Friday, September 18, 2009

Back on track soon, and a note about Lynnfield

I've been away from this blog for quite some time. That's mostly my fault, but soon I should be back to regular posts. In about a week or so, I should have a new (horribly long) post about everything I've done with the computer since the last post. I'm very excited to share it with you!

On a side note: I'm also very excited for Intel's release of the Lynnfield version of their Nehalem core architecture. It's supposed to be for "budget" builders, though the only chip with the Lynnfield core that could be considered budget to me is the Core i5 750-which at $200 is actually a midrange price. It's $100 cheaper than the Core i7 920, and is only slightly slower than it's i7 cousin. This might be due to the changes Intel made with the Lynnfield chip.

Those changes are why I call the two "cousins." For starters, Lynnfield i7s (which feature the LGA 1156 socket type) are incompatible with parts made for Bloomfield i7s (which are LGA 1366), which were the first Core i7s to be released. Other changes include taking PCIe control away from the Northbridge and switching back to dual channel DDR3 support from tri-channel (Intel says this is because most people don't need the bandwidth provided by three channels of RAM.)

If your curious to get the whole scoop, and see why the i5 is slower than the i7 920, as well as the problem with LGA 1156, go here to learn more. That is an excellent Maximum PC article that breaks it all down. That article is also where I got my info from (thanks MPC!).

But I digress. See you later!