Recently in CPUs Category

The last time I wrote a column about what kind of CPUs you should be looking for in a desktop or laptop computer, it was all about Intel's Pentium Dual-Core and Core 2 Duo, with a smattering of AMD Athlon X2.

Well, it's been awhile and everything's changing.

The newest Intel CPUs start out with the word "Core," followed by a little "i," a number between 3 and 7 and then, after a dash, another number, as in Core i3-530, Core i5-750, Core i7-860 and many more.

Newer AMD processors include the Athlon II X2 255, Athlon II X4 635 and Phenom II X4 965.

I've been reading about all of these in Maximum PC magazine (yes, the paper edition - it's cheap and if you're at all interested in PC hardware, you should definitely subscribe). It focuses on hardware for gamers, but what's used by gamers today will probably be standard for the rest of us either six months or a year down the road, and it's nice to get a little ahead of the curve, if you know what I mean.

But the number of CPU choices is dizzying, there are different models for laptops and desktops, and since these chips are all relatively new, the market is still flooded with computers sporting "older" CPUs but not sporting lower prices.

What I'm trying to say it that it's not a bad idea to know something about the latest CPUs and to either get a deep discount on a computer that doesn't have one ... or just accept reality and buy a new computer that includes one of these newer chips, if only to give your purchase an additional year or two of usable life.

This excellent article at The Tech Report is a great way to see the performance relative to the price of the latest from Intel and AMD. The whole site is great, and I'll be adding it to the blogroll immediately if only so I can more easily find it the next time I want to read about the latest PC hardware.

Not that I'm a big buyer of "new" anything ... but it's nice to know how the other half computes.