Friday, April 23, 2010

i7 pwnage

If you’ve ever gotten an error code on a blue screen that magically appears because you were trying to do too many things at once, fear not citizen, Intel has provided your solution.

The new Intel Core i7 Extreme processors are the most powerful processors on the planet boasting six cores which, if you don’t know, is the most individual cores packed into a single processor, ever.

“6 cores and 12 processing threads with Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology” Intel’s website states, for the Intel® Core™ i7-980X processor Extreme Edition, making it the most powerful processor the world has ever seen. You might be asking yourself right about now – What does this mean to me? – The simple answer is that for now, anyone that owns one of these won’t have any sort of processor issues in the near future unless for some reason you’re gaming, encrypting large files, converting large video files, and photo editing all at the same time. Even then, this monster of a computer brain should be able to keep up.

CNET prices the beastly i7-980X at $1,298.95, which, is pretty steep for your average home computer user, but if you consider the rate at which technology evolves the price should come down within the next few years.

So even with the steep price, what could be bad about amazing speeds? “Core i7 has enough architecture changes to require a brand new connection design between the chip and the motherboard. This is no small change, because Intel has stuck with the LGA775 (land grid array) chip socket since the days of Pentium 4. The new socket design, LGA1366, will not accept any older Intel CPUs, nor will Core i7 work on any older motherboards.” Rich Brown, who reviewed the product on CNET, said. Meaning that the processor being 1,300 bucks itself will also cost you a motherboard upgrade.

More specifically the motherboard you might have to look into is Intel's Extreme Motherboard DX58SO priced between $2301.99 and $2874.44, again reminding us that this isn’t a mainstream piece of hardware, for the moment anyway.

Interestingly enough, the i7-980X has three channels of DDR3 memory. Meaning that in the future when this processor comes standard in a prebuilt pc it won’t be uncommon to see RAM in multiples of 3.

That being said, it’s safe to say that at least for now you don’t need to run out and buy one of these unless you happen to be a very tech savvy person with an excess of money laying around.

If you do fall under that category and you don’t have one of these you’re doing it wrong, very, very wrong.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Welcome

Welcome to my tech blog. Here you'll find all kind of cool stuff that has to do with anything tech or even things nerdly enough to catch my interest.