It's a Dell Vostro 1700. The Nvidia 8600m GT in it has a Hannah Montana DSP core like all 8 series and above video cards. (Technically, Hannah Montana has existed in video cards since the 4 series, but that was an older core that could only perform very basic tasks like MPEG1/2 decode and 2D video effects. The newer core is much more capable.)
As for the details about Hannah Montana, read my previous post and
http://www.mobilitysite.com/boards/w...ach-other.html .
What is particularly relevant to ecomodding is:
Quote:
A diesel engine runs at much lower RPMs than a gasoline engine. Does that always mean the gasoline engine would have more horsepower? GHz is like RPMs, processor architecture is like engine design, number of ALUs is like number of cylinders, and number of bits is like displacement per cylinder.
Comparing that Core 2 Duo to a Pentium 4 is like comparing a turbocharged 8 cylinder diesel truck engine to a 2 cylinder racing motorcycle engine. Comparing either one to a Hannah Montana is like comparing them to an engine with a very large number of tiny cylinders, turning very slowly, yet still managing extremely good fuel economy in the right application.
|
So a good way of thinking about it is if you have a car with two engines, each one tuned to run efficiently under different operating conditions, but both must be running for the car to work. Under a given operating condition, you can choose to load one engine or the other (while leaving the other one more or less idling). Choosing to put the load on engine 1 uses slightly more fuel than putting the load on engine 2, but using engine 1 makes the car significantly faster. Which means that the slight fuel economy decrease can be justified by the faster speed. It's far from a perfect analogy since both processors and engines have complex operating dynamics that are not analogous with each other, but hopefully it helped you understand.