Intel has a new group of mobile chipsets coming out that smell like Core 2 duo designs run on 22nm instead of 65/45nm as they were originally.

Chip samples are out in the hands of builders, some early development board sample runs were sold at Thanksgiving as "Black Friday Specials".   Price is trending higher than is realistic though.

Intel is going to have some real issues with these new chips with some pre-existing serious price/value competition that they didn't count on having .... Dell.

Why Dell?   Well, when you retread yourself a 2009 laptop designed Core 2 Duo chipset and die shrink it and get it all put into a board package and go to sell it for $100+ you'll find you have some price/value beating completion selling the original 2009 unit factory refurbished in a case with big memory/hard drive/CD/floppy drive and a keyboard all for the exact same money.

Yup, Dell has hundreds of units coming off 4 year lease all the time.   For prices starting out at about $100 (or less for an ugly one).

What is sad is that the cut down new chip carries much smaller L2 caches for each processor than the original Core 2 Duo did.

Yup, when my little chip board deal went south I ordered an ugly cheap Dell Optiplex 760 from a Dell refurb house.   It came in yesterday afternoon 2-day FedEx and it was better than I feared it would be and it runs perfectly (very quiet) and it has 4 gigs of shared video memory and a whopping 6 megabytes per core as an L-2 cache.  

Per processor core, 6 megs of L-2 pipeline buffer sitting next to the chip itself.

Now, for Linux this is absurd since Linux only uses 512k per core as the full reserved systems memory requirement.

Can you see Linux running like a RAM drive sitting fat and pretty on the processor L-2 cache itself?   With room left over?



It is fast.   Nothing causes any form of delay.   I can't stack enough stuff in front of it to cause it to slow down any at all.

To get the two processors to register something other than two colored lines lying at the less than 5% tick on the systems resources graphs I have to do something big, like that BIG very first systems cumulative upgrade after installing the CD.  Normally, this activity takes a like half hour and pegs the old Athlon processor 100% while it does it.

Took 5 minutes total, one processor went to 40% and stayed up there mostly while the other one looped around a bit underneath it.  Variable speed case fan didn't even speed up ....   Download internet speed was the limiter here, processor and memory kept up easily.

Memory, I have never stirred the line from the allocated 512K level.  I have never used any of the remaining 3+ gigabytes of systems memory so I hope the video card is well satisfied with that much allocated to it.

I have a hard drive RAM cache, never touched it though.   Never.


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So, for all those Intel new cyborg guys out there on the football field with their little midgets buddies sitting up on their shoulders yelling at them to slow down, don't eat so much and "Hey, you are getting overheated again !!!" all the time ---- watch out.

You have some new competition that just entered the sub $100 device football game.   Dell Refurbished Business machines.   For less than $100.

Think of them as old WWII Sherman Tanks clanking out there on the football field.   Got lots bigger guns (multiple big barrels no less), got lots of ammo and lots of gasoline in that big armored gas tank.

Them Shermans may be old and refurbished, but don't make the mistake of getting in the way of one.   And since they ARE the real deal them Cyborgs can't really compete with them for speed or power (even if you pulled off the midget and let the Cyborg run at full speed and literally cook himself to death).   Might be 45/65nm, but heavy metal works on a battlefield just fine since it HAS a heat sink and the fan to handle it.

In this here mini-device football game if you are searching for a box unit, don't forget to go look at them Dell Refurbs.







They come in Tank Size, Battle Ship size and Aircraft Carrier size.   All are between $100 and $300 with the two year lease units being the higher priced ones.