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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.
Before we get to 0.09 microns, lets start using nanometers to get rid of those preceding decimal places. Plus, unlike micron, a nanometer is an accepted SI unit (see http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html). Strange the PR people should use it first -- could this be a sign of the Apocalypse?
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
But don't you get a thrill out of the fact that you nearly have more processing power on your desktop than the entire world did twenty years ago?
It makes scientific research incredibly simpler/cheaper, and that is worthwhile on its own. If you've much patience, a 486 running windows 98se and Office '97 is still fully functional, I use one as my backup desktop system.
Ok, I admit it. I'm confused. I thought a smaller die size increased heat. Less surface area to radiate from.
Gotta love the last line:
Next year is always the best time to buy a new PC.
for every more powerful cpu to come out there's people saying we don't need it. I wonder how long it has been going on? Windows 3.11 was nice on a 486 66Mhz but I'm sure happy that chip development didn't stop there.
I think it would be interesting to see the effect of CPU power on software pricing. With faster CPUs software might be less optimised thus costing less programmer time. It's just a thought...
Am I the only one who notices that every week /. posts a news article about Intel or someone coming up with supar-dupar-mega-fantabulous technology that we never hear about again?
Like New Optical DSPs With Tera-ops Performanc
Or Intel Cites Breakthrough In Transistor Design
Perhaps Clockless Chips
Not forgetting Intel Promises A Cool Billion (Transistors)
Notwithstanding Intel Claims Smallest, Fastest Transistor
But who could forget Intel Claims 10Ghz Transistor
Which looks a lot like Intel Says 10GHz By 2005
But is just as vapor as Intel Creates 30-Nanometer Transistors
or my personal favorite: Intel Goes for Display Encryption
How can they get any work done when they're too busy telling us what they predict in a bajillion years?
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
I'm looking forward to ever-increasing clockspeeds, as this could get us away from programming applications in a low-level language like C/C++. Let's face it: Most of the bugs in current programs stem from the fact that C was not designed to handle sloppy or lazy coding. Dangling pointers, buffer overflows, memory leaks etc. result from the low-levelness of C (that's OK - for it to be efficient it needs to have the ability to do all kinds of things with the hardware directly). C should only be used for developing operating system kernels and device drivers, as no other higher language would handle the task well.
Faster processors and more memory would make higher languages such as Lisp or Python viable for applications (such as Browsers, Desktop environments etc.), which in turn would result in less bugs and increased stability when applied correctly. The current state with software makes me sick. I don't blame it on C per se, but on programmers using the wrong tool for the wrong job.
Writing in such a higher language would probably even increase portability (which C can't fulfill by a far shot) as you would program at a higher abstraction level. No need for autoconf/automake or ugly defines scattered throughout the code, making maintainance more difficult.
I hope that more coders switch to some better suited language than C/C++ for application development. I've switched to Lisp myself.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.