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The last time I used Firefox, I could open and close it over and over and see my memory usage increase with each opening. Firefox leaks memory like a sieve and is extremely unstable.

Really?

I know that the latest Firefox versions (5, 6, 7b) are known for being RAM-hungry and crashing a lot...

Really?

I have no idea why you think that, it has been proven time and time again chrome uses WAYYY more memory than firefox, over twice as much. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-14.html Chrome is the bloated one.

Web Browser Grand Prix 2: Running The Linux Circuit:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opera-chrome-firefox,2689.html

* And, there you go...

APK

P.S.=> Tom's Hardware already's "got ya covered" on that front too...

... apk

Sure it can.

Personally I think the biggest problem with browsers like IE9 and Chrome is, their timeout settings are so short that pages don't even always load properly.

If you look at the article, you'll see problems with that:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-13.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/web-browser-performance-standard-html5,3013-13.html

Firefox did better, although slipping ?

It doesn't say how they test though. All it says is 'load 40 tabs', not how many times they did that and if they cleared the browser cache and so on like DNS-cache.

Sure it can.

Personally I think the biggest problem with browsers like IE9 and Chrome is, their timeout settings are so short that pages don't even always load properly.

If you look at the article, you'll see problems with that:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-13.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/web-browser-performance-standard-html5,3013-13.html

Firefox did better, although slipping ?

It doesn't say how they test though. All it says is 'load 40 tabs', not how many times they did that and if they cleared the browser cache and so on like DNS-cache.

looking at the page loading times, you can learn about the psyche of these browsers

- everyone REALLY loves hanging out at Google more than anywhere else. they probably have a van with "FREE CANDY" painted on the side.
- Opera has a YouTube addiction
- Internet Explorer does it's "book learnin" at Wikipedia and buys all kinds of stuff on eBay
- Opera is still terrified of the craigslist killer and quickly hides in Amazon's library instead
- Chrome is the only one that thinks the Huffington Post is worth reading

You are not being honest with yourself. Apple has well and truly moved out of the fanbois base and now sells to the masses. Non-tech people totally love it.

Not only are they selling to the masses (if you don't think selling tens to hundreds of millions of devices is mass market you're seriously deluded), but they are turning them into loyal customers. The iPhone has by far the highest customer retention rate around ("UBS: iPhone’s 89% retention rate crushes competition; next closest is HTC at 39%") and they continue to lead in PC customer satisfaction figures ("Apple scored 87 points, ahead of HP with a result of 78, Dell with 77, Acer also with 77 and Compaq with 75. [...] Apple holds the highest score on record for the eighth consecutive year.") They're obviously doing something right.

Best place to ask: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ They have some good articles too were they test wi-fi routers and can tell you the cons and pros of the best ones: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wi-fi-performance,2985.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/802.11n-wireless-router-access-point,2605.html Thanks!

Best place to ask: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ They have some good articles too were they test wi-fi routers and can tell you the cons and pros of the best ones: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wi-fi-performance,2985.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/802.11n-wireless-router-access-point,2605.html Thanks!

Best place to ask: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ They have some good articles too were they test wi-fi routers and can tell you the cons and pros of the best ones: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wi-fi-performance,2985.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/802.11n-wireless-router-access-point,2605.html Thanks!

If you know how to write firmware, you could probably use the MIMO access points to do some phased-array fun. Write the code to determine the approximate direction of the client (which, you should be able to do with multiple antennas for triangulation), and then increase the power using multiple antennas in said direction.

*goes to do some Googling*

It looks like there already is an access point that does this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/beamforming-wifi-ruckus,2390-3.html

The incredible thing is that chip-based beamforming, like MIMO, has been compatible with 802.11a/b/g for years. In fact, the technology is an optional part of the 802.11n standard. Despite its benefits, though, Cisco is the first to deliver on-chip beamforming to market. The enterprise-oriented AIR-LAP1142N access point is Cisco’s first and so far only product to feature beamforming, which it brands as ClientLink. It arrived in the first quarter of 2009, but the firmware that enables beamforming capability didn’t arrive until July. We tested with this firmware literally within days of its release.

