitely not. Do you consider the best chipsets around, flash memory, and GPUs wasteful? They may not have had the success they wanted with GPUs, but their marketshare is still huge. Their chipsets have consistently led the entire market both in consumer and server areas.

Intel could probably be more frugal, but I don't know if "wasteful" is the best word. You can't succeed in every product venture you make, and the tech world is notoriously hard to predict where it will go. Itanium was an example of a "good" product in performance, but it never caught on and therefore it's benefits were never realized.

Edit: What exactly is the purpose of this thread? The OP clearly doesn't want to hear anyone else's point of view. A blog probably would have been more appropriate...

I don't know if it is shallow, but it is definitely a very generalized statement. I have seen it in my own life, where I can get by almost exactly the same with half the income I had at one point, just because I become better at buying things that are needed and will actually fulfill the purpose they were intended for. I wasn't trying to portray that having more money will always make you waste some of it, but it does make you more likely to waste it, since it isn't as big a deal if you do. (you are less likely to do as complete of due diligence as you would if you knew that you couldn't afford to lose said investment)

True, I do agree with you in a more generic way. I don;y know if it applies to Intel or not, as I have not worked there and don't know how fiscally conservative they are with their funds. I would tend to say I doubt they waste a lot of money, as Intel has traditionally been a very fiscally conservative company in terms of profits and yields.

If only more schools listened to your thoughts; I agree that simply more money doesn't always help. If it does help at all, it often times is at diminishing returns.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Now, as for the comment on PC makers using the atom in their desktops. I challenge you to find 1 PC manufacturer that sells a full desktop based on the atom architecture. My quick search shows that the low end for all major PC manufactures that mom and pop will buy uses a celeron (with the exception of gateway that uses a sempron.)

You might find a netbook with the atom in it, but you'll be hard pressed to find someone seriously marketing a full desktop. Which, isn't that your argument, that the cheapest PCs have atoms in them?

As for the celeron comment, I would go with the E1400 which is dual core for $40 over whatever athlon64 chip you are talking about.

The only people using atoms as desktops are people that know that it is a specialty CPU designed for low power. Nobody is getting swindled into the lower performance atom like you seem to be fantasizing.

[edit]Hey, I found one, Compaq still makes desktops, who would have thought? Either way, its a far cry from being either the cheapest PC or a major manufacturer.[/edit]

And... fast-forward to 2014. Intel has re-branded their newest Atom lines as Celeron and Pentium, and there is a massive proliferation of these Atom-based CPUs being sold in desktop PCs. And people with 5-6 year old PCs looking to upgrade, will be mighty disappointed to find out that their shiny new J1900 PC is actually slower in most tasks (like web browsing) than their C2D rigs.

I read the writing on the wall back in 2009.

 

[cbn]

And... fast-forward to 2014. Intel has re-branded their newest Atom lines as Celeron and Pentium, and there is a massive proliferation of these Atom-based CPUs being sold in desktop PCs. And people with 5-6 year old PCs looking to upgrade, will be mighty disappointed to find out that their shiny new J1900 PC is actually slower in most tasks (like web browsing) than their C2D rigs.

I read the writing on the wall back in 2009.

I'm hoping Intel decides to change the situation from SAD (SoC As Desktop) to BET ON US (Best ever technology on new universal SoC) meaning they replace quad core atom with a single fully enabled (AVX 512, etc) big core with HT.

This to consolidate the Celeron atom based and core based product lines into one small die high value SoC (aka a universal SoC) with high drive current xtors.

 

[Matt1970]

And... fast-forward to 2014. Intel has re-branded their newest Atom lines as Celeron and Pentium, and there is a massive proliferation of these Atom-based CPUs being sold in desktop PCs. And people with 5-6 year old PCs looking to upgrade, will be mighty disappointed to find out that their shiny new J1900 PC is actually slower in most tasks (like web browsing) than their C2D rigs.

I read the writing on the wall back in 2009.

Things are not getting more expensive. $50 will get you a pretty peppy processor where 20 years ago you were likely to spend twice that for a comparable processor of the era. But ya, there are processors out there now in new computers that a C2D can run circles around. Some blame goes to Intel but I think the lion's share of it goes to the PC manufacturers and retailers for not making it clear that these are energy saving processors.

