Chip Makers Selling Fewer High-End CPUs

Lt Wuff writes "CNN has a story about how the newest/fasted/latest and greatest processors aren't selling like Intel and AMD hoped. Maybe people are wising up to the fact that you don't need the fastest processors on the market in order to open AOL..."

Comments

well

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm sure AOL could fix that for a little bit of the profit made on the high end chips

Re:well

[Isle]

Or maybe it is Open Source that has made it harder for software companies to help the hardware companies by adding bloat?

It would certainly lower their competiveness against Open Source, so they focus on their prime busines: Making better software. Instead of helping the hardware people.

My current CPU is 3+ years old

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an AMD K63-450 (400 OC'd to 450), and am just now beginning to think seriously about upgrading. For 95% of the things I do (browse, code, email, write, irc, etc), it's perfectly acceptable. It just made sense for me to spend money on other things like memory and disks.

I'm thinking about upgrading now because that other 5% of things (games and ripping/encoding) sure would benefit from it. Plus, I'm sure the CPU won't last tons longer in it's OC'd state.

Re:My current CPU is 3+ years old

[gtaluvit]

I'm totally in the same boat. I have a Celeron 566, formerly oc'd to 850 but lately kept 566 for stability. I've had the same CPU for quite a while but only now have I hit a spot where I actually need more CPU power and thats for that new Army game. Halflife and mods, Quake 3 and mods, all run perfectly fine. GTA3 liked to hiccup occasionally but honestly, in the land of 3ghz, 1 would do me just fine now.

Re:My current CPU is 3+ years old

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing wrong with your machine. I use a K6-3 350 with 192 megs of 100 mhz ram. A cheap Seagate hard drive, and a substandard trident agp video card, I have no plans on upgrading anytime soon. I run win2kpro and officeXP and nothing really is all that noticeably slow. I'm content.

Re:My current CPU is 3+ years old

[AvitarX]

Exactly what I did. Sloket and celeron 1 gig on Ebay 89.00, 128 MB ram, like really cheap.
Geforce 2 TI 40 ish on Ebay. Myh machine now works on everything I throw at it on max setting. I got upgraded for WarCraft III, but I really didnt nead to, the Beta had hella high requirments compared to the fully optimized release.
I had a PII 450 slotted CPU
96 MB PC 100 RAM
Matrox G400 16 MB Graphics card.

The army game was struggling, and now it runs better then our brand new DELL P4 2 Ghz machine with a Gforce 4 MX. I mean that is sad that they would cripple the mid range machines that badly with the crappy graphics card.

Re:My current CPU is 3+ years old

[Anonymous Coward]

400->450 doesn't really stress the cpu that much, you can expect it to live just as long as it would unclocked

Re:My current CPU is 3+ years old

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the K6-3's run REALLY hot, and few 450's were even sold.

Re:My current CPU is 3+ years old

[BCW2]

I just upgraded to a K6-2 400 from a P233mmx. I know and agree with what your saying. Now if there was a 2GHZ Front side Buss and a hard drive that could keep up???? I have played on an AMD 1800 with 2 GB of ram a pair of 40Gig harddrives, striping ide array, G4 w/128MB of DDR. I had to max the resolution to slow it down in Unreal Tournament, just to live longer than 10 seconds. The first time I ever thought a machine was fast enough. But who can afford it?

Re:My current CPU is 3+ years old

[Skal Tura]

that isn't even expensive:
Athlon XP 1800+ around 110-120e or so now
2x40Gig new would cost around 200e but one 80g costs around 120-135e
Motherboard around 100e
2Gb of ram, that costs a bit, around 320e i'd say
also video card around 300-320e
then all the other cheaper stuff around 100e and a case with 100e
without buying a new monitor:~1090e with monitor about 1300e to 1500e depends on the monitor.

Re:My current CPU is 3+ years old

[Anonymous Coward]

I have almost the exact same setup as you do, and upped to a 2.26 intel P4 last month to play mame, pinball and a few popular games... and I gotta say, it was worth every penny for that and ripping/burning. A 15 minute burndisk now takes less than 3 for instance. Look for a good deal- there's plenty out there.

Re:My current CPU is 3+ years old

[chthon]

Mine is almost 6 years old. PPro 200 MHz. Since I upgraded my 2.4.16 kernel with preemptive and low-latency patches, I find that do not have the need for a faster processor at the moment.

Re:My current CPU is 3+ years old

[ncc74656]

I have played on an AMD 1800 with 2 GB of ram a pair of 40Gig harddrives, striping ide array, G4 w/128MB of DDR. I had to max the resolution to slow it down in Unreal Tournament, just to live longer than 10 seconds. The first time I ever thought a machine was fast enough. But who can afford it?

An Athlon XP 1800 setup isn't expensive at all...$70 for the processor, $50 for the motherboard, $45 for 256 MB (or $100 for 512). Those are the low end of what's on Pricewatch, but buying from reputable dealers shouldn't cost too much more. That's quite a bit cheaper than what I put into a dual Athlon MP 2100 at home (about $650 for the motherboard and processors...already had the memory and other stuff).

(2 GB of RAM, BTW, is insane...if you're not serving up databases to dozens/hundreds of users at a time, why would you need that much? I wouldn't need it for the video editing & encoding I do, and I strongly doubt that mere games would use more than a mere fraction of it. Striped hard drives are nice, though...as long as you're aware that RAID-0 really isn't RAID (there's nothing redundant about RAID-0) and take the appropriate precautions.)

yeah

[Em Emalb]

I don't need all that processor power. The apps I use, the games I play, everything else runs just fine on existing hardware.

Plus, I don't have as much throw-away money like I used to. The economy is a huge driver in this, and if they don't see that, they are silly.

The money I would spend on frivolous things is now being shoveled into the bank so I can save for things I really need(TM).

Re:yeah

[pridefinger]

>>I don't need all that processor power.

Neither do I. My year and a half old processor (Athlon 1.1 Ghz) still runs new games (read Unreal Tournament 2003 demo) at 1600x1200 at acceptable fps -- granted I have a Geforce 4 ti4400.

>>The economy is a huge driver in this, and if they don't see that, they are silly.

Good point. You wonder if they are falling into the same trap the recording industry has fallen into in overlooking the obvious.

Don't get me wrong, I want the fastest processor possible (if I can get it for free), but right now I just can't find anything I do that DEMANDS that I have 2+ Ghz power.

-Pride

Re:yeah

[T3kno]

Amen brotha, my dual P3-550 still runs FreeBSD fine, and the 1.2GHz TBird I bought a few months ago runs Windows for my wife. No real need for the latest and greatest, maybe when someone comes out with a cool game (there hasn't been one since Half Life) I'll upgrade.

Re:yeah

[Elbereth]

I think it's a matter of diminishing returns. If a $75 CPU runs at 1.5 GHz and is fast enough for 75-90% of the computing tasks you do, and a 2.5 GHz CPU costs over $500... then why would you even consider the 2.5 GHz CPU? It's too expensive, and it would only impact on a small number of computing tasks (encoding/decoding, video capture, DOOM3).

Now that even value CPUs are ridiculously fast, there isn't much reason to buy the top of the line. I used to buy dual processor boards and populate them with two of Intel's second or third fastest workstation CPU. Those days are over, since I can't really imagine myself wasting so much money, just to get an additional few megahertz. Now I look to previous generation workstation CPUs, since they're being dumped on the market to clear stock. Plenty fast enough for me. My last purchase was two 1.2 GHz Athlon MPs, back when the 1.6 MHz (1800+ MP or thereabouts) MPs were being sold.

Re:yeah

[lactose99]

Ditto that. My PIII 550 is still my main machine and does what I do reasonably well (play games, coding, experiment with new OSes, etc...). The last upgrade I bought for it was a GeForce 4MX, and that increased my gaming "productivity" tenfold.

Then again, my (very) aging P75 NEC laptop with 40MB RAM still works quite well as a portable development platform with FreeBSD. Not the fastest thing in the world, but for taking my coding outside, it does the job I need it to.

Re:yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

My year and a half old processor (Athlon 1.1 Ghz) still runs new games

My PIII 750 with a GeForce 2 400MX runs UT2003 at 1024 just fine. Sure I don't use all the detail it could, but I can play it.

Re:yeah

[s390]

The economy is a huge driver in this, and if they don't see that, they are silly.

Yeah, it's really so strange how being laid-off from a job that paid mid 5-figures up to near six-figures or more, scraping by on unemployment, really cuts down on consumers' willingness to plonk for newer technology. But companies saved staffing costs...

Especially when their "old" (2-3 years) home desktop or notebook PC works just fine for email and surfing job-search websites.

Henry Ford was a prime SOB, but one thing he did right was pay his workers $5/day (a high wage at the time), realizing that he'd never sell enough Model A's unless his workers could afford them. Today's overpaid and overprivileged corporate executive class seems to have lost sight of this. Refusing to pay more than rock-bottom wages destroys demand for their own high-tech products.

Re:yeah

[tandr]

.. and what if DOOM3/UT2003 is 75% of all software that you run?

Re:yeah

[SN74S181]

My very (very) aging 486-50 laptop with 28MB of RAM still works quite well as a portable system with NetBSD on it. Not the fastest thing in the world, but with FVWM it's a nice snappy little machine.

Re:yeah

[VoiceOfRaisin]

.. and what if DOOM3/UT2003 is 75% of all software that you run?
it means youre pretty bad at math.

Re:yeah

[roc_machine]

.. and what if DOOM3/UT2003 is 75% of all software that you run?

Then you have more throw-away money than the original poster... and that seems like a heck of a lot of dough to spend just to play a few computer games. Why not just get a videogame system? It's more economical, that's for sure. You can't dispute that.

Re:yeah

[adamjaskie]

Well, my 486-50 laptop only has 12MiB of RAM and a 127MiB hard drive, and it runs Slackware 3.5 just fine, with X, gcc, fvwm2, and 53MiB hard disk space left over!

Re:yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause you would be hard pressed to run an XBox at 1280x1024

Re:yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

what you want, a cookie?

Re:yeah

[lactose99]

Now that's not a bad idea... I've been fairly anxious to try the "other BSD," having already installed FreeBSD and OpenBSD on various machines I own or have r00t access to. Trying an even thinner BSD distro might prove quite useful on the leftover 540MB drive for my NEC.

Thanks! You just gave me a project for next weekend.

ISOs away!

Re:yeah

[evilviper]

Pay more to the workers to create demand? So what you're saying is that AMD & Intel should pay more to their Taiwanese, Japanese, and Mexican sweatshops? Somehow, I don't think that'll really increase demand for their highest-priced products.

Re:yeah

[tshak]

You obviously haven't played UT2003 at 1280x1024 with 4x FSAA. Of course, the video card is a much bigger issue then the CPU. However, the physics and AI for BOT's eat up a lot of CPU - I noticed a ~10% increase in performance just from removing one bot from the game.

Re:yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe though they could at least afford the celeron/duron

cause right now, they ain't buying shit

it's all relative

Re:yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto 550mhz pIII upgraded tnt2 to geforce 2 gts. However, I just downloaded the ut 2003 demo, and it's really slow. At least in linux :)

Re:yeah

[Some Dumbass...]

Especially when their "old" (2-3 years) home desktop or notebook PC works just fine for email and surfing job-search websites.

You're actually understating the issue. About the only thing which prevents 10-year-old computers from being fine for email and surfing job-related websites is the heavy requirements of modern OSes (GUIs, really). I have a 1996-era Pentium Pro system which has run both Windows 2000 and Linux-Mandrake (with KDE) at different times, and which can surf the web comfortably with either.

Re:yeah

[Citizen of Earth]

I don't need all that processor power. The apps I use, the games I play, everything else runs just fine on existing hardware.

Who would have guessed that our interest would run out before Moore's Law did. Wait a minute; the entire computing industry is based on Moore's Law. Danger! Danger!

Re:yeah

[protohiro1]

Its pretty crazy, I am a professional 3d artist, so I would consider my hardware demands about as steep as they get, but I have found it pretty hard to justify getting the lastest stuff. Yes, a 2x2ghz Xeon would be nice for rendering on, but maya and the rest run great on a 1ghz athlon with a mediocre 3d card. So if a "content creation" client doesn't need it, no one needs it. Sad but true.

Re:yeah

[Citizen of Earth]

Henry Ford was a prime SOB, but one thing he did right was pay his workers $5/day (a high wage at the time), realizing that he'd never sell enough Model A's unless his workers could afford them.

If only he had have paid them $10/day, he could have had exponential growth forever!

Re:yeah

[Citizen of Earth]

Microsoft is the Enron of software, primed to implode soon.

I don't think that Microsoft will implode very much unless the DOJ slaps it with a $30-billion fine first. Until then, the bubble can always be re-pressurized with ill-gotten gains.

Re:yeah

[arakon]

Amen, I'm a 3d Artist as welll (or aspiring anyway, trying to breakin the game industry) But I've actually been planning on getting a dual Clawhammer when AMD final releases them... cutting those render times is my number one priority so I can see product fast and work faster. Thats assuming they don't want my firstborn for that kind of power.

They always have such a steep price point.

Re:yeah

[Sivar]

it means youre pretty bad at math.

It means you're pretty bad at math.

Don't criticize the garden of another when your own is full of weeds. :)

Re:yeah

[thesadmac]

Playing at 15fps is pretty flipping awful though!

Re:yeah

[thesadmac]

I need a dual 2 gig Xeon machine. I work for BAE Systems and I need super fast machine to test out my software on. Even then it can take like a week to run. Computers still need to get way faster.

Even games require at least a 1.5GHz XP these days if you want them to look half decent. OF: Resistance chugs on my machine at home (XP1700/GF4Ti4400) unless I turn the draw distance down.

Re:yeah

[oval_pants]

Or do what I plan to do:

1.) 2.4 ghz P4= $196
2.) Overclock a 2.4 to 2.6 or 2.7 p4 with a decent case and some cooling ($50-$60 more).
Cost saved from overclocking than buying a 2.6 ($499)=$250+

What an incredible revelation from CNN!

[Komrade S.]

From the people who brought us World Championship Wrestling, I would expect no less [/troll]

But the higher-end processors required for world processing IS still getting higher, running OfficeXP and XP Home is a demanding job for most computers. When you get into multiple documents, RAM becomes a problem also. So maybe this is a sign people also aren't upgrading their software? Or maybe this is CNN creating a pithy tech story for the masses again, albeit an incorrect one.

Re:What an incredible revelation from CNN!

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

From the people who brought us World Championship Wrestling

Damn, I gotta burn another article of modding (I have points till Wednesday).

WCW aired on Ted Turner's network. CNN is a news station...

I watched a LOT of WCW. Since VKM bought them, I haven't watched much wrestling. A couple pay-per-views at the local Hooters and a few RAWs and SDs, but not much. I preferd WCW. I don't care much for VKM's version. I never really did. That's I watched WCW.

EZ-E is the man.

Big Papa Pump NEEDS to be on TV NOW! (aside for Jeff Jarret's promotion).

that is

[Kevin_ap]

until AOL releases its latest software with even more cool integrated features (=useless crap that's hard to get rid of or switch of) that is even more poorly writen and buggy than its last...

Re:that is

[stuuf]

for a second I thought you were talking about the new version of Micro$oft Office XP

Re:that is

[Anonymous Coward]

Well they're both as equally useless and a waste of money.

Re:that is

[Anonymous Coward]

He means Mozilla! Heresy! Burn the witch!

This is why Apple isn't dead

[bsharitt]

This also explains why Apple isn't dead yet. For checking my e-mail, browsing the web, and writing papers for english my G3 600 iMac works just fine.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[asv108]

This also explains why Apple isn't dead yet. For checking my e-mail, browsing the web, and writing papers for english my G3 600 iMac works just fine

Well the AMD 600 Machine I built for my dad nearly 3 years for $650 works just fine too, running Linux and windows XP. There is no advantage for Apple as far as aging hardware is concerned. Good luck running osx on that G3 imac.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course I can beat my computer at chess. It doesn't have any arms.

-a

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it's the reason that Apple isn't dead just yet.
Steve Jobs decides that you don't need a speedy processor or the ability to upgrade your machine to meet whatever requirements are necessary for productivity. When Steve Jobs decides that the Mac audience is ready for innovation or change he slams them into it with no recourse. "Use this. I told you it's good so it is good."
Of course the Mac faggots choke on his cock with zest and glee so they really don't mind being treated as mindless since they have embraced being mindless.
Macs aren't good systems anyway, what's the big deal about being able to render in Photoshop at some fraction of a nanosecond when your BSD clone OS runs like a bear in molasses.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Styx]

Have you tried it? It works fine. I run MacOS X 10.1.5 on a G3 233 MHz (granted, it does have 320 mb ram), and for what I use it for (Netscape 7/Office X/ssh/mp3 playing), it is quite sufficient.

I do think that the previous poster had a point, though. You don't NEED 2+ GHz for most computer use. If you did, Apple wouldn't sell any machines.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[adam613]

Actually, Apple isn't dead yet for the opposite reason.

You're correct that they don't force average users to upgrade every year like Microsoft/Intel/AMD try to do. But Apple also has a much larger percentage of it's total users who actually need a lot of power. A lot of people who are still using Macs are doing so for video or desktop publishing work which benefits from things like dual processors and 1000+ MHz G4s. So it's worthwhile and cost-effective for them to upgrade often, paying top-of-the-line prices each time.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Jaguar runs beautifully on my 700 Mhz iBook, and I can't imagine that it would be that much worse on a 600. The OP is right; I wouldn't give up my iBook for a 10 Ghz PC, because no amount of speed is worth being forced to live with a crappy (in the case of Windows) or clunky (in the case of Linux) environment.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Apple isn't dead. It just smells that way.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Just so you know... My imac450 runs os x just fine. Good luck with that rattle box you built your pop.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[bsharitt]

Good luck running osx on that G3 imac

I am running OSX, it came preinstalled. It runs quite well in case you were wondering. OSX likes a lot of RAM, not necesarily a high clock speed, and with 256 mb, it works great.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I thought that was you.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[rodgerd]

The difference is that Apple want to sell me yesterday's performance at today's price. If Apple would sell me a 800 MHz G4 for what it costs to build a low-end P4/Athlon system with a budget GeForce 4 card, I might be interested.

(As is, I'm still doodling along with an 800 MHz Athlon. The only things I'd consider buying is a cheap second hand formerly high end GeForce 2/GeForce 3 to replace my GeForce 256 or a modern IDE drive to replace my aging Fast SCSI Barracudas).

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[MissMyNewton]

And I ran a PowerMac 8500/120 (from 1995) till last year (6 years) with proc (g3 400, $225) and ram (768MB, $110) and disk (18GB SCSI-2, $100) upgrades. And I ran OS 9.x successfully and 10.1 just fine too (with Ryan Rempel's XPFextension package...

And while I can't prove it to you in person, OSX ran a ton better on an G3 400 than WinXP did on the PIII450s I doled out to employees when we upgraded boxes this fall... P Sure, I could have bought a new iMac for the money spent, but from a install/archive/manage standpoint, it was a win...

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude thats Scary you just discribe my 8500 running 10.2 the only difference is I bought a IDE card and added a 40 gig drive and a yamaha 16x burner with all work now under 10.2

Not bad for a 1995 computer eh?

Kyderdog Dan

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[drsmithy]

Except it likes a lot of CPU as well. It's slow on my PB 667 and not even "fast" on a dual 1GHz G4.
Whatever machine you've used previously to call OS X "fast" on a G3, I would have hated to have used it.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Anonymous Coward]

well an apple 800mhz is going to be alot faster then an amd 800. It has twice the jump that amd has on intel if you use the pr ratings. The thing is that an amd 2000xp = $120 (who cant afford that) oh wait the people with p2s and low end p3s dont know hot to build a computer
; anyways a mac has to be built by apple. you pay for that and top of the line prices still for all the hardware. A dual 1 gig loaded was around $3500-$4500 bucks when it came out and will stay there most likely...I do alot of video editing and graphics so i need the power. But i do programming and games and just about anything on the computer...For the price an apple is not worth it..I make sure i have a good motherboard and 768mb of ram and just upgrade my processor with the 2nd or third from the top processor since its alot cheaper. i stick with amd since they are cheaper and a much better deal for the money and anyone with common sense wont crack the cpu when installng the heat sink.

My last upgrade was due to one of those p2 300 fools who didnt know how to upgrade. Gave him all my old crap (athalon 1.4 barebones system) at a good price and did my self an upgrage for about 250 bucks out of my pocket. It only cost that much since i decided to get 2 new 80 gig 7200 rpm maxtors to run in raid 0 along with my abit board and amd 2000+xp.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Shuh]

The difference is that Apple want to sell me yesterday's performance at today's price. If Apple would sell me a 800 MHz G4 for what it costs to build a low-end P4/Athlon system with a budget GeForce 4 card, I might be interested.

Interesting how "yesterday's performance" stacks up to "today's performance in this comparison of P4/G4 in consumer computers.

Although most P.C.-users seem to understand how an Athlon can be faster than a P4 at higher megahertz, or that a different architechture like the Itanium can be faster than either of them at a lower megahertz, no-one seems to be able to afford this kind of understanding to the PowerPC... despite the evidence. Oh well...

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Shuh]

Well the AMD 600 Machine I built for my dad nearly 3 years for $650 works just fine too, running Linux and windows XP. There is no advantage for Apple as far as aging hardware is concerned. Good luck running osx on that G3 imac.

Good luck installing a USB/Firewire card on the Athlon and doing DV editing as fast as a 600Mhz iMac...

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[asv108]

Well why the hell would my 52 year old father ever want to do DV editing? He does have a usb digital camera which works just fine. What percentage of computer users give a fuck about DV editing? People are still hungover from the glory days of camcorders, most find it rude to be shot on video, but don't think twice about a snapshot.

Re:This is why Apple isn't dead

[Shuh]

What percentage of computer users give a fuck about DV editing?

You're right... most people are interested in kernel compiling and having their Digital Rights(tm) managed. My bad.

I'll bet they could...

[0x0d0a]

...It's worked for MS for years.

And meanwhile... QWZX

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux advocates continue to harp on how Linux will run on "lower end" hardware. The world continues to roll their eyes.

Re:And meanwhile... QWZX

[jasonditz]

What's the deal with that anyhow? Linux sys-reqs are getting pretty bloated in their own right.

I mean, back when I first got my 5x86 it ran X-Windows like a dream (and a PCI video card, it screamed!), now its way below the minimum sys-reqs to even install most distros.

The funny thing is when I put Debian (and later FreeBSD) on it, it still runs X beautifully, same video card, same RAM, same everything.

So my question is:
Why do the major commercial distros all insist on such ridiculously high sys-reqs to run the install program?

Re:And meanwhile... QWZX

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause companies like RH like to follow in MS's footsteps.

Re:And meanwhile... QWZX

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because they are assuming you are going to run KDE 3.0 with all of the nifty graphical features turned on.

Of course if you are always just running X with blackbox or sawfish or something it would run pretty much the same speed on any computer Pentium class or above.

BTW, Blackbox kicks ass. Everyone should at least try it.

Re:And meanwhile... QWZX

[anonymous cupboard]

Umm, I have *never* had a problem installing a distro on an old P-Pro running at 166MHz and 64MB of memory. It is a lot slower (decompression takes performance) but once loaded, it works very nicely as a file server. As distributed with Gnome, the GUI sux, but I don't login there very often.

Re:And meanwhile... QWZX

[PhoenixFlare]

So you're saying running X, etc. ran fine before, and with later iterations, it....Still runs fine? What exactly is wrong here?

Unless you install Linux for a living, you have way too much time on your hands if you're complaining soley about the installer speed....

Re:And meanwhile... QWZX

[jasonditz]

I'm not complaining about installer speed, I'm complaining about the number of resource hog installers that won't even attempt to run on systems which would be perfectly servicable Linux boxes. I wouldn't care if they installer defaulted down to something simpler, or even just ran slow as hell. Its just absurd to require a Pentium and 64 MB of RAM to take an operating system off a CD and put it on a hard drive.

Re:And meanwhile... QWZX

[jasonditz]

Well yeah, but an "old Pentium Pro with 64 MB of RAM" is hardly bare minimum for running Linux, or even X-Free. Try those same distros on something another generation older (486 with 32 MB) and see what you get.

I'm not expecting some high end configuration install program on the low end, but why can't the installer default to a simpler version if the sys-reqs aren't there? A 486 with a PCI video card still makes a perfectly respectable X client, and it can also perform some light server duties.

My 5x86 runs as a DHCP server and also a boot server for a couple of NC's. It can do all that and still run X at 1024x786 (though that's pretty hard to read on the godawful Tandy monitor I'm using).

Re:And meanwhile... QWZX

[PhoenixFlare]

I wouldn't care if they installer defaulted down to something simpler, or even just ran slow as hell.

Excuse me?

A (short, it's 2 AM here) search reveals that at least Mandrake, RedHat, Slackware, Debian, and Gentoo all can install in a text-mode, and for one, Debian can install with as little as 12 megs of RAM.

If you really can't find a machine that doesn't have at least 12 megs of RAM....Does that machine really deserve to still be in use?

Yes, reusing old equipment with Linux can be fun, and more power to you if you get it working, but grousing that modern software won't work on what (i'm guessing, from your post) is an absolute-bare-bones machine....Just isn't really warranted.

Suck it up and do a minimal amount of upgrading to get current, or do a little research and find something that will work for you....I count at least 91 different flavors on Distrowatch at the moment. .

By way of example, even 6 years ago, my Dell P200 had 64 MB of RAM, and hell, my $60 video card in this machine has 64 megs just by itself.

Personally, I'm going to put another 256 megs of RAM in this box soon, for $100 at the most (still shopping around)...Not exactly uber-expensive, and it benefits everything on my machine :)

Re:And meanwhile... QWZX

[anonymous cupboard]

Regrettably, it seems to be a bit below bare minimum for running KDE or Gnome. I agree that it can get painful putting a general distribution onto a system intended for specialised use like yours.

I also have monitor problems though. I have this aweful Vivitron 15" on my server which makes me feel ill at 1024*768.

Re:And meanwhile... QWZX

[jasonditz]

True enough, but:

Mandrake and Red Hat won't even run on a 486 anymore.

Debian worked great, I didn't try Slackware (my latest CD for that was 3.0, and I know that works, but its also 8 years old). Never used Gentoo, so I don't know about that, but:

SuSE requires 64 MB to install properly (theoretically there's an unsupported install program that only uses 48 MB though).

My problem isn't even neccesarily the RAM requirement (although 64 MB seems excessive), its the processor requirement. There are plenty of 486's around nowadays, and they make perfectly servicable workstations. Why is it that all the commercial distros are sys-reqing them out of the market? I really don't see how their install programs are any easier to use than Debian's, or FreeBSD's for that matter.

Upgrading my 486en to 32 or 64 MB of RAM is cheap enough these days, and certainly worthwhile for performance, but upgrading them all to a Pentium would be a royal pain.

software lag and video cards

[cheese_wallet]

It seems that intel and amd have recently made pretty large jumps in their processor speeds. And while windows XP is processor greedy, the benchmark for good performance in XP was surpassed a while back.

So I think we are just seeing the results of a software lag, where the current batch of software doesn't need or even work better with the highest end processors.

On the other hand, video cards are taking more and more load off of the CPU. And they cost about the same. I know I've upgraded my video more often than my CPU. I've got four videocards sitting on my desk right now, victims of perceived obsolesence.

Maybe the future trend is for other peripherals to start adding computational functionality, and further reduce the CPU load. Perhaps CPUs of the future will be used for nothing but scheduling and coordination.

Re:software lag and video cards

[ergo98]

And while windows XP is processor greedy, the benchmark for good performance in XP was surpassed a while back.

