Originally Posted by Sidney

Bottom line still is "what do I gain from productivity point of view?".

Originally Posted by jmke

I just told you; one physical server, multiple virtual servers, easy to configure, easy to backup, easy to restore, easy to upgrade.

Originally Posted by thorgal

I'm quite sure that Sidney wasn't personal Kougar, just speaking "in general". I for one am a bit like you : interested in progress because I like it, and to have some fun benchmarking and competing against others... the amount of money I spend having this fun however...

Originally Posted by Kougar

Solely focusing on business computers that run Office
products all day is just another small portion of the market.

Originally Posted by Kougar

The entire point of thise insanely large 12mb L2 caches, even 16MB caches is to keep the CPU fed with data to crunch.

If you look at AMD K7 processor verses AMD K8 processor benchmarks you will see the improvement integrating the memory controller will bring... it is the biggest reason for why AMD's K8 easily defeated the Pentium.

For example... Imagine you and two other people in a building... You need to complete a project but lack the information. To get the info you must ask the 2nd person to go talk to the 3rd person to get your info and bring it back to you. If you keep havingto ask questions or you find you don't have all the info you can see how slow this would make completing your project...

The middle guy has to act as the go between for you to get the information you need... Until now the middle guy has always been the chipset, the CPU could never directly talk to or update the memory.

Originally Posted by Kougar

Well, to be frank there was nothing in his post to indicate if it was a overly broad, general statement, or if it was directed at my past comments. Given the highly facetious/mocking tone of his post and that due to my replies up to that point only seemed to indicate the later.

I would agree whether the performance increase is worthwhile enough to justify an upgrade is a important consideration to any review. However I also think being able to get higher performance for the same $1 spent towards a new system or new mainframe is also important.

Sure, it won't affect Excel that much, but with that logic all anyone needs is a Pentium 4, which is true. However not all consumers cannot make use of all four cores, and not all businesses cannot make use of the extra CPU power. Solely focusing on business computers that run Office products all day is just another small portion of the market.