See: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wi-fi-performance,2985.html Great comparison.

You can call in all the experts and engineers to figure this out but never underestimate the importance of common sense and understanding of basics concepts involved. A couple of articles on Tom's explain it well. One story has some testing and benchmarking. May not be exactly what you need but may go a long way in ensuring good wi-fi. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wi-fi-performance,2985.html http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/571-wi-fi-beamforming-networking.html

You can call in all the experts and engineers to figure this out but never underestimate the importance of common sense and understanding of basics concepts involved. A couple of articles on Tom's explain it well. One story has some testing and benchmarking. May not be exactly what you need but may go a long way in ensuring good wi-fi. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wi-fi-performance,2985.html http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/571-wi-fi-beamforming-networking.html

I think you'll find that's not even remotely true.

Here's a better chart too -- Tom's Hardware Gaming CPU for the money.

Under $100: AMD
Best at $115: AMD Phenom II X4 955
After $150, Intel starts being on the chart instead.

PS ...

CPUs priced over $220 offer rapidly diminishing returns when it comes to game performance. As such, we have a hard time recommending anything more expensive than the Core i5-2500K, especially since this multiplier-unlocked processor can be overclocked to great effect if more performance is desired. Even at stock clocks, it meets or beats the $1000 Core i7-990X Extreme Edition when it comes to gaming.

Infiniband is out in that budget. But you could see how far you could get buying some cheap quad cores and interconnecting them with GbE. You can take a look at TomsHardware cpu charts (e.g. for 3dsmax rendering since this is a similar task: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-2010/Image-Rendering-3DS-Max-2010,2420.html) and get the most bang for your buck.

The same awesome sandy bridge which was involved in a $700million recall?

Tom's Hardware posted a similar sort of analysis a few weeks ago: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995.html

I might question whether you are incapable of reading comprehension, but I don't know it.

You can question anything you like. There's still no doubt Microsoft knew what they were doing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/12/russia-uses-microsoft-to-_n_713653.html
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/russia-uses-microsoft-to-suppress-dissent-51505
http://www.osnews.com/story/23797/NYT_Russia_Uses_Microsoft_to_Suppress_Dissent
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Russia-Anti-Piracy-Raids-Microsoft-Piracy-Putin,11270.html
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2011/03/microsoft-sorry-for-bing-quake-tweet.html
http://techrights.org/2011/09/05/microsoft-mockery-of-the-chinese/

The most naive question to ask if is this sort of delay is relevant to Moore's law and similar patterns. There are a variety of different forms of Moore's law. We've seem an apparent slowdown in the increase in clockspeed http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mother-cpu-charts-2005,1175.html. The original version of Moore's Law was about the number of transistors on a single integrated circuit and that's slowed down also. A lot of these metrics have slowed down.

But this isn't an example of that phenomenon. This appears to be due more to the usual economic hiccups and the lack of desire to release new chips during an economic downturn (although TFA does note that this is a change in strategy for Intel's normal approach to recessions.) This is not by itself a useful data point, so this is not further need to panic.

On a related note there's been a lot of improvement in the last few years simply by making algorithms more efficient. As was discussed on Slashdot last December http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/24/2327246/Progress-In-Algorithms-Beats-Moores-Law by a variety of benchmarks linear programming has become 40 million times more efficient in the last fifteen years and that only a factor 1000 or so is due to the better machines, with a factor of about 40,000 attributable to better algorithms. So even if Moore's law is toast, the rate of effective progress is still very high. Overall, I'm not worried.

Assume by "stacking" they are referring to (and the article alluded to) something similar to Intel's Tri-Gate transistors?

http://hothardware.com/News/Intel-Announces-New-22nm-3D-Trigate-Transistors/

And not simply stacking and interconnecting like this?

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/rochester-3d-processor,6369.html

If you are going to use the traditional PC controllers, why not just play it on the PC

Because the PC that you already own has an Intel graphics processor. According to this chart at Tom's, Intel graphics is comparable to the original Xbox's GeForce 3 or to the Wii's Hollywood GPU, whose fill rate matches that of a Radeon 9000. Lately I've been recommending buying PCs with AMD CPUs just to make sure that people get either AMD or NVIDIA graphics, not Intel GMA (nicknamed "Graphics My Arse").

