M4600 w/ IPS Screen & 2000M = DENIED!

i didnt order it, its the replacement system dell is sending me because they couldnt fix my M4400

of course, its a great upgrade for me, but if i'm going to be upgraded i'd like to get what i need to last me through an upgrade cycle hence im thinking of selling it and getting the config i want

 

Ah, I see. That makes more sense to me now.

 

i notice in your sig you ordered the i7 2.7 instead of a quadcore, what made you do that? the i7 2.3 quad is about the same price as far as i can see....

they're giving me the same processor but i figured i'd like quadcore, since apps are starting to take advantage of multicore

 

For what I do, a quad core doesn't really make sense. And they tend to eat up more power (less battery life). When comparing even my current system with a co-worker of mine who has a quad core i7 system and tasks that we have in common, the performance difference is negligible. Plus, I get more than twice the battery life.

In my experience, it's not often to run an app (or even several simultaneously) that will eat up more than 4 execution threads unless the machine is under sustained server-class loads. I don't need a laptop that has that kind of power just going to waste and eating up the battery.

I've thought a lot about going with a mobile i7 quad core, but my actual workstation (non-mobile) has that kind of power, should I ever really need it.

 

fair enough, i dont have the luxury of having a desktop as i spend 3 months at a time in different countries without any real fixed base. hence i need a portable desktop in essence....

 

The newest quads have much improved power gating which substantially reduces the idle power consumption. However, I agree that 2 cores / 4 threads is sufficient for must users. The quads provide little performance boost relative to dual core when running single-threaded programs (see the Cinebench 10 single benchmark results at notebbokcheck).

John

 

i think the key thing is, in the next 1-2 years, will we see an explosion of multicore optimised programs? especially since intel's roadmap seems to indicate that by 2013 quad is standard....

i intend to use this as my main machine for at least 3 years.

 

That's the million dollar question. I mean, we've had quad cores out for several years now and there hasn't exactly been a huge explosion of apps taking full advantage of them yet. It's difficult to project 2-3 years out, but I'm still guessing that adaptation and adoption will be measured. Coding to take full advantage of multiple cores isn't exactly easy.

 

Sure, but it *will* happen. A couple of years back, people agreed that dual cores make less sense than a faster single one for most work loads. Now I would not want to miss at least the second core simply for the ability of running more than one job at a time. With ever growing memory, people will get used to do even more stuff in parallel. So even without specially adapted algorithms, I'm sure that four to eight parallel threads will be reasonably common. Right now I'm using three of the four cores of the M4600 I'm writing this on without doing especially heavy work.

Cheers

Joe

 

So is the 2000M and IPS Screen pairing final? Or is it just a glitch? Cause I don't want the 2000m just so I can get the IPS Screen...makes no sense to me.