I was actually writing a Slashdot submission some time ago that dealt with "minimum requirements" and how they are determined in the software industry. For instance, for Windows XP Microsoft states as the requirements "PC with 300 megahertz (MHz) or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233-MHz minimum required". I offer up the opinion that they pulled these numbers out of their ass, and that is the general routine of the software industry in general. While items such as memory or hard drive space can be actually metered and truly quoted on in minimum configurations (recommended becomes more of a suggestion as it is completely subjective: If you're willing to tolerate endless paging, Windows NT 4.0 will run on, and was originally specified as for, 12MB. If Microsoft re-released Windows NT 4.0 pre SP1 today, they'd claim that it required a minimum of 128MB, and a 300Mhz+ processor). I believe that software manufacturers simply find the middle to low end in the current marketplace and stick that on their box with the hopes that more detailed "requirements" makes it appear that the QA department did a better job, when all it's really doing is needlessly muddling and implying metrics that don't actually exist. Minimum CPU requirements for non-realtime applications are a farce.

Why do I bring up XP? Firstly, I've found XP to actually be significantly less demanding than Windows 2000 (for instance startup times have dropped dramatically as they optimized the kernel and ancilliary code). Windows 2000 specifies a "minimum" processor of a 133Mhz Pentium, yet Windows XP specifies that you need a 233Mhz or higher processor. Why the jump of 100Mhz? Does it latently consume more resources? Checking my CPU meter I can see that it generally sits at 0%. Compare this to Windows NT 4.0, to which XP still shares a tremendous lineage (one can still run virtually all current software on an NT 4.0 machine) which only requires a 486 33Mhz. Claims that XP is a CPU hog are ridiculous: While it can be demanding from a video perspective if you have the "effects" on, and you should have lots of memory, it would likely run perfectly fine on a Pentium Pro 60Mhz, presuming you had the required memory.

Why do I say this little rant? Because I truly was interested some time back about the engineering foundation for determining and quoting on minimum, recommended, and optimal configurations, and how they are derived.

Re:software lag and video cards

[Argylengineotis]

" Maybe the future trend is for other peripherals to start adding computational functionality, and further reduce the CPU load "

Indeed, there are a number of peripherals that could benefit from a trend like this, both for the respective industry's business perspective as well as the user's improved experience:

• Speech Recognition Accelerator. With the recent trend of incorporating reasonably capable audio directly on mobo, the viability of he sound card oems is in a state of peril. They will either be forced to adapt by moving into chipset production or by increasing the utility of their cards. Since voice recognition is so processor intensive, an accelerator built into an audio card is an obvious option.
  
• Database Accelerator. With the huge gains being made with the ATA protocol. SCSI oems are facing dwindling performance and sales. At the same time, dB usage is growing and promises to explode with the adoption of the sql based filesytems coming from the GNU world and MSFT. A SCSI controller able to sync, link and otherwise accelerate transactions might be useful enough to warrant an accelerator built on to the SCSI controller / Drive controllers.
  
• Networking Accelerator. There are already several cards that offer limited accelerator features, but there are many paths for this item to follow: encryption acceleration, built in 802.11x and Bluetooth switches, packet error correction, on-NIC DNS caching... perhaps the entire network stack could be moved to hardware, and just spit out the data directly to RAM or HD, depending on what you are doing.
  

There are probably not too many other opportunities for peripheral acceleration, but with all of these accelerators on a fast bus (one of the proposed standards, or perhaps multiplexed AGP?) your system would sing like a kitten with a processor running at bus speed.

Re:software lag and video cards

[dadragon]

The minimum system requirements being hyperrbole is hardly a new phenomenon.

Doom II was listed as requiring a 486/66 with 8mb ram. I ran it on a 386/DX with 4mb ram until I got a new computer in '97. Ran a little slow, but otherwise just fine.

Re:software lag and video cards

[hfastedge]

i think this suggests that software makers should forget about optimization to fuel the hardware market.

Re:software lag and video cards

[ergo98]

I think the software industry has already fueled the hardware market simply by putting grossly inflated "minimum specs" on their boxes. I will reiterate that anything that isn't realtime often has no minimum CPU limits. For those who don't know, realtime relates to some operation which must complete a certain operation in a prescribed period of time: For instance a PVR has to encode the video without falling behind. Anything that isn't realtime however then falls into the domain of "What are you willing to tolerate?".

Probably the most ludicrous requirements listed on boxes relate to CDs: Virtually all boxes will state something inane like "Minimum 4x CDROM", yet these are for products which do full installs and load absolutely nothing in a time sensitive manner from the CD. Is it absolutely imperative that the install finish in 15 minutes?

Re:software lag and video cards

[Anonymous Coward]

You just described the Amiga

Re:software lag and video cards

[Anonymous Coward]

Im a multimedia dev, the 233 Mhz min sounds exactly like our minimum for smooth software only mpeg1 playback on most machines (also allowing for other graphics,animations,audio to not completely fsck up).

You have to remember that this is not just the OS that they would be quoting on here, MS just happens to have a few media oriented aspects to the OS that also need to run on the system, whats the point of quoting a min spec for the OS+word if they cant decode music, videos etc.

It's not an exact science by any means, but in MS's case they would likely have to aim for a min spec for all things that you can do out of the box.

Re:software lag and video cards

[Anonymous Coward]

" Maybe the future trend is for other peripherals to start adding computational functionality, and further reduce the CPU load "

This is the way PC hardware used to be before Intel needed a way to make people upgrade their processors. The way to do that was to have dumb devices made like winprinters, winmodems, etc, that do all the real work in software instead of hardware like things used to be done.

Re:software lag and video cards

[Citizen of Earth]

Maybe the future trend is for other peripherals to start adding computational functionality, and further reduce the CPU load. Perhaps CPUs of the future will be used for nothing but scheduling and coordination.

The CPU of the future will be a 1-MHz 6502!

Re:software lag and video cards

[Sycraft-fu]

Waht constitutes a minimum or recommended requirement is totally up to the judgement of the company. Frankly, i like people that err on the side of caution. Back in the DOS days, I had a fairly slow PC for the time. Well I found that many games listed a system near or a bit under mine as being a minimum, but proceeded to run like crap. They were technically speaking the truth in that the game RAN, but it didn't run well enough to be fun. I liked games like Doom because they were more conservative, and the game ran ok, even on the minimum system.

Now for MS, the goes double since the OS is what you run apps on. So MS needs to think not only of what the OS will need, but what apps are likely to need too. In that light, it's not unreasonable to say that XP needs at least a 300mhz processor and 128MB of ram. Personally, my recommneded minimum for XP is a P3 class computer with 256MB of ram, I think Microsoft is too conservative for general use.

Yes, you can technically run XP on any P2 class system, and probably even Pentium class system (I don't know if it uses 686 specific code or not) with a tiny amount of ram but it will be so slow as to be unusable and you'll be lucky to get apps to load.

Also I think all the bitching is pretty academic. It's hard to buy anything under 700mhz these days unless you are buying used.

Re:software lag and video cards

[Dun Malg]

Maybe the future trend is for other peripherals to start adding computational functionality, and further reduce the CPU load. Perhaps CPUs of the future will be used for nothing but scheduling and coordination.

It seems like such things go in cycles. Originally, mainframes would do serial comms by twiddling outputs with CPU instructions directly. Then someone sez "hey, it's now possible to build a little buffer circuit that does it for me". Then later, as CPU's got faster, the wealth of extra clock cycles were put to use tiddling serial bits again because it was faster than the homebrew serial buffer. Repeat until you reach today, where the UART chips are fast enough and cheap enough that we'll not see direct serial manipulation by the CPU again. Right now it seems we've reached that point with video. The CPU can't even come close to what the vid card chipsets are doing, so that task is currently in an "offloaded" cycle. But who know what the future might hold? They may come up with something new that has so many clock cycles to burn that it can run circles around a GF4. Not likely, but also not impossible. Basically, it appears that functions go off-CPU permanently when the peripheral hardware that performs said functions becomes cheap and plentiful.

Re:software lag and video cards

[Courageous]

What I want is a cheap, affordable, fast 4-8 GB flash ram disk. The long pole in the tent in all standard computer systems right now is the disk drive. By having a very large "almost as fast as memory, but with persistence" unit to attach to my computer, the whole system performance profile changes dramatically.

C//

Re:software lag and video cards

[Fweeky]

A friend of mine runs XP on his 224MB P200; he thinks it's great. Indeed, it's perfectly usable, even if his benchmark system was a P75 running '98 :)

Re:software lag and video cards

[chthon]

A year or six ago, Philips had such plans to create an add-on for motherboards to off-load video and audio processing from the CPU, and I think that there were other companies with the same plans.

It did not go through, because this would break the revenue model for Intel, which is based upon Moore's law : every eighteen months faster CPU's to create more demand.

So what did Intel do ? They created the MMX multimedia extensions and convinced several software publishers to support them. This way, they could say that their processors could handle all this processing and the Philips plans were almost doomed from the start.

Now they have MMX and fast processors, but some people still do not have enough processing power. The fact that 3D acceleration boards have success must mean that MMX is not really what it is supposed to be.

It seems to me that there is a cyclic movement between doing more things in software and then adding more specialised functions in hardware. I have seen this since the first articles on microcomputers appeared.

For the above suggestions (Speech recognition, database and network accelerator), I suggest you get "Computer architecture : A Quantitative Approach". Your suggestions have a far lower value than you might expect, because they would be costly to implement, and not used very much. I think that in that book there is even an example of a database accelerator on a mainframe system.

As for the network accelerator, "Computer architecture" also states that you can buy bandwidth, but you have to design for latency. One uses a network card to transfer data between computers. If you were to implement the things you said here in a network card, it would be a computer in itself. You would need to implement the communication between your computer and the network card as a network connection itself.

e.g. take a DNS on board your network card. Domain and host names are not a property of datagrams, but are things used the application to find hosts. This means that the computer should contact the network card as a DNS host, for which it needs a network stack.

If you want to simplify this, then you will have to create a new protocol between your computer and the network card, which is a waste of time I think.

Also, putting protocol stack functions on the network card effectively limits the card to the protocol chosen unless you implement it in software of course.

Re:software lag and video cards

[ergo98]

So MS needs to think not only of what the OS will need, but what apps are likely to need too.

Again, I think memory limits are fine, presuming that they are actual metrics and not just "Well if 128MB is good, then 256MB is even better. If 256MB is even better, then 512MB is great. If 512MB is great, then 1GB is superb, etc.". Even with memory one gets into the fanciful arena of subjective measures: XP runs nicely with 256MB because it can basically use a hundred MB for a file system cache, reducing disk paging and increasing cache hits, leading to a smoother experience. Is it necessary though? Probably not: Back in the day of restricted memory they developed virtual memory specifically to deal with software that require more memory than one has, gracefully paging to disk : It's slower, but it works.

You mentioned "what apps you'll likely need too", and I'm not quite sure how to respond to that. Firstly, the overwhelming majority of apps are not CPU bound: Web browsers, reasonable media playback (not full screen high bitrate DIVX, which requires far more than a 300Mhz processor anyways) like Winamp, Word processing, etc. All of these would run perfectly fine on a 66Mhz Pentium 1 processor. When you get into the realm of CPU bound applications, then the application itself dictates it rather than the underlying operating system, and it's folly to think that Microsoft should take other apps into account too (especially given that, as mentioned, in actual operations XP runs at 0% cpu usage: There aren't CPU intensive system services running)? When Doom 3 comes out, should Microsoft state that XP requires a Athlon 2000+ and a GF4 or Radeon 9700? Of course they shouldn't.

Also I think all the bitching is pretty academic. It's hard to buy anything under 700mhz these days unless you are buying used

My point was that the software companies feed the hardware upgrade cycle by implying that products require minimums far beyond what they actually need (as I mentioned in another posting, they go so far as to claim minimum CDROM spin rates for applications which have absolutely no streaming media requirements or required throughput threshhold. It's just another useless requirement on a box). Even in the gaming market, many games are entirely video card bound, but what is "acceptable" is entirely subjective: Personally I find it hard to tolerate the frame rate ever dropping below 60fps, but a few years ago I was completely satisfied with 15fps. There are many today who are playing games at rates that I consider unacceptable, yet they're having an enjoyable time and don't know the difference. Are they wrong? Of course they aren't.

I may get the impression that I'm a luddite old sk001 UNIX guru, but in reality I do my day to day computing on an Athlon 1800+ with a GF4 4400, etc, however I recognize that this vicious cycle of forced obsolescence is largely artificial.

Re:software lag and video cards

[pclminion]

"PC with 300 megahertz (MHz) or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233-MHz minimum required". I offer up the opinion that they pulled these numbers out of their ass, and that is the general routine of the software industry in general.

Actually, I do have a program I wrote that requires dual 2+ GHz procs and 1+ GB RAM.

That is, if you want to see your results within a day...

Re:software lag and video cards

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend of mine ran XP on his ~200mhz laptop with 192 megs of ram for awhile, he couldn't stand it, he went back to 2k because the gui was too klunky slow. He's also one of those "In the know" people that cares about speed.

Re:software lag and video cards

[ergo98]

Actually, I do have a program I wrote that requires dual 2+ GHz procs and 1+ GB RAM.

That is, if you want to see your results within a day...

Why is the metric "within a day"? What if I want my results in a minute? What if I want my results within a second? What if I want my results within a microsecond?

For non-realtime systems it becomes a subjective measure of what is tolerable, not what is possible, but of course "tolerable" entirely relates to "the conditions you are use to". There was a time, many years back, when I went start povray running to render a single frame before I went to bed, and I'd come down in the morning to find that I pointed the camera the wrong way, or forgot a light source, etc. Today that would be insane, but only because we become spoiled by better. If you state a minimum that'll create 10 rendered frames per minute (note that this isn't realtime being watched, but rather is generated to an animation) as some arbitrary minimum, then I would ask why it isn't 20 frames per minute? Why not 100 frames per minute? 1000 frames per minute? If you rewrite the minimum in a year, will you accordingly up the minimum just because of changes in the marketplace? It's likely, and it also points out the absurdity of said minimums.

Re:software lag and video cards

[ergo98]

he went back to 2k because the gui was too klunky slow...He's also one of those "In the know" people that cares about speed.

Apparently he's not "in the know" all that much, given that XP is basically a highly optimized version of Windows 2000 (with better device support to boot), and the GUI can be configured to be a virtual clone of Windows 2000. I cannot stand the visual effects of XP, and that's why I had them turned off pronto.

There is no reason whatsoever why XP couldn't run just fine on his laptop. In any case, the problems that he encountered were due to the usually subpar video processors on most laptops, which would make the video effects all the more intolerable.

Re:software lag and video cards

[timbck2]

I believe that software manufacturers simply find the middle to low end in the current marketplace and stick that on their box

I work for a software company, and while I'm not a developer I'm responsible for determining what hardware we tell our customers they need to buy to run our software. That's precisely where I get our requirements from. I go to Dell's website and spec out a low-end PC or server. That's always much more than is needed for the application, but it meets my requirement that the spec must be "realistic" -- that is, the customer must actually be able to purchase what we specify in the current market.

Then our spec always includes a blanket statement something along the lines of "lesser configurations may be sufficient -- please check with us if you wish to use older hardware". That way we're completely covered -- if the customer wants to go out and buy that 2.4GHz P4 they've been eyeing they're free to do so, but our application may only need an 800MHz Celeron.

Re:software lag and video cards

[jafac]

That's totally correct. I test software, and the software I test has a documented minimum requirement of 300MHz PIII with 64 megs of RAM.

I have a machine in my lab that's a 486-66 with 16 megs. I run our software on it so I can document weird behavior so that support will be able to recognize it when a customer tries to run it on unsupported hardware (and then proceed to lie about it) or if there's something wrong with their supported hardware that they don't know about (but we'll soon tell them about).

Basically, the program runs fine. Slow as hell, but fine. I know for a fact that they pulled the minimum requirements out of their ass. I was in the meeting when they did it. And I'm totally comfortable with it too. Maybe it runs fine on my 486 - but I'd rather have the safety cushion of better hardware in the field.
Now - there ARE situations where there's technical merit to having some hardware unsupported. Just doesn't apply to my product - which shall remain nameless, for my own protection.

Re:software lag and video cards

[cheese_wallet]

"They may come up with something new that has so many clock cycles to burn that it can run circles around a GF4"

I think it's called the radeon 9700. Just kidding..hehe

I know what you are saying, but it doesn't really look like much of that is going on. I'd probably be second to last to know about it, but it doesn't seem like anybody is too anxious to actually try anything new or different. Too much risk involved.

Re:software lag and video cards

[cheese_wallet]

" What I want is a cheap, affordable, fast 4-8 GB flash ram disk"

I know what you mean, but maybe you should say non-volitile memory instead of flash...flash wears out after something like 10,000 write ops.

Hell, I'll stick a battery on a dimm, if you write a driver that knows that can treat it like a permanent memory storage device. It'd probably be easiest to do it with registered memory, and I don't recall offhand but I don't think many mainboards support registered memory.

Re:software lag and video cards

[cheese_wallet]

reading your post made me think of intel as hard-line communists, with all the processing power being central, claiming "our cpu cycles are everyones equally" or something.

And what some of us are suggesting is akin to a very conservative governing style--a very limited central government with most of the power laying in regional sub-governments.

I don't mean to flame here or anything, but I don't want to read a book that tells me why I can't do a bunch of things. I mean, I saw a great deal of improvement at work when I upgraded to a dual cpu environment. to me that is the same thing I was talking about, just at a higher level that I intend.

I do think you are right about saying we need a new protocal between the cpu and the network card, but I also think we need the same between between the cpu and all the major components. A packetized network, serial network.

Re:software lag and video cards

[cheese_wallet]

"The CPU of the future will be a 1-MHz 6502!"

I still have an apple //e sitting on a desk at my parents house. I powered it up the last time I was home. I'll say this: That thing has the greatest feeling keyboard I've ever used. It just feels excellent. Like you're getting a massage (you decide) while you are typing.

I still have a few copies of "Copy ][ plus" DMCA be Damned!

Treason!

[fm6]

The money I would spend on frivolous things is now being shoveled into the bank so I can save for things I really need(TM).

Aren't we all supposed to be spending money to Help Stimulate the Economy(TM)? We Can't Let the Terrorists Win! (TM)

I have been...

[aliusblank]

I've been saying this for years.. yet still people feel they need the pentium 8 4 bagillahertz cpu to browse the web [well unless there using xp and ie 6 :P].
Oh by the way, theres a great deal on the athlon xp 1600 over at newegg.

just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k

[primus_sucks]

My company just "upgraded" everyone's computer from win 95 to win 2k. Now it runs waaaay slower. Don't worry - software bloat will catch up to the hardware!

Re:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k

[NineNine]

Hey kid, you went from a shitty DOS-based OS to a rock solid NT based OS. If you don't think that that's an upgrade, you're a fucking moron.

Re:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k

[Phosphor3k]

A celeron 500 with 196mb sdram is easily enough to run Win2k with word, groupwise and IE open without hicupping. If your minimum spec is lower, then your IT department needs to be shot.

Re:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k

[MissMyNewton]

C'mon now.

Seriously.

For most people in your company, the "slowness" is going to be way more than offset by stability and the productivity it yields: not just in terms of time lost rebooting, but also for sysdamins restoring whacked documents from backup since 95 GPF'd and F'd up an important spreadsheet or presentation.

As a troll, I give you a C-

Re:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, if you compare it to the right rock. NT is as solid as mica. Just peels away to nothing with no difficulty.

Re:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k

[nelsonal]

I had 2k running fine on a P2 266 with 384 MB of ram, Win2k loved ram not processing power. Open office took a little longer than usual to start up, but IE or Opera were fine for browsing. I could even get Q3 running pretty well with less of the eye candy at 800 x 600.

Re:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k

[kingOFgEEEks]

I don't even want to begin on this one, but i believe it's my duty to do so.
Win2K is most possibly, the best M$ operating system ever. I can say this unabashedly, and with a straight face, because i truly believe it. It is truly compatible (it's even got support for AppleTalk) with other os's, (as long as you use Fat32, it can work with linux) but it's strong point is under NTFS.
I have been a user of Win2K for a little over a year now (took me a while to give up dual booting 98SE and NT4) and i truly believe that it is quite a substantial OS.
If your gripe about NT5 (Win2k) is the slow boot process, remember, you only need to boot once a day, as opposed to hourly with 9X. The time spent waiting for booting once is much less than booting 8-10 times.

it's all there, and if you don't know how to use it, i am sorry

Re:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k

[Anonymous Coward]

I have run 3d games on my 333 celeron easly, but I also had 786 megs of ram... running win 2000

Re:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k

[MtViewGuy]

Actually, Windows 2000 Professional works great even on a Celeron A 500 MHz machine provided you give it enough RAM (256 MB minimum, but you really want more like 384 MB) and install the OS on a modern ATA-33 or faster interface hard drive with 20 GB of disk space available.

Re:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k

[primus_sucks]

I'm sure this is the logic the company used before they spent millions of dollars to make everyone's machine twice as slow. Wonderful idea! Obviously you need enough horsepower to run the latest and greatest software or upgrading doesn't make sense.

Re:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I run Win2K server on a P-150 notebook with 128MB of RAM. It's slow at times, but rock-steady-- I get maybe two crashes a year. I'm sure if I could upgrade to more memory (256 or more) it would be even more tolerable-- it's definitely faster than WinNT in most cases.

The things that tend to be sluggish are visual effects (turn 'em off) and a few items like the Control Panel, for some strange reason. But it's abundantly clear that RAM, and nothing else, is the limiting factor here.

If your company wants to get anything out of that investment in Win2K licenses (other than the improved administration and security and stability, which count for a lot) they should throw an extra 256MB of RAM at each machine.

Well, yeah

[rice_web]

Consumers already weren't buying new computers, it was only a matter of time before geeks stopped buying the high-end parts, too. Only die-hard geeks seem to have the latest and greatest these days.

Personally, I won't be upgrading my P3-866 until the P4-4GHz arrives, which probably won't be until the third quarter of 2003 or later. My 866MHz P3 still performs perfectly for what I do, and many games run smoothly. Sure, I notice its age every now and then, but the latest P4s and Athlon XPs offer relatively little noticeable performance increase (I know, I had a P4 2.2 until I sold it; it just wasn't worth its weight).

But, I think we're missing a big point at the same time. The economy is in terrible condition right now, and computer upgrades are the least of many people's concerns.

Fast CPUs aren't selling?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee I wonder why.. maybe because webbrowsing and email simply does not require that powerful of a processor? Or maybe it's because the latest processors are friggin space heaters? Or maybe it's because of the megahertz myth? Maybe for normal everyday things the CPU isn't the bottleneck? I could go on and on. What will it take, a government funded research mission to figure this stuff out? I mean the silicon companies are just not getting it.

The new hog

[Enforcer42]

Ah yes, Microsoft Office runs oh so nice on that 2.8 Ghz Intel, SO much better than on a 500 Mhz PIII.....I think I'll part with $500 for that shiny new P4 2.8 to gain that .2 seconds to spell check somethin...

Lazy Programming

[unicron]

I blame lazy/inefficient programming for todays ever increasing processor demands. A good example would be Jedi Knight 2. On a my P3-800 with 256mb of ram and a geforce 2 ti it ran like ass anytime there were more than 3 guys running around or if I was in a big room. Really pissed me off. And that was at 800x600, I had to turn it down from 1024x768 because it was unplayable.

2 nights ago I downloaded UT2K3. I thought it was going to be worse than JK2. So I turn off all the effects, runs fine. Start turning settings up. 800x600 with medium effects runs fine. So I go to 1024x768 with full effects. Runs beautifully. Dropped 10 bots in, no drop in performance. I would've put more in but they were owning me.

Kind of off-topic, I know, but it really opened my eyes to what programmers can do if they honestly care about the their public and put good programming techniques to work.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Stormie]

On a my P3-800 with 256mb of ram and a geforce 2 ti it ran like ass anytime there were more than 3 guys running around or if I was in a big room. Really pissed me off. And that was at 800x600, I had to turn it down from 1024x768 because it was unplayable.

News flash: if changing resolution improves performance, then your problem is that you're fillrate bound on the graphics card. Nothing to do with your CPU, nothing to do with "lazy/inefficient programming".

If you were getting the same crappy performance regardless of resolution, then you'd have a point.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to be sarcastic but ....DUH!

programmers are really really REALLY lazy today. they dont write tight code the do not optimize anything anymore. Hell back in the 80's it was common for you to rework a subroutene for a month to squeeze a few milliseconds out of it... today that few milliseconds increase would result in astounding performance...

but they dont do it...

either they are uneducated because of the morons teaching them or they are just too lazy saying "hell there's plenty of processor cycles for this"

Re:Lazy Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

News flash: If he's getting that crappy performace at 800x600, then ANY resolution above that would be as crappy, if not worse. 800x600 is damn near the bottom of the barrel these days, chief, so I'd say that most of his resolutions suck. Just because he can run it at 300x200 in black and white with sprites turned off and get a good res doesn't mean it's the fillrate.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Yorrike]

Well, my Athlon 650 (512MB RAM, GeForce 4 MMX 440) runs Warcraft III at 1280x1024 as smooth as silk, but UT2003 is choppy at any resolution, so it's CPU upgrade time in the next few months.

Or I may just hold off until Doom3 comes out and do a mobo/cpu/ram/gpu upgrade. I can wait...... I think.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

"Those were the good ol' days, and let's hope they never come back."

Re:Lazy Programming

[NineNine]

either they are uneducated because of the morons teaching them or they are just too lazy saying "hell there's plenty of processor cycles for this"


No, you see, when you have a JOB, you have to do what your BOSS says. PROFESSIONAL programmers usually have a BOSS which gives them a DEALINE. Kid, when you come down from your collegiate ivory tower and get a job, you'll see what I'm saying. A month for a few milliseconds? You're fucking crazy. That's like telling a company, "we can speed this program up for you by a few milliseconds, but it'll cost you about $10K".

Get a job.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not question your claim regarding lazy programming. I have to ask though, how does the demo or UT2003 (with half-res textures btw) run compared to Unreal Tournament? Is it as fun to play? Does the added terrain mapping detail make the game more enjoyable? The original UT kicks the living hell out of the UT2003 for playability on modest hardware. I have played the demo, fiddled with settings, etc. I am now playing the tried and true UT once again. As long as new maps can be found and new mods produced, there is no compelling reason to buy UT2003 unless you have a brand new top of the line box to play it on.

Re:Lazy Programming

[unicron]

Yes, their is. Two words: Bombing Run.

And don't start with the "they'll make it as a mod for UT" because that's lamer than hell.

Plus, they got rid of the sniper rifle(for the most part, the delay on the lightning gun really cripples it), which is great in my opinion because it will eliminate all the damn facing world's players that NEVER left the roof.

Re:Lazy Programming

[unicron]

Maybe he's a linux programmer? Nobility before practicallity?

Re:Lazy Programming

[Grishnakh]

So, because this stupid PROFESSIONAL is worried about his BOSS and DEADLINE, he does a crappy job programming. Consumers find this out ("Man, don't buy any games from xxx company! They run slow as hell!"), and stop buying games. Company goes out of business, and BOSS and PROFESSIONAL programmer are on the street.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

survival of the fittest

Re:Lazy Programming

[fermion]

It is not lazy programmers, it is economics. In an effort to create affordable applications, we trade expensive programmer time for cheap cycle time. For instance, we use RAD tools to shorten the development process. We also skimp the design process, often using the RAD tool as an implicit design tool, thus avoiding the messy process of creating solid specifications. Both of these create applications that while cheaper, require heftier processor to run well.

If you get a chance, you should look at the Mythical Man Month. It has a chart that shows just how slow hand coding is. Compilers allowed us to create more complex codee at the cost of speed. That trend will continue.