Mass Effect 2 had a lot of player statistics being collected:

Recent statistics gathered by Mass Effect 2 snooping revealed that the Engineer is the class least played, whereas the Soldier seems to be the overall favorite. Roughly 50-percent of the people who started Mass Effect 2 actually finished the game, whereas apparently two PC gamers completed Mass Effect 2 twenty-eight times. 15-percent of the in-game dialogue was skipped as well.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Mass-Effect-2-Casey-hudson-Console,11248.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-processor-core-i3-athlon-ii,2666-11.html

Keep going.

If you don't want to pay an arm and a leg, AMD's still the place to go.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dual-core-stress-test,1049-29.html

Proving you're full of shit.

AMD is great, but i'm afraid that your fan comment is not historically accurate. amd has made big mistakes in this area before.
What happens when the CPU cooler is removed
video

Intel had already tried that with certain notebooks. You paid $50 to "unlock the extra power" of your CPU. In reality, you had to enter a key to use hyperthreading and a larger cache. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/pentium-g6951-clarkdale-upgrade-card,11320.html

how did we get to set top boxes?

The article is about emulators that run video games that were originally designed to run on specialized computing devices connected to a television. I've been told by CronoCloud and others that most people don't connect a generic PC to a television. Instead, they connect specialized devices to a television, and such devices are commonly called set-top boxes. The closest thing in the PC camp to a set-top box that I'm aware of is an Atom-based home theater PC.

and if you dont know the differences tween an atom and a i7 I am not going to spend my time educating you

A disagreement on burden of proof.

I suggest you google it

I tried atom performance per mhz, atom vs i7 benchmark and atom i7 performance single thread, but nothing on the first page of results of any of the queries answered my question. Because the Atom and i7 are in entirely different market segments, there don't appear to be any pages comparing the two. It took a change in my strategy (Google p4 i7 performance single thread) to pull up this forum thread claiming that the i7 executes roughly twice as many instructions per clock per core as a P4.

besides I said 386 and i7

I fully agree with you that there were numerous upgrades between a 386 and a P4. But earlier I had said the performance per cycle was comparable between a P4 and an Atom, so I was using the P4 and the Atom as a baseline for comparison.

Ahh, all this talk of external PCIE reminds me of the ASUS XG Station, I had so much hope for that: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ces-asus-xg-station,4679.html Too bad :(

If AMD is hoping to make a killing selling performance memory to "Ultra Pro" users, it's not going to do it by pairing it with Fusion. No performance user (gamers, CAD, etc) that is willing to shell out extra for AMD-branded memory is going to be using onboard graphics -- they would be using a discrete graphics card. In such cases, the relationship between main memory speed and onboard graphics is completely irrelevant. See this review breaking down Fusion's unsuitability for performance users:

When it comes to the desktop space, Llano’s prospects are decidedly less impressive in light of the competition. These APUs make for an ideal solution to replace entry-level PCs with crappy integrated graphics. And, they certainly could introduce a lot of graphics muscle to a segment historically light in that regard. If Llano catches a foothold there, the APU could impact peoples’ expectation of what a PC can do. Developers might start targeting a higher lowest common denominator in their games, and that’d of course be great news for PC gaming.

But once you reach outside of the budget basement and consider folks willing to use discrete graphics, the A-series’ utility is hamstrung. It’s easy to put an $80 Radeon HD 6670 in a cheap OEM box and walk away with something that easily trumps AMD’s product in both processing and graphics benchmarks.

The story in anandtech that you're quoting finds that higher bandwidth memory pushes up gaming performance when you're using the onboard video. That's certainly true, but the performance user willing to pay for performance memory is using a stand-alone video card. With a stand-alone card, the tomshardware results that I linked to are the relevant benchmark -- not the anandtech one you posted.

