On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 5:16 PM, Lamar Owen lowen@pari.edu wrote:
It's only when doing multiple things, or doing multithreaded things, that the Core2Duo pulls away.
OK, but who just runs a single process?
For the purposes of usability, effectively anyone who spends the day in Firefox. And there are a lot of people for whom that is the case.
Even there the tcp stack and filesystem operations should be mostly running on a different core.
And 2GB RAM is kind of minimal - I like lots of disk buffer.
What you like is irrelevant to the usefulness of 2GB of RAM to other people.
It is very relevant to the performance they experience.
If you don't have things in cache, your 'responsiveness in normal use' is going to be dominated by disk waits.
None of which negates the gist of the message, that a 2.0GHz Pentium M (and even a slower one) is still a usable machine. Nothing more; nothing less.
Nor my experience that a Core 2 Duo will save much human time and also is able to run virtual machines that the pentium M can't. And CentOS 5.x is still a usable OS, isn't it?