Re:Lazy Programming

[NineNine]

Well, in your scenario, it's still has nothing to do with "lazy programming". It has to do with business necessity. Outside of the Mozilla project, I've never heard of "lazy developers". But hell, look at them, they took their time, and it's still a huge, slow, buggy app. "Laziness" has nothing to do with it.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what this story is about. There are only a few programs that will push your 500Mhz system from 4 years ago past the edge. UT2003 and a few other apps(3D, games, servers) still need more processing power. That means that people will have to buy newer CPUs. The 1st 2 UT2003 levels look awesome, and I can't wait to see the other ones.

Aside from that, you should look at the prices for a high-end computer from 10 years ago. They were $4000-$5000, for a system that you can get for $50 today. But people still bought them 10 years ago, people have just gotten very cheap. Spend $200 on a top of the line video card now, 10 years ago it would have gotten you a 256-bit VGA display card.

Re:Lazy Programming

[astrotek]

theres no delay on the sniper rifle, its point and shoot, it just appears to shoot slow because you have a shitty ping. The aim works like halflife(or more like quakeworld), not quake3.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but in the long run, not designing your product tends to make it WAY more expensive. Similarly with documentation, including the internals.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

and that is the #1 reason why Q3 is better than the UT series.

I can't stand that "disconnected" feel that UT (et al) have. Q2 actually feels the best (assuming halfway decent ping), Q3 is a little worse but no where near as bad as UT (ugh).

Re:Lazy Programming

[WasterDave]

eliminate all the damn facing world's players that NEVER left the roof.

Apart from a quick dash to chuck the redeemer into enemy territory, you mean?

Dave

Re:Lazy Programming

[Squalish]

The delay on the lightning gun prevents it from being better than the redeemer. What cripples it is that the netcode for the game right now is so crappy that unless the person is standing still, it is impossible to hit anyone unless you are running back and forth firing at someone else with a lightning gun 10 yards away.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Christopher Thomas]

News flash: if changing resolution improves performance, then your problem is that you're fillrate bound on the raphics card. Nothing to do with your CPU

That depends. Objects that take up fewer pixels (either far away or viewed up close at lower-res) are drawn with lower poly-count models. If you're CPU bound dealing with any of the geometry, this can cause the game to be slower at higher resolution (when more objects need the more detailed models).

Even when you're fill-rate limited, the fault can be with the game. The unpatched version of Tribes 2 ran like a slide show on my machine. As far as I could tell, this is because it wasn't doing nearly enough culling and hidden-surface removal before rendering the scene (this caused certain telltale visual artifacts). The patch boosted performance to a playable level.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

News flash: When you debunk an idea, back up your remark with a counterstatement.

Ok, it has nothing to do with your video card. Tell us then, what does it have to do with oh conveyor of wisdom...

Re:Lazy Programming

[lpontiac]

I blame lazy/inefficient programming for todays ever increasing processor demands.

Bear in mind that with programming, "lazy" can be good. Moore's Law might mean that an application that would require an ingenious, complicated, and massively efficient design 10 years ago can be made simpler today.

Yes, this is lazy. It also means that it can be done by less developers in less time - you get the software cheaper and more quickly. Errors tend to scale upwards with both complexity and size, so we're talking about less bugs as well.

Re:Lazy Programming

[SuperKendall]

And UT ran fine at the same res because????

You'd better think through your arguments with the facts at hand.

Re:Lazy Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

You're joking, right?

Re:Lazy Programming

[wheany]

Well, there are these things called optimising compilers nowdays. It is not guarenteed that you can make better code "by hand." Of course, compilers can't help with stupid coding, but often, when trying to optimize code, you produce unreadable, unexpandable, and unreliable code.

Re:Lazy Programming

[prichardson]

Exactly! The mac version of Diablo II (yeah, you heard me) runs terribly! Even with all the effects turned off and the resolution at a paltry 640x480, I still can't get more than 10 fps and mostly it is at something like 3 unless i run it in a window. In a window it runs about average. On the other hand, Max Payne, and Warcraft III run really well, and use a LOT more eye candy. It just goes to show you what a shoddy porting job can do to even a mostly sprite based game (BTW i have a G4 w/ GeForce 2 MX 200, 384 MB RAM)

Re:Lazy Programming

[borzwazie]

Both of these games are examples of cpu-bound programs. Most of the benchmarks showing up on the web indicate that.

I do agree that UT2k3 is more optimized, however.

Re:Lazy Programming

[BoneFlower]

As a computer science student, I don't think its necesarily lazy programming.

The current push in programming education *is not* to write high performing apps. The theory is, with optimizing compilers being as good as they are, and hardware being so fast, it is better to write *maintainable* programs. UT2K3's code very likely is harder to understand for a maintanence programmer than JK2, they probably made fewer concessions in performance for simplicity in the code. Complexity of the graphics could also be an issue, but I haven't seen the games so I can't comment on that.

There are very few mentions in my programming textbooks of situations where you would sacrifice easy to understand code for performance. It is all reliability(code works) and simplicity(other coders can understand it).

So it may not be laziness. Just education that
doesn't teach that sometimes performance is better than simplicity.

Re:Lazy Programming

[gid]

And your point? There's no mention in the parent post that's he talking about being CPU bound. You can just as well be a lazy/inefficient programmer in the realm of drawing to your video card also, using lots of uneccessary polys for character models, etc. (which from what it sounds, this might be the case)

stability

[morgajel]

maybe know they'll go on a stability kick.

I don't know about you, but my system just isn't as stable as it could be, windows or linux.

Upgrade to dual CPU

[Bartab]

I recently decided to upgrade one of my PCs and settled on a dual CPU. The motherboard and CPUs are all available for commodity prices and thus give far more value for the dollar than a 2+gig single CPU.

Re:Upgrade to dual CPU

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're running Linux/X/KDE/App - you are spot on. My dual 550 Celery really does help things move along. Even better, I offload the X server by running it on my cheap laptop.

But for Win* players -- MS-* packages are all monolithic. They use 1 CPU, either CPU, but the other is 99% wasted. Fast, single CPU machines are better here. But, then, those types of people like to pay up.

Re:Upgrade to dual CPU

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite true, there are a handful programs that will take advantage of a two-cpus under NT4,2000, or XP. Quake3 does it, 3DStudioMax, a couple of CAD programs, etc.

For me personnally, I'd never go back to a single-cpu system. There's never any lag on my box (a dual P3 800MHz system). One chip gets assigned to whatever app I'm running, and Win2K will place all the other processes neatly into the other chip. On my other Athlon box, there's times when the mouse freezes briefly, sound skips, or just hangs the system for a second when processing, something I never experience on the dual-box that's slower than my 2GHz AMD.

Re:Upgrade to dual CPU

[Anonymous Coward]

You dont have hardware raid from highpoint do you? There is a known bug with some of their earlier drivers that cause the sound skips and stutters.

I have a 1ghz athlon, and have *never* had a sound skip or stutter and i use the machine for all sorts of stuff all day.

I used to have a dual 500 PIII (well, still do but now it is a FreeBSD development server) and loved it to bits. So i do agree in principal to dual processor machines :o)

in other news

[geekoid]

AOL Intel, and AMD enetered into a secret agrrement, code named "Show me the Money".
In an unrelated story, aol will be adding new features into aol 9, its min. req will be dual 3 Gig processor, 512 megs ram.

Re:in other news

[Some Dumbass...]

Oooh, a post just itchin' for a punch line!

In an unrelated story, aol will be adding new features into aol 9, its min. req will be dual 3 Gig processor, 512 megs ram.

... and a dedicated electrical generator.

In an unrelated story, aol will be adding new features into aol 9, its min. req will be dual 3 Gig processor, 512 megs ram.

... for installation (Requirements for use may be higher).

In an unrelated story, aol will be adding new features into aol 9, its min. req will be dual 3 Gig processor, 512 megs ram.

... and a two-button mouse.

In an unrelated story, aol will be adding new features into aol 9, its min. req will be dual 3 Gig processor, 512 megs ram.

... and a 14.4K or faster modem (doesn't AOL have something to do with the Internet?)

Re:in other news

[Anonymous Coward]

I vote for "and a two button mouse.". Subtle is the way to go. Keep people on their toes. :)

Why go for the newest?

[I_am_Rambi]

When you can wait a few months and get a cheaper processor, that will do the trick. Most of my friends, when building their own computers, will wait for the second or third generation chips (ie AMD 1800XP+). They can get a fast computer, for cheap.

Just take a look at Pricewatch. The Athlon XP 2200 is at $144, while the Athlon 2000 is under $100. Why would you spend that much more on a new processor, when you aren't getting alot more speed out of them.

With a few months turn over, it is worth the wait to save $50 or more on a slightly older processor, than on that latest processor.

Re:Why go for the newest?

[geekoid]

people like you are the problem.
Sure I know it make sense to wait, and you know it, but if everybody does it we're screwed. ;)

Re:Why go for the newest?

[An Onerous Coward]

That was my thinking when I slapped my most recent computer together. I grabbed a really nice motherboard, and then slapped in the cheapest processor the supplier was selling (a 1.2 Duron). I figure I'll upgrade when the 2400+'s hit the $70 range (this time next year, I'm guessing).

Poor AMD. I have to wonder if they're making any money off me at all.

Re:Why go for the newest?

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't the people like this that are the problem, it is the fact that these companies have this type of pricing model. Most people would take a 25% hit in performance for a 50% cheaper price.

They either need to have an agreement between AMD and Intel stating that the new chips will be $300, and will stay there for 1 year. Or they will find themselves not making a lot of money. AMD started this problem by undercutting Intel's prices. They sold a lot more chips. Intel had to keep up, AMD lowered even more, the cycle continued. Motorola sold chips to Apple and their prices stayed up there, but look at the sales.

The whole tech sector got screwed by Sales and Marketing.

The tech sector needs to look at the car manufacteurs as a example. If some component is 25% cheaper next week, the price of the car stays the same. The car company makes some more profit. Intel, AMD should adopt a Apple like approach to pricing. Every 6 months you go back and look at lowering prices, and releasing new products. People will have no excuse that maybe next week the price will drop $10, I better wait. Or the 2.5Ghz chip is coming out next month, the price of the 1.8Ghz will be $25 cheaper. This will only happen 2 times a year, and they won't know when it will be.

Re:Why go for the newest?

[shepd]

>They either need to have an agreement between AMD and Intel stating that the new chips will be $300, and will stay there for 1 year

Yay! Cartel, Collusion and Anti-Trust lawsuits abound! I can smell the Ambulance Chasers crawling up their proverbial asses right now! Mee-Maw-Mee-Maw!

Next thing you know, the vitamin companies are going to get together and create an artificial increase in vitimain prices because they know General Mills, Quaker and Post can afford it!

Woohoo! More wasted money!

Re:Why go for the newest?

[RandyOo]

I agree wholeheartedly, and this has been my philosophy for upgrading for several years. I always stay a minimum of one, preferrably two cycles away from the latest, greatest thing. It's certainly the best ratio of price to performance.
By the way, it's "a lot". You wouldn't say "alittle", would you?

Obvious, looking at prices

[stuuf]

Intel's most high-end chip is always about $200 more than the next lowest. Why spend $650 for 2.x ghz when you 2.(x-1) ghz will do just as good for $400?

Re:Obvious, looking at prices

[damiam]

And the Athlon 2x00 XP will do better for $200.

Re:Obvious, looking at prices

[martissimo]

it's way more pronounced than that.

take a look at newegg.com and look at the P4 processors... a 2.8 ghz northwood is 550 bucks, a 2.4 ghz northwood is 202 bucks. at those kind of pricing differences i cant imagine the extra 350 being an attractive deal to very many people.

i've always believed that when upgrading you were best off to buy at least a few notches below the "latest and greatest" and with pricing systems like this it looks like lots of people are starting to feel the same way

Re:Obvious, looking at prices

[VAXman]

BMW's highest end car is $20,000 more than the second highest, and gets from 0-60 in 0.1 seconds fewer than the second highest. Yet people still flock to the more expensive car.

Re:Obvious, looking at prices

[Squalish]

And the Athlon 1x00 XP will do half to 3/4 as well for $60.

Re:Obvious, looking at prices

[0a100b]

But BMW won't ship a faster model every few months, and usually the price of a model will be stable fore some years instead of a few weeks

Hmmm...

[rice_web]

Well maybe if companies actually OPTIMIZED their code, we wouldn't need 2.8GHz P4s. MS Word will probably need an 800MHz processor in its next revision. Sheesh.

Re:Hmmm...

[Squalish]

I never really saw the rationale in upgrading past Word 97 as a desktop user(and not as a corporate purchasing consultant, who lease their souls to the most established company). Are there any new, compelling features? Any? Will I be able to strangle the bump-mapped, anisotropically filtered paperclip with the $479 CDW receipt for the STANDARD VERSION of office XP?

Re:Hmmm...

[Corporate Troll]

No... Office 2000 is more annoying than Office 97. (Personalized menu's anyone - yes, I know you can disable it) I did't see any new features that make it worthwhile. At home I still use Office 97 and it works just fine for anything I do. At work I have Office 2000, so can compare even though I'm not an extensive user. I cannot say anything about Office XP. Does anyone actually use Office XP? I never even saw it.
The other day I got my first Office 97/Office 2000 incompatibility: in Excel 97, I wasn't able to change the background colour of a cell in a document that was created using Excel 2000. Found it quite strange, but perhaps I did something wrong ;-)

Re:Hmmm...

[msim]

Here at work we use Office XP & windows 2000.
The biggest shit off i can find with office 2k, both outlook and word is the stupid stupid stupid insistance by these fsckin programs to *INSIST* that they know better than you in regards to capitalising the first letter of a new line. you can disable this, but at that point you loose just about every other funky auto-spellcheck ability that office has

Oh what a surprise!...

[DeeKay]

That's what Apple-Users have been answering the "Apple's soon dead [again? :-] because the P4/Athlon is sooo much faster!"-nerds for ages! ;-)
Great to see it gets some hard proof! ..or DO each of us drive 400hp cars? No? Why not? If we can't live without 2.8GHz, why should we "punish" ourselves with cars below 100hp?

Re:Oh what a surprise!...

[Zeinfeld]

Great to see it gets some hard proof! ..or DO each of us drive 400hp cars? No? Why not? If we can't live without 2.8GHz, why should we "punish" ourselves with cars below 100hp?

Well I bought a 350hp car because I didn't see that it was worth waiting a year on the waiting list to be able to buy the supercharged version.

However I do notice that many of my neighbors have cars with equivalent capacity (4 litre or above) but give only half the power and less than half the mpg.

I just upgraded my son's computer with the cheapest components I could get from Frys that I could be confident would last a couple of years (having previously bought grotty PCs and regretted same). For $350 I got an Intel motherboard, 1.9 GHz processor, 1/4 gig Ram and a pretty nifty video card.

I agree that there is not much reason to upgrade from need these days. Even gaming is no longer a power users issue since the copy of tombraider angel of mercy you buy in the store next week will have been developed on hardware that is already close to obsolete.

The only mass market, power application I see about at the moment is digital video editing. That will pretty much soak up cycles on anything you throw at it. But the market is fairly specialist still.

As the hardware gets cheaper I am much happier to accept machines with everything integrated on the motherboard.

Re:Oh what a surprise!...

[Anonymous Coward]

Having the sound card, NIC and video on the mother board is good in theory. But wait 5 years when the next big OS comes out, and the propritary drivers will never be upgraded for it. Just use a $5 sound card, $5 NIC, and an NVIDIA (no other choice with new games, they force you to use it) video card.

Re:Oh what a surprise!...

[Zeinfeld]

Having the sound card, NIC and video on the mother board is good in theory. But wait 5 years when the next big OS comes out, and the propritary drivers will never be upgraded for it. Just use a $5 sound card, $5 NIC, and an NVIDIA (no other choice with new games, they force you to use it) video card.

My point exactly, I no longer bother about that issue because I don't buy a machine expecting it to have to last three years, let alone 5.

My main problem with motherboards is that for some reason the dweeble-brains who design the bios are incapable of understanding that disk sizes increase substantially over time. The Intel Providence motherboard I replaced simply would not boot to any disk available as standard today.

Re:Oh what a surprise!...

[Anonymous Coward]

"However I do notice that many of my neighbors have cars with equivalent capacity (4 litre or above) but give only half the power and less than half the mpg."

The CC Myth in action!

I put together a "new" machine on Friday

[idiotnot]

For about $500, and a few spare parts I had around, I built an Athlon 1700+. It's much faster than the 1Ghz notebook I bought last winter (sounds similar to the one in the article), and gobs faster than my primary machine (400 MHz G3). Still, doesn't matter much when you're surfing, or looking at pr0n. Okay, so the flash ads aren't as annoying when they load. :-)

But I think the Athlon 2200's were like $170 more than I paid for the 1700.

What drives us to buy new cpu's

[GoatPigSheep]

Besides internet browsers, there is another popular program that encourages people to upgrade: that is Windows. I tried installing windowsXP on my cyrix 6x86 166mhz and it crawled. Even though I only had 32mb of ram I still expected better performance than this. I upgraded my pc to a p4 2ghz with 512mb ddrdram and windows was still incredibly slow. I sold my pc and bought a g4 MacPC and now OS X-windows runs great. That is why I like Apple brand pc's because the mips g4 processor is alot faster than intel or cyrix chips. I will be using my mac for a long time without having to upgrade. Windows is one of the main reasons people still need to buy fast cpu's. Games are also a problem but if you want to play video games you can buy a video came system like atari jaguar.

Re:What drives us to buy new cpu's

[questionlp]

The G4 processor is based on the PowerPC architecture and not the MIPS architecture... both have roots on the RISC side of the fence.

Just pitting nicks.

Re:What drives us to buy new cpu's

[willr7]

PC's are video game systems, much better than consoles.

games are the majority of problems in why people need to buy new cpu's, are there any apps out there that demand more than 300mhz? i have 450mhz, and xp doesnt come close to using all of my resources.

jaguar sux, pc games are king ;D

Re:What drives us to buy new cpu's

[Anonymous Coward]

This was a joke, right? :-)
Or worse, yet, a Mac troll-- and by someone who doesn't even know who makes the Mac CPUs...

Jeesh.

Re:What drives us to buy new cpu's

[Anonymous Coward]

not sure what you are talking about. For all windows problems, it does have one good thing about it: The UI speed. I have'nt seen another OS able to manipulate windows and objects at the speed windows can.

I've tried OS X machines and the OS seemed clunky and slow.

If 2ghz ran Windows XP slow, then you have not set up your machine properly, or don't belong near a computer. My 800MHz Duron runs great. It opens up Outlook, IE, Word, etc. faster than you can blink and boots up in less than 25 seconds. I can only imagine how fast it would work on a 2ghz machine (if it was set up properly)

Re:What drives us to buy new cpu's

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting logic:

You installed Windows XP on a 5 year old machine and it ran slow.

You installed Mac OS X on the hardware it was designed for - and it ran fast.

and you concluded that Macs OS X is better. (for a fair comparison try running Mac OS X on a four or five year old machine. The part about XP running slow on a 2g machine, is complete bs - read some of the other posts)

id Software owns the Chip Market

[edeity]

Intel and AMD should just realise that it is id Software that drives the early adopter market segment of chips. id should be getting a cut of all cpu's sold. Pay the MS Tax, and the id Tax.

View Quake (and soon Doom) releases relative to chip sales, and I'm convinced there will be a correlation. There is wider macro economic factors, but the key driver is Frames Per Second for the latest id software release.

Re:id Software owns the Chip Market

[harks]

I am very interested to see how high-end processor sales are affected by the release of Doom III or Unreal 2.

Re:id Software owns the Chip Market

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one am planning on upgrading my system when
Doom III hits. I'm running a dual athlon with
AthlonMP 1.2G's, but maybe an upgrade to 1.6G MP's
some more ram, and I'll definately be upgrading
to the latest/greatest nVidia card about that time.

So, ya, in my case id has always dictated the timing
of my purchases..... And if you want more proof,
look at 3DFX, they were the big ticket to being
able to play games without upgrading to the costly
AGP/high-end-card of the day.

Re:id Software owns the Chip Market

[Anonymous Coward]

If Doom3 is half as fun to play as it is pretty, I will consider buying a new box. Sad but true. From the demo, UT2003 is not going to provide quite enough empetus for the upgrade. It is all up to Doom3 at this point. If it rocks when it ships I will be inline for a 3GHZ monster box. If not, I will sit out yet another upgrade cycle.

Intel bit itself in the a** here

[GreyWolf3000]

Those of us on /. who know better can put together a nice system with yesterday's parts, but I think the average user still equates processor speed to overall performane. Even when Joe claims to consider RAM, he seldom considers the speed of that RAM, and never the FSB or the hdd speed.

Intel marketed it's processors on the basis of the clock speed. While the 2.8 Ghz did have a 533 Mhz FSB, for the most part, the common joe-driven PC market has grown up thinking that CPU speed makes the biggest difference.

I think perhaps people have just gotten tired of buying new computers--it's just not the next 'big' thing like it has been for the last 10 years.

i think it's a big scam anyways

[Frag-A-Muffin]

I'm still using a PIII-700 and it's plenty fast for me. I make computers for friends and family and I ALWAYS suggest that they DON'T go for the latest and greatest. I tell them it's a waste of money and that it'll drop in price within a month. Instead, I always go for that 1 specific CPU that has the best price/performance ratio. I believe right now, that point is currently at P4-1.6 or 1.7. Anyhow, the one immediately after it is usually a bigger jump than all the ones below it. Fast CPUs just aren't necessary. I tell them to get more RAM instead of a faster CPU. They'll end up seeing a bigger performance difference. And please don't tell me about the 123123123 FPS I can get in Q3 with a faster CPU. It's just NOT necessary for 99% of the people out there that actually purchases systems.

What OS they should put on it is a completely different story! :)

Re:i think it's a big scam anyways

[rmohr02]

Yes, RAM does make a bigger difference in performance than CPU speed. My parents' P4 2GHz 128MB RAM is much slower than my P4 1.8GHz 512MB RAM.

Re:i think it's a big scam anyways

[Anonymous Coward]

> I believe right now, that point is currently at P4-1.6 or 1.7.

Yes. That also maps to a P3-1.4 Xeon (512K Cache). Same speed, a few less dollars.

Re:i think it's a big scam anyways

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought a 2 Ghz machine with 512 MB RAM. I run purely Linux on it. It replaced an old P-90 with a 333 overdrive processor. A welcome change, but in day to day tasks, it does not do "that much" better than my wife's 1.1 Ghz Celeron with 128 MB RAM. I can rip CD's faster, play music with alot of other tasks going on, but I bet that I get many-many years from this machine. I suppose if I were a gamer it would be different.

Release the goods already.

[bascheew]

Who wants an Athlon XP 2200 or Pentium 4 2.8 when AMD and Intel plaster pre-releases all over and talk as if their next new thing is already out? Not me... They are shooting themselves in the foot.

Economy?

[Visoblast]

I'll bet the not-so-great economy has something to do with it. There are computer geeks like me who haven't been getting enough income lately to consider buying computer hardware, high-end or not.

My old box

[shird]

Ive been running a 350Mhz PII for the past 3 or 4 years, and its been fine - just a matter of tweaking it here and there to get as much performance as possible. I upgraded just yesterday to a 2.26Ghz, but not because my machine is painfully slow, or that I want to start playing games (other than soitaire, I don't), but just to make my overall experience of using the machine more comfortable - and to have another machine to network with.

For what I want to do, its been perfectly fine. But occasionally I try out some cool screensaver, or have to do a kernel compile or something, and only then is when I notice the difference.

With enough memory, modern operating systems can function quite well on older processors. They have fairly advanced memory managemet, scheduling etc. Microsoft Word XP starts in about a second on this older machine - how much faster do you really need?

Re:My old box

[Stonehand]

Well, of course it depends on what you do with it.

For instance, at home I've got a PII 450MHz w/ 384 MB RAM (bought just over four years ago), with the occasional upgrade (e.g. GF2MX400/64MB instead of the OEM STB nVidia Riva TNT card it came with). For writing, it's fine. For coding, it's fine. For work... since I do a lot of number crunching, faster would be better, but it's not my work box. For gaming, for /my/ tastes (mostly turn-based strategy, e.g. _Dominions_) it's OK, although CM:BB is going to push it (because it does a lot of math, I'd suspect, to compute those 60-second turns out in the steppes with long LOS and numerous vehicles). Shogun:TW was a bit dodgy on it (and massive musket battles were an absolute no-no), 'tho, and for an action gamer it'd be a really lousy system.

My work (a lot of statistics -- number crunching) could obviously use more CPU speed, and, depending on task, RAM (but I reduce the need by using online approximate quantile algorithms to "sample" the data, so that processing occurs on a mere subset). That's where I can /really/ use faster CPUs, disks and memory -- running tests which take multiple days of computation ain't pleasant.

Re:My old box

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto with the 4 year old PII 350. Got two of them - workstation and server. If you throw lots of memory at these, they will run any app comfortably. Next upgrade will be some more fans to cool the 200 gigs worth of harddrives.
Itching to upgrade to the new 533 MHz memory bus speeds coming from intel recently. That will make a real difference. The botttleneck has definately not been the processors for a long time now.

Need more powerful software...

[Anonymous Coward]

I want faster and faster processors, but the only way that's going to continue is for there to be an adoption of processor intensive applications.

Generally these have been Video, 3d rendering, 2d rendering, etc. It just seems that there needs to be a new killer app that has a minimum requirement of 2.8ghz... imagine that...

I love when they use the Internet

[asv108]

As a reason to upgrade your computer to a 2+ GHZ machine. The funny thing is, most people don't know any better and assume that buying a new computer will make the Internet faster. The FTC needs to start coming down hard on computer companies who advertise that a new pc will make the Internet faster.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[Kaz Riprock]

Even better than the computer companies are the broadband providers that offer "lightning-fast downloads".

Hello! Do you know how fast lightning moves? That's just not even close to ATT Broadband/RCN/@home speeds.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[dillon_rinker]

But it's true! For example, those flash-animation ads suck up a LOT of CPU, and a newer processor would render them faster. Flash ads are the primary reason why I'm thinking about upgrading...from my P-166.

=)

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[Reality Master 101]

You know, the Internet is more than how fast bits flow into your computer. The speed of the processor directly affects how fast your pages render. In fact, I recently upgraded my inlaws to a much faster computer, and they commented on how much faster "the internet" was. (their normal home page renders ridiculously slowly for some reason)

In other words, the Internet is not much good without applications to use it, and faster applications == faster Internet.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[NotAnotherReboot]

If you ever had to use Internet Explorer on the iMacs at my school you would definitely believe that a faster machine would 'make the internet run faster.'

Render times for pages and the speed of your connection could both be construed as factors on how fast you load things on the web, but after a certain point (long passed, 500mhz+ machines) you don't need anything more.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[bitMonster]

Hmmmm.... What's the information content of lightning?

Do you know how fast a voltage propagates down a twisted pair?

Bah.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[alienmole]

Actually, the most common reason for improved performance of "the internet" that I've seen is increased RAM. Browsers tend to chew memory, and if you don't have enough, the page swapping will slow even a fast CPU to a crawl. There are plenty of people upgrading 400MHz machines to GHz+ machines, who really just need to pop in another DIMM. (Of course, they're not capable of doing that, so buying a computer may be the best choice... Ignorance costs.)

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[Istealmymusic]

Agreed, "downloads" is misleading, as it could also refer to downloads from you, zipping across the net to other people. That's very important if you upload a lot of content regularly, as I do.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

have you ever tried opening hotmail imbox (with over 500++++ junk mail messages, of course) on a 133 MHZ @ 32 MB ram Machine?? well even with OC 23 or T1 it aint gonna b pretty

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[ChadN]

What's the information content of lightning?