 

[crashtech]

Anyone who thinks this is not true should take some time to shop the low-end, however distasteful that may seem. It is chock-full of confusing numbering schemes that give no indication that the shiny new tower you are looking at can barely outpace a Pentium 4. Caveat Emptor and all of that, but it does seem true to me that in years past, even the lowest of the low would beat a five year old machine. It's just not true anymore.

 

[sm625]

The funny thing is that a typical 2009 system with a C2D E8400 really doesnt consume all that much power. They will idle around 50 watts and stay under 90W fully loaded. No one is going to spend $400 to "upgrade" their system to a slower processor just to save 25 watts. There is no way to spin this as anything other than the intentional selling of crap in the hopes that people will buy it and then be unsatisfied and then upgrade again. The problem is that they are upgrading to ipads and telling PC OEMs and Intel/AMD to go stuff it.

 

[Maximilian]

Anyone who thinks this is not true should take some time to shop the low-end, however distasteful that may seem. It is chock-full of confusing numbering schemes that give no indication that the shiny new tower you are looking at can barely outpace a Pentium 4. Caveat Emptor and all of that, but it does seem true to me that in years past, even the lowest of the low would beat a five year old machine. It's just not true anymore.

Its always been a confusing mess. Apple is the only company that does it right.

HP ENVY 15-j140na

vs

Macbook Pro


Both have their downsides but its obvious to me which is the total clusterf*ck. Macbook Pro gives no indicator of how new it is "Macbook Pro (2014)" would be better but a minor complaint. HPs number tells me nothing except that I should buy the Macbook.

I dont even like Apple but credit where its due! Other companies are a complete shambles.

 

[Roland00Address]

Virtual Larry (the OP) next time instead of necroing a 5 year old thread, why don't you create a new thread and link to the 5 year old thread like a time capsule?

 

[sm625]

I think its great! Look at all the people talking up atom in 2009. Now there's atoms in desktops everywhere! So now we have this wide chasm of potential performance from low end systems. My low end G3258 system scores 108 on sunspider. But some of these atom systems score like 700. Jesus what a mess. If someone were to tell me 5 years ago that we'd have such a wide disparity in performance for systems that cost in the $300 price range, I'd have said no way. We're talking almost an order of magnitude here. This is a historically significant event in computing.

 

[crashtech]

Its always been a confusing mess. Apple is the only company that does it right.

HP ENVY 15-j140na

vs

Macbook Pro


Both have their downsides but its obvious to me which is the total clusterf*ck. Macbook Pro gives no indicator of how new it is "Macbook Pro (2014)" would be better but a minor complaint. HPs number tells me nothing except that I should buy the Macbook.

I dont even like Apple but credit where its due! Other companies are a complete shambles.

True enough. Mainly right now I am talking about Intel's use of the Celeron and even Pentium name for CPU models that belong in netbooks and mobile devices. Best Buy even deliberately hides the model number in the "specs." provided at the store, merely saying "Pentium Quad Core" when it's a Bay Trail Atom. Lots of people ending up with total pieces of crap right now.

If anyone asks me I tell them to desktops where the CPU model starts with "N" or "J," but that doesn't help when it isn't even provided.

 

[Maximilian]

True enough. Mainly right now I am talking about Intel's use of the Celeron and even Pentium name for CPU models that belong in netbooks and mobile devices. Best Buy even deliberately hides the model number in the "specs." provided at the store, merely saying "Pentium Quad Core" when it's a Bay Trail Atom. Lots of people ending up with total pieces of crap right now.

If anyone asks me I tell them to desktops where the CPU model starts with "N" or "J," but that doesn't help when it isn't even provided.

Yeah, I think most people would end up with crap anyway though, its just with apple they don't have a choice of buying crap they can only buy a decent (but maybe overpriced) product.

Take washing machines for example. I know ah heck all about washing machines, nothing at all about their performance metrics, internals, what makes them good/bad etc. I bought a used miele washing machine last year by asking people who do know whats best (appliance repair guy) what I should buy. They said LG direct drive or a miele, used miele from ebay is probably still better than a new one from most manufacturers he said. Had no problems with it!

