Early 2016 Intel technology in new motherboards/PCs/Tablets

[gcmartin]

This week I have a personal deadline to replace the lost of 2 desktop PCs. They were rather old, but had faithfully served over many years. One was its motherboard while the other loss was RAM failure. Since they both were 64bit, I was able to donate them to a local non-profit who refurb for education, seniors, missionaries, and the community's poor (the 2 non-profits which do this no longer accept 32bit PCs for refurb).

This time around, I had been considering the newer technologies and notice that its a very large field of options, no matter if I want a tablet, a laptop, or a desktop. The number of Intel CPU options is ENORMOUS!
Not to mention trying to weed thru what is 2011 processor technology sold as new today versus 2016 new technology available. Lots and lots of disguises in vendor sales making the job of astute selection much more difficult than it was in the past.

Further, little is known about the support of HDMI and DisplayPort.

And knowledge of vendors who are making USB-C available and how this factors for both use and for power delivery.

Here's is some of the items people, who are making choices at this time in 2016, might find useful.

• Intel i5 specs for i5-6260U
  
  Hyperthreading - Virtualization
  Seems that all skylake mobile CPUs (i3/i5/i7) (except for 1) come with hyperthreading and virtualization. It is important to ask before commitment. Further, it is also important to KNOW the number of cores of the processor you are buying. For example a mobile i3 with 2 cores will process as much as a non-mobile 4 core i3: each of these has 4 threads to throw at your workload; but, non-mobile i3/i5 does not have hyperthreading.
  
  Intel produces a site chart so that you can ID CPU ability
  
  All AMD CPUs have virtualization built-in, but no AMDs use/have hyperthreading in their hardware makeup. (Additional information on AMD ability is shared in the next post.)
  
  The DisplayPort video technology allows up to 3 monitors to be daisy-chained together to a single PC connection. Your OS has to have technology to set and view all monitors the hardware see. For this reason, a DisplayPort connection offers advantages over a HDMI connection.
  
  Other useful spec knowledge
  • usb 2.0 - 0.5Gb/sec
    usb 3.0 - 5Gb/sec
    usb 3.1 - 10Gb/sec which some support the following w/wo USB-C
    • Thunderbolt - 10Gb/sec
      Thunderbolt 2 - 20Gb/sec
      Thunderbolt 3 - 30Gb/sec
      Yes, thunderbolt technology is now in non-Apple platforms
    Further, I have not mentioned Blue-tooth whose versions now are V4+
  All x86 PCs manufactured today are 64bit PCs; sometimes you may see a manufacturer designation of x86-64.
  Intel has some 32bit Atoms: Notably the Atom Intel Stick PCs. intel will also release, over the next 30-60days, several Intel Sticks with 64bit Skylake CPUs.
  
  Video display ability is all over the map from less than 720p to 1K/2K/4K to monitor/screen.

A little knowledge of the hardware specs before your purchase, can be helpful. This can be useful if you are concerned about future proofing a purchase that will work with the expected devices/peripherals coming our way for our home use and our LANs.

With the new kernels that we have in Puppyland, we should expect the latest PUPs with these kernels to map appropriately with your hardware purchases.
Edit: add'l AMD info

[Terry H]

... but no AMDs use/have hyperthreading in their hardware makeup.

Hyperthreading is an Intel terminology for their implementation of Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT).

I have an AMD FX-6300 which AMD released as a 6 core processor. In reality it is 3 physical modules with dual thread capability. This is AMD's implementation of SMT.


Excerpt from wikipedia.org:

AMD has re-introduced the "Clustered Integer Core" micro-architecture, an architecture developed by DEC in 1996 with the RISC microprocessor Alpha 21264. This technology is informally called CMT (Clustered Multi-Thread) and formally called "module" by AMD. In terms of hardware complexity and functionality, this module is equal to a dual-core processor in its integer power, and to a single-core processor in its floating-point power: for each two integer cores, there is one floating-point core. The floating-point cores are similar to a single core processor that has the SMT ability, which can create a dual-thread processor but with the power of one (each thread shares the resources of the module with the other thread) in terms of floating point performance.

AMD are being sued for misrepresentation of their Bulldozer cores:

A class action lawsuit has been filed against chip-maker AMD for allegedly tricking consumers into buying its Bulldozer processors by overstating the number of cores contained in the chips. The suit claims that while Bulldozer was advertised as having eight cores, functionally it actually only had four.

Excerpt from article:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/ ... ore-count/