For a location that hasn't been hit with lightning, it is pretty high, because the probability of lightning hitting that apecific spot is fairly low. However, since lightning never strikes the same place twice, if a spot that was already hit with lightning were to be hit again, the information content would be infinite! :)

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[gwernol]

The funny thing is, most people don't know any better and assume that buying a new computer will make the Internet faster.

Do you have any evidence to support this belief? How do you know that "most people" assume this? Have you conducted statistically significant surveys. Have you read about a statistically significant survey?

Its not even as if this belief is actually wrong, as you seem to think. Connection speed is only one component of the overall "speed" of the Internet. Page render time is also an important component and this will be affected by CPU speed. There are enough complex content and layout types out there (flash, audio, video, CSS, dynaic HTML, client-side Java...) that your CPU really will make a difference to how quickly you can surf the 'net.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[asv108]

Well if I had to choose between having a P-II w/ 128megs and an Oc3 line or a P4 w/ 512 megs and a 56k modem, I would choose the P-II for faster internet.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[garcia]

well I recently upgraded my roommate to XP from 2k (his choice, not mine) and we found that one of his 32mb sticks had gone bad. So for the install and a day he was stuck at 64mb.

Pages DO NOT render faster between 64 and 128 it seems. The god damn programs load faster and the OS is quite a bit more responsive but the Internet is not any faster.

Maybe that was just in this case though.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[cozziewozzie]

Disabling Flash is a more cost-effective solution ;-)

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[ProtonMotiveForce]

Oooh, come down hard on them, huh?

For what? Advertising?

Does your browser run faster on a faster computer, including rendering? Yes.

Do in-browser applications run faster? Yes.

Which bus did you just fall out of, that you think "the internet" is just a bunch of bits on wires? In common parlance, it's an experience.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[Skuld-Chan]

It will though to a certian extent. Take my Power Macintosh 6100/60 - it tops out at 7-9kilobytes a second (even in PowerPC Linux). But with its G3 200 turbo board it tops out at 50 kilobytes a second. (this was tested via my own local area network)

I know this thing isn't breaking any speed records yet, but the faster processor (IBM 601/60 vs Altivec G3/200) did make a noticable difference.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[spinkham]

What you are talking about is called in common terms, the web. The internet is indeed a bunch of bits on wires.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[Citizen of Earth]

The funny thing is, most people don't know any better and assume that buying a new computer will make the Internet faster.

"I bought that 1-GHz processor they said would make the Internet run faster and it didn't! Hell will freeze over before those lying bastards get another dime out of me!!" -- John Q. Public

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[Ztream]

Hmmmm.... What's the information content of lightning?

One bit: very much "on".

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[BoneFlower]

If you surf heavy flash/client side java/other crazy stupid stuff like that... a faster PC will make those parts of the internet faster.

Or if you are like me and have as I do at the moment- 20 windows, and 7 things in the system tray, spread across two monitors, playing Mp3s, some of the sites you have up most of the time have java/flash, plus you are often compiling during surfing, hell yes a faster CPU will impact internet performance. While the net itself isn't faster, with the way I work, a faster CPU will provide a noticeable boost in response times with my browser, email clients, FTP when its running, and noticeably increase how fast my system can recieve and display the data.

The way some people work, they are pulling so much stuff off the net at one time and off their local hard drive and stressing their CPU to the point where their intenet bottleneck actually is their PC.I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[BoneFlower]

ACtually, electricity IIRC travels at the speed of light... or close to it. Whether it is going through the air, or through a wire, electricity travels at the same speed.

So yes, ATT Broadband moves as fast as lightning. So do the old 300 baud modems I hope everyones upgraded:)

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[tempfile]

The problem is the horrible incompetence of the people that today "advise" you when it comes to computers. The idiots in "computer stores" today only know what press releases and commercials tell them.

Re:I love when they use the Internet

[alienmole]

The problem is the horrible incompetence of the people that today "advise" you when it comes to computers. The idiots in "computer stores" today only know what press releases and commercials tell them.

That's a feature, not a bug. People sell people stuff they don't need, more money flows, economy looks good. But it's a bubble because sooner or later, people clue in to the fact that they don't actually *need* to upgrade again, and the market saturates almost instantly. This has in fact already happened, if you look at PC maker revenues over the past few years. This current article is just the latest of a sequence of events that's been going on for a while. The big boom is still winding down in some respects, and will continue to do that until there's some real or imagined reason to upgrade again.

Three years to death

[fm6]

Well, bear in mind that most machines are purchased by businesses -- and they follow some weird rules.

Consider the 3-year-old Dell 450 PII on my desk. High end when I got it, low-end now. I don't need to do any heavy processing, but some of the apps I use consume a lot of RAM, and I'm always short of disk. So I requested an upgrade.

It had almost gone through, when my boss told me that I was making things difficult by not requesting a new machine. Computers are amortized over three years (at least by anybody who pays federal taxes), and our IS department takes the attitude that a fully-amortized computer costs more to support than it's worth.

Of course, as soon as I changed my upgrade request to a new computer request, there was a purchasing freeze....

Re:Three years to death

[anonymous cupboard]

In Europe the amortization time (tax write-off time) is generally a very unrealistic five years. In Germany at least, a lot of professional PCs are on 3 year leases. This way you don't have to worry about write-offs.

However, with a lot of front-end stuff moving to languages like Java, 450MHz sucks big time so at my last assignment, we jumped to 1.6GHz Dells. Oh we use lots of RAM too but the local disks are usually almost empty (i.e., 1-2GB used) as apart from the local O/S (Win 2K pro or XP Pro), the JRE and some other local stuff like X, everything was served via the net.

Re:Three years to death

[nelsonal]

Same thing happened to me, so I bought more ram, happily that was all I really needed. Best purchase I have made all year, but I'm taking the Ram with me when I leave.

Re:Three years to death

[ppetrakis]

You can upgrade that Dell with a CPU from powerleap.com. I recently upgraded my old PII 400 to a Celeron 1.3Ghz and WOW what a difference. Cost me around $150, I probably could have gotten it cheaper but I didnt shop around. The upgrade game just isnt worth the cost (and yes I do play games). I'd have to spend $400+ upgrading all the major components including the power supply for maybe another 30% of performance ontop of what the celeron is giving me now. Simply wasnt cost effective.

Peter

Re:Three years to death

[ekephart]

As interesting / absurd as this may be it's true. The company I used to work at used to send off all their old computers (ie in 2000, P2-400s) on palettes to be destroyed. One day I suggested that they give them to a school district or a charity. I was told that shipping them there would be more expensive since they had to be handled with greater care. I countered by suggesting the they let such schools or charities pick them up. Their response? It's a liability. That and most school districts won't pay to have them shipped out to themselves. Pretty stupid if you ask me.

I offered to take a palette home but apparently it's not a tax deduction if you give them to an employee, just if you give them to non-profit or destroy them.

To this day I imagine my apt with 100 computers placed here and there.

Re:Three years to death

[shepd]

I have been through exactly the same stupidity. And this is at a college that accepts donations but won't hand them out.

They paid someone $5 a monitor to cart out palettes of decently working 14" VGA/SVGA color monitors.

Methinks that now I have a company registered under my name I might be able to get an "employee" who isn't me under their rader to take them out at that price.

And yes, it is stupidity like this that is the reason why your education tax dollar is so high. It's high time they cut it even further than teachers striking. They need to to cut it far enough that the people doing these dastardly deeds feel the pain of no money/jobs. Only then will the insanity stop.

Re:Three years to death

[chthon]

I know that here in Belgium amortisation of such high-tech stuff is three years. However, smaller companies tend to not replace PC's when they are still capable of doing all the work that they are needed for.

Re:Three years to death

[anonymous cupboard]

In the UK and Germany, the write down for tax purposes is five years. On the other hand, I know high end users such as bank trading rooms that like to replace after two.

Gaming

[Apreche]

We already determined in a previous slashdot article that gaming pushes computer tech forward. Since the minimum requirements for most games are still a 500mhz cpu with a 32MB AGP video card, nobody has a need to upgrade their pcs except for the most bleeding edge gamers, and other power users who do video encoding or AutoCAD type applications.
I remember back in the day Virtual On came out for PC and the minimum sysreq were higher than any available pc on the market, unless you had 5 grand. When the minimum amount of power required to use new software goes above the power of most people's pcs then they'll start buying faster CPUs.
Heck, even the people who are already buying faster CPUs don't buy the fastest processor available. The money:speed ratio makes it so much more worth it to buy the second or third fastest AMD, even though the fastest P4 is the best you can get.

Re:Gaming

[photon317]

I disagree that gaming is the sole pusher. I think Porn has always been a big technology factor, and continues to be so, at least on level footing with games. Sad thing is that most porn needs are met by even older machines than current games. Porn hasn't been keeping up the tech pace the past few years, instead sticking to low-res video and whatnot. When they get their asses in gear and starting releasing photorealistic 3-d porn worlds, computer hardware will start jumping again.

Precisely

[Jason Earl]

Why in the world would anyone want to spend the money on a top of the line processor when they can buy an entire computer based on a value processor for $299 at Walmart.com? Heck, instead of spending $1500 or more on a new computer, I can buy three computers over the next year and be pretty sure that the computer I buy six months from now will be faster than the expensive computer I am buying now. So what if these computers are crap. At these prices I can afford to purchase another.

Besides, I don't want to spend my money on a processor. I don't run an processor intensive apps. I want more memory, a bigger monitor, and a faster hard drive. Spending money on a fast processor is just a waste.

The funniest part about this is that the killer application that would drive people to buy new processors is multimedia sharing. Encoding and decoding multimedia sucks down cycles like crazy. Instead of making it easy for people to share multimedia files Intel and AMD are busy making it as hard as possible. If sales are bad now, imagine when Intel and AMD's new products come out that treat their customers like criminals.

Re:Precisely

[rgmoore]

The funniest part about this is that the killer application that would drive people to buy new processors is multimedia sharing. Encoding and decoding multimedia sucks down cycles like crazy. Instead of making it easy for people to share multimedia files Intel and AMD are busy making it as hard as possible.

Wrong. Multimedia encoding takes lots of processor power, but multimedia sharing takes comparatiely little. Just think about it. How many of the people on the net are actually ripping and encoding the files they're sharing, and how many are just downloading them and passing them along? I'd guess that there are dozens or hundreds of people who only copy for every one who actually encodes something.

Re:Precisely

[Jason Earl]

Yes, I understand that fileserving (especially over the Internet) doesn't require a lot of processor power. I suppose I can't speak for those folks that are infringing on copyrights, but I have been ripping my CDs to Ogg, and I am starting to think a faster processor would be a good thing. And my buddy that is encoding all of his digital video is even more interested in a powerful processor.

And that's what Intel should be pushing. They should be running commmercials where people are sending video CDs of their kids to the grandparents. That requires a nifty processor, and it is precisely the kind of thing that gets normal people to upgrade their computer. Unfortunately Intel has been paying too much attention to Hollywood, who believes that they are the only folks that can make movies.

Besides, why should Intel care if people are downloading media? They aren't in the media biz. Multimedia files are big, and most people also purchase new computers when their hard drive gets full. Sure, you or I might simply pop in a new hard drive, but that's not at all normal. Computer sales mean processor sales. In other words it is in Intel (and AMD's) best interests to encourage people to share multimedia files.

The fact of the matter is that unless you are dealing with multimedia there is little reason to upgrade your Pentium II 500, and yet for whatever reason the hardware companies are going out of their way to make multimedia difficult to do on PCs.

Re:Precisely

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in the world would anyone want to spend the money on a top of the line processor when they can buy an entire computer based on a value processor for $299 at Walmart.com?

Because some of us like the peice of mind that when they plug a computer in that sparks arent going to fly out of the power supply and burn their house down. I feel like I'm the only person that looks at quality anymore. I don't want a faster computer. They're fast enough. I want a quieter cooler computer. I don't want a bigger hard drive, I want a RELIABLE hard drive. What's the point of a faster processor when the BUS speed is still pathetic by comparison?

Re:Precisely

[CainX]

Why in the world would anyone want to spend the money on a top of the line processor when they can buy an entire computer based on a value processor for $299 at Walmart.com?

Actually the XBOX is only $199 now. :)

Re:Precisely

[Jason Earl]

I agree that sometimes a quality computer is in order. However, no matter how nice your computer you probably don't need a top of the line processor. Which was my point. Spending money on the processor is a waste of money that would do more good spent on some other component (like a water cooling system).

Re:Precisely

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in the world would anyone want to spend the money on a top of the line processor when they can buy an entire computer based on a value processor for $299 at Walmart.com?

I need the processing power *now*. It costs me money to wait an extra hour for large compiles.

If you know you need the top of the line processor, then you Know you need it. If you aren't sure if you need the top of the line, then you don't need it.

Re:Precisely

[Zork the Almighty]

Besides, I don't want to spend my money on a processor. I don't run an processor intensive apps. I want more memory, a bigger monitor, and a faster hard drive. Spending money on a fast processor is just a waste.

I totally agree, but as a multimedia encoding person I always want more processor power. I say, who needs a faster processor when you can have MORE processors instead. When I want more processor power, I want to be able to go to the local computer store, plunk down $150 and get another processor for my box. The sooner I can jam 32 Pentium 4s or Athlons or whatever into my computer, the sooner Intel's and AMD's bottom lines are going to improve. There's no way I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars to REPLACE something and get a 25% speed boost, but I'd sure as hell ADD more processors to my box every couple of months.

Re:Precisely

[Fweeky]

32 Athlons? Nice, I'll be interested to see how you handle the 2300w or so of heat :)

Re:Precisely

[Junks Jerzey]

Why in the world would anyone want to spend the money on a top of the line processor when they can buy an entire computer based on a value processor for $299 at Walmart.com?

And the funny part about that $299 PC, is that it's more powerful than what software developers--even game developers--were using just a few years ago. If you had dropped that Walmart PC onto John Carmack's desk in 1993, he would have been completely blown away by its performance.

Re:Precisely

[ConceptJunkie]

...and of course Intel heavily pushed the Pentium 3 as a way to improve downloading media. Remember those commercials? "Get into the Internet" or something. Complete garbage and totally bogus marketing from a truth or relevance point of view.

Re:Precisely

[Jason Earl]

Well, not totally bogus. Processor speed is useful when decoding compressed multimedia files. I know that one of the reasons that upgraded was so that my oggs would skip less. Any tech knows the bottleneck is the network connection (especially if you are behind a modem), but having a faster computer doesn't exactly hurt.

The point is that at least Intel was advertising something that people actually wanted. Which of Intel's customers want Hollywood to be able to control whether they can listen to the songs on their computer? None, that's how many, and yet that's the direction that Intel is going.

Re:Precisely

[Alan Partridge]

SMP systems on the desktop are a fools' paradise. Even "high end" apps are rarely multithreaded. Check out Maya if you don't beleive me. But single CPU unless you're speccing a server for availability under load.

Re:Precisely

[ConceptJunkie]

Well, really it's no different from advertising that driving a Jagamaro Porschevette will get you hot chicks.

Or the logic behind Sprite's "Obey Your Thirst" that would have Nomad blowing chips left and right and sobbing in the corner for Roykirk.

"Don't listen to any advertisements, listen to this advertisement. Don't do what your told, do what we tell you."

Sure?

[rmohr02]

AOL is extremely resource-intensive. When connecting, I can't even get the Ctrl+ALt+Del window to open (don't flame me: I'll use AOL until Saturday when I go to college).

Re:Sure?

[Snowbeam]

Then you'll be forced to use a pen and paper to reacquaint you with humanity. That will then be followed by a life altering course where you learn the meaning of life without AOL. Then you join the workforce and realize that AOL or not you have more important things in life to worry about (eg. Love)

Re:Sure?

[hendridm]

> don't flame me: I'll use AOL until Saturday when I go to college.

And you'll be wishing you were using AOL again once you encounter your University's newly enacted policies regarding piracy and bandwidth throttling.

What school (and where) do you go to that starts classes next week?

Re:Sure?

[rmohr02]

And you'll be wishing you were using AOL again once you encounter your University's newly enacted policies regarding piracy and bandwidth throttling.

I doubt it--I'm not much for pirating music, and now that I have an FM tuner for my computer, I won't bother.

What school (and where) do you go to that starts classes next week?

The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Apparently the Oregon Institute of Technology starts a couple of days later, but I don't know of any others.

Re:Sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

University of Washington starts on Sep 30th.

sick and tired

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever since CPU's hit 200mhz, people haven't been able to notice a read difference unless they're power users. People are just sick and tired of the endless upgrade cycles, especially when the economy sucks big time.

Yeah, I need a 2.something ghz CPU for Word!!!

[fmaxwell]

running OfficeXP and XP Home is a demanding job for most computers.

You can get an Athlon XP1600+ for under $60. How much faster will Office/Windows XP run on an XP2600+ that costs hundreds of dollars more?

Re:Yeah, I need a 2.something ghz CPU for Word!!!

[Komrade S.]

Seriously, I've heard 1ghz AMDs clank on OfficeXP and XP Home. And my point is, can you run XP on a Celeron 300? A computer that was bought 2 years ago? No, no you can't. And what about whatever next revision there is? No, no you still can't, it gets slower and slower, there's a reason why I have a P42GHz and I run Word 2000 instead of OfficeXP.

Re:Yeah, I need a 2.something ghz CPU for Word!!!

[brsmith4]

Um, i ran (now runs linux) Windoze XP and office XP on a PII 300 laptop w/ 192Mb of RAM and both ran reasonably well. Of course, that was with all of those schnazy settings turned of (except ClearType).

Re:Yeah, I need a 2.something ghz CPU for Word!!!

[Jaysyn]

Hell, I just got an Athlon 700Mhz, a Cooler Fan & a Motherboard for less than $70 shipped. Add 256Mb RAM (like what $35 @ the most?) and I guarrantee the resulting PC will run WinXp & Office XP.

Jaysyn

Re:Yeah, I need a 2.something ghz CPU for Word!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok I"m dual booting linux and win xp pro on a Pentuim II 233 with 384 ram and let me say win xp and office xp fly. Word starts in something like 2 seconds and using it is always snappy and responsive. Turn all win xp's fancy crap off.

Re:Yeah, I need a 2.something ghz CPU for Word!!!

[BlameFate]

Me too. Running XP Pro on a AMD K6 266 with 162MB in a four year old laptop, works fine and is responsive and snappy (classic windows theme, natch). When I want linux I pop in the Knoppix CD and reboot and mount the empty partition of the internal drive to save stuff to.

Re:Yeah, I need a 2.something ghz CPU for Word!!!

[ncc74656]

Seriously, I've heard 1ghz AMDs clank on OfficeXP and XP Home.

XP Home sucks ass on nearly everything you throw at it. Someone here at work still has it on his P4 notebook (he's not ready to nuke it because he's not sure if the jog wheel (it's a Sony) will work under Win2K), and even after turning off most of the chrome, it's still sluggish...even if all you do is click outside the Start menu to close it. The first thing I did with my notebook when I bought it was boot up a Linux CD to identify the hardware (/proc/pci), then pop in the Win2K install CD and nuke XP off of it. It's much more responsive than the aforementioned P4 notebook...and this one's a slower-clocked Athlon XP with SDRAM (non-DDR).

Why AMD or Intel?

[implex]

Rather than speed I find myself looking for power savings. Getting a fast processor that I can roast a chook on doesn't do me any good. The Via and Eden processors on the mini-ITX board suit me. A smaller board so that my computer can be hidden and is not so intrusive. Couple that witt a flat screen and a slide away keyboard and look what kinds of things you can do! price and performance for what most of us need.

Devil's Advocation

[Jahf]

So, most people seem to be in agreement that you don't need a faster processor to run today's applications. I would agree with that for the most part. I'm able to subsist on a desktop P3-800 and a laptop P3-600.

However, it's important to realize that the drop in sales will also result in a corresponding drop in research.

I'm kind of not happy about that ... since I think it will slow down the pace of technology, at least on the client-side (versus server side, which was just beginning to be penetrated by the desktop architectures).

It may have 2 very cool side-effects, though:

1) Pervasive computing may become more ... pervasive? It will be possible for the embedded computing to catch-up to the desktop power because more time will be allowed for miniaturization -and- embedded platforms will last longer (example: AMD is killing it's AMD K6-2 line because it's too slow ... this will hurt alot of embedded products because the market isn't strong enough to allow redevelopment onto newer platforms)

2) Network/Telecom/etc infrastructure can finally catch-up. I strongly believe one of the things that caused the Internet boom was that a majority of people had access to modern telephone lines and most could scrounge up a computer. Since then, computing technology has outpaced infrastructure development (by that I mean -many- people currently still can't get xDSL, and yet your average new computer could completely swamp a T3). If things slow down and stabilize, we can again let the infrastructure mature and saturate the market, which is often the recipe needed for a new technological boom.

However, I am going to be upset if I can't buy a 32/64bit Hammer in a year at a decent cost, just because I want it :)

Re:Devil's Advocation

[hendridm]

> However, it's important to realize that the drop in sales will also result in a corresponding drop in research.

Perhaps, but I think much of the research will shift to making existing technology smaller and cheaper. Perhaps next year when they we are discussing the latest-and-greatest here on Slashdot, it will be part of a $299 machine at Walmart. Ok, maybe not quite that soon :)

Seriously though, I don't think we need all that much innovation on the desktop anytime soon. I would like to see them focus on software innovations and technology like making USB more reliable. Remember, mainstream 64-bit is just around the corner too, which will probably mean more spending once the prices reach acceptable consumer levels.

I'm still waiting for an open-source version of Visual Studio to show up on SourceForge.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[Anonymous Coward]

However, I am going to be upset if I can't buy a 32/64bit Hammer in a year at a decent cost, just because I want it :)

AMD is not going to throw money down the toilet, at least, not intentionally. Currently they are concentrating their efforts where they can actually make money, namely on Athlon and Duron.

We have already seen that Opteron is being put on the back burner. It probably will eventually come out (mid-to-late 2003) but not in huge quantities.

Unless people start buying on the high end again, there may never be a desktop version of Hammer.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[jbolden]

Those prices are at acceptable levels today. Go to Intel's pricelist and subtract off the cost of cache from the Itantium 2 you'll find it doesn't run much more than the pentium4. All it takes is an OS app manufacturer ready to make the switch. I don't see MS doing it, I hope Apple does (since they need to make a switch anyway).

Re:Devil's Advocation

[hendridm]

> All it takes is an OS app manufacturer ready to make the switch. I don't see MS doing it

Why don't you think MS would be willing? It seems it would be easy for them to port the existing code used for Microsoft's AS Special Edition to a "Professional" (desktop) version.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[jbolden]

Microsoft has never been great about pushing technological change through and they focus heavily on compatability. While AS supports 64 I'm not sure how much else they have that does. For example even SQL server 64 bit is only in beta.

If Microsoft wanted to make the move you'd see way more apps. Anything they do has years of vaporware before products ship. The lack of vaporware is telling; they aren't pushing the 64 bit platform and don't intend to be there by 2005.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[Christopher Thomas]

Unless people start buying on the high end again, there may never be a desktop version of Hammer.

It's possible that AMD's falling victim to the Osborne Effect. I know _I'm_ waiting until I can get a Hammer system before upgrading.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[spinkham]

That would indeed stink, as I've decided that I'm not spending money on a new motherboard/precessor until it's 32/64 bit x86 compatible (AKA hammer.)
Perhaps it will be a platform that is finally faster and better then the Alphas in all respects..

Re:Devil's Advocation

[Citizen of Earth]

So, most people seem to be in agreement that you don't need a faster processor to run today's applications. I would agree with that for the most part. I'm able to subsist on a desktop P3-800 and a laptop P3-600.

I have an 866-MHz Linux box at home and a 400-MHz Linux box at work, and they get faster every year.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[Jahf]

Unless I read it wrong, that pricelist shows the cheapest Itanium as the Itanium 2 , 900Mhz w/ 1.5MB cache at $1,338.

The most expensive Pentium 4 (2.8Ghz) is $508 and the 2.8Ghz Xeon is $562.

The difference is $836, more than double the cost of the Pentium 4. I definitely do find that runs more than the Pentium 4, even if I could find the Itanium at that price (I haven't found many places that list Itanium processors, and those that do rarely list the versions with less than full cache, which lists over $4K).

In a market where most people are buying entire machines (minus monitor if you want a fast machine, but in many cases with monitor) for the difference between those CPUs, I would say Itanium is priced way out of that market.

Intel's plans (read somewhere, sorry, I don't remember where) are not to bring Itanium below the $3,000 average purchase price market, and they don't plan to reach -that- level until 2005.

Hammer is the only 64bit solution that is currently planned for a very long time in the consumer market. Plus, from what I remember the Itanium provides poor 32bit performance where Hammer actually excels there.

Not that the Itanium isn't a purer 64bit solution, just that it does not fit the markets this thread is aimed at.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[Kiwi]

Hammer is the only 64bit solution that is currently planned for a very long time in the consumer market.

There is also the rumoured Motorola PowerPC G5, which is supposed to be 64-bit.

- Sam

Re:Devil's Advocation

[drinkypoo]

I'll be upgrading my car for now. If Hammer were out now, I'd be buying a new MB/CPU/RAM instead of some badass tires for my new wheels.

Now I have to choose between a new geforce card (when the new one comes out) and a front air dam. So far my GF3Ti200 is holding pretty well...

Re:Devil's Advocation

[jbolden]

You missed the part about subtracting out the cost of the cache. Itanium 2 is only selling in a very high end configuration right now; but it wouldn't be hard to sell a version with less cache.

For example if you look at the pentium III line at the same mhz:
700mhz PIII with 2m cache = $1980
700mhz PIII with 1m cache = $1177

you pay a lot for the cache

Itantium 2 900mhz with 1.5m cache = $1338
Pentium 3 900 mhz with 2m cache = $3692
Itanium 2 1000mhz with 3m cache = $4362

Get the cache down to 512k and the Itanium will cost no more (and perhaps less) than a PIV.

So yes I think we could move right now to Itanium 2 configurations (and IMHO this would be a great move for Apple given their CPU problems but that's another thread). Because there aren't 64 bit consummer apps Intel isn't building a consummer version of the chip but they could do so almost at will if there were any demand.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[Shuh]

So yes I think we could move right now to Itanium 2 configurations (and IMHO this would be a great move for Apple given their CPU problems but that's another thread).

<Megahertz-n-Processor Fan-Boy Mode> But the Itanium only runs 1200Mhz! That's even slower than the G4! The 2.8Ghz P4 R000LZ! </Megahertz-n-Processor Fan-Boy Mode>

Re:Devil's Advocation

[Shuh]

All it takes is an OS app manufacturer ready to make the switch. I don't see MS doing it, I hope Apple does (since they need to make a switch anyway).

Why? Apple's rip CD/DVD, do SETI@home, RC5, etc. as fast or faster than most P.C.'s! Why go to a slower architecture that needs microwave-level megahertz to perform well? Not to mention the fact that they are both in Microsoft's DRM-pocket? No thank you.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[jbolden]

Methinks you didn't read the thread. The conversation is about Itanium 2 not Pentium IV. Itanium 2 is much much faster than either the G4 or the P4.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[Shuh]

Methinks you didn't read the thread. The conversation is about Itanium 2 not Pentium IV. Itanium 2 is much much faster than either the G4 or the P4.

Actually, the Itanium 2 is behind in SPECint with the 2.8Ghz P4, but is roughly double the SPECfp. Go to Intel's own site and they will tell you as much. As far as megaFLOPs are concerned, the G4 has them beat hands-down (as evidenced by both Apple and Intel's sites). A variant of the 64-bit Power architecture is a much more logical choice for Apple because it would give the best backwards compatibility. Additionally, DRM circuitry is about to start infecting the P4, and I don't see the leap to Itanium as improbable.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[jbolden]

I agree 100% the power4 would be a much easier change and if IBM's consummer version is meant for Apple terrific. If they can figure out a way to build a power4 that runs much more cheaply and doesn't have the heat problems terrific. If they can't Intel has the Itanium 2 today.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[Jahf]

But your original post seemed more that it was arguing that MS is not pursuing this. The cache argument is much more geared against Intel than MS.

