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Originally Posted by Gregg Bell
Thanks Dennis. Great explanation of the cores. Makes the multiple cores seem appealing if you're doing lots of little things, whereas not so much if you're doing one big thing.
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Multiple cores are always useful, but the effect might not be as great as you might think just by seeing that there
are multiple cores.
In a modern multitasking OS, there are always an assortment of things going on at once. Do a top or htop in a terminal on Ubuntu to see what Linux itself has going on, aside from apps you may be running. Granted, most will be in a sleeping state, but more than one core is handy. It simply won't make any particular app quicker, unless the app is written to use them, or spawns other processes.
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And the maxing out on RAM suggestion--that quad core has only 3GB and so that wasn't thrilling.
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RAM is
cheap. I was given a laptop by a friend who wanted to get a new machine, which I helped her buy. It came with 3GB, as 2GB and 1GB modules, and could take 4. Upgrading it to 4GB cost about $25 to get a 2GB RAM module to replace the 1GB unit. I was also upgrading it to Win10 from the installed Win7, and every bit helps. It's an older machine and hardly a speed demon, so it may get an SSD drive to replace the HD. Most machines are I/O bound, not compute bound. The CPU is waiting for things to be read from/written to disk, and all machines wait at the same speed. Anything that reduces disk access helps performance. More RAM for better caching helps, as does a faster drive for when you
do access the disk.
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And interesting about the SSD drives. I never knew that about the limited writes. I'm definitely much better informed for what to look for now. Thanks!
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The write limits are inherent in the NAND flash SSDs use.
But there's a lot of misunderstanding about the limits. Given that the firmware on the drive tries to spread writes evenly, how long will it take for any particular cell to get written to more than 10,000 times? A
long time. As mentioned, you are likely to get a new machine before you even notice drive wear.
Back when, the folks I know recommended Intel as the safest choice in SSDs. Things have gotten better, and Crucial and Samsung are also well rated. My 240GB Crucial MX-100 SSD in the desktop cost $100.
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Dennis