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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.
This was the news of 1971
Next year looks like the best time ever to buy a new performance PC.
Well, duh. Just exactly like every year since they were invented.. And just like every computer magazine pundit has said since day one
The Gardener
--
A mil is approximately 592 meters.
You get that dividing a "mile" (1609 m) by "e" (2.7183).
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
No friggen way I'll ever own a 13 nanoM chip. I'm just too supersticious. I've got enough to worry about with my data, and (jpg)'s to trust them to an unlucky number. It's worse than a hat on the bed!
They should switch to Angstroms.
Oh wait a minute, my calculator tells me that 0.13 Microns equals 666 Angstroms. Holy Ess, The end is Nigh.
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'.