I still think Itanium's 32bit issues would stall it in this market ... AMD's Hammer or Intel's supersecret-incase-Itanium-fails 32bit/64bit hybrid processor have a much better chance in this market.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[Shuh]

I agree 100% the power4 would be a much easier change and if IBM's consummer version is meant for Apple terrific. If they can figure out a way to build a power4 that runs much more cheaply and doesn't have the heat problems terrific.

The PowerPC s found in Macs (601/603/604/G3/G4/G5, etc.) are all "consumer-versions" of IBM's Power 4 workstation RISC processor.

If they can't Intel has the Itanium 2 today.

IBM has been in the high-end RISC workstation space for years with a modern, efficient, RISC chip that does 64-bit. Intel, OTOH, has found cranking megahertz on a 25-year-old x86 ISA isn't going to cut it indefinitely and has just recently got into RISC with Itanium 2.

Apple already moved to a modern chip ISA with the PowerPC back in 1994. It's Intel/Microsoft's turn to bring the P.C. into a similar architectural space with the Itanium 2. Why would Apple want to bear the early-adopter cost for a another modern RISC architecture that doesn't buy them much extra performance over the modern RISC architecture they already have?

Re:Devil's Advocation

[jbolden]

There is one and only one reason, a consummer level version of the RISC architecture isn't being sold. There aren't any technical reasons to dump the G4 line but either IBM or Motorolla has to show interest in supporting Apple.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[jbolden]

Let me charify:

1 - There is a belief that the cost of contructing 64 bit CPUs is high. My primary goal was to disprove this.

2 - Further I hoped to show that Intel has the capacity to produce this cheaps almost immediately if there was a source of demand

3 - To create demand at the consummer level for these chips an OS manufacturer needs to step up to the plate and manage to convince the app guys to go along

4 - Microsoft by far would be the best choice to do this, and they show no interest in pursuing this.

Incidentally Linux has excellent 64 bit support. Redhat and perhaps HP might be able to pull a consummer chip off themselves (i.e. guarantee Intel enough sales to make it worth their while).

The other posssible candidate is Apple since they need to make a shift anyway. I'd agree that Hammer might push Intel to make the 64 bit chip with less cache available since they wouldn't want AMD to have something they don't have.

I think it is Microsoft that is holding back wide adoption (for years into the future) and Intel which is holding adobtion in terms of early adobters.

Re:Devil's Advocation

[Anonymous Coward]

K6 was more likely killed because they didn't want to set aside fab space for it anymore.

That said, I tend to agree with the infrastructure issues-- mostly related to that last mile-- are going to be the real bottleneck for the next couple of years. (Lord knows there's enough fiber sitting out there waiting to get lit up...)

Lazy Programmer Syndrome

[victim]

At work we refer to this as Lazy Programmer Syndrome. In short, left to his own devices, a programmer will work on performance until it is just tolerable on his kick ass high end development machine. If he is developing a multiuser system he will only optimize until performance is tolerable with a single user (himself). Have pity on the server when 50 people start using the service simultaneously.

There is know known cure other than enlightened managers and these are hard to come by.

Re:Lazy Programmer Syndrome

[unicron]

If lack of time due to deadlines is the only thing keeping software from being optimized to its full potential, then Duke Nukem Forver will run like the friggin wind on a 386.

Re:Lazy Programmer Syndrome

[FyRE666]

:-) We had something similar last year on a pretty big web project. We had two servers - one running httpd and mail, the other a dedicated database server. Due to the huge and unnecesarily complicated database (the customer wanted the ability to add new columns/tables at any time via a web interface and still have it work ok - not very efficient since it ended up with a huge number of redundant tables) it was taking about 2.5-3 seconds average for a query.

This didn't seem too bad until it went live and tried to cope with over 1000 visitors all searching and messing about within the first hour. The phone was ringing with complaints just after lunch ;-)

It was then that I happened to notice the dual P3 database server only actually had one processor fitted. The supplier swore that we'd only ordered one CPU which seems odd when we knew we needed two and it's slightly inefficient to buy a dual CPU motherboard with 1 Proc. Plus we'd paid for 2.

Didn't make much difference anyway; with another proc in there the load was still way above what it could handle ;-) You live and learn...

Re:Lazy Programmer Syndrome

[Fulcrum of Evil]

There is know known cure other than enlightened managers and these are hard to come by.

Sounds like what you really mean is Unrealistic Deadline Syndrome. Try telling your boss that the software is feature complete, but it needs to be 50% faster. See if he gives you the extra month.

Re:Lazy Programmer Syndrome

[astrotek]

dont forget team fortress 2

Re:Lazy Programmer Syndrome

[victim]

Psst. I am the boss. :-)

Re:Lazy Programmer Syndrome

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

TF2 isnt that old really. The original release date was Q3 1998 (quoted from TF in birthday mode). I believe Duke Nukem Forever dates back to atleast 1992. By extrapolation, I'd say that would put TF2's min requirements at about 500mhz, which seems about right if they're just modding the HalfLife engine(min 166mhz 64mb), which is based on Quake1(min 386 8mb).

mac is GH3Y

[Anonymous Coward]

bitch

Building Systems

[T-Kir]

I've found the best way to build a system is to get the mid/high level chip rather than the top end, the savings are large enough to speed up the system in other areas (like lower latency RAM).

If you can build someone a decent computer, but keeping costs down (I don't mean getting crappy componants), they're far more likely to upgrade sooner and in the same manner so the cost is more spread. i.e. someone spends $2000-3000 on a brand spanking new computer (latest everything) but loses the ultra performance crown in 3-6 months, is going to be less inclined to get a new system 1-2 years down the line (unless they have cash to burn), wheras if the costs are under $800-1000, they never lose the ultra peformance crown 'cos they never had it in the first place.

I suppose the nice thing about new chip releases (esp. major revisions) is they knock the lower specced chips down nicely.

Re:Building Systems

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly what I recommend to my customers

fasted??

[Anonymous Coward]

fasted??

Shouldn't that be fastest?

two words (and some numbers)

[cdf12345]

UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2003

End of arguement.

Re:two words (and some numbers)

[Carnth]

Actually, the UT2003 demo plays pretty good on my P2 400 Geforce2 GTS. It appears to be very video card dependent.

Re:two words (and some numbers)

[Anonymous Coward]

Guees you forgot about the part where the UT2003 demo is only using about 50% of the textures that will be included in the final version.

Re:two words (and some numbers)

[Anonymous Coward]

Not for me, and not for a lot of UT fans is my guess. From the core group I frag with exactly none of them are even going to buy this game. Granted, my group only represents four players, but they all love UT and we play quite often. More so in the past year than currently do to marriages and babies, but we have spent many a day just fragging each other repreatedly. We even had a ranking system at one point, and a title. I repeat, not a single one of us is buying this game! The graphics may be prettier if you have a system capable of exploiting the engine, but the game play is just not better. Worse, the game play is not even as good as UT.

Maybe my little group is unique, I actually kind of hope it is and the game does well. I would not be surprised to find many other avid UT players skipping this game though. Time will tell I suppose.

Re:two words (and some numbers)

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla

End of argument.

Have you ever tried "phpMyAdmin" on mozilla. Even on my fast machine, it crawls like treacle - and forces me to use IE. Mozilla guys should get optimisation of the gecko engine on their priority list instead of tabs and other candy.

I'd be buying hardware if I had the money

[Crag]

I browse /. at a threshold of 4, so if this is redundant, I appologize.

I have an infinite appatite for more toys. The only thing preventing me from buying quad Xeons, dual Athlons and a bunch of Sparc hardware is that I'm broke. This last year has been very difficult, and I think even more so in the technology sector. If we all start getting rich off of killing foreigners or something, then maybe the demand for more power will return. In the mean time I'd be more impressed if they could show that people were spending the same (inflation adjusted) money on lower-end hardware.

The article itself does mention the economic slump, but doesn't actually provide any real facts or data, just anecdote and fluff.

Re:I'd be buying hardware if I had the money

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a really, really bad speller.

Re:I'd be buying hardware if I had the money

[Citizen of Earth]

I have an infinite appatite for more toys. The only thing preventing me from buying quad Xeons, dual Athlons and a bunch of Sparc hardware is that I'm broke. This last year has been very difficult

I have tons of money, in part because I only buy things that I think I will get a lot of use out of, which is why I have a processor that is one or two generations old. Like others have been saying, it suits my needs.

Economy

[Snowbeam]

The story implies in part that users are wising up to the point that they don't need the extra power to use their apps. I respectfully disagree with that. I want a new machine right now, but the money has other uses in todays economy that are more important for me to deal with. For example, paying off certain bills that are now garnering higher interest rates. True, my current machine is capable of doing what it NEEDS to do. Alas, were this the economy of two years ago, I would be getting a machine that could do what I WANT it to do. CNN has it partially right, but they should accomodate all the factors and not just a singular one.

Also if your running linux

[The Analog Kid]

You don't need as much power, a 200mhz pentium pro, with scsi drives, is perfectly fine for some server tasks.

Re:Also if your running linux

[Anonymous Coward]

amen brother

Re:Also if your running linux

[questionlp]

That's exactly what I am using at work as a DNS caching, internal CVSup mirror of FreeBSD's RELENG_4 and Ports source directories, device monitoring, and syslog server. All running off of a Compaq Proliant 2500 (single PPro 200 w/ 256K cache, 480MB of RAM, 5x 4GB SCSI hard drives in RAID-5). It used to also run a web, mail and SFTP server for the Tech team, but it got moved onto a different machine with more HD space (that new machine is running both PostgreSQL and MySQL for testing).

Even then, the server was still very responsive and more stable than what it used to handle: Exchange 5.5, NT4 + BDC, WINS, DHCP, SQL Server 6.5 and IIS 4.0. It gives me shivers just thinking about that.

Uhh, no.

[Bowie J. Poag]

More like:

I dont have any money because my company got rid of me, replaced me with two Nigerians and a six-pack of Hindus, despite my having 4 certifications and 10 years experience."

Cheers,

Apple loses on MHz and Price ...

[AHumbleOpinion]

The article is not necessarily good news for Apple. People may be trending for price over MHz but Apple loses on both MHz and price. People who buy Macs are more concerned with usability or they are oriented toward a particular "Mac" application. Thrown in a few fashion statements as well. In other words nothing has really changed.

Re:Apple loses on MHz and Price ...

[Anonymous Coward]

i have like 7 pee cees, running various levels of redhat, and suse, and a couple of winXP's.

I will be leaving microsoft completely, when i get a decent used g4 to run os x.

do you know why?

http://www.adobe.com/
photoshop
illustrator
h ttp://www.macromedia.com/
dreamweaver
flash
htt p://www.propellerheads.se/
reason
rebirth
http: //www.graphisoft.com/
archicad

unless you prefer me to stay on Windows.

i can always do that.

Re:Apple loses on MHz and Price ...

[Anonymous Coward]

unless you prefer me to stay on Windows. i can always do that.

There is nothing wrong with that.

Re:Apple loses on MHz and Price ...

[Anonymous Coward]

unless you prefer me to stay on Windows.

It all depends on what you can personally tolerate...

Stop working on faster processors...

[Kaz Riprock]

I think AMD and Intel should send their R&D dollars to Western Digital, IBM, and Maxtor. Instead of wasting the money building processors nobody wants, they could all be working on hard drives that spin faster than 7200 RPM and have bigger than 8 MB in their cache.

THEN I'd be happier with the speed of my computer.

Re:Stop working on faster processors...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can buy, right now, hard drives that spin more than twice as fast as 7200 RPM. You can also get more than 8 MB cache if you really want to but it's generally smarter to just get more RAM and cache it nearer to the CPU anyway.

Re:Stop working on faster processors...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard drives are one (big) factor, but unrealistic that processor companies would fund development. People never look at how fast a drive is, they look at how BIG it is. In my opinion the chip manufactorers should look into something they can influence, like actually increasing the bus speed.

Moore's Law meets Marketing Dept.

[lugonn]

Hmmmm...I wonder if we will keep seeing chip speeds double every 18 months, or if the ChipMakers(tm) will only offer consumers faster chips when slower chips see lost sales?

GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Directrix1]

You heard me right. The people who are responsible for our current economic slump, are the game developers. You might say, "Game developers, I would think game players because their not buying this newfangled technology, but not game developers." Well, its the game developers' fault you chump. Always developing crap that runs on all last-gen vid cards and never embracing powerful new technologies. Their slow integration of more modern technologies has made people so disillusioned with newer technologies that they frankly don't give a rats ass anymore. I agree with them. Most games out now can play on most old hardware. Because everybody is so damn afraid that their software won't sell because it won't run on existing hardware that they just limit its capabilities to hardware that has already penetrated the market. So why upgrade. If I have a computer that can play any game out there (and had it for the last 5 years), why should I upgrade.

Developers should stand up to their patriotic duty and develop games which thrive only on new hardware, only on the fastest, biggest, brightest boxes under the sun. Only on machines which took mommy and daddy twenty years to save up enough money for and will be outdated in the inverse of that time. Only on the biggest capitalistic ventures of all computer fabrication history. Only when the developers step up, will our economy recover. But there is still the problem with the throw away society vs. the persistent friendly environment struggle raging in our computing worlds right now.

This is where Microsoft needs to step up to the plate. Require an entire internal hard-drive ONLY for the OS. And require all programs and documents to be stored in an external storage mechanism which when plugged into any existing windows workstation will automatically load in the registry, shortcuts, desktop, and what not (applicable to the users security context of course). This way when somebody decides: "Hey I can't play new games any more I better upgrade." They won't have the laziness factor breaking in with, "Yeah but then you'd have to get that geek from next door to help install all your programs and stuff like that and its just not worth the hassle." Because people in America are lazy and are all about how much effort they have to exert to get a task done. Using the approach I have stated all they gotta do is unplug their drive toss out the computer. And say hello to brand spanking shining new computer, and good bye $2600 cash. With which they can finally play all those newfangled games, unlike everybody stuck with the last gen computer.

The End

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Directrix1]

And also I forgot to mention that computer manufacturers really need to jump on the bandwagon and actually produce some kind of fast hardware with seemingly limitless amounts of RAM. The next computer I get will look like the computer that is started up in the intro sequence in Mega Man X. RAM measured in the TeraBytes baby, yeah! And processor speeds in the TeraHz. And how bout some friggin' FSB speeds that match internal clock speed for a change. Jeez I'm getting tired of all these stupid latencies inherit in having to have 75% of the data cached already or have the speed effectively dropped exactly to the FSB speed. Also, why aren't there three sub processors one that does the actual operations, one that controls all data input making sure no cycles go without processing data, and one with data output making all results immediately available for display or what not next clock cycle (all three should be programmable with their own instruction sets and use the same registers). Just my 5000 cents.

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[FauxPasIII]

> Also, why aren't there three sub processors one that does the actual operations,
> one that controls all data input making sure no cycles go without processing data,
> and one with data output making all results immediately available for display or what
> not next clock cycle (all three should be programmable with their own instruction
> sets and use the same registers).

Sounds like fun, but the machine would be a living nightmare to program for. Witness the playstation 2 for a real-world example of this design mentality.

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Jason Earl]

Uh, Game developers aren't in the market to sell hardware. They are selling software. They want as broad a potential market as possible. If a person has to buy a new $2000 computer just to play the developers $50 game, then the developer isn't going to get a lot of sales. Games like that might make Intel happy, but if they really want games that suck up cycles like mad, then they should write them.

My guess is that with the XBox out, things are only going to get worse. Most PC Game companies won't want to write something that couldn't at least theoretically be ported to the XBox. Microsoft has basically removed most gamers primary reason for upgrading their PC.

As for the rest of your rant, what Microsoft really needs is a /home directory like UNIX. All of my files, settings, and everything else sits in that directory so that moving to a new machine is easy.

P.S. I know you were trolling.

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[SClitheroe]

Actually, witness mainframes for a real-world example of this design mentality... Using VLIW and optimizing compilers, it is easy to abstract dedicated I/O processors as nothing more than opcodes of the CPU you are targeting. And since your compiler looks after the optimizations, you basically get a free lunch.

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Directrix1]

But this /home equivalent would also need to store all registry entries needed to execute their programs (registry entries which should be restrained to only being under the users personal registry area.).

Also, I'm just saying that what I said is what the game developers would need to do. I know they will never do it. Financially they have little to gain. After all why make a game thats so damn good that everyone upgrades just to play it, when you can crank out just a random POS DirectX6 compatible app that looks pretty enough on the box to pull in the suckers at Hastings.

Its sad but now I get no joy out of any game coming out. Games are no longer novel. There is nothing Getting Better in them anymore. I mean first it was just the fun of the game, (back when everything didn't have to be first person 3d). The better graphics might have been a reason to upgrade to a better atari or whatever, but the games were pretty much just fun games. Now the games are the graphics and everything is just a plain shoot-em up POS or unoriginal drivel puzzle game just trying to imitate tetris in some new dumbass way. I don't know, maybe we are reaching the limits of entertainment. Enter the rise of camping again, I guess.

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Directrix1]

So keep your precious x86 instruction set (or RISC or whatever the hell architecture you use), but make this one like a math coprocessor (i.e. optional extra code to use) that standard x86 instructions can map to when needing to access data, (hell this could just be implemented entirely within the box without an outside interface), or they can pass an opcode to enable it and use it. All they'd have to do is add a few instructions, registers, and buses to make it all possible if you want it. Because no matter what, it will be useful. It would seem like it would beat MMX SSE or whatever all those new extensions are.

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Jason Earl]

But this /home equivalent would also need to store all registry entries needed to execute their programs (registry entries which should be restrained to only being under the users personal registry area.).

NO! That's the problem with the registry, it's chuck full of crap. It's amazing to me that Windows is still trying to get this right when UNIX has had the right idea for approximately a century.

System settings and default settings for applications would go someplace besides /home (like UNIX's /etc) and settings in /etc would be overridden by settings in the users /home. That way when I moved to a new machine I could move my home drive and (assuming the applications are installed) everything would work the same. Windows has the worst of both worlds. Not only is it practically impossible to move the modifications to your profile to a new box, but it is also impossible for a systems administrator to set up default settings for users without being some sort of a Pagan God.

As for your rant on gaming. My personal opinion is that technology doesn't make cool games. I still spend time playing Nethack, for crying out loud. And I made the mistake of introducing my Boy Scouts to Netrek, and now I can't get them to leave me alone about the game.

Game companies support older technologies because they have learned that Microsoft is as much their competitor as their friend. If you depend on them too heavily they will back stab you. That and they know that if they require the newer technology then they are going to get calls from folks every time it breaks their PC.

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[1in10]

As for the rest of your rant, what Microsoft really needs is a /home directory like UNIX. All of my files, settings, and everything else sits in that directory so that moving to a new machine is easy.

c:\Documents And Settings\

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Jason Earl]

Yes, they are getting closer. That's at least better than %WINDIR%\profile, it's still not /home though. I literally can tar up my home directory move it to a new machine and be done. Because I don't have permission to write anywhere else (well /tmp) I can rest assured that I have all of my info too.

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[guybarr]

P.S. I know you were trolling.

he wasn't trolling, he was drolling. and very nicely so, IMHO.

lighten up :)

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[ncc74656]

what Microsoft really needs is a /home directory like UNIX.

Something like c:\Documents and Settings, you mean? Not every app knows it's there, though most programs that try to save to My Documents will get redirected into that directory. (And what is with /. not accepting &nbsp; and other character entities?)

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's roughly what modern, superscalar pipelined processors do, they just hide it a bit. They're actually very efficient, even for their absurd clock rates.

As for fast FSBs, I agree with you, but try making memory that's stable in the gigahertz range sometime. Give them time, but don't expect the memory to stay cheap! If you want memory bandwidth to equal your true clock speeds, the memory will become rather more expensive than your processor - period. Deal with it, and you'll have blistering performance, but not until someone comes up with a much better fab technique or goes optical, or both.

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Alan Partridge]

err... how can God be considered extraterrestrial when it is merely a figment of the human imagination?

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Directrix1]

You are ignorant dumb sir. How can the existance of an entity that exists in a completely different domain from that of our universe be proven or even disproven. Not only did I not mention any one specific god, but I also did not even mention god as being a physical entity in our universe. You believe that aliens could be out there, why is it so far fetched that other (I hate to use this phrase) "planes of existence" could be "out there". For all we know the entire human thought process might be the result of another existential domain's interactions. Our universe has a set of constraints and relations (or phsyics) which all entities within have to behave according to. These rules end when you are no longer talking about the domain in which we exist.

Now I'm not saying ETs don't exist. I'm just saying the methods we are using to discover them are flawed, unreliable, and not expansive enough to even begin to find them. In other words, we are going about this task all wrong. End of Story

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Alan Partridge]

Of course I am ignorant. It's YOUR failure to recognise your own limits that leads you to believe in God, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus et al. For the record, you are the one with the opinion that requires proof, you don't need to PROVE something doesn't exist - nothing cannot be experienced.

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Directrix1]

Jeez, guy. First of all the tooth fairy, Santa Claus et al are all real. I saw them kissing mommy under the mistletoe (that dirty whore, I literally had to pull daddy away from the shotgun mom gave him for Christmas :-P). Secondly those other characters you mentioned supposedly exist in our realm (if you go by the assumption that they exist at all). Even though a god might show its presence with actions in our realm, that does not necessarily mean it exists alongside us. Thirdly, you have never heard of disproving theories. OK, well I propose the theory: "God exists in a different adjunct existential domain to ours, whose only relation with our known physical universe are the discrete interactions which manifest themselves in our realm as a result of the god's actions." Now a proof is REQUIRED to show that I am wrong. So until that happens, shut your nerdy mouth and go get some friggin caffeine soap. You smell. Also, your double negative is hard to reverse, are you saying everything can be experienced, or that there are only some things which can be experienced?

And if your a programmer and you can't quite follow what I'm proposing above, then let me put it to you in this way: Take the movie The Matrix, subtract out the preposterous notion that they would be using our bodies as heat sources and make all the humans in the simulation just another entity in the simulation. The realm containing this massive super-computing project is your adjunct existential realm, the system operator is god, and you my friend must be about 3 bits. Goodbye

Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!

[Alan Partridge]

so... you believe in a supernatural creator because you SAW THE MATRIX? What's hard to understand about "you cannot experience nothing". Also, the tooth fairy and Santa Claus MUST be supernatural beings because they operate outside of both our experience and known physical laws.

Just like your God.

And your powers of logical deduction, it would seem.

HELLO!

Well, yeah...

[Lordfly]

Name an application that requires as a minimum spec anything over 1 ghz. Most consumer-end products use maybe half that (Battlefield 1942, for instance, requires a 500 mhz with a 3d card... that was top of the line 3 years ago, but still).

I think it's just a case of hardware outpacing software. Even the most fervant Ubergeek doesn't need the fastest processor anymore... my 1.4 ghz Athlon runs everything just fine, thank you very much. I should be able to run everything coming down the pike for the next year or two, in any case.

And by the time I get around to upgrading again, 2+ ghz processors will (in theory) be dirt cheap :)

Lordfly

Re:Well, yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well.. its not more than 1Ghz... but..

A guy at work got a box of cereal for his kids last year... he's been surviving on a P2/400 for years now. Inside the box of cereal was a friggin Lego program or something like that (a "freebie" kids program)... he tried to install it, and it ran like crap on his 400... .. until he read the instructions. Requires a 700Mhz processor or higher. What the heck is the world coming to?? 700Mhz for a Lego program??

Of course, wait for Microsoft's next release... I'm sure it'll be coming, because the CPU vendors will need to sell more processors, and the drive vendors need to sell bigger hard drives.

Microsoft Windows 2004 / Office 2004 (ZP?). Minimum system requirements: 2Ghz CPU, 80GB of disk (with enough room left to play solitaire). What more do you get? Hey, it plays solitaire and browses the web... what more do you need? Why does it take more space for so little more in features? Uhh.. well, we don't really know.. maybe its those "required" 1GB data files full of junk that we put in there, because we couldn't figure out how else to make it so big. To add even more space, along with making IE7.5 part of the kernel, we decided to throw in solitaire, office, visio, and quake3.

Re:Well, yeah...

[Kredal]

cat /dev/random > neededfile.dat

if (neededfile.dat == null)
{BSOD();} ... or something. (:

Not a big surprise...

[frank_adrian314159]

I started making system purchasing decisions for other reasons around the 800 MHz point. My main issues now are size and silence. I could not care less that I could double my SETI@Home work units. The thing that allowed me to do that would still be noisy and clunky. Give me small and quiet any day.

Re:Not a big surprise...

[Sebastopol]

Give me small and quiet any day.

I hear that from friends. I'm in the same camp. I waited for 1GHz piii's to drop below $150 so I could run Linux fanless with a matrox 2d card. I'm a coder not a gamer -- I want quiet!

I looked at the cappucino (at thinkgeek.com), but it was too expensive (yeah, I'm a cheapskate!). You might be interested in it.

Re:Not a big surprise...

[Anonymous Coward]

amen to size and silence!

that's why i use a mini-itx mobo from Via! $100 and you get everything: LAN, audio, graphics, CPU, 1 PCI, RS232, USB, S3, RCA, LPT - all you need to do is add RAM and a hard drive!

yea, i'm going to run right out at pop $150+ for a P4 CPU alone!

now wonder the sticker sez: "Idiot Inside"!

Re:Not a big surprise...

[frank_adrian314159]

I looked at the cappucino, but it was too expensive. You might be interested in it.

Oddly enough I just ordered one. BTW, there are cheaper places to order it than Think Geek. I found a bare bones version for about $425 but I didn't want to screw it up and my fingers are a bit too big for that tight of place :-), so I ordered one pre-made w/512K mem, a 40Gb HD, and a DVD-ROM for about $900. Expensive, yes. But it's my one toy for the year, so...

Prices!

[echophase]

Look at the price comparison from pricewatch.com:

For an XP 2200 - $145

XP 2000: $90

Not a huge performance jump there to justify the $55 increase in price.


Maybe users are saving money by not getting the "top of the line" cpu and dumping more money into components, such as video cards, more memory, faster hard drives, etc.

Re:Prices!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just a $50, it's more than a 60% increase. I don't know how AMD's numbering scheme compares to actual speeds any longer, but the more expensive CPU is no more than 10% faster, and the actual performance increase probably averages out to something like 5%.

Re:Prices!

[Squalish]

AMD's numbering scheme is supposed to be equal to pre-palamino Athlon XP's. This was back when Athlon MHz was the same as P3 Mhz.

This is quite understandable

[Matthew Luckie]

I have the same experience in running my mission critical gateway machine, an Intel Pentium Pro 180 that is collocated in my parents' basement running linux. You might scoff at my use of the term "mission critical", but you don't want to see how mad mum gets when she can't read her recipes!

That machine does samba, apache, printing, xdm, and NAT. It is always responsive, although it does only serve three people. I could see it powering a large corporation (around 200 users) with a good administrator that keeps open source bloatware away from it.

I refuse to run software like KDE / Gnome (aren't these the same now on redhat?), mozilla, vim, and openoffice. I have ensured that my users are happy with twm, lynx, and emacs - with some hacked up training courses I put together.

Re:This is quite understandable

[miracle69]

I'm interested in finding more about this particular setup.

My Fiance is a cooking nut, so I want to support this as much as possible, so I won't loose my beer-and-pizza gut from college. I've looked into some linux-based recipe programs but she didn't like any of them.

