CULV chips-Which CPU's, Speed Difference

markw10

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Jul 18, 2005
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I'm interested in purchasing a notebook with one of the new Intel CULV chips. I know MSI just came out with a notebook with a CULV chip but I'm looking a lot at Acer and ASUS, specifically the Acer 3810T and ASUS UX30.
I did some research and went to Intel's site though and found it hard to research the various CULV chips. If I'm right speed in general varies from 1.2GHz to 1.6GHz and you can get it in either a Celeron version, Single Core (Solo) and Dual Core.
Currently I have an ASUS eeePC 1000HE with the Atom N280 running at 1.66 Ghz.
Even though these chips only go up to 1.6GHz they would still be faster than an N280, right?
Also, I am looking heavily at the Core 2 Duo SU9400 and SU9600.
Would a Dual Core at a slower clock speed than a Single Core at a higher clock speed be faster?
Also, what type of graphics should I look for on a notebook? I won't be doing heavy graphics work on it but will be using multitasking and have 3-4GB memory and want to be able to use it well with Windows 7.
 

neon neophyte

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theyre way faster than Atom processors clock for clock. like, 3 times faster. (dont quote that number, i think its even a little bit more.)

a slower dual core would be faster than a faster single core. except in programs not optimized for multithreading. most programs can multithread with 2 cores. 3 and 4 is where it gets tricky.

i wont lie, i dont know squat about mobile graphics.
 

Bamboozler

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Jun 3, 2009
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I'm also closely following the UX30 in hopes of running Windows 7.

Processors:
The number of cores you need will depend on how many concurrent CPU intensive applications you run. Assuming a program is single threaded, Windows will assign a program's thread to the core that is under the least load. That is how it balances. This means that a single threaded application, running alone, will not benefit from more than one core. It will simply run on one core or the other. If you run two applications, each with a single thread, then they won't have to compete for CPU time, because they'll be on their own cores.

More and more applications are multi-threaded these days in with case Windows will assign some threads to one core and some to the other and your program will run twice as fast.

This means that a single thread app will run faster on Core2 Uno 1.8Ghz than on a Core2 Duo 1.6Ghz but a multi-threaded app will run faster on the latter.

GPU:

The GMA 4500MHD (that the UX30 is supposed to get) is a decently powerful onboard GPU. It has been clocked up to support playback of Blu-Ray media, hence the "HD". Even though it will play HD content it will be practically incapable of playing any real 3D games that come out in 2009. It does not have dedicated memory and cannot compete with AMD or Nvidia mobile GPU solutions. However, it *should* be able to handle W7 aeropeek interface without any trouble. It is possible that it will not, only time will tell on that one.