AMD Slashing Prices
Over the last three or so months, I’ve been eyeing an Athlon XP 3800+ X2 processor upgrade but just couldn’t justify the expense given the delta in performance between a single processor XP3500+ and the cheapest dual processor version available at the time. A price check was done every couple of weeks, but the suppliers didn’t budge an inch. After hearing murmurings of the Intel Core Duo 2 benchmarks, I thought they’ve got to drop prices when that thing gets released. Yep, they sure did.. around 60% for what I was looking at. The end result was the in stock purchase of an XP 4200+ X2. Sweeeet. It feels good to know that there’s another bout of price/performance improvements coming down the pipeline.
There was one sticking point in the upgrade process. The old processor’s heat sink would not budge. You know that point where you force something and it gets to the point of questioning “should I be doing this?”. Fortunately I held back and only applied “suitable force” before checking on the web for other people’s experiences. The end result was that a hair dryer was blown across the existing heat sink which made the old heat sink paste loosen up. From then on it was clean sailing finishing up with a satisfying red and green graph showing in the Sysinternal’s process explorer program for each of the processor cores.
Global search engines are a wonderful thing. I’ve had an intern working on software development here over the vacation break and at odd times during the week. He had a question the other day about “what we did to solve problems before google”. Well, solve problems we did but a lot more slowly and with much more trial and error. The pace of technology change is just incredible and the ubiquity of broadband internet access will just accelerate it.