What sort of set-up do you have?

feel free to email me at m i r a c l e @ spamfree p r o c y o n . c o m

Re:This is quite understandable

[archen]

I imagine it wouldn't be to hard to set up MySQL on a machine and then just make a CGI script to interact with it. Even better in that it's totally abstracted from the client machine, so she could read recipies no matter what type of computer she used.

Re:This is quite understandable

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a "data retailer" of sorts, and we use satellite delivery to get the data out to customers. Of course we outsorce the satellite part, so we need to send the data to the satellite company. We send somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million files daily.

No joke -- the "uplink" computer, the one that sends ALL the data to the satellite, is a pentium 100, 128 megs RAM, running RedHat 5.something. It has a turbo button. It is really something to behold, once you know the age of the computer. But if all you are doing is sockets, why pay more?

Re:This is quite understandable

[Corporate Troll]

Same situation here...just it is a P166 with 128Meg RAM running OpenBSD (Really...OpenBSD has no bloat, well not the kind of bloat typical Linux and Windows systems have). Mine serves 5 users, and one would think it is non-mission critical. The problem with such a setup is that once you get your "users" (read: family) to rely on the setup it has becomes mission critical. My sister actually calls me for support if for some reason the "internet is down". You have to see the faces of your coworkers if you do technical support for home :-P And to maximze uptime, I finally even shelled out the money for a UPS. Best purchase I ever made in years (we got quite a lot of power outages lately).

I still have a PPro200, but it still is used as a desktop. Great desktop by the way... Has 256Meg RAM, more than enough for anything my family can throw at it ;-) Well, except for newer games... But don't get me started about that.

Speed up but not performance

[woogieoogieboogie]

The clock of the processor may be faster, but overall PC performance is not. Your typical low end machine sees little difference between a 1 ghz and a 2 ghz processor, the memory and hard drive are bottle necks.

Looking at toms hardware benchmarks, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q3/020826/p4_280 0-09.html , the fastest Athlon is just over double as fast as an Athlon 850 and much of that is due to the faster FSB and ram. I am running an Athlon 1.4 ghz and there is nothing on the market which is worth upgrading to. Why upgrade for a 25 to 40% increase in performance. Ever super overclocked, none of the processors offer double the performance. If I want more real world speed, I could spend the same money on a scsi card (have one already) and a small scsi disk for windows to sit on. it's just like a car, you can only do so much with the engine, then you have to worry about the chassis, heat, and traction.

Re:Speed up but not performance

[Anonymous Coward]

AAARGH! Not ANOTHER stupid comparison of computers to cars!! I am so fucking sick of those!

Is everyone so stupid that they can only understand things with car analogies?

Re:Speed up but not performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Is everyone so stupid that they can only understand things with car analogies?

No, but it makes it easier; you see, analogies are a bit like cars ....

Re:Speed up but not performance

[kingOFgEEEks]

.... the more time you spend working on them, the more you start thinking like them....

Re:Speed up but not performance

[Anonymous Coward]

OMFG. car analogy faggot alarm.

you are an idiot. you have no idea how hard it is to design a car vs. grabbing computer parts off a local chink shop's shelves or purchasing crap off of pricewatch vendors and slapping shit together.

fag.

Rama Lama

[fm6]

If I don't get a new machine soon, that's precisely what I intende to do. Though threatening to spend your own money often shakes a PO loose.

But what's the point in taking the RAM with you? By the time you leave, it'll be worthless, and will only work on obsolete machines!

Re:Rama Lama

[Anonymous Coward]

Not always... I bought 512M of my own memory for my machine at work when I got tired of waiting as well. My manager cleared it and told me to keep my receipts and stuff. When I left, the company sold me my 'obsolete' P3-850 with 19" monitor for $200. I put my 512M that I had bought for it in with the 256M that came with it when I got home and it is still a nice machine.

Re:Rama Lama

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly because I am not leaving anything to that crazy place. I might leave it for a friend if he is still there. Besides it was Samsung ECC Rambus, so it has not fallen in price too much over the last year or so.

Same problem MSFT is having

[Anonymous Coward]

seems the "sweet spot" has been found. My little 700mhz Althon does fine for word proc. and web browsing on Win09. So basically the desktop system has made it. Gosh only 22 years in the making :) (a few mhz steps at a time proves INTEL wasn't too stupid).

Well we all now know MSFT's answer, can intel make a subscription out of chips? I don't think so!

Now only if INTEL had virus' to force upgrades then they could stay in business....hymmmm .....who is creating these virus's that are make products obsolete and unsupported any 'HU! ... HUMMMmmmmkm.

CPU's and the great update

[nitelifer]

I thought the whole goal was to buy the system with a slower CPU (best power/money ratio) but main board that could handle a much faster speed. Sometime later, get the faster CPU for cheap when you need to upgrade. Anyhow, as in the aforementioned, I upgraded a system for my son out of necessity. His 300mhz AMD wasn't cutting the mustard with Q3 and the like, so I purchase a Athlon XP 1600 and board and ect.... but honestly , how fast do you really need to go?? just my 2 cents...

Don't know why - the marketing is pretty clear.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I need the very greatest?

First, set a price point, say $500, and look for the biggest, badest, mobo setup you can buy. Be mindful of the P4 is a just a poor P3 (clock-for-clock) performance trap.

Note to Intel: It's not nice to play fools of your customers.

Anyway, look at what you get if "money is no object". Yea, I wanna pay $ThousandsMore for a puny .x GHz (x00Mhz) increment. Wasn't a .2 GHZ chip (P-Pro) worth about 20 bucks just a few years ago? Why $ThousandsMore to add that same performance increment today?

I just went through a motivated buy decision. My dual 300 pushed 550 Celery is, well, old. After many hours aligning Pricewatch dual's with vendor reality -- no sale, sorry.

P4's utterly weren't worth the price asked. Not by Intel, not by the mobo makers (Intel's system chip prices, no doubt), and not by the memory makers.

Then I started looking at P3's. Better pricing, but I'd spend as much money today to take my dual 550 to a dual P3/512/1.1Ghz as I did on the 550 -- many years ago.

They told me "the Internet" would "go faster" with a MMX chip -- remember the dancing spacemen? They lied.

Their aliens told me their chip would give my Internet music a zillion times more dynamic range. Not only did they lie, but their hooking their hitch to that whole DRM Pay-Per-View thing -- so I now won't have any music at all.

Then, of course, there is the whole commercial/kidde overtake of the Internet. Frankly, it is turning into 1) a cool phone for the kiddies (IM); 2) a media outlet in the image of freaking TV (a thousand channels and nothing to watch).

Lastly, I think people are starting to see the evil impact of Computers they don't control have on their lives. Apathy is the first sign of descension.

Not till I see nickel on the core�.

[(H)elix1]

I'll buy the high end CPU's when I don't have to worry about chipping or cracking the silicon. Fool me once, shame on me... I know the P4 has a nice slab of nickel on top, but I don't care for the performance/price I get for the high end CPU's. That leaves AMD, and I'll be damned if I spend top dollar for something I can crush that easy (again). With much fear and trembling, I got my dual MP CPU's mounted in my workstation. I spent ~$100 for a 'disposable' CPU and ~$80 for mainboard, which was an AMD XP 2000 (1.66?) and a cheap Asus board with the works last week, but no way will I bite for the top end processor for my gaming box until I get a no heat sink whammy guarantee. When I see something I can lapp, I'll pull out my wallet for something that can run 1942 w/o lagging.

I know its coming... I've seen (pictures) of the engineering samples...

Re:Not till I see nickel on the core�.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but those pics were fake. Shortly after the news and pics were posted, they were proven fake by a number of people and news of that spread also.

Re:Not till I see nickel on the core�.

[GigsVT]

pull out my wallet for something that can run 1942 w/o lagging.

My NES could run 1942 without lagging. Good lord, what kind of ancient hardware do you use?

Re:Not till I see nickel on the core�.

[ottffssent]

I know its coming... I've seen (pictures) of the engineering samples...

Yeah, but since they've pushed 'em back a quarter, I might have to grab one of those lovely cheap Athlon XPs. If I can scrounge up a floppy somewhere I can flash my BIOS to recognize them. The Duron/600 I've got cost me about $50. Amazing what I can get for $50 now, almost exactly 2 years later.

Re:Not till I see nickel on the core�.

[(H)elix1]

Yup, just updated my folk's computer too... 1.2G duron w/heat sink for $40 shipped. A couple years ago that (600) was more than enough for Oracle, Weblogic, Visual Age, and my apps.... now, it hardly counts as a counter-strike server. Just plain nuts. I broke down and 'made due' with a xp2000... fastest thing I ever owned.

I do remember the healthy chunk of money I spent on a PII-400, however. Glad I paid extra for the retail three year warr.... By the time it wigged out on me, I did not want it to be replaced with another 400.

By the time the next AMD chip ships, RAM will change, HDD interfaces will change - heck, even the AGP port might make another big shift (8x a different pin count?) No point in buying RAM, a spendy mainboard, or even a video card. Bet it is not just the CPU / chipset makers getting hurt by good enough.

Re:Not till I see nickel on the core�.

[ottffssent]

No point in buying RAM, a spendy mainboard, or even a video card.

Not sure what you mean there. I'd argue that you should *always* buy more ram and a spendy mainboard. Cheap motherboards suck so get a good one. Cheap CPUs are just 25% slower - who can tell? As someone who spent 10x as much on a monitor as he did on his CPU, I can say unequivocally that I'm a happier man than someone who split the money evenly between the two.

Re:Not till I see nickel on the core�.

[Dahan]

My NES could run 1942 without lagging. Good lord, what kind of ancient hardware do you use?

It's been a while since I last played 1942 on a NES, but I seem to recall that it did lag a little when some of the bosses came up, with their attendant swarm of little planes.

Re:Not till I see nickel on the core�.

[Kredal]

Really? I thought anything over like 16 sprites on the screen, or 4 in a row would lag it... are there always that few baddies on the screen in 1942? I'll have to go back and check it out...

Re:Not till I see nickel on the core�.

[(H)elix1]

By cheap - at least in my case - I picked up an Asus board with a nForce 220(?) chipset. On-board sound, lan, video, etc... $80 for an all-in-one board. Not a KT333 or the new 400 anyhow. For RAM, it is crucial, but only PC2100. Amen to the monitor. My bride complained about my Sony until I picked up a pair of 21" monitors for her box...

Wait a minute!!!

[God! Awful]

I thought intel et al were supposed to be using software as a loss leader to sell their custom hardware. Not much use if all the software runs on old hardware!! (So how come they haven't started pushing Linux XP yet?)

-a

It's cause were all F@CKIN UNEMPLOYED

[43PercentBurnt]

See subject.

Re:It's cause were all F@CKIN UNEMPLOYED

[/dev/trash]

This was modded as funny but it's true! I want a new 2Ghz PC, but I can't because I have no work. No work no new toys.

Fuck da PeeCee...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a real machine...go log ontop ebay and buy a fucking SUN box. Solaris 9 and Sparc. All you beeyatches with linux and doo doo windows can suck my big manly sparc processor penis...

Warranted by the warranties

[mmol_6453]

One of my friends's work just bought him a new laptop. His old one (P233, under DOS. Old Borland IDE) worked perfect for what he does. (home and field support on embedded software in automobile testing equipment)

They bought him a new one, latest etc., just because the warranty on his old one ran out. They didn't want to support a laptop that wasn't supported for them.

The end of collusion!?!?

[myowntrueself]

Maybe the industry collusion that has seen Microsoft producing more and more bloated OS's in order to help Intel & AMD sell more chips is breaking down? I'd suspect that the monopoly rulings against MS and the rise of Linux has something to do with this. I'll never forget reading that 'leaked' Intel internal memo "We can expect to sell more high-end CPUs since windows 2000 requires another 250MHz to deliver equivalent performance to the desktop". Microsoft simply failed to deliver with XP; its a lot less CPU hungry than Intel would have liked... (This industry is so corrupt it makes politics & law look like positively honorable professions)

P3 = P4

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because you lie Intel

Real vs. perceived speed of the internet

[swb]

The funny thing is, most people don't know any better and assume that buying a new computer will make the Internet faster.

For a lot of people it *does* appear to be faster, but it's not just simple CPU speed. If the average CPU updater is creaking along on a 1st or even 2nd generation PII (233-450Mhz) system, chances are they also have little RAM (as little as 32MB), a much slower memory bus (66Mhz on 1st gen PIIs) and slow disk drive, a weak video card and a creaky OS and browser

When you move up to a contemporary machine you end up with a better Windows (2K and XP are superior to 95 and 98) running a newer browser, more RAM which reduces swapping, and when swapping DOES happen it happens to a faster disk at ATA-66 or even ATA-100 speeds with little fragmentation.

All this does add up to a browsing experience that seems faster to most people. The cognescenti realize that its just a better machine and that the internet pipe is no better, but to the other 99.5% of the computer-using population the internet got faster..

Re:Real vs. perceived speed of the internet

[afidel]

hmm both my work pc's (desktop and laptop) are P2-300's both have 256MB of ram and both have pretty damn fast rendering. The laptop runs XP and IE6 while the desktop runs Mozilla on 2k. When browsing from home with the laptop over 56k dialup it is slow, in the office on multiple T-1's it's fast, aka its the badwidth not the cpu limiting the internet experience.

So buy a 15K rpm drive.

[Styx]

They do exist, you know

Just as with 7200 rpm drives, it's just a question of time before it migrates down the foodchain, and ends up in ATA drives.

Is your sister 11 years old with budding titties?

[Anonymous Coward]

If so I'm not gonna mod you up

Grrr

[Com2Kid]

I do too need more CPU power, I want to play around with four dimensional fractals, and I need at least a 25x-30x speed increase to get anything near real time renderings. Hell if I want to work with them in a resolution higher then 320x240 then I need at least a 100x increase in CPU power.

So yah, I'm looking to upgrade. . . .

Gamers fuel the market

[Rooked_One]

Everyone knows that... Sure some people might need dual xeons for high end graph apps, but most of intel and amd's sales come from people who play games. Sure a lot of the sales come from bigg corps, but those decisions, I bet, are based on what someone that knows a bit, and has probably played a few games on.

As soon as DOOM 3 comes out, watch for the serge.

Re:Gamers fuel the market

[Spruce Moose]

Dude, you should watch out for the sarge instead.

How about games?

[antdude]

I don't see any changes with computer games. They still usually require a lot of power. My Pentium III 600 Mhz system with a GeForce 2 Pro chogs with the newest games.

Re:How about games?

[xenocide2]

You totally missed the points. The article's point is that typical user applications haven't gotten more complex as processers have gotten faster. The poster's point was that even for the class of software that has gotten more complex (games), much of the complexity is being offloaded to the video card. Newer cards are doing things like transformation and lighting in the hardware, rather than having the CPU bust it out for you. So it might be that just upgrading to a gf4 or a radeon 9700 is all that will really help fps on games that are designed with this offloading in mind.

If Intel really wants to push sales of their chips, the best thing they can do right now would be to encourage developers of applications do default to using encryption, a CPU intensive process that hasn't yet been offloaded to dedicated hardware. Games are intensive but newer video cards dedicated in design to rendering outpace even a CPU with SIMD. Increasing CPU speed might be able to get you a faster load time, but you'd have to switch to something like generating textures on the fly

Re:How about games?

[ergo98]

much of the complexity is being offloaded to the video card

I completely agree that the biggest bottleneck for most modern games is the video card, however the are exceptions that should be guiding the way for future games that'll require 10Ghz processors and beyond:

-Falcon 4 stutters (when I get near the FLOT) on my GF 4 4400+Athlon 1800+ system, despite being a game that is several years old. It stutters because that extremely innovative software group, that was shortly thereafter disbanded, tried to simulate a fairly complex war to have an actual, living world around the player. The CPU is definitely a massive limitation in this game.

-Operation Flashpoint, an otherwise generic "FPS" (it's actually a tremendous strategic war simulation, but I mean if someone quickly looked at it) is very CPU intensive because it, like Falcon, puts dozens or hundreds of units, all with AI, in close proximity. Even still, though, the world is incredibly limited versus what it could be: For instance in a particular mission enemy units will only exist in a small quadrant on a 100km2 map because it would be dramatically too computationally demanding to have the AI of an islands worth of units, yet I want that. I want to have games that are linear, but instead let me go off in whatever direction that I want without seeing the wizard behind the curtain: Immerse me.

It is a sad state that most people measure the computational requirements by something like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, games with only a couple of AI players that themselves live within very tightly bounded worlds (and hence have a limited number of permuatations to consider). Current games are just starting to touch the surface of what will one day be possible.

shocking!

[Anonymous Coward]

You made a lame Microsoft joke without spelling it 'm$'!

Re:shocking!

[abradsn]

Thank you Captain Obvious!

Generalizations

[hendridm]

> programmers are really really REALLY lazy today

And black people love their watermelons and fried chicken, right?

> Sorry to be sarcastic but ....DUH!

Is that really sarcasm?

stability

[sstory]

are we reaching a period of stable equilibrium where (the vast majority of) people use email, browse the web, edit docs, with no real pressure for more power?

Cheaper, cooler, more efficient

[AT]

This is a good thing. Maybe the big chip vendors will stop focusing on Mhz numbers and start making smaller, cooler and more efficient chips.

If I have the choice between a giant-ass chip with multiple fans that takes 100+ Watts vs. a slightly slower, fanless, power sipping version, I'd definately take the latter. I'm definately keeping my eye on the Via C3...

Re:Cheaper, cooler, more efficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, slightly slower, sure. Try SLOW AS MOLASSES. For Pete's sake, the FPU on that thing runs at *half* of the core clock speed.

Re:Lazy Programming I blame cds

[Anonymous Coward]

Programmers had to fit their goods on floppies.
Programmers had to write tight code to fit their goods on floppies.

The reason is simple

[aerojad]

Now that the NASDAQ has crashed and the internet is about to die, there is of course no need for any new tech... no one will ever buy a new computer again, Intel & AMD will never sell another chip, and Microsoft will never make a new bloatware OS. Now that the whole tech thing of the 90's has a spork stuck in it and it's basically done, we can get back to the good 'ol things - tv with 3 channels, static, and big hair. Ahh.. the return of the 80's.

One Word:

[Tokerat]

Mozilla.

If you're running MacOS 9 with IE, don't even kid yourself, that's not browsing. That takes longer than Photoshop rendering (no lie).

Especially tables. The worst part is it locks the machine in MacOS 9. I click on /. "Read More..." links and go take a healthy dump and it's still not ready when I get back. Then all my AIM windows scroll out of control due to messages building up. Since that sucked up memory for all the incomming packets that needed to be saves while my machine was frozen, AIM bites the big one and then takes IE and the rest of the system with it.

Netscape, on the other hand, has a sluggish UI but at least it doesn't lock down my system durring such routine tasks as page rendering.

Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft does it on purpose...

Re:One Word:

[NotAnotherReboot]

Alas- if only our school's network wasn't so anal about anything and everything. There's not a chance it would allow me to put Mozilla on there and I'm sure that asking for it would just get a weird look from one of the stupid ladies that runs the network from the library.

nitpicking

[asv108]

Yes I know about browser speed and such, but people assume that a new computer will speed up their network connection, even though 56k modems have been with us for quite some time. I bet the great majority of people here would choose broadband and a 800 mhz Athlon over a 2.8 GHZ P4 with a modem hands down.

AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno....have you tried running AOL lately? :-)

Looking for advice

[PD]

I'm running a Z-80 computer system (1 Mhz) and I was wondering if I should upgrade to the new Z-80B processor. They go 2.5 Mhz, and supposedly really scream. But is the extra speed worth the $4 that the new processor would cost? Thanks.

Re:Looking for advice

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll make the internet 2.5x faster. I say go for it.

Re:Looking for advice

[nels_tomlinson]

I'm running a Z-80 computer system (1 Mhz) and I was wondering if I should upgrade to the new Z-80B processor. They go 2.5 Mhz, and supposedly really scream. But is the extra speed worth the $4 that the new processor would cost? Thanks.

Typically, you had to go to a faster cpu, and put in a different capacitor (for the clock circuit). Generally, everything else worked fine at the higher clock speed.

I know people who did that. If you were using the machine for any serious programs, such as electric pencil or wordstar, it was certainly money well spent. ZPM was an even better deal, if you had a Z-80.

Re:Looking for advice

[Stephen VanDahm]

I'd spend my money on a 2400 baud modem -- high speed internet access is the future....

Re:Looking for advice

[blindbat]

No, but it will make the internet run faster.

Re:Looking for advice

[Brane2]

You are underclocking your Z-80. It should be good up to at least 2.5 MHz, workong within specs. Z-80B should go up to 6 MHz and z-80H should be fine up to 8 MHZ, without overclocking. So Moore's law can't touch you for at least four years ;o)

Re:Looking for advice

[acceleriter]

I would upgrade to a 6809. Or better yet, a 6309. OS-9 smokes on the 6309, and the multitasking will make you never want to go back to CP/M.

Re:Looking for advice

[Kashif Shaikh]

What, you want to upgrade your Gameboy? Did you try overclocking it first?

Aside:
I remember having an old Commadore 128D back in the days...it used to run at 1mhz(I also believe it was a Z80 proc). By typing fast into the console, the proc doubles it speed to 2 MHz!! But get this--it was so fast, that my computer screen turned all white everytime I used it!

No joke:) Must be extra useful in non-interactive batch scripts...

Re:Looking for advice

[Citizen of Earth]

I remember having an old Commadore 128D back in the days...it used to run at 1mhz(I also believe it was a Z80 proc). By typing fast into the console, the proc doubles it speed to 2 MHz!!

The C128 had an 8502 (6502 compatible) that ran at 1 and 2 MHz. It also had a Z80 in it that was clocked at like 2MHz but could only access the system bus half of the time because you couldn't turn off the sharing of the bus with the video chip like you could for the 8502 which is why it could run a 2MHz. The Z80 ran so slowly and I don't think that very many people were interested in CP/M at the time, so Commodore could have just saved themselves the trouble and expense by leaving the Z80 out of it.

But get this--it was so fast, that my computer screen turned all white everytime I used it!

It shut off the 40-column video chip in order to give the processor 2-MHz system-bus access. However, the 80-column screen still worked fine, since it had its own isolated video memory, a whopping 64K in the C128D.

Re:Looking for advice

[femto]

Nah, your money is better spent on a beowulf cluster of 4004s.

Re:Looking for advice

[buckeyeguy]

Depends... how many pico-frames per second are you getting on that mono-graphics version of Quake? ;)

Well Duh

[jeramybsmith]

I think I am in the majority of people who buy cpus. Basically, you don't get enough of a performance boost from buying a 200 dollar more expensive chip to justify buying it.

The last chip I bought was an athlon xp 1700+. I can't foresee needing anything faster for a good while (unless I go nuts and decide to run WinXP and play Doom3 while running a seti client with realtime priority).

Worse yet, your typical business computer still does not need anything faster than 500mhz. AMD and Intel in their race to make faster chips have far exceeded the requirements of business and obsoleted the parts they really need.

Intel, bringing you the cutting edge technology of 1979 for over twenty years.

Re:Well Duh

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

"(unless I go nuts and decide to run WinXP and play Doom3 while running a seti client with realtime priority). "

Just go dual-CPU then....cheaper in some cases.

If they'd stop changing sockets.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they'd still sell a lot of processors.

I know the big reason most people i know arent upgrading their processor speed is that their boards dont support them and they dont want to spend 500 dollars+ on parts that work fine just to get the new socket.

Think trashing a gig of sdram for ddr and a socket 1 for a 478 just for a minor speed upgrade.

its not worth it anymore.

If they would just standardize on a socket that could support the current AND the future cpus then they would sell more processors. And they probably wouldnt sell less boards since people arent buying them anyways.

He's 95% right

[X_Caffeine]

I use a Celeron 333mhz laptop and a 1.4ghz desktop, and I can't tell the damned difference on web pages. Unless the page uses Flash -- the 1.4ghz machine closes those pages much more quickly.

Maybe because they're not availible?

[Nameles]

All of my suppliers, last time I checked (2 weeks ago, maybe?) didn't have anything higher than XP 2100, if that, and the 2.6 P4. One of my customers has been waiting for his 2200 for a while now...

This will hurt Intel

[Groo Wanderer]

This will hurt Intel proportionalely more than AMD. The CPU game is all about Average Selling Price (ASP) across the whole line. AMD has always had thier CPUs clustered in the low range $50-$150, and has an ASP of around $80-90. Intel on the other hand, excluding the effects of $3700 large cache xeon's, has always had significalntly higher ASPs.

For every $600 P4/(latest speed grade) they sell, it can subsidise 50 $100 celerons by $10 each, bumping the ASP up a ton. They use this as a club to abuse AMD in the market, and still make good money. Since AMD can (no longer) control the high end, they can't do this, so thier ASPs suffer. The club gets even bigger when you add those xeons into the mix.

Getting back to the point, high end sales allow intel to weather competition, and down markets more than AMD. AMD's sales are clustered much more, so the bottom and the top end chips cost about the same, or at least don't have as many times the cost differential as intel's do. When top end sales go down, intel hurts a lot. AMD hurts, but much less. Losing $50/chip is much easier than $500/chip. Look for this to hit intel in the following quarters, while AMD can roll with it.

Looking ahead, when the Hammers come out, they are targeted against the Xeons. This will gut intel's margins much much more than the athlon did. Intel can sell all thier P4s at cost, and make the profit up on the xeons, they have no competition there. It will get interesting in January.

-Charlie

Huh?

[fm6]

You can upgrade that Dell with a CPU from powerleap.com.

Gawd, they still sell those useless CPU upgrades? Those are not profoundly reliable. Anyway, I need more RAM, not a CPU that will idle faster while my swap disk thrashes!

Kind of appropriate that they should come up in this topic though. Which is how people are beginning to get clued in about not needing faster CPUs!

Re:Huh?

[MentlFlos]

I've had great luck with the 1.2 celery upgrades. I'm using one right now in an old BX board and the cluster at work is 17 dell workstations upgraded with those chips. (yes 17... 16 computational nodes and one control box/nfs server)

It is an amazing upgrade (assuming you have enough ram and your HD isn't a POS)

Re:Huh?

[Rick the Red]

In general I'd agree, but it all depends on what you need. CPU upgrades are not "profoundly unreliable." My firewall is an AT-class machine with a CPU upgrade -- a 133MHz "586" CPU upgrade! Ancient, but it's faster than the chip that box used to have, and it's been working for years. I recently came into posession of a slightly newer PC -- an AMD K6/233 -- and I'm debating upgrading the firewall, but it is profoundly reliable, so why change?

Re:Huh?

[ppetrakis]

Reliabilty problems??? I've not seen a single one and the system is stressed regularly. Also this conversion package comes prepackaged and tested from powerleap, All I had to do was plug it in. In my case CPU speed 'was' the factor that was holding me back. I have plenty of RAM, disk, and even a GF3 ti200 . Before the upgrade, Playing games was OK but I had to turn most of the effects off. Now I can play Q3:Urban terror and NWN with ease and they look much better!! Borland C++ builder runs ALOT better. Considering I havent spent a single dime on this box since I built it almost 4 years ago (minus the video card) and considering what I originaly paid for it (not much) it makes for a worthwhile investment.

Simply, In my case the price/performance ratio paid off. I agree with the original story mostly however the root of the problem is most computer users dont know what they need so they have no idea how to be conservative when going about their purchasing decisions. Their oughta be a single rating for CPUS that is synonimous as to what horsepower means to cars. That would be ideal. If you disagree with a single rating, then a combination of simple ratings ontop of "horsepower" equiv.

Peter

Resource is a many plundered thing

[fm6]

I doubt if a faster CPU would make AOL run any better. Sure it's a resource hog, but mostly RAM and disk. It's not like they're doing any intentse calculations while waiting for a connection!

Overclocking!!

