Core i5-2500k first impressions

[Rich Braun]

Jarod Wilson <jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org>
> I'm not quite clear, who is the "their" and the "yours" in the above?

Our esteemed president yesterday took the bait from his critics and posted
specific info against the advice of his advisors.  I don't need advisors to
know that it's a bad idea to name names when prodded by my own critics to
point out vendors whose products I don't currently buy.  Someday, those
vendors' products and strategy might change, and/or they might become my
employer, customer or strategic partner.  The Web has a long memory -- the BLU
archives go back decades, and I hope they continue for decades in the future. 
;-)

> I'm a wee bit
> server-centric these days, I don't care for Linux on the desktop
> very much anymore).

You're missing out, man!  I tried Linux on the desktop circa '93-'94, gave up
on it in those very early days, and then tip-toed back into it with Kubuntu in
'09.  While Microsoft and Google (OK I'll name a couple vendors here ;-) are
swimming strongly away from the desktop in favor of putting most new UI
features into the browser back-end, Linux desktop apps are leaping forward. 
It's quite possible that in the next couple of years the Linux desktop will
indeed leapfrog Apple and Android as a UI, especially for the
multi-window/multi-monitor big-screen experience.  Now that I'm doing some
pretty heavy software dev along with sysadmin work, having lots of desktop
real estate with zippy screen performance is crucial--and I don't see that
happening on the 4" screen of my cell-phone any time soon.

What kind of Linux-native tools am I talking about?  Things like MySQL
Workbench (try it if you're a DB person, sure beats phpMyAdmin!), poedit
(utf-8 internationalization drove me nuts until I got this up and running),
VirtualBox (latest version is truly slick).  Even Picasa and OpenOffice have
gotten good enough to use for lightweight stuff (I still keep Win7 Ultimate
tucked into an on-screen VM, can't quite wean myself off the true-blue
Office).  The printer manufacturers do a very decent job of Linux support
these days; the two areas where I've found Linux desktop continuing to
frustrate are the basic setups for sound and graphics.  But once you finally
resolve those things, the desktop is much more wonderful than the
Windows-based systems I used between '94 and '08.

Returning to the topic of this thread:  the *4th* generation Core (I've
corrected myself and been corrected by others on the Intel confusion, which
really drives the point home!) chips are the platform for truly driving Linux
onto the desktop.  Yeah, I hear the arguments that a "real gamer" would only
use non-Intel graphics.  But pushing Linux out to the masses is an economics
game of the most basic traditional type that we all learned in 9th grade:  the
lowest-cost provider wins out, eventually.  Software costs have to be measure
not only in money but in time (especially the newbie learning curve, but also
developer effort and such).  Linux is gradually turning the tide.

Hopefully AMD gets back into the game so the Core story isn't the last chapter
of the hardware book.

My $.02.

-rich