Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

Alright, so I am a little late on this one, but Digitimes has some interesting rumours, and the one that really caught my eye was the i7-950 getting a huge discount. Makes me thinking whether it was just a slightly higher clocked but overpriced i7-930 to begin with.

There's also the hex core i7-970, but at that price of US$885 in bulk quantities, I think I'll keep my money thank you very much. As usual the highest end is low on value; stick to something like a quad core i7-860. Hit the link to find out more.

"For one, Clarkdale CPUs have proliferated everywhere, and we've gotten our hands on one model, the Core i3-530, that promises to be a much better value than the relatively high-end Core i5-661 that we first reviewed. To counter, AMD has introduced five new value-oriented CPUs, ranging from two cores to four, including the Athlon II X4 635, a potent value quad-core priced directly opposite the Core i3-530."

The two CPU giants are battling it out again, this time in the lower cost segment of the industry. Both CPUs run great, and each have their own advantages which highlight the recent trends each manufacturer has been following. AMD tends to favor great value and performance, while Intel offers better power consumption and overclocking. What is even more interesting is that The Tech Report was able to borrow a Pentium 4 computer from a museum to see how it would compare. The results reveal two interesting facts. First,per CPU performance has not significantly improved over the past few years and has instead improved speeds through more cores. Second, and perhaps more importantly, power consumption for work done has gone down considerably. This would certainly explain why I see so many aging computers around. They still have the oomph to handle all but the more demanding tasks. Now I do not feel so bad for gifting some of my older computers away! What are you using? The latest and greatest, or does your computer still have Turbo button?

"Intel has just concluded its first CES press event of 2010, dedicated to "announcing" the already well known Arrandale and Clarkdale CPUs. They will be part of Intel's planned 27 total SKUs coming in 2010, including four varieties of Core i3, eight Core i5s, and five Core i7 models. We were treated to a demo showing off a Core i5 laptop CPU running a 1080p video with another video stream overlaid on top of it with a measly 10% CPU usage."

Much of this leaked before CES, but there's still some good info to be had here. Highlights include an Intel wireless solution dubbed Centrino Ultimate-N 6300, which has three receive antennas and throughput of 450mbps, a Core i5 CPU that has two cores and four threads clocking in at 3.33 Ghz with a turbo boost up to 3.6 Ghz and a price tag of $196 USD. What's a bit surprising is that out of all the CPUs they announced, there's a lack of high-end CPUs...only the Core i7 860 is on the matrix with four cores and eight threads, and that's not a new CPU. Engadget mentions there's another Intel press conference tonight, so I expect that's where the high-end CPUs will get announced. We should be hearing about six-core i7 processors with twelve threads. Yowzers!