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CPU Wars
msolnik writes: "Whether you say "0.13-micron" as most of us do, or "130-nanometer" as PR flacks prefer, the phrase is weighing heavily on both Intel's and AMD's minds. Indeed, each company's timeline in reaching that mark may determine who calls the CPU shots in 2002. Read more here at Hardware Central." Other submitters noted that AMD and Motorola have both updated their development roadmaps.
bloody hell, they really are hyping the G5, and they haven't got any confirmation of what technologies it will use, they simply assume that motorola's latest chip will be the basis, how much would you have to pay for a mac for them to make returns on their production process?
Software Freedom Day!.
With the recent entrance of the seccond generation MMORPG on the gaming front, processors that were considered decent no more then six months agao are now not even worthy of the title 'decrepit'. Games like Anarchy Online, Starwars Galaxies, and Dark Age of Camelot, only to name a few, are pushing the benchmark higher and higher for gamer.
.midis and don't try to stop inovation.
If MMORPGs dont suit your taste, take a look at a few new less eppic games such as Giant: Citizen Kabuto from early last year, people couldnt run that with all the widgets and gizmos cranked up to the maximum level, I could barely even play it on my PIII 500, and that was almost a year agao. Now-a-days we have we have to look out for games like Civ3, and Aliens Vs. Predator 2, recent titles that managed to make a bitch out of a 1GHZ box. Sure these games arn't exactly the crem de la creme of efficient software, but they are what we have. Rather then praying for a revolution where we hold developers by the neck and tell them to slow down their development I say that we should support them. All though new games are beutiful, they don't compare to the Enterprise's Holodeck.
Now unless you can show me a cost effective meathod that will speed up games and make them run on my old P2, I suguest that you quit your bitching. I for one want a system that will allow me to crank up the realism and not come to a screaching halt.
Now if you hate your bloated software, don't use it. You can get by without any of it, throw linux on your 486, surf the net with w3m, write your efficient code in vi, and use pine to send me a letter telling me how wonderful the world was before the evil corparation forced you to buy you a faster computer.
Untill you are prepared to throw away all of your nifty little gadgets that showed up with faster processors, don't complain. Play your old games, listen to your
Well IMHO you're not really correct. All this is relative to what you're used to work with.
... but then again you'll always be saying this.
You're only naming two games, both using the same engine, that are now approx. 5 years old. These days all games are trying to be as immersive as possible, using 3D graphics and sound, enhanced with special FX, and playing against an army of bots trying to mimic our behaviour. They are already using dedicated coprocessors (called GPU's these days).
GUI's have evolved from crappy crammed black and white boxes with hourglasses to 24-bit 1280x1024 alpha-blending anti-aliasing semi-intelligent "interfaces". This all takes memory, memory bandwidth and CPU cycles.
I find myself amazed, even as a software developer, that these days I can take pictures with my digital camera and send them to my mom using e-mail. I predicted this could be done a long time ago. But now I'm doing it I have to stop at moments and find myself simply stunned by the world we live in. We're ordering pizza's from our PCs using broadband network connections. My audio software (Propellerhead's Reason) can emulate a jampackked rack of synths and samplers, and the sound is generated in realtime. I don't have a digital camcorder, but if I owned one I'd spent my nights making my own movies. Picture this 10 years ago.
If you think OO is what makes softwar bloatware then you don't understand OO, in my opinion. OO is one of the ways to achieve true code reuse, which is what we're all striving to do because we are all lazy asses. Code reuse means you get a lot more done in less time, and if done right it should take less space all at the same time.
What really makes software 'bloatware' is the addition of functionality beyond what is needed by the majority of the users. But then again the markets have widened and software has become one of the biggest business in the world today. More users want to find software useful and software vendors respond with more and more features which will always sound like bloatware in the eyes of a few geeks who like to hack together their own kernel and run it on your average pocket 'PC'.
Sure games were fun 20 years ago just as they are fun today. I like to play tetris myself a lot of times but if you really think about it, same now as back then, only 5% of all games are classics and 95% are crap. We're all just spoiled now and the only reason we'll play pong is because it makes us feel nostalgic.
In 10 years you'll say that you don't need the latest AMD XP 22000+ (16Ghz nominal) with 512GB of battery-backed-RAM and a semi-optical harddisc of 600TB
I say, keep 'm coming.
Dave
Personally I'd never go back to the days where i had to wait
I bought my first computer in 1995. It was a Packard Bell P75.
