1.86 Yonah or 1.66 Merom

[rscosworth]

Guys,

Got the chance to buy a 1.66 merom at a knock down price.

Im currently running a 1.86 yonah with vista home premium.

Will be loading ultimate on in a couple of days; the question is, should i buy the merom or not?

Cheers

[dr_st]

Unless you're going to install a 64-bit OS - no.

[rscosworth]

well i have vista 64bit cd, not sure if i would use it though.

[kkposh]

In my opinion,there is little difference in performance.

the only difference is:

the merom supports 64-bit technology.
the T2400 yonah supports Intel Visualization Technology.

which technology is useful to you?

[gator]

There is very little performance gain from Yonah to Merom on normal applications and day-to-day use. The difference is visible only on intensive 3D apps, that too when run for a long duration. I ran an extensive test using my really long matlab code and there was barely any difference.

Unless you are getting the Merom chip at a really low price, or you plan to sell the T60 later on, don't bother getting it.

[Troels]

Matlab still only support single core CPUs and doesn't support multi-threading the two cores at once?

[gator]

Matlab still only support single core CPUs and doesn't support multi-threading the two cores at once?

Matlab has support for multi-threading since atleast version 6. I use matlab 7 and it uses both the cores.

[dr_st]

I use matlab 7 and it uses both the cores.

Hopefully it compensates slightly for MATLAB7 being a bloated slow piece of crap.

[/offtopic]

[gator]

Hopefully it compensates slightly for MATLAB7 being a bloated slow piece of crap.
[/offtopic]

It is not that bad, the graphics features are lots better than 5 and 6. But yeah, it does take some resources. I tried using GNU Octave, and it is awesome for opensource. It is almost identical to MATLAB and there are tons of custom packages available. Have you tried it?

[codek]

I use matlab 7 and it uses both the cores.

Hopefully it compensates slightly for MATLAB7 being a bloated slow piece of crap.

[/offtopic]

what do you mean

[dr_st]

what do you mean

I mean that it takes it like 2 minutes to load up, and 5-10 seconds to respond to simple commands, such as "help svmclassify", when you run them the first time (after that it seems to work fine). Also, the UI underwent some dumb changes (Ctrl+Tab no longer works in the editor to switch files, WTF?), and trackpoint scrolling doesn't work as well.

I do agree that the graphical functions have been improved, and I like some features of the new online debugger too, although some of them are dumb, like "variable appears to never be used" inside multi-function GUI .M files.

I haven't tried Octave, gator. All around, I'm pretty satisfied with MATLAB. It's just that MATLAB7 really got on my nerves by some UI/speed-crippling decisions, that seemingly are justified by nothing.

[brentpresley]

Back to topic:

Get the Merom. Merom is about 15% faster clock for clock than Yonah. Taking that into account, the Merom at 1.66 edges out the 1.8 Yonah in terms of speed.