Don't get me wrong, AMD's on-die graphics are head-and-shoulders above even Intel's Sandy Bridge HD3000 graphics -- but they don't hold a candle to even basic video cards, like the Radeon 6670:

These APUs make for an ideal solution to replace entry-level PCs with crappy integrated graphics. And, they certainly could introduce a lot of graphics muscle to a segment historically light in that regard. If Llano catches a foothold there, the APU could impact peoples’ expectation of what a PC can do. Developers might start targeting a higher lowest common denominator in their games, and that’d of course be great news for PC gaming.

But once you reach outside of the budget basement and consider folks willing to use discrete graphics, the A-series’ utility is hamstrung. It’s easy to put an $80 Radeon HD 6670 in a cheap OEM box and walk away with something that easily trumps AMD’s product in both processing and graphics benchmarks.

Three different categories are currently on offer, roughly matching AMD's APU/CPU product categories; Entertainment, Ultra Pro and Enterprise. Oddly enough, the company is offering only 2GB modules with data rates at 1333.33MT/s and 1600MT/s, with 9-9-9 and 11-11-11 timings for the first two product ranges respectively."

The suggestion that 1600MHz is too slow for what AMD is calling "Ultra Pro" (they presumably mean gamers) is just not substantiated by the data:

We looked at different memory speeds for the LGA 1156-based Core i7-870 and chose to run DDR3-800, -1066, -1333, and -1600 at fast, as well as relaxed, timings. Although the differences were typically very small, there were a few applications that obviously benefited from faster memory. This wasn’t surprising, as we already did similar comparisons on most of the other popular platforms:

In all cases, we’ve seen significant performance differences when looking at the synthetic or low-level benchmarks. Memory bandwidth does increase considerably if you speed up the memory transfer rate, and tightening timings also improves performance by cutting latencies. However, only a marginal fraction of these benefits actually arrive at the application level. Even going for the fastest memory available will give you a performance boost that is probably smaller than the effect a faster processor speed bin would deliver.

Tom's Hardware did an excellent and extensive test on WiFi networks not long ago. It is well worth the read, as is the first part of the series. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wi-fi-performance,2985.html

Charlie Miller (of NSA, pawn2own, and other fame) seems to think Mac OSX's code is less secure than Windows http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pwn2own-mac-hack,2254-3.html.

The article does not mention which kind of SSDs they've used, or have I missed something? That might be very interesting, especially when it comes to reliability. It's often claimed the SSDs are more reliable than traditional drives, but accrding to this http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html that's not really true.

"The random read performance depends on four factors, not one: the areal density, the seek/settle time, the rotational latency, and whether the data is in the drive's buffer cache already."

About 99% of random read performance depends on RPM, the other 1% is everything else. As for areal density and buffer: Techwarelabs short stroked a 7200rpm 1.5tb to 300gb and only got 10.3ms while 2004's (ok 7 yrs not 10 like I originally said) Fujitsu MAU3147 15,000rpm SCSI drive has a average random access time of 5.7 milliseconds. That Fujitsu is a 73gb drive with a much smaller buffer (8 vs 32mb) and much lower areal density than the 1.5tb drive and it's still nearly twice as fast at accessing data randomly. In case you think that's some kind of fluke Tomshardware tested a 450gb 15,000rpm SAS drive. It got 6.0ms.

I've tested 15,000rpm drives on xp, vista and 7. Boot-up and starting programs is night and day difference, but you don't really notice the difference any other time.

"it's fairly sequential reading (of multiple mostly sequential stripes in alternation), which is why the modern 5400 RPM drives spank older 7200 RPM and 10k RPM drives."

True, but very few people do a lot of sequential reading, unless you're doing a lot of video editing with large-ish files, ~100+ mB, where a older 50mB/sec 7200rpm drive would be beat by a modern 5400rpm 100+ mB/sec drive due to the areal density, but you have to go back several years to find a 7200rpm drive that only does 50mB/sec.

"I'm sure a modern 3TB drive would match or beat a 10 year old 15k RPM drive if you used short stroking* [tomshardware.com] on the modern drive."

You would be wrong. 2004's (ok 7 yrs) Fujitsu MAU3147 15,000rpm SCSI drive has a average random access time of 5.7 milliseconds. Tomhardware short-stroked a 7200rpm 250gb SATA drive down to only 12gb and only got 8.5 milliseconds. They also tested a 15,000 SAS in the same test and got 6.0ms.

