CPU's are often advertised by GHz, cores, and generation. Really evaluating how much a CPU is worth to you seems to be a more complex question. I'm interested in basic web surfing, watching youtube videos, watching DVD's, but also working with some large and somewhat complex spreadsheets. A quad core processor, while it sounds impressive, and may be useful for certain types of games, is basically useless to me (some spreadsheet programs, like libre calc, don't even support multicore processing, but even if they did, any benefit to performance would be negligible). While generally speaking, a CPU with a higher clock speed is going to perform tasks faster than a CPU with a lower clock speed, it's not always the case. Unless clock speed is the bottleneck in what you are doing, a higher GHz number is not going to produce better results. There's also the issue of base-clock vs turbo mode, for CPU's that have it. CPU generation and architecture is also highly relevant. A celeron from the early 2000's could have 2.9 GHz clock speed, but get blown away by a later generation CPU. Lithography is another thing to consider. Generally the more recent, smaller lithography CPU's have impressive clock speed, but they also apparently burn out much faster too. I'm not sure what correlation there is between lithography and durability, but I've heard bad things about the 14nm skylakes, for example. There's also miscellaneous crap to consider. I recently discovered that intel vPro chips have a hardware backdoor that allows for remote control, even when the machine is turned off (in other words, it can even power up a machine remotely). It can allegedly (mostly) be turned off in the bios, but certain aspects of it can't be completely disabled. Since I want to run a linux OS, CPU compatibility is highly relevant to me. Quite a lot of the recent hardware, including CPU's, does not seem to be linux compatible. Any thoughts?
simple, what was linux built on, an Intel platform or an AMD platform (Apple no longer applies). My money is on Intel as they have been the standard for decades and the vast majority of shit was/is originally written on an Intel hardware platform and then ported over to other hardware platforms.
Yeah, looking at ubuntu's certified compatible hardware for example, most of the processors are intels
You can surf the web, watch videos, and work on spreadsheets on the simplest, lowest budget PC. You do not need anything near a quadcore processor or the like. Go and buy a $150-$200 namebrand PC and live happily ever after. Anything else would be a waste of money.
It might be a little more complex than that. Linux compatibility, and the fact that I want a laptop, are constraints. I'm also not sure that low budget PC's would handle the type of spreadsheets I want to do. So I tried running an 8 million cell spread sheet (with four million of those cells being multi-condition logical functions) on a 3GHz/3.4 turbo second generation core i7 desktop, and also a 2.5GHz/3.2 turbo second generation i5 laptop. Looks like I maxed out the CPU's in both cases, but both handled the processing in about 7-9 seconds. My guess is that a budget chromebook would probably choke on something like that.
I would personally find a second hand 2nd or 3rd generation i5. That's probably the sweet spot for price and power, and should be all the power you need for quite some time. I've had some AMD AM3's that are very slow to respond and load windows, compared to even an intel pentium dual core G620 will run circles around most AMD's. Always go second hand hardware, new shit is for suckers!
I agree with relaxxx, get a K series i5. they have the unlocked multiplier and can easily be pushed over 4ghz, if you are interested in that kind of thing.
What are you actually talking about? Wouldnt be the actual conditional calculations that max out a spreadsheet program, no thread syncronization required for that More likely how the the info for each cell is stored into memory, Librecalc used to uses classes instead of arrays which is why it chewed up so much memory, although I think they fixed it recently. ans still has to cache the info for each cell for your graphics engine It would be the software not the cpu Are you talking about Librecalc crashing?, if not, so what?
Everything you mentioned can be done on a dual core except the spreadsheets where the more cores you have the better. AMD's new ryzen R7 chips are coming on the market in less than a week and for about $330.oo one of those is just made for spreadsheets and anything with matrices or rendering 3D content or whatever because they have eight cores. That's a huge drop in price from Intel currently asking a thousand dollars for the same performance. Otherwise, it just depends on just how complex these spreadsheets are and how patient you are with your computer spitting out the results. However, I'd definitely recommend waiting until ryzen comes on the market and start driving prices down.
I've liked the second generation i5's. Seemed to have plenty of power. Also many seem to be linux compatible.
Not familiar with teh k series. Overclocking sounds kind of rad. Practically speaking, I don't think I'd really need it, might easily burn out the chip. Overclocking is kind of like being a bad-assed nerd though... I like it
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. I ran my test sheets on windows machines using excel. The i7 was a quad core, 32GB DDR3. The i5 was dual core, 4GB DDR3. Performance was about the same. What I could gather from the task manger was that the bottle neck was all CPU, not ram. Calc might not perform as well. I think they tweaked a couple years ago to boost performance. I should probably test out calc specifically, unless the machine I get has excel, and I decide to go with a windows/linux dua boot
I'm not sure that cores are going to boost spreadsheet performance that much. Calc doesn't even support multicore processing, and I think it's their claim that multicores don't help that much with spreadsheets. I read that AMD worked with LO to optimize calc for AMD chips. Apparently they worked out CPU/GPU sharing that sped up calc a lot. Appartently any machine that supports open CL will benefit from the optimization, but AMD chips benefited the most
Intel implemented unlocked clock multipliers in certain cpu's in the i5 line-up. any processor with a K appended to the name/number has an unlocked multiplier and is intended to be/can be overclocked. For example; https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117728 by changing the bios setting you can get it to run at the 4.3 rate full time with little risk. ever since I bumped my Pentium 133 up to 150mhz every system I have built has been overclocked. the one I'm using now is quad 2.5 running at 3.0
We're still in the awkward transition phase right now where the entire industry is moving in this direction, but isn't quite there yet. However, if you are going to buy a new cpu it just doesn't make sense to buy one that doesn't support using multicore processing for spreadsheets. That's part of what's so exciting about AMD finally coming out with a chip with 52% lower IPC is that there are now cheaper chips available that have both great single core performance and as many as eight cores forcing Intel to lower their prices. Whether you need the extra cores or not, you will benefit because Intel is being forced to slash their prices.
