Poll SP4 and Intel Core M

[cmcigas]

So I have been reading up on all the rumors for the SP4, and even though they are rumors what do you guys think about it coming with an Intel Core M instead of a Core iSeries like the SP3

Personally, I get they want better battery life and the ability to price it better but I use my SP3 for work reasons and only the i7 can allow me to do everything I need without lagging at all.

Please let me know what you think!

 

[EthanDavis]

Whichever one is better for gaming.

 

[GreyFox7]

Both.
SP3 - 3 builds: Low i3Y, Med i5U, High i7U
SP4 - 3 builds: Low Core-M, Med i5U, High i7U Maybe a 4th with Core-M.

Unless they figure out a Physics heat worm hole or other Heat Magic Trick there's not much room to work at the upper end. Perhaps splitting the heat sources by going with a Xeon CPU and a separate Mobile GPU some advantage could be gained but that's not the industry trend and that would likely mean two fans again... another thing that seems unlikely ... although id bet there's a prototype of it.

 

[macmee]

Both.
SP3 - 3 builds: Low i3Y, Med i5U, High i7U
SP4 - 3 builds: Low Core-M, Med i5U, High i7U Maybe a 4th with Core-M.

Unless they figure out a Physics heat worm hole or other Heat Magic Trick there's not much room to work at the upper end. Perhaps splitting the heat sources by going with a Xeon CPU and a separate Mobile GPU some advantage could be gained but that's not the industry trend and that would likely mean two fans again... another thing that seems unlikely ... although id bet there's a prototype of it.

Don't forget that the SP4 will also be running windows 10, and I'm assuming that there will be software improvements which should reduce heat also. Keep in mind Windows is one honking huge resource heavy desktop OS and whilst windows 8.1 is good, that there is still room for improvement.

 

[GreyFox7]

As "big and heavy" as Windows is, it's the Apps that cause most of the problems; Windows Update notwithstanding. Sure you could kill all logging and free up a percentage point or two and maybe a couple degrees of heat. OR efficiency tuning might get you similar results. While those efforts are not unworthy it's not generally where big gains will be realized. There's a significant downside as well to the stripped down approach which makes finding and resolving problems that much more difficult when they happen and they always happen.
I understand there are huge improvements in the new graphics standards but apps have to be written/rewritten to use it. However, devs aren't even using the advantages that are available to them now. Maybe someone can figure out how to optimize all the old and bad code out there and magically make it perform efficiently but I'm not holding my breath.

Windows Update does need to be given a Lap-Band operation and some significant improvements. Why is it that a so called background process kills your performance whenever its running. Very, very, sad. There could be a couple other background process that need some work as well but even when they are out of the way its the Apps that kill.

I worked on a corporate app performance swat team and most of the problems boiled down to poor and uninformed choices by developers. Even when they chose a bad tool for the job such as using VB for a critical Database Application other choices prevented successful conversion (VB was Single threaded so on a 16 CPU server 1 CPU was running at 95+% a couple others at a few percent doing other work and most of the CPUs were idle). The expert development consultants were prototyping a rewrite but only getting 20% improvement due to other bad choices. Yet there was a very simple fix when you looked at the problem correctly and in much less time than they had already spent we achieved a 4x performance improvement cutting run time from 36 hours to 8 and avoided buying new 100k servers which would have only given them a 5% improvement at best. In most cases they just write code with no understanding of the impact it has. Throw crap at the wall and see what sticks, close the door and deliver it. Don't worry, the next system will run it twice as fast and have twice as much ram.

 

[InspectHerGadget]

Here in Australia I use a program called MYOB for my business. Several years ago they redesigned it to use SQL Server and .NET.

It is a remarkably slow clunky program, so much so I need an i7 to make it run at reasonable speed.

It takes skill to write programs well and they dropped the ball on this one. They are constantly patching it but patching bad code doesn't really fix it. I think that they have a long way to go.

 

[ptrkhh]

Core i, we have stayed at pretty much the same performance level for 3 Surface Pro generations.