Intel i7

[Louis Garcia]

I'm looking at the Dell XPS Studio with the new intel i7 chip. Anyone
have experience with this new chipset with fedora?

-Thanks

[James Wilkinson]

Louis E Garcia II wrote:
> I'm looking at the Dell XPS Studio with the new intel i7 chip. Anyone
> have experience with this new chipset with fedora?

Not personally, but I know a lot of people (including Linus, and the
major server manufacturers) have been running Linux on this processor
for quite a while.

Incidentally, the i7 is a processor¹, not a chipset². The chipset in
this computer is the Intel X58 chipset, which is what practically
everyone will have been using.

As a general rule, you’re much more likely to have problems with
chipsets than processors: new chipsets usually need new drivers (which
may be buggy or not exist), whereas processors are normally expected to
be 100% backwards-compatible with their predecessors. In this case, you
should be fine, since Intel is pretty good these days at ensuring Linux
just works on most of their hardware, Linux is a target market for the
hardware, and the chipsets just aren’t doing anything particularly new
that needs software support.

And there again, you’re much more likely to have problems with dodgy
BIOSes that are only tested with Windows than with chipsets. For that,
you really need to check with someone who’s got a recent Dell.

You may want to ask again, specifically mentioning the graphics chip
you’re planning on getting. It looks like you have a choice of the ATI
Radeon HD 3450 or the 4850. man radeon on F10 mentions the 3450, but not
the 4850.

Hope this helps,

James.

¹ Something that actually does the calculations.
² Something that helps drive data around the computer, and (usually) has
  a bunch of other integrated functions.

[Kevin Kofler]

James Wilkinson wrote:
> You may want to ask again, specifically mentioning the graphics chip
> you’re planning on getting. It looks like you have a choice of the ATI
> Radeon HD 3450 or the 4850. man radeon on F10 mentions the 3450, but not
> the 4850.

They're both HD, neither is supported by the Free as in speech 3D drivers.
Both have working 2D support, but no 3D acceleration.

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATIRadeon

Kevin Kofler

[Vnpenguin]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 7:32 PM, Louis E Garcia II
 wrote:
> I'm looking at the Dell XPS Studio with the new intel i7 chip. Anyone
> have experience with this new chipset with fedora?
>
> -Thanks

Not with Fedora, but we have a CentOS 5.2 server with this new
processor. It works well :-)
=============
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 26
model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU         920  @ 2.67GHz
stepping        : 4
cpu MHz         : 1600.000
cache size      : 8192 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 8
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 4
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 11
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse
 sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc ida pni monitor
ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr popcnt lahf_lm
bogomips        : 5349.45
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
========
> uname -a

Linux foo.bar 2.6.18-92.1.18.el5 #1 SMP Wed Nov 12 09:19:49 EST 2008
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I think you can run Fedora without problem :)