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WASPy names for Intel processors
Wednesday, April 29 2009
Q
I drove into town today to take care of a few errands, which including fixing a hole in one of the Honda Civic's tires (it had run over a nail). The guy at Mavis Tire fixed the hole for free, which almost made up for all the extra brake and suspension jobs they've weaseled out of me over the years.
I also bought four sheets of quarter inch Wonderboard for use in covering the styrofoam on the outside of the greenhouse in the narrow strips where that styrofoam will be rising up out of the ground (and also the subterranean strips adjacent to them). I'd deployed quarter inch Wonderboard in this application the other day on the south wall just below the glazing and it seemed perfect, although I don't know for sure how Wonderboard actually weathers. I do have a piece of it out on the laboratory deck that's been out there for years; I use it as a movable soldering surface. It hasn't visibly degraded at all, though in wet periods it turns green with some sort of algal growth.
I was also looking for some sort of roofing material for the bit of roof over the greenhouse doorway, which projects outward from the otherwise sloped glass of the south wall. In the end I went with a piece of green translucent PVC roofing normally used to allow light into large metal farm buildings. It was the cheapest roofing Home Depot had in stock. They also have a version that is completely clear that I will probably use in some future solar project.
I'm about to begin a rather ambitious web development project, so I've decided it is time to upgrade my main computer, which was last upgraded four years ago, what used to be a couple lifetimes in the tech sector. I haven't been paying much attention to the progress of computer hardware in that time; from what little I'd read I knew that processor speeds had actually gotten slower and that to increase overall CPU speed designers had turned to incorporating multiple "cores" to process more computational threads in parallel.
I did some research to see where the most bang for the buck lay in the world of CPUs and motherboards and soon learned that AMD, the maker of the Athlon, had lost what had been a long-running lead in the price-to-performance ratio. For the money, the best processors are Intel Core 2 Duos. The computer I've been using since 2005 has been based on an Athlon 64 running at 2.0 GHz and having two gigabytes of memory. It looks like my next computer will be an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.8 GHz and having four gigabytes of memory, and it will operate about four times as fast as the one preceding it.
The most amusing thing about Intel processors these days is the names of their core architectures: Conroe, Allendale, Merom, Kentsfield, Penryn, Wolfdale, and Yorkfield. Do you see a pattern here? To me, they all sound like WASPy prep school names. If you saw a list like that on the wall of a building and you had an Irish or a Jewish name, you'd wonder if Google Maps had led you astray. I don't know what pretensions the Intel chip designers have of being part of the landed gentry, but from where I'm sitting it looks like the kind of unintentional comedy it would have been easy not to produce.
Given that the economy is in such bad shape, with so few people chasing so many products, it seems like it's a good time to go actually go shopping.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?090429 feedback
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