[gilesjuk]

Why pay an extra third for the fastest when you can get similar performance by overclocking? sure it shortens the chips life but who runs a CPU for ten years anyway.

Competition..

[Perdo]

is so good for us.

The bounty of processing power is no one's loss.

It's not like Intel would not have fabs churning out processors reguardless of their speed. Intel's costs and profits are the same at 100 Mhz as they are at 100 Ghz.

Competition has reduced their profit margins, reducing what they have available to spend on R&D. But the money they have spent has given us accelerated roadmaps anyway.

One could argue that chip quality has declined so that processors are not as stable or energy efficient, but if you pull away from the cutting edge, you get efficiency and stability back eg. Tulatin.

The cutting edge is there for you if you need it at the expence of everything else.

Tech sales words to live by

[Vodak]

it's the economy stupid

This is another reason why palladium won't sell

[pardasaniman]

You see, if people are satisfied with existing chips. They would see no need to buy a palladium enabled chip.

If Intel thinks it's bad now....

[frovingslosh]

Just wait until the chips with DRM built in come out. Sure, they and M$ want it to be a trap waiting to happen until Bill thinks the world is ready for him to spring Longhorn on us, and I know that a good number of people will not understand what they are helping to happen when they buy these CPU's; but I'll resist buying this stuff and look for every option I can find before I let them sell me aCPU that let M$ decide what software I can run.

I was diehard Intel before the Pentium III came out. When they built a serial number into the III that clearly could not be trusted for e-commerce but was great for invasion of privacy tracking of users, I stopped buying Intel and waited for AMD to come out with the Athlon. I've never regretted it. If enough technical people like me, who control the purchase of many computers each year, do this and let their reasoning be known, it may have some impact on this attempt to take control of computers from those who buy them and want to decide what software they run on them. Sure, AMD bought into what Bill Gates told them to buy into too, but I'll either look for other options or buy pre-DRM technology processors for as long as I can, and encourage others to do so too.

Re:If Intel thinks it's bad now....

[Anonymous Coward]

i wish every geek here would send amd an email or a letter on the point you just made. maybe you could encourage others to start the protest before it`s to late. it can`t hurt... thanx

Duh?

[dwaggie]

How often do they think someone is going to buy a high end processor? You buy it, and they come out with another one a month later.

There's no need for 400Mhz more when you've already got, uh, 1.6Ghz more than recommended.

And as far as the 'lazy programming' blame.. Programs are -doing- a lot more than they used to, as well. More processing, more threading, more UI nifties.

Competition

[akuma(x86)]

It's not like Intel or AMD are unaware of the fact that most people do not need more processing power. They are forced to develop faster and faster processors due to competitive concerns.

If either Intel or AMD stop making faster chips, their competitor will price them out of the market with faster chips.

Given a choice between a PR3000 processor and a PR26000 processor at the same price, the consumer will buy the PR3000 processor since he/she will get the extra perf. for free. If one company runs far ahead of another company in terms of performance, they can undercut the competition on price.

The entire CPU business model is predicated on the fact that you must obsolete your own products or risk getting priced out of the market by your competitor.

Here's another thing to consider. If you are a software developer, you want to write software that will run well on the majority of machines. The majority of machines at any given point in time is far below the performance of the state of the art. It does not make much business sense to make your software run well only on the highest end machines because then your market is limited. So, most developers will develop for the average machine. Unless of course you are Microsoft and you can do whatever the hell you want.

Id, is a lone example of a company that pushes the limits of computing, but I consider them to be an outlier.

So, Microsoft and outliers like Id will drive the need for more CPU performance.

why buy Intel when you can get a VIA?

[Anonymous Coward]

the prices, power requirements and heat output of the P4 processor is freaking ridiculous...

VIA C3 866MHz - $35 and only five watts... overclock to 933 or 958 with only five degrees increase in temp - a balmy 95F ('normal' temp is about 86F!)

yea, go with a P4 - get a new mobo, power supply, and multiple fans for your system... i'll keep saving power and using a fanless, heatsink-only VIA thank you very much...

btw, the $100 Via C3 800MHz mini-itx mobo has everything on board - all you need is a PSU, stick of RAM, and HD...

Get a spring loaded heat sink.

[Blaede]

My Alpha PAL is constructed like this, you tighten down on the springs till it is snug. I'm sure I'll be using this HSF for the next 6 years.

catch-22?

[jdkane]

Hmm, that must be quite the fine line to walk: Huge R&D, marketing/PR, and costs in order to get a leg over the competition -- and yet not able to run with it because of lack of market demand.

I don't envy these large companies in the slightest. I wonder if the auto-makers have resolved the same situation.

This would be an interesting study within itself.

300MHz G3 b/w

[Gilmoure]

I had the chance to buy a new Mac (533MHz dp) last year (had just sold a house and had 25k in bank). Ended up picking up a used G3 off of eBay cheap. Now that I'm a field tech, I don't game that much (lunch time in the pit was too much) and I'm not doing anything more taxing than low level DTP. Upgrading to 10.2 has finally made me want a new Mac. Not for the processor speed (can get a 550MHz G4 for $259) but for an AGP logic board and monitor card. 10.2 is finally at a daily usuable state for me. I imagine this will be driving other Mac hold outs as well. I doubt I'll be picking up the latest/fastest Mac (can't afford xServe anyway) but will find something off of eBay again. I'm not doing 3d modeling, or video editing, just internet, DTP, and strategy games (SMAC!). Still don't need the latest/greatest. Just enough to get by.

My car is another matter; 454, .030 over, 10.5:1cr, aluminium heads, dual Quad, etc. Gotta' have a beast like this for my daily driver. Good thing I'm paid milage seeing as how I'm putting 50-100 miles a day on it.

AOL ads are the real problem...

[UnknownQ]

Maybe people are wising up to the fact that you don't need the fastest processors on the market in order to open AOL...

That's right! You need the biggest monitor to display all those user friendly ads AOL likes to display when you log on, even after you pay a huge rate to get on in the first place!

How I hate you, AOL.

No reason to upgrade

[southpolesammy]

I have absolutely no reason to upgrade to the faster processors out there today. I have an old PII-400MHz cpu, around 300MB memory, enough disk space for the forseeable future, and a plenty fast enough cable modem connection to the Internet. My computer is used for web browsing, email, java development, website development and publishing, reading the newsgroups, listening to MP3/OGG's, remote VPN connection to work, sometimes I play games like Mahjongg or other non-CPU intensive games where thinking is more of a priority than reacting, and that's pretty much it.

The things I need it for work just fine on the hardware I have, so why would I need an upgrade? I plan to run this system until it drops, and assuming that will be a few years from now, THEN I'll buy a new system off the shelf at the Kroger supermarket down the street for $99 and it will blow away anything on the market today.

Quote me in a few years....

[twoslice]

and have a good laugh...

"Nobody will ever need more than 256MB or RAM
and nobody will ever need more than 2Ghz of processing power!"

Processors have always increased in speed at a constant rate (Moore's law takes care of that) and some coders depend on Moore's law to fix the performance problems caused by their god awful, ill concieved programming logic. (go bubble sort!)

What these chip-makers don't realize...

[jvollmer]

is that if the chip's end is too high,
the PC's case doesn't close!

Heat

[spudgun]

I'm just sick of my PC heating my room to my melting point in Summer. I don't need much more speed than my Celeron 600 - but I need faster RAM and a better Motherboard HDD speed than DMA/66

Why can't Intel make a 1 GHZ CPU at a much lower Micron size / power Consumption
after all, that celeron seems to add to the P133, P100, laser and monitor in heating my room to unbearable temperatures.

They might need it

[xplorer1991]

"Maybe people are wising up to the fact that you don't need the fastest processors on the market in order to open AOL..."
To process all those popup ads.

You installed XP on what?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minuite, you where annoyed that XP wouldn't run well on a 166 with 32 megs of RAM? Isn't the minimum for XP around a 300mhz with 128 megs of ram?!? Putting XP on a box like that is like trying to tow a horse trailer with a Geo.

Re:You installed XP on what?!?!

[m3000]

And try running a modern Linux distro with Gnome or KDE on a machine like that. With only 32 MB of RAM, it'll crawl right along too.

No comes the part where....

[Lester67]

Microsoft releases Service Pack 2, and bumps up the system requirements for this REQUIRED patch.

Then everyone runs out and buys bigger machine to run it.

Hell if it weren't for Office XP, most of our company wouldn't need more than an 866.

(Before you start ranting about OpenOffice.org. I tried. I really, really tried.)

Re:No comes the part where....

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't feel guilty. OpenOffice is slower than MS Office. I think they took out the Java code and rewrote it in lisp.

Mhz/pr0n?

[Gilmoure]

Just how many Mhz do you need to look at pr0n? It's not like there's a whole lot of vr stuff out there, yet.

Deus Ex

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that it needs "the latest and greatest", but if you liked Half Life and haven't played it you're missing out.

processors and AOL

[Bandito]

Maybe people are wising up to the fact that you don't need the fastest processors on the market in order to open AOL...

Actually, you do need the fastest processors to open AOL.

All good news for VIA/Cyrix

[n9fzx]

While Intel and AMD have been locked in the performance race, Cyrix took their x86 line in a different direction: low power consumption and low heat dissipation. I just built a new box based on the VIA/Cyrix Eden ITX formfactor motherboard for less than $400, and it consumes less than 36w (no fan). And, best of all, it runs everything in the ham shack -- including some powerful DSP software (PSK31).

Speed freaks...

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the guys I work with, who has over the years always been a speed freak (overclocking his CPU's, overclocking his GeForce Ti200 to close to a Ti400 in speed, etc) has even stopped trying to be cutting edge. Maybe I've been getting to him :-P

Me: "So, how many frames/sec does your video card do now on those games?"

Him: "120."

Me: "Ah.. and the advantage to that is.. what? I mean, even the best monitors only have a vertical refresh rate of like 85Hz.. thats only 85 frames/sec that your *monitor* can display."

Him: "oh.. yeah. But I get great texturing at lower refresh rates."

Me: "Yeah.. and you just got married... how much gaming do you really do these days?"

Funny... now that he has a wife (and a *life*), suddenly having the fastest machine in the state isn't quite such a big thing anymore.

Me.. I'm still running a P3/550 at home (although I did just aquire a 1Ghz machine, when I get around to setting it up). I don't really play games all that much, and the 550 really works fine for word processing, web browsing, and downloading software. If the 1Ghz had cost me money, I wouldn't have it... but, for free, I guess it'll help me crunch Seti@home and RC5 workunits faster. :-)

Re:Speed freaks...

[Fweeky]

Me: "So, how many frames/sec does your video card do now on those games?"

Him: "120."

Me: "Ah.. and the advantage to that is.. what? I mean, even the best monitors only have a vertical refresh rate of like 85Hz.. thats only 85 frames/sec that your *monitor* can display."

Uhm.

In UT2k3 I get between 30 and 140FPS. That 30FPS is the important bit; it's about as low as you want to go. My average framerate is about 60FPS, but it's the lows that are important, not the average or the highs (which are typically lopped off by vsync anyway, which, *gasp*, leaves CPU and memory bandwidth for background tasks).

However, if I wanted to play in 1600*1200, or use AA or high level ansio, I'd be totally boned. That 30FPS would drop to 20, or 10FPS, and that is definately not desirable on a fast game like UT.

If I want to run Tenebrae Quake at anything over 640*480, I can relive the days of playing Quake on my Amiga at 15FPS, just at a slightly higher resolution and slightly nicer visuals. Hell, even stuff like MoH isn't always super smooth.

If you think being able to hit FPS's higher than monitor refresh rate is stupid, then you seriously need to fetch yourself a clue. Are you going to complain that your CPU is 98% idle most of the time? After all, what's the point of all that power when it's not being used?

Re:software lag and video cards - more than that!

[Mazzaroth]

Funny, I remember back in 1984, a new computer came around. The Amiga had a handful of custom designed chips (running concurrently with the CPU) to handle display, I/O, animation, audio. You could actually move the mouse arount without seeing the CPU loosing cycles. Maybe the industry is finally moving a bit closer to this design which, back then, simply made sense... and still does.

Now add to this an OS that can be distributed accordingly to the type of operations operations (like Plan 9) and over multiple CPUs (Apple OS X, or Linux), with a solid filesystem (get the ideas from BeOS)...

Also, I don't want to upgrade my CPU anymore, I want to add CPU power to what I already have. Give me a scaleable hardware architecture (with a lot of empty CPU slots), with the OS supporting it. Add a 'cheap' factor. THIS would be my ideal computer... for now! ;-)

Clock Speed != processor speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it seems that people are slowly learning that just because a CPU has a higher clock speed doesnt mean it runs much faster.

The preformance of a CPU is based on a lot more things then just the clock speed. A clock speed increase from 133->600 will of course be noticeable, unfortunately the increase from 600->1gHz isn't as rewarding. Amdahl's law and all that.

So Joe Average is thinking to himself that he didnt get much a of a boost when he bought upgraded his 600 mghz machine to a 1.2 ghz machine, he isn't about to plunk down another 400~ dollors to get a 2.4 ghz machine.

If you want a faster machine get more ram.
If your machine is still slow. Get FASTER ram (but get the same amount) if it's still slow get a faster hard drive

Free monitors

[FunkyELF]

Right now i'm lookint at a 21 in monitor because they wrote off a computer at my dad's company because i think it was a pII 350....but they didn't realize that it had a huge monitor listed with it. So the system went off the books, and the monitor came home, now its w/ me at college :)

Re:Free monitors

[sleeper0]

thats what dad said huh?

Time for home uber servers

[philipsblows]

I've been talking about this issue lately with a friend of mine, with whom I am trying to do some interesting home automation stuff. For those applications, a machine that runs in the many megahertz is fine based on current uses, but...

The way I see it, the computer in the home should be a lot more like HAL or any of those other scifi computing devices. A lot of processing power today goes into drawing the GUI quickly and tracking user movements on the internet and whatnot, but where's the beef?

A 3 GHz processor should be recognizing speech, figuring out who really lives in the home and who is breaking and entering, which hot spot is the family pet and which is an iron that was left on, etc. It goes without saying that a single 3 GHz cpu should meet most of the comuting needs of a typical family.

I suggest that in order to sell high performance to the mainstream, something more useful than a Windows service pack will have to be available to soak up that performance (and this has already been suggested in other responses to this topic). The computer should stop being a thing that the family goes to a particular room to use... personally, I think the so-called "data furnace" or other similar approach is where the mainstream will begin to adopt this real computing power, when the home server starts doing really amazing things. Things more impressive than whatever it is WindowsXP does for people, anyway.

Voice recognition (that works very well), handwriting recognition (that works even better than that), maybe real time language translation, some simple learning algorithms, agents (web downloads should already happen automatically), intelligent security systems, family health monitoring, car-home networking... the list of applications to take advantage of this stuff is long and probably getting longer.

Wal-Mart Computer

[evilviper]

Actually Wal-Mart's 800MHz system is only $200 now. Ummm, for those wondering, it ends up being about $233 for the shipping+handling and tax.

Now if Wal-Mart could only do the same thing for Laptops!!!

Speed not the only "performance" metric

[CustomDesigned]

I am not that interested in blazing speed. What I want from a system is:

• Reliability (ECC mem, parity on cache, internal thermal limits)
• Low noise. My dream system has no fan, but I can't afford water cooled and speed does matter enough that Pentium 200 doesn't cut it.
• Low power.
• Low cost.

A transmeta motherboard with ECC would probably be up my alley, but don't tell me where I could have bought one, because I just sprung for a Dell SC500 - noisy fan, not exactly low power, but low cost ($400 w/ rebate) and reliable.

Re:Speed not the only "performance" metric

[Anonymous Coward]

dude - you bought a Dell and got screwed!

try:

- shoebox sized PC
- up to 1.2GHz CPU
- CD/DVD/CDRW
- 3.5" bay
- TV out
- Firewire, USB
- built in video, audio, LAN, etc.

$165 INCLUDING CPU!

www.newegg.com - SV24 :-)

that's because..

[c1pher]

"Maybe people are wising up to the fact that you don't need the fastest processors on the market in order to open AOL..."

"it's so easy to use, no wonder it's #1!" *giggle* *snicker*

Next step:Quiet, cool running small PC STANDARD

[csoh]

I would say to intel:

1. Lessen the MHZ race.
2. Allocate your engineering resource to make the processor/system run cooler instead, to the point that it no longer need the active cooling measure(fan) on processor and (hopefully) whole board/system.
3. Make a new small, low power, quiet PC form factor standard(or push the less known existing standard or join others) accomodating this advantage and invite every other in the industry with no/minimal IP restriction.
4. Make this combo your main production, push other heatmaker to the niche.

(Okay. This is what VIA already tries to do but following item is what only intel probably can do)

4. MARKET IT HEAVILY. It would be easier than current marketing based on speed because you no longer need to deceive the customer. And it is the OBVIOUS BENEFIT to average customer - small, quiet, power saving PC with standard parts that one could leave it always on without stress/anxiety -, and to industries - always on -> new usage -> new software and hardware -> new market!-
5. You've just created a whole new market. keep chugging along, 800lb!

Re:Next step:Quiet, cool running small PC STANDARD

[OzJimbob]

I'd support this; the one thing that annoys me more than any other thing about my 1ghz/PIII is the amount of noise it makes, with a cooling fan for the CPU and the GPU on my NVidia card. I like to leave it on in my room playing chill out mp3s at night, but I gotta crank the stereo to get over the noise it makes! Silent PCs (and power-saving PCs) would be a step in the right direction.

Re:Next step:Quiet, cool running small PC STANDARD

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I have to disagree with the moderator, this is an important issue for me too. The only way I'm going to get new computing kit is if it runs *totally* silently!

At present I need a machine to encode digital video tapes to MPEG, but I *hate* the howling monster, and prefer to use a Pentium 200 machine for everything else.

But the root of the problem may be that computers are too unspecific. It could be that the average user doesn't require the huge versatility of a general purpose PC. Maybe appliances are the future? Something so cheap, uniform and ubiquitous, like the mobile phone, for email, browsing, etc...? If it hasn't taken off yet, it's because the design hasn't been properly nailed down yet, and reliability is still poor.

Re:Next step:Quiet, cool running small PC STANDARD

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh...

4. MARKET IT HEAVILY. It would be easier than current marketing based on speed because you no longer need to deceive the customer. And it is the OBVIOUS BENEFIT to average customer - small, quiet, power saving PC with standard parts that one could leave it always on without stress/anxiety -, and to industries - always on -> new usage -> new software and hardware -> new market!-

There has been this market, and remained small--some people (including me) bought Macs because they tend to run cool and quietly.

I am thinking of getting a second iBook in the near future. However, I'd be upset if Apple introduced hotter, more power comsuming CPU in it.

Re:Next step:Quiet, cool running small PC STANDARD

[Hoser McMoose]

2. Allocate your engineering resource to make the processor/system run cooler instead, to the point that it no longer need the active cooling measure(fan) on processor and (hopefully) whole board/system.

You mean like the Banias chip that Intel is developing?

3. Make a new small, low power, quiet PC form factor standard

You mean like Tidewater?

4. Make this combo your main production, push other heatmaker to the niche.

Now that probably isn't something that Intel is after. There isn't the money to be made in that market as their is in the high-end CPU market... at least not at this point in time. Things may change.

Anyway, long story short, there is some thought to doing what you suggest, but initially it will be all targeted towards laptop users. Maybe it'll start to bubble down to the desktop as well. I certainly wouldn't mind a TiVo/DVD/DivX type system sitting in my living room, and a full sized PC with a loud fan is not exactly what I had in mind.

Re: My current CPU is 433MHz and doing fine...

[saskboy]

I run a 433 Celeron, that I upgraded from a 333 Celeron just last year. It has only 128megs RAM, and a CDburner, and new 32meg GeForce200MX and keeps me happy.
If it plays my music, TV, and prints my reports for school, it does its job. I might upgrade it to a 750MHz this Fall, just so I can win easier in Unreal T.

Governments throw capable systems to the schools, whether the machine is usable in the department or not. 3 year life cycle BABY! Intel wishes it were a 1 year cycle.

Its impressive, but not so useful...

[coene]

It's amazing, we're nearly at 3GHz (there, if we consider OC'd chips).

Personally, I am running an Intel P3-1GHz/512mb/IDE. I am a power user. I play games, I edit video, I play all kinds of multimedia files, I run visual and development apps, compile normally, all with a bunch of "background apps". I work the hell out of my machines, and I DONT NEED anything faster! Sure, I'll upgrade in the near future, simply to keep up on the trends -- but I really dont need to. It's not the CPU power that I need. I need more RAM. I need more storage space -- and I need FASTER STORAGE.

What do I want? Serial ATA! DDR400 (if they can make it fast and reliable)! Disks that can sustain 133MB/s (150MB/s SerialATA). I want Gigabit ethernet! Thankfully, all of these are becoming standard on new systems -- which is excellent. Of course, Intel and AMD have nothing better todo, and want to win the marketing war, so let them keep making the fastest chips. Just dont expect them to sell like hotcakes as more users realize that the CPU doesent really matter much once you hit 1GHz, except for specialized apps.

Amen bro!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll buy that dual Athlon as soon as get a new freaking job!

Rumor has it

[guttentag]

Intel plans to blame their sales on online file sharing.

Tribes 2

[Anonymous Coward]

best multi-player game ever

Or if single-player is your thing, No One Lives Forever 2 is about to come out. I consider the first one the best single-player fps.

Re:Tribes 2

[Anonymous Coward]

I recommend Morrowind. Well, it's not a shooter... but a damn good FP RPG!

I blame the rise of Peer to Peer networks

[victorvodka]

Perhaps everyone is using Kazaa to pirate the lithographic masks for these processors and making their own.

Re:I blame the rise of Peer to Peer networks

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a wafer burner which I got after my DVD burner got boring. It'll do 13 micron and 12 inches, copper process. IDE controlled. I'll trade it for four of those new 320 GB harddrives.

shop for HW on price but spend big $'s on SW

[Wansu]

Many people shop around for the lowest price on a computer system but then they think nothing of loading it with expensive software. If you load a new PC with XP pro, Office, Norton AV, etc., you have about as much money tied up in the software as you have in the hardware. It would be interesting to see a cost breakdown on some of the systems you see advertised that come with "all the software". At some point, the cost of the software on your basic bargain system will exceed the hardware cost. I'm not sure whether we've reached that point but we're bound to be close. This combination of hardware frugality with software extravagance reminds me of dieters who pour tons of rich dressing on their salads.

yeah perhaps

[Skal Tura]

yeah perhaps people have noticed that they don't need the fastest cpu around
although, i have AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53Ghz), 512Mb DDR 266Mhz, and i want more power, i hate every god damn delay when i use my computer.
and i do not play games nearly at all, i try some of the newest games, like at couple past days i have been playing a bit ut2k3 demo, but not very often, atleast very new games, only classics like cstrike.
but i hate all the other delays... waiting to mozilla open, boot up time(when i actually do reboot...)
to put it short: i simply want more cpu power and memory bandwidth. PERIOD. =) (waiting for hammers to be released....)

my $0.02

[athlon02]

I think it has to do with the fact that mass storage devices can't transfer data like CPUs, RAM, and video cards... When we finally get cheap non-volatile memory that can be used in place of conventional hard drives and other drives with moving parts to strictly electronic and magnetic media then you'll probably see more people wanting to buy. Now i'm not saying this is the only factor, far from it. What I am saying is that average Joe Schmoe sees a 500-800MHz computer today and says "Well I can surf the web, watch some DVDs, listen to music..." just as well as on a 2GHz machine. To Joe, he has no concept of computer architecture to know just how much better a 2GHz chip is over a 500MHz one, he just knows they do the job equally well. But eventually you put non-volatile memory in there the size of an HD, that transfers as fast as RAM today (or better), and make an OS take advantage of that and suddenly Joe finds out his machine boots much faster, apps spring up even faster, his movies run even smoother, but at higher resolutions and bit depths than before, any games he plays get several more FPS at those high resolutions, and when his system starts to lag at all, it's because we have holographic monitors or better quality 3D algorithms that were previously unusable in realtime applications.

Now we could argue that that's irrelevant, that MS would just make an OS that made such a system drag :) but again, it's just my $0.02.

I guess I just think of mechanical drives like I do about combustion engines... greedy companies want money so much for their obsolete resources that they're not open to viable alternatives that could be phased in without losing tons of money, and possibly making even more, if implemented properly.

Of course nobody's buying.....

[theflea]

I have a IBM Thinkpad with a 500 mhz p3. The best thing I ever did was add a 256 meg stick of ram to the 64 it came with. A co-worker of mine recently asked me to check something out on his brand new Dell Laptop with a mobile p4 and 128 megs of ram. It just didn't perform as well as my Thinkpad. Another myth is that xp & 2000 are bloated. They definitely need more RAM, and like faster processors, but I really like them. MS word 2000 runs like a champ. I dual boot the laptop with rh7.3 and it's come a long way, too. Gaming/compiling, etc are a different thing, but for everything else, tweak your old hardware.

Re:Of course nobody's buying.....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Another myth is that xp & 2000 are bloated. They definitely need more RAM, and like faster processors, but I really like them. "

Oh, I see. Since you like them, no bad statement about them can be true.

Face it, they are as bloated as Chris Farley at the all-you-can-eat buffet, and you like it, which makes you not a true geek.

How does it feel to be exposed ?

Re:Of course nobody's buying.....

[kyoko21]

I hear that. I have a ThinkPad 600 that is equiped with a P2-266 with 256MB of RAM running XP. It works fine and it works great. Aside from the speed issue, this little slow laptop performs much much better than my 1.6GHz at work that is running W2k. I don't know what all the garbage that is installed on my W2k after getting it from the IT guys, but for some reason they loaded alllll this unnecessary crap and it was just one lame computer after it came through their hand. I would reinstall the system myself but I just don't have the time to do all that at work. Unless I take a weekend off and come in and reinstall everything myself. Not bad for a guy who has 3 VALinux Servers running at home all three sporting dual processors and multi GB RAM capacity configurations. Yeah, I know it's an overkill but I was laid off so following the spirit of oddtodd, I got some cool sh*t. :-)

Re:Of course nobody's buying.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh.. yeah, one of the guys I work with (IT.. I'm more the server side of things, he's desktop support) went to an OfficeXP show&tell a few months ago... he comes back to tell me about all the new features of OfficeXP.

All kinds of database linking features and a lot of other odds and ends.. and my comment to him is "yeah.. but those are only things that probably 1% of users are going to use. Most people just type a memo or do a simple spreadsheet."

I think people are more loathe to upgrade to bigger and better machines to run bloated software that adds few, if any, 'features' that they are actually going to *use*. Sorry, but I'm not one to upgrade just because MicroSloth says their new OS needs it. Win2K does fine for me, and I only went to that after I upgraded to my 550Mhz P3.

And my old desktop (P2/350) replaced my old 166Mhz BSD server machine... don't really notice the speed difference (it really just serves disk and some simple static web pages). The only difference is that I added a 120GB drive along with the 47GB drive in the server now (and bought a used 20/40DLT drive on ebay to back it up).

Re: My current CPU is 433MHz and doing fine...

[Skal Tura]

what is this, a club to own old computers?
i couldn't do a day with some 333mhz celeron, it would simply lag too much for my habits...
and i do not even play games... i simply irc, surf, read and write mail, code and script stuff, sometimes make some graphics, and thats about it...
what sucks my computing power then?
well nothing but i like things to run fast and faster, without delays opening up etc...

What I got

[deadgoon42]

I have a T-bird 1 GHz and 768MB of SDRAM. The ram is just overkill (but I got a good deal) and the T-bird was kinda high end when I bought it almost two years ago. I enjoy building computers, but I decided there's simply no reason to get the latest and greatest because my setup does everything I need it to do.