Techwarelabs short stroked a 7200rpm 1.5tb to 300gb and only got 10.3ms

There is no replacement for RPM.

uh, I believe we're talking about server situations, not consumers. Having a GPU on an ARM chip or on an X64/x86 chip is a nonsequitur. Or did I miss something here? I fail to see where you come up with this shit considering even Intel is trying to make an ARM chip.. You think they're doing it because supposedly arm doesn't run as well or about having GPU's on the chip? Hint: Intel is shitting their pants over ARM right now.

I'm sure a modern 3TB drive would match or beat a 10 year old 15k RPM drive if you used short stroking* on the modern drive.

*Wikipedia has very little info on this subject, but this link was from the references in the disk partitioning article, and it is quite informative.

For example:
Steadfast Networks' Karl Zimmerman, as quoted from bottom of this page (emphasis added)

We simply get significantly higher I/O [with SSDs] at a lower cost than we'd be able to get with standard drives. We've had many customers needing more I/O than what 4x 15k RPM SAS drives in RAID 10 provide, and an upgrade involves moving to a larger server chassis to support more than four drives, a larger RAID card, etc. Other configurations have needed 16+ 15k RPM drives to get the necessary I/O. Going with a single SSD (or a couple SSDs in RAID) greatly simplifies the configurations and makes them much cheaper overall.

That is then compounded by the fact that you generally use one SSD to replace 4+ standard drives on average.
You're then looking at a 20%+ AFR with hard drives and 1.6% with an SSD.

(AFR = Annual Failure Rate)

IMO whoever wrote that article is a shill, full of shit or an idiot. The article is not analysis, it's far closer to "anal-related" stuff...

Example: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-3.html

Ultimately, the French-English language barrier was responsible for how hyped-up this information became. Sites like Mac Observer and ZDNet incorrectly reported these figures as "failure rates" based on a Google Translation.

A drive failure implies the device is no longer functioning. However, returns can occur for a multitude of reasons. This presents a challenge because we donâ(TM)t have any additional information on the returned drivesâ"were they dead-on-arrival, did they stop working over time, or was there simply an incompatibility that prevented the customer from using the SSD

But from the french retailer's stats:
Released in April 2011
http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/French-Website-Publishes-HDD-SSD-and-Motherboard-RMA-Statistics-4.png/
Released in December 2010
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

You will see that Intel has 0.3% and 0.59% return rates respectively.

So the difference in the return rates should tell anyone with brains that the non-intel SSDs (particularly OCZ SSDs) are crap, the Intel ones are decent. Saying bullshit like "returns can occur for a multitude of reasons. This presents a challenge" seems to be more spin than a 15krpm drive.

As for the stupid graph in http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-9.html

Larger version: http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/A/302122/original/ssdfailurerates_1024.png

It's also shit. For most of the known period, SSDs are worse than HDDs. It's mainly his estimates/projections that show SSDs as better.

Go figure how stupid that is, it's like saying:
"Oh look, most SSDs are worse than most HDDs for the actual data we have, this means that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs"

And one wonders how many data points he actually has on the graph for SSDs, if it's just from the french retailer, I think it's two points for each drive brand/model.

I haven't been to tomshardware for a while till today. And it seems to have got even worse from the time when I stopped reading their articles because they were too crap.

You want something that's not so crap, go to Anandtech. They're not perfect, but this Tom's Hardware article makes Anandtech look like the Richard Feynman of IT reviewers.

IMO whoever wrote that article is a shill, full of shit or an idiot. The article is not analysis, it's far closer to "anal-related" stuff...

Example: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-3.html

Ultimately, the French-English language barrier was responsible for how hyped-up this information became. Sites like Mac Observer and ZDNet incorrectly reported these figures as "failure rates" based on a Google Translation.

A drive failure implies the device is no longer functioning. However, returns can occur for a multitude of reasons. This presents a challenge because we donâ(TM)t have any additional information on the returned drivesâ"were they dead-on-arrival, did they stop working over time, or was there simply an incompatibility that prevented the customer from using the SSD

But from the french retailer's stats:
Released in April 2011
http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/French-Website-Publishes-HDD-SSD-and-Motherboard-RMA-Statistics-4.png/
Released in December 2010
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

You will see that Intel has 0.3% and 0.59% return rates respectively.

So the difference in the return rates should tell anyone with brains that the non-intel SSDs (particularly OCZ SSDs) are crap, the Intel ones are decent. Saying bullshit like "returns can occur for a multitude of reasons. This presents a challenge" seems to be more spin than a 15krpm drive.

As for the stupid graph in http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-9.html

Larger version: http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/A/302122/original/ssdfailurerates_1024.png

It's also shit. For most of the known period, SSDs are worse than HDDs. It's mainly his estimates/projections that show SSDs as better.

Go figure how stupid that is, it's like saying:
"Oh look, most SSDs are worse than most HDDs for the actual data we have, this means that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs"

And one wonders how many data points he actually has on the graph for SSDs, if it's just from the french retailer, I think it's two points for each drive brand/model.

I haven't been to tomshardware for a while till today. And it seems to have got even worse from the time when I stopped reading their articles because they were too crap.

You want something that's not so crap, go to Anandtech. They're not perfect, but this Tom's Hardware article makes Anandtech look like the Richard Feynman of IT reviewers.

sigh, someone else who didn't RTFA. If you look on page 8 you'll see this image where Intel's 'reliability study at IDF 2011' says HDDs are pants, SSDs are great.

of course, this is part of Intel's marketing for SSDs, so you'd expect them to say this kind of thing. Of course, that means someone has said this - specifically as some sort of selling point.

new hardware with pre-installed malware is rare but not unheard of. a short search shows external drives, photo frames and laptops.

Is Avatar Kinect a world-changing innovation or is it just silly?

We've been asked this question before sometime around 2001. Back then it was Matrox and not Microsoft, and it was called HeadCasting

The answer... it was just plain silly. The G550 was a failure for everything except extreme multi-monitor work and HeadCasting was a completely ignored feature.

I'm not sure about others, but for family and friends I'd rather see them when I talk to them, and for the rest of the people on my Steam "friends" list I'd prefer not even being able to hear them let alone see some stupid 3D image they hide behind.

Clock for clock it appears roughly comparable, according to Atom vs. P4 on Tom's.

If you take a close look at the benchmarks in that link, you'll notice that the only ones Atom wins are those that take advantage of multiple cores. They're comparing dual core Atoms with single core P4s. The single core Atom in there gets destroyed in pretty much all those tests.

You'll also notice notice that they're using desktop Atoms in there, which usually have more cores and are clocked higher than the netbook variants.

Then what do you recommend as a baseline target for low-budget PC game development?

Oh I agree with you there, a standard netbook configuration (say an Atom N270 + GMA 950 and 1GB of RAM) seems like a good target for a low budget game. I was just pointing out how it is in some ways underpowered even compared to a decade old mid-range configuration.

An Atom CPU is nowhere near a P4.

Clock for clock it appears roughly comparable, according to Atom vs. P4 on Tom's.

And according to your link, the GPUs you find in netbooks, GMA 500 and 950 (and 3150, it's not on the chart but it's just a slightly overclocked 950), are closer to the original GeForce 256 or the crippled GF2s than to the GF3.

Then what do you recommend as a baseline target for low-budget PC game development?

You don't worry about hardware requirements on a console. If it runs for one dude, it runs for everyone.

I had previously considering the rule of thumb that if it runs on this year's netbook, it runs for more or less everyone. An Atom CPU is more or less equivalent to a P4, and the Intel GMA (nicknamed "Graphics My [behind]") in a netbook is comparable to a decade-old GeForce 3 or Radeon 9000 video card according to Tom's chart.

It's about 132 MB/s actually - remember, it's multiples of 1000, not 1024 and then some space is used by the file system.

Anyway, it's not clear what they want just from the description here on Slashdot. Read the labels of the drive? But seriously, one could get a 2 TB drive or whatever drive has the most density these days and make it show up as 500GB drive... I believe it's called http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html