Go ahead. Laugh. If you told me you actually paid money for a PB, I'd laugh, too.
PB actually used good motherboards in their systems. It was the components that sucked.
Anyway, to this day, I *still* have and use my PB computer. Yes, it went from a P75 -> P133 -> P200 MMX, and went from 8MB -> 32MB -> 64MB -> 128MB and the hard drive went from 1GB -> 4GB -> 20GB, but it's stll in use.
Admittedly, I've bought other computers since and I no longer use it as my main machine, but I *could* if I wanted to. I only bought faster machines because I wanted to, not because I needed to.
It runs Win98 like a charm and runs Linux even better. It has always been stable and still is, 6 years later.
If people would cater to their needs instead of their wants, the CPU industry would either wither, or they would start offering REAL improvements. These 100MHz increases are BS.
They need to start with a minimum 1GHz jump and better internal architecture. Everything else is just them going wallet fishing.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
Well to be honest, I have been watching this sine the first Athlons came out and proved that Pentium was not all that. So far AMD has been able to bask down Intel at every turn. The 2 ghz p4 is still slower then amd's athlon 1900 (1.6 GHz). Its not the speed, its what you can do per clock cycle, and amd chips dose do a lot more.
But reading the article, I find that the again go after the ghz number,
Of these, the P4 Northwood could be the most compelling CPU release of 2002
Their reasoning, the p4 well be unto the 4 GHz barrier in a few months. The Athlon is planning to make some jumps as well which, makes this sounds to me like the article is written by someone leaning towards the users who love big GHz numbers and not real speed.
What makes this even funnier is the fact that most users could buy a 1 GHz and still play the latest games and the other things in 2 or 3 years.
my 2 cents plus 2 more
Unless you are ripping Divx movies left and right or a Seti@home freak you don't need a faster cpu, It will do nothing for you. Anyone notice that you pretty much have the same Harddrive as you did with your pentium 1 120, the size has increased but if you go IDE it is still 7200rpm and the data transfer rate isn't any faster.
It is funny, Xp Pro runs the exact same on my PII 400 with 384 meg of ram as it does on my PIII dual 1 gig with a gig of ram machine. The 400 actually boots faster!. So what does processor speed to for you in every day apps? everyone here knows exactly what i am saying. I am just complaining becaue we always hear about the new processor that is supposed to be so great that is coming out next year or whatever. WHEN AM I GOING TO SEE A SOLID STATE HARD DRIVE? Sure Serial ATA is coming up but the transfer rate on that is only starting at 166MB/s. ok. show me a harddrive that actually needs anything better than ata 100 first.
The bottleneck in every modern computer is still the hd, and the bus, we should fix those first and then jack up the mhz..
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
No, but we do use the micrometre. The same way we use microfarads, microseconds and microvolts. I guess in the US you still use microns, but then you still use feet, inches, pounds and ounces, too. You have a perfectly good system of SI units, so why not use them? At least micron is just another name for a valid SI unit. Unlike Angstroms, which are just an abomination against nature (they should have just used nm or pm as appropriate).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I consider the Northwood to be the "real" Pentium 4, just as other second-generation products like the 100MHz Pentium and "Coppermine" Pentium III have proven to be the "real" versions of Intel processors in the past.
I agree with this. The Pentium 4s we see today are just puppies with very big feet. They will grow up and become something much more impressive.
Bush's education improvements were
but I'm sick of this "C for kernel, bloatlang for everything else" BS. I'm writing a ALife sim of language evolution program (for my thesis) in C and I'm thinking about writing agent ai code in *asm*, because compiler generated code won't be fast enough. I wrote simple AI apps for fun, multivariable optimization programs and finite element solvers for modelling at work, ran sound and video editing programs and ALL could use some more optimization at a lower level. C, asm, fortran aren't going anywhere until compiler technology advances to the point that they can produce better code from a problem description than a human can.
I was just giving another example. RH6.2 on my computer was faster than Win98SE. I recently wiped everything and went Win2k, RH7.2 without changing any hardware.
Everyone who wants to see Linux succeed on the desktop (including myself) needs to recognize that all those bad words people hurl at MS won't change the fact that Linux + XF4.0 runs significantly slower on the same hardware.
A lot of the advantages of Linux on the desktop start to disappear when you realize that it takes a lot of power to run it. It's not agonizingly slow on my computer, but it's pretty frustrating. Especially when Win2k just hums along on a slower disk with an "inferior" interface.