Also, I work for a computer manufacturer and I have noticed that most of the systems we build use the lowest or next to lowest processors we offer. So consumers are definately wising up.

I think we've reached a plateau in personal computer performance. The big thing now is internet bandwidth. I think that is where people are going to be putting their money in the next few years.

Ford

[Norman Lorrain]

I read recently that Ford paid a high wage simply because the turnover was so high.

Paying them to buy the vehicles they built wouldn't be conducive to staying in business long.

Re:Ford

[Anonymous Coward]

"Paying them to buy the vehicles they built wouldn't be conducive to staying in business long."

Companies don't make products solely for employers.
If they did that everyone would own
a business a no real work would get done.

Re: My current CPU is 433MHz and doing fine...

[saskboy]

In fact I own many 8088s and other oldies but goodies, when I want to play old games.
My 433 doesn't lag because of the processor, it lags because Windows programs the popup menus to be delayed, and animated.
The internet connection is my limiting factor, not CPU.

Yeah, I'm waiting until Doom3 is released

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waiting until doom3 is released before upgrading my slightly-frustrating-for-gaming but perfectly fine for coding/web/word/etc etc. duron 850/gf2mx/512meg pc133.

Re: My current CPU is 433MHz and doing fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck, for years (until just a few months ago) I was on a P166. I did pretty much what you did (actually, a lot of coding) which was mostly fine. Played some emulated console games. But after getting a 1.4ghz machine there's no way in hell I'd go back.

This Sums it Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in the world would anyone want to spend the money on a top of the line processor when they can buy an entire computer based on a value processor for $299 at Walmart.com?

Please. I bet you're still looking for hacks to your 2600. If you can't keep pace, fine. Don't bitch about how you refuse to pay. BTW, the Walmart PC is for ghetto nigs. Are you a ghetto nig? Save yo benjamins fo a crack pipe upgrade sucka.

An idea for how Intel and AMD can still make money

[TheSpeaker2Machines]

Why bother building huge multimillion dollar semiconductor plants when all Intel needs to do to make more money is add new targeted comsumer assembler instructions to the P5? Think of the possibilities here, people!

MCD EVM, 3 ;order #3 extra value meal from McDonald's

A corporation, such as McDonald's just has to enter a strategic alliance with Intel and pay a nominal fee and any consumer in America can click a browser button and have a hot, greasy meal delivered to their doorstep in a matter of minutes. All the consumer has to do is enter their credit card # and click "I Accept" on the new Pentium processor EULA. It's win-win, baby!

They need Female Models/Sex Appeal

[insane8]

When will Intel/AMD take note of car manufacturers selling techniques and start labeling their new high-end processors with sex appeal.. I want to see a advertisement of a bikini model caressing a P4..

A more effective upgrade right now

[MtViewGuy]

I think people don't realize that there are ways to substantially increase the speed of your computer without having to buy a new very fast computer altogether.

The first upgrade everyone should consider is getting as much RAM as you can afford. People are surprised that many computers with DIMM slots built during the late 1990's only sported around a measly 64 MB of system RAM; with the price of RAM so cheap nowadays there's no excuse to run at minimum 256 MB of system RAM. With that much RAM available, the need from almost every operating system to use the hard drive for virtual memory is very low, which substantially speeds up overall system performance (not to mention being able to run more apps simultaneously safely).

The other major improvement that really helps is to get the fastest hard drive you can afford; today's ATA-100/133 hard drives run very fast even on ATA-33 connections because of the fact most of them run at 7200 RPM, which really speeds up general hard drive access; you can get low-cost controllers and at full ATA-100/133 access speeds also.

Finally, if the first two upgrades I suggested still doesn't improve things you can get CPU upgrades to substantially up your CPU speed. If your computer has software CPU configuration and uses Socket 370, you can get upgrades that could increase the CPU speed by a factor of 2 to 3 times what you have now; Powerleap makes the S370 adapter to install later-production Coppermine-core CPU's on older Socket 370 motherboards, and Powerleap also makes the PL-370/T CPU upgrade that allows you to run a Tualatin-core Celeron as fast as 1.2 GHz depending on your motherboard design.

I'm posting this from a Mac I bought in '96

[goingware]

I used to be an Apple employee, and Apple used to have this program called "Loan to Own". It started in the days when most people couldn't afford to own their own home computers, so Apple would give a once-in-a-lifetime tremendous discount for the purchase of a computer by its employees, so they and their families could use them at home.

When I got my Mac 8500/150 in 1996, it was nearly the fastest personal computer money could buy. I used to say widely that it was about half the speed of a Cray 1 supercomputer that cost something like a $million back in 1980. I think the retail price at the time was like $3k.

For the longest time the only upgrade I put in Pishi was 64 MB of RAM, added to the original 32. There are 8 memory slots in here, it will take 1 GB. It is still possible to buy RAM for this box, although it's a little more expensive than today's PC memory.

I used it to bring work home, and later for consulting, for quite a long time. The last paid consulting work I did on her was in the spring of 2001.

In the middle of that job, I finally upgraded, and got a PowerLogix PowerPC G4 CPU upgrade card, as well as some more RAM.

I still have the original 2 MB of video RAM, but I'm thinking of upgrading to the maximum of 4 MB. I could put in a video card, but there are only three PCI slots.

Finally, I bought an Adaptec 29160N Ultra160 SCSI host bus adapter.

I put Mac OS X on it using Ryan Rempel's XPostFacto, and it works OK but is not really fast enough for production work. When I got a contract to do some OS X work I got a 700 Mhz G3 iBook which is really sweet.

The only reason I would want a G4 laptop is so I can do AltiVec programming, but for that I can use my old Mac, it's just not that fast. I'd also like a dual G4 machine to do SMP kernel coding.

What has given Pishi new life, though, was to install Linux on it. It's my main desktop machine, where I do all my web browsing and email. I have a much faster PC that runs Windows 2000 and Slackware, but I have been doing a lot of windows programming this last year so I can't leave it in Linux.

Pishi is running Debian 3.0 (woody) with kernel 2.4.19. And it works just fine.

Besides the increased video ram (so I can run 32-bit at the resolution I use) I'd also like to get an Ultra160 hard drive. The Adaptec card is running a SCSI-II hard drive I've had for years, which has my linux installation. There's only 2 GB on the drive, so I can't really use it for a fileserver, and it gets unresponsive if there's a lot of swapping. If I got a 40 GB Ultra160 drive and maybe some more ram, I could easily get five more years out of this machine.

My Mac is named after my cat Pishi. I say in the above web page about the machine that my parents are looking after her. They eventually brought her to me in Maine, and she was with me for a few months, but sadly she passed away from cancer. I named the machine Pishi because she used to like to sit on top of my monitor a lot back when I was doing a lot of BeOS programming.

Oh, one more thing - the BeOS won't boot with the PowerLogix card. But I understand it will boot with a Newer Technology G3 card. I'm hoping it will also boot with a Newer G4 card. Newer Tech is out of business but it's still possible to buy their cards, even brand new.

AOL...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe people are wising up to the fact that you don't need the fastest processors on the market in order to open AOL...

You don't need a fast computer to open AOL. You just need one for all of the POP UPS that they force upon you ; )

I upgraded my RAM

[scrimmer]

and haven't had to upgrade since. My main desktop machine is a Celeron 366, 256 MB RAM, GeForce DDR 32MB, with a 7200 RPM hdd. I really don't have any complaints about speed or web page rendering.

Photoshop bogs down, naturally, when I'm editing large photo files, but beyond that I'm happy with what my machine can do (and with how fast it can do it).

Microsoft is Intel's and AMD's hero

[Anonymous Coward]

This is where our hero Microsoft comes in. They wil make slower OS that gobbles up more CPU and RAM so that these fast Intel and AMD processors will sell.

Re:Microsoft is Intel's and AMD's hero

[Shuh]

This is where our hero Microsoft comes in. They wil make slower OS that gobbles up more CPU and RAM so that these fast Intel and AMD processors will sell.

They need to get smart and start copying what Apple is doing with their operating system again.

Uh-oh

[Paul Komarek]

As a scientific user of commodotized x86 hardware, this has me a little worried. We've been happily riding the x86 performance-per-dollar wave on the backs of video gamers. If gamers and other large groups of users quit underwriting high-performance cpus, the scientific community may find itself back in the old "big-bucks workstation land".

Well, it was fun while it lasted. ;-)

-Paul Komarek

This is a little improved.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been saying this for years, yet still people feel they need a Pentium 8 4Bagillahertz CPU to browse the web. We know this isn't the case, well, unless they're using XP and IE 6. :P

Oh, by the way, there's a great deal of information on the Athlon XP 1600 over at NewEgg.

I am not an economist

[Skwirl]

But this makes sense to me and here's why. Firstly, he's setting an example and raising the stakes. Other companies who are competing for labor will have to raise their wages to meet Ford's bid, so not just his own employees are affected by the higher wage.

Secondly, his employees will go out and spend their extra dough on products and services and that extra money will eventually circulate around until it lands in the lap of somebody who decides to buy a car.

It's a trickle up effect. The tide rises all ships, yadayada.

Go for quantity, not quality

[PizzaFace]

If you are at all price sensitive, it makes much more sense to spend $X for clearance-aisle technology instead of $3X for brand-new technology that will be on the clearance aisle in 3-6 months.

My brother used his annual bonus to buy his family's first computer, and spent over $3000 for Gateway's top of the line (which was something like 800 MHz at the time). He'd have been better off buying two or three 400 MHz machines so he wouldn't have to wait in line behind his wife and kids for machine time, spent mostly browsing the web over a dial-up connection.

Too damn expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe these things are just getting TOO DAMN EXPENSIVE. Buy a high-end system in 2002 and expect to pay upwards of $8000. Buy a high-end system in 1980 and pay $3000.

Re:Too damn expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? I think you have those numbers reversed.

Not the CPUs that needs to be slow

[forgoil]

It is the big parallell processing gray mass just above shoulder height that must run real slow for you to use AOL...

Re:yeah-Round & round it goes....

[Anonymous Coward]

Not immediately no. There's a book out there were the author traced the flow of money from one end of the country to the other, and out the back. From country to country, just a dollar of yours proably sees more of the world than you do. So yes paying a foreign worker more money will eventially help everyone else.

other things to buy

[Anonymous Coward]

I built my current PC. Instead of buing the latest fastest processor, I bought a low of the range one and spend the rest of the money on better components, and what is more important, in making the PC quiet, so I bought a really good and silet power supply and cpu cooler.

... and it shows.

[jpmorgan]

You can't create wealth by simply paying people more. Sure, if you pay people more, they'll have more money .... but then you just get inflation, and their overall purchasing power doesn't change one whit.

Wealth is a factor of how much resource you can command, and price and money is simply a flexible way of stating current relationships between the value of labour and products. Just because you pay people twice as much doesn't mean that suddenly they can extract twice the natural resources from the ground, or produce twice as many sprokets for the same amount of effort as before.

The way to increase wealth is by paying as little as possible (reasonably- this doesn't mean pay your employees shit so they quit, or are highly disgruntled); then ideally you get the employees who are best suited for the job. Those who are actually worth more (i.e., are capable of producing more wealth) will end up in positions where they are better suited and have the opportunity to produce more, thus benefitting everybody.

Am I smoking crack? Well, if McDonalds paid all their employees $150,000 a year, you'd find engineers flipping burgers instead of creating new technology. And your average hamburger would cost $50. Who wins?

Where are the apps ???

[dr.Flake]

The thing is, for a long while software develpment, hardware dev, and the increase in processing power needed for functions we want was pretty much in balance.

a new game came out, and you thought:"i should upgrade". NOt just because of this game, but you knew also for a whole bunch of others games and applications. even for that new Win95 OS everbody was talking about.

Then games were getting faster thanx to GPU's and not the CPU. Office apps were pretty much complete. (No CPU eating functions after real time spell checks.) And browsers are waiting for the data to come through the line, in stead of the data waiting in the cache to be parsed.

above is 99% of the market.

All i see now that needs the ultimate systems is sience and video editing. None of my friends even owns a video camera! Mom is no where near the need to run large neural net progs to estimate the best oven temperature for her diamond shaped cake.

But: ripping DVD could be the next CPU development stimulator! We should make it legal ;-)

why buy incredible cpus?

[agnosonga]

must be for servers...

and cracking passwords

This is nothing new

[Reziac]

I've been hearing this same whine every time a higher-speed processer came out since the 486 era. "No one" was buying 486s, they were just too expensive, and a 386DX-40 could do the same job for less money. Then "no one" was buying Pentiums, they were just too expensive, and a 486DX4-100 could do the same job for less money. Then "no one" .. you get the picture.

You are smoking crack... and it shows.

[Skwirl]

Did I say anything about "creating" wealth? Ford's goal was to create an economy where he commanded as many resources as possible towards the creation of automobiles. Ford wasn't minting money, he was transferring his wealth (i.e. current profits) to the workers.

A few rich CEOs can buy maybe a dozen or so cars before the marginal utility starts to wear a little thin, but if you can persuade those CEOs to transfer enough of their wealth to their employees so that the individual employees can afford a car, then you've got utility by the boatloads.

Indeed, history shows us that other automobile employers had to follow suit and Ford's profit sharing program resulted in much cheaper cars across the board.

Granted, he also raised wages in order to prevent turnover and that heightened efficiency led to the cheaper cars. Happy workers are productive workers and, yes, they do actually pull more natural resources from the ground and produce more sprockets under the right conditions. (Note: Even if inflation is looming, the workers don't know it yet and they're still happily working harder.)

That's rather the point. If all you ever do is keep lowering employee wages until you hit the sweet spot, you'll be in a whole lot of trouble when you realize that you were on the wrong side of the labor supply and demand curve the whole time. High turnover was a warning sign to Ford that he (and the rest of his industry) were on the wrong side of the curve and they needed to raise wages. Ford undoubtably realized that one of the happy side-effects of repairing the situation was that there would be a heightened market for automobiles among the working class. Everybody wins. Ford builds his automobile empire and the working people get their cars. (Well, everyone wins except for us, the 21st century recipients of the negative environmental and social effects of car culture.)

jpmorgan, you're only correct when an industry is operating on the far side of the labor supply and demand curve. I also suspect you're not much of a Keynesian.

I suppose this all has some relevance to the recent situation. There was, afterall, a very high turnover rate amongst tech workers during the 90s who were chasing pre-IPO dreams. That sounds like (one of many) dead canaries in a mineshaft to me. (Remember: Although a few won the IPO lottery, the majority of tech workers didn't and suffered grueling hours, draconian IP contracts and vaporware products as a result. Meanwhile, corporate propaganda was telling us that the supply of workers was low when, in fact, we now find most tech workers are out of a job.)

Re:yeah-Round & round it goes....

[evilviper]

paying a foreign worker more money will eventially help everyone else.

Ah, but you've forgotten two important points.

1. Paying them less, keeps the money closer to me... I doubt that their money comming back to me is going to come close to the money I get from paying less to them. (not that I'm being insensitive, just talking pure economics here). That can vary depending on the product in question, and my own profession, but it's true in general.

2. We were discussing the limited numbers of HIGH-END CHIPS, nothing else. Intel and AMD employees would probably use their extra cash to buy VIA chips due to price (if they actually had enough disposable income to buy a PC in the first place)

Bus speed.

[inkfox]

It all boils down to bus speed.

In the few areas where we're suffering (compile times, render times, etc.), a faster CPU doesn't do much good because it spends most of its time starved on the bus.

More focus on taking care of this problem is what's needed. Past that, I don't want a faster CPU. I want more level 1 cache.

Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

On my old Athlon 600 I could recompile a kernel and listen to mp3s (with no skippage) at the same time.

I'm now at 1.1 ghz. (Thanks, AMD, for your stupid ass numbers!) I'm tempted to try recompiling a kernel, playing mp3s, and.. Damn. Running Quake 3? Gotta think of some good processor intensive things to do.

Right. The point is, the last batch of processors is decent enough to do everything people need them to do. Hell, the batch before that is fine for 'Joe User'.

Mmm. Ram, faster hard disks, GeForce 5's.. Now that's what people want.

Amazing, isn't it? We've been spouting it to the clueless for years - that processor speed is not as important as the chipmakers make it out to be.

Are we that surprised that the clueless are listening?

Gentoo Linux

[ndecker]

Gentoo Linux is the killer app the industry is waiting for. While emerging a new Mozilla i could use a 20GHZ CPU.

Simple answer

[NeoSkandranon]

Why would you pay mucho extra cash for the faster CPU?

geek penis envy.

god damnit!

[funkmastermike]

I'm just gonna start writing bloated programs using extremely redundant code... THEN we'll see who needs a faster cpu!

Not surprised

[travail_jgd]

The chipmakers keep bringing out newer and faster chips, but the cost of the "bleeding edge" chips is enough to give pause to many people. Looking at Pricewatch, a P4 2.8Ghz CPU is twice as expensive as their 2.53 Ghz CPU. For AMD, the XP2200+ is 60% more expensive than the XP2000+. Even those who don't know computers realize that they'll be paying a whole lot of extra cash ($250 for the P4), and not getting a lot of Gigahertz in return.

Even though CPU clockspeeds go up, it seems like the best time to upgrade is after a major change is made: faster FSB, faster RAM, more L2 cache, smaller die size, etc. The incremental upgrades are almost always smaller than the clock speed would suggest. Compounding the problem is the fact that a lot of computer components haven't increased in speed; the PCI bus, consumer hard drives, and Internet connections have seen little or no change over the past few years.

Is a palladium-free processor worth the price?

[johnjay]

Would it be worth buying the fastest processor you can today so that you can have a Palladium free system as long as possible? I've been thinking of doing that.

In your example, if you buy three computers over the next year for cheap, and the last of your three computers has hardware-based digital rights protection, do you end up with more value for the money?

Re:Is a palladium-free processor worth the price?

[Jason Earl]

No, just wait until the OEMs announce the Paladium machines and have a firesale on their old equipment. That'll be the time to buy unencumbered hardware. Hopefully the OEMS won't realize that they are firesaling their valuable systems until it is too late to jack up the prices.

My guess is that Paladium is going to be the mother of all backfires. People aren't likely to take the idea of Hollywood having control over their PC lightly.

This is why new software requires more power

[nurb432]

They gotta keep the indusry moving, so they work together. Even if its an 'unwritten rule'.

New version of Windows, or 'cool game' that comes out every 2 years needs just a tiny bit more power then you have on your desk after a year.. So you gotta get a new machine..

Its an endless cycle.. only the consumers can break it..

Re:Duh..

[Anonymous Coward]

This story was posted to give the slashbots an opportunity to talk about their personal experience. Since they do not have lives, the only thing they can talk about is "me, me, me, my PC, my PC -- I run Linux and it rox."

One (orTwo) words for you...

[Mysticalfruit]

Doom III...
Games have always pushed the state of the art. I know more than a couple of people who went out and bought 486-66's just to play Doom. Those same people then turned around and bought Pentium 133's to play Quake...
One of my co-workers just built a machine in the anticipation of playing Doom III (128mb video card and all)
If I was at Intel (or Nvidia), I'd be discreetly sending people over to ID to help them get done with Doom III and get the damn thing out the door!
Then intel and AMD can watch with glee as the whole (take game home/install/runs like shit/upgrade) cycle continues...
Another good example of game that's forced alot of people to spring for better hardware is NWN.

"Old" procs still great for vanilla uses

[slide-rule]

I have [currently] three PCs at home connected in some crude network. The sum of their processor "MHz" ratings are just barely over 1GHz. My K6-2/400 box runs Linux so I can get e-mail and read slashdot. The CPU meter got boring sitting at "0" all the time. (I guess I'm saving even more system power to not draw "0%" on the screen. ;) My wife's K6-2/500 box dual's between Linux (for e-mail and web) and Win'98 for Word, Money, and BG2, the last of which runs just fine for my needs. (It only started taxing down in Chapter 7, but that was fine since I was getting owned anyway ;) The last box runs an ancient P-166 for Linux to basically maintain the network connection and share the modem. Aside from being lazy and/or broke (which are the main reasons preventing me from upgrading "on principle"), what *need* do *I* really have for even one box to be 1+ GHz, let alone to have two or three at 2+ GHz each? I'll answer that : I don't have any such current need; that said, the overall power of "CPU"s has exceeded my need a while ago. I'm focusing my dollars more recently on those other bits like video cards, sound cards, monitors, hub devices, more ergo mice/keyboards, etc. [shrug]

paper launch perhaps?

[mapmaker]

If AMD is interested in selling more of their high-end chips, maybe they should try **RELEASING THEM**!!!

I've been itching to build a new box around an XP 2400 ever since its "launch". It's been a month since then, and there are still no chips!

All I can say is..

[MasTRE]

fina-fscking-lee

;)

Myself...

[Sj0]

I'm waiting for the hammer. Why get something a little faster now, when I can get something revolutionary in a few months?

Is this spam?

[fm6]

Or are you just stupid?

Dual-CPU Upgrade Cycles?

[Levendis47]

This whole thread reminds me of a similar discussion over in the Apple forum the other day...

Quite a few of my friends are currently pondering "retiring" their current machines to the "home network infrastructure" wrecking yard and building new systems... it seems to be all we talk about at work.

One of the trends I've seen (amongst ~15 fairly competent developers currently in the process of buying parts and whotnot) is that quite a few have hopped on the dual processor bandwagon... particularly Dual-Athlon MB's for the obvious price points.

To that end, the biggest trend I've found is that the most important component to these guys isn't the processor or having a toater-oven GeForce 4 Ti... but rather a solid MB with a good set of ram. One of them even got the dual-MB and just set it up with a single low/mid-range XP processor. As he said, "For $400 now, I can get an excellent motherboard, an okay processor and some high-quality DDR333 RAM and use just leftover components from my old machine [not bad: Audigy, GF3-Ti and 80gb HD]... in 6 months, I'll buy 2 MP processors for 30% less than what they currently are and put the XP in my old KT133 motherboard."

I'm considering following his example.

Of course, I have yet to own a machine faster that 800Mhz/512mb RAM and it serves all of my needs except playing UT2K3 until my fingers blister...

Anyone else have good/bad/indifferent experiences about using dual-CPU's as a long-term upgrade path? Intel or AMD?...

-levendis47

C'mon gamers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, I'm not a 'gamer' by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm increasingly of the opinion that gamers are almost -single-handedly- responsible for the entire retail/home high-end processor market, save (maybe) home-video editing or other such processor-intensive applications. So I say, without the out gamers out there amongst us, there might not have been such a desperate foot race between Intel and AMD in the now infamous 'MHz-battle'. Go gamers!

New CPUs don't help...

[fok]

I do EVERYTHING w/ my Athlon 1.4MHz/256MbRAM, including perfect 1024x768 UT2K3. I can even read /. !!! Why upgrade now?
I'll just wait 'till 4GHz Hammers for $100 hit Brazil!

Any Flask-er can tell you this.

[mausmalone]

Yeah, I use flask... so sue me... unless you're MPAA...

But anyhow, anyone who runs Flask to convert MPEG2 video to either MPEG1 or AVI will tell you that CPU speed is sometimes not the bottleneck. Believed this myth for a long time, but when I upgraded from my Duron 600 to a TBird 1200 and only saw a 1 fps boost, I realized I was wrong. So I tried it out on my friend's Athlon XP 1400+ (about 1200 MHz) and it doubled my framerate.

The moral of the story? Find the bottleneck in your system and work on that. If you're using flask, it's apparently memory speed. (he has DDR 2100 and I have PC133). For boot times and program loading, it's memory size, speed, and HDD size and speed. There is probably nothing you do now on your current system that a P4 3 GHz machine will do better next year.

I bought a g4 TiBook...

[simpl3x]

and it was outdated the day it was anounced! slower than intel, slower than amd, hell a citrix could probably give it a good run for the money! The T1 was well worth the money though.

Well yeah.

[fm6]

I guess you only run basic apps that don't need a lot of processing power. Which makes you like 90% of all computer users.

Re:I have a 386

[Anonymous Coward]

I can beat you all. Besides my many machines in use, one is a 1988 386/25 with an overdrive 486/50, 32 MB RAM, IDE, SCSI and ESDI drives. Runs win98 with 1024x768 graphics and is on the network, IE and Netscape. Extremely slow, takes 4 minutes to boot up completely, but it runs and can browse the new. Also I use some Fujitsu Point webpads with wireless NICs that are 486/100 machines. Just fine.

I have a 386/25

[Anonymous Coward]

I can beat you all:) Besides my many machines in use, one is a 1988 386/25 with an overdrive 486/50, 32 MB RAM, IDE, SCSI and ESDI drives. Runs win98 with 1024x768 graphics and is on the network, IE and Netscape. Extremely slow, takes 4 minutes to boot up completely, but it runs and can browse the net. Also I use some Fujitsu Point webpads with wireless NICs that are 486/100 machines. Just fine.

Re: My current CPU is 433MHz and doing fine...

[Skal Tura]

do you do anything else than surf & mail? ;) seems like that... and ofcourse with old software cause ie 6.0 is very slow sometimes... or actually often, 5.5 was a lot faster...

Re: My current CPU is 433MHz and doing fine...

[saskboy]

I surf eBay, mail, and University sites all at the same time, while editing pictures, listen to MP3s of mine, and crunch SETI@home.
Then I shut some down to watch MPGs of TV, and type essays. Burn CDs, and IM friends with a web cam.
A full computer experience, with all the toys, at a fraction of the price for a P4 2.2GHz.

Xbox falling behind - even as a loss leader

[BattyMan]

Why in the world would anyone want to spend the money on a top of the line processor when they can buy an entire computer based on a value processor for $299 at Walmart.com?

Actually the XBOX is only $199 now. :)

In the face of $300 computers from Wal-Mart, the Xbox is starting to look like yesterday's deal:

A: It's limited to 64M RAM, at least until some clever hack expands that.

B: You'll spend $30-$70(US) on a mod chip, and then there's still the issue of installing it. This isn't a challenge to /me, but would be for someone without pretty fair soldering skills. Modded Xboxxen go for $300 (+shipping).

C: Add a USB keyboard & mouse & a plug for the side of the Xbox and a hub and an RGB monitor pigtail and you're up against that $300 pricepoint mighty quickly even if you do your own modchip install.

D: Installation notes suggest that it may prove necesary to replace the DVD, apparently the Empire chooses DVD models that have trouble reading consumer-burned media. (They have plenty of trouble reading genuine Xbox DVDs if they're scratched, too) This would queef the deal bigtime.

Actually Wal-Mart's 800MHz system is only $200 now. Ummm, for those wondering, it ends up being about $233 for the shipping+handling and tax.

Oh well. The value proposition offered by the Xbox
is the opportunity to stick it to his Billness.

FOR GREAT JUSTICE.

SOME YOUR XBOX ARE BELONG TO US!!!

Purpose Reliable

[fm6]

Faster in what sense? Yeah it clocks faster, but do you really do anything that uses those extra CPU cycles?

I shouldn't have made my statement about reliability so sweeping. But the fact remains that replacing the "official" CPU with something outside spec is adding a nasty bit of complexity to the system. Which is to say a new point of failure. Which I used to see a lot of from people trying "upgrade" their 80386-33 boxes.

And for what? Your CPU is only one of several potential bottlenecks in a system. Very rarely is it the bottleneck that slows down your word processor or spreadsheet. Yet people tend to fixate on CPU numbers, and end up paying for cycles they'll never use.

I've been saying this for a decade,

[BattyMan]

only with different numbers (both part numbers and speed figures):

I think it's a matter of diminishing returns. If a $75 CPU runs at 1.5 GHz and is fast enough for 75-90% of the computing tasks you do, and a 2.5 GHz CPU costs over $500... then why would you even consider the 2.5 GHz CPU?

Especially since that bleeding-edge chip is going to drop 50% in price over the next 6 months (or whenever the yields pick up on the next faster speed