A bit of effort and a bit of research goes a long way but a lot of people just don't put the effort in. Even with google at their fingertips they cant be arsed to learn if what they are thinking about buying sucks or not. They're the people who are bitching and moaning when X product they bought on a whim or were sold by a sales guy breaks or is slow, theres noone to blame but themselves. If people go into a store and expect the sales guy to know what hes talking about and get them the best product for their needs those people need to learn how capitalism works, its all sell sell sell.

 

[crashtech]

Yes, Caveat Emptor. But if you look at a spec sheet and see "Pentium Quad Core, 2.41GHz," most people would think that they had done due diligence.

If they were being honest and sticking with actual desktop CPUs, a Celeron G1820 is faster than any C2D, and people would not be getting screwed.

 

[Ketchup]

.... people with 5-6 year old PCs looking to upgrade, will be mighty disappointed to find out that their shiny new J1900 PC is actually slower in most tasks (like web browsing) than their C2D rigs....

I just started reading the recent updates to this thread (and I do like how you picked up the old thread) and I don't quite agree with the above statement.

I submit to you this: Why do average people buy a new computer? It's because the old one slowed down due to all the junk and malware they have acquired over the years, they see something in the new machine that the old one didn't have (touch screen, Windows 8, etc), the old one died, or they just need an additional machine. The CPU barely matters today anyway (in the context of what has been available since the start of this thread) for web browsing/email checking/listening to music.

Mainstream software just doesn't push hardware used to. Look at Windows 8. It runs about as fast as 7 and faster than Vista. Remember from Vista on back when every new OS was so much slower than the one before it?

 

[crashtech]

Mainstream software just doesn't push hardware used to. Look at Windows 8. It runs about as fast as 7 and faster than Vista. Remember from Vista on back when every new OS was so much slower than the one before it?

Well I disagree with the above, one specific example is Malwarebytes. It used to be a cute little program, and now, my buddy who does house calls puts it on C2D machines and it can bring them to their knees while scanning. I do the hardware end of it for him and I warned him that it has to be set on a delay or the damn machines are very unresponsive when they are first fired up.

 

[Ketchup]

Well I disagree with the above, one specific example is Malwarebytes. It used to be a cute little program, and now, my buddy who does house calls puts it on C2D machines and it can bring them to their knees while scanning. I do the hardware end of it for him and I warned him that it has to be set on a delay or the damn machines are very unresponsive when they are first fired up.

They really should have included an intensity option, such as in Superantispyware. On it's lowest setting it is barely noticeable.

However, I will also point out that the slowness is mostly hard drive: I just fired it up on my VM and it is using about 40% of one core. And hard disk drives are just about as slow as they were back in 2009.

 

[crashtech]

40% of one OCed 4790K core probably represents a very significant amount of the total resources available on a C2D, wouldn't you think?

 

[Ketchup]

40% of one OCed 4790K core probably represents a very significant amount of the total resources available on a C2D, wouldn't you think?

It would, but this is one core of a 3720QM (I really don't overclock anything anymore) on a machine with a traditional HDD. My point was 2 cores of a core 2 duo and one core of an 2-year-old i7 might be about even IMO, which would give me a relatively good idea of what to expect.

I know, I might be pushing my guess a little far here. But I will say that since going to SSD, it is amazing how little time I wait on the system. I have a Lenovo at the house with a Pentium (3-4 years old) and with the SSD upgrade it pauses for nothing in Windows 7.

I am upgrading a guy with a Dell XPS One to an SSD next week (it has a core 2) and looking forward to seeing how it performs.

 

[sm625]

Malwarebytes lag is caused by hard drive. I have a C2D machine with SSD that had some stupid website hijacking thing going on. When I ran malwarebytes scan it found the problem and I couldnt even tell the scan was running. But that does bring up another point: hard drives. lol. In 2014? Why. In 2009 we had the X25-M! Even to this day they are one of the best SSDs out there in terms of budget performance (since there are so many of them available used, and they are still good for many many years to come).

 

[Maximilian]

Virtual Larry (the OP) next time instead of necroing a 5 year old thread, why don't you create a new thread and link to the 5 year old thread like a time capsule?

No Larry don't listen to this, keep necroing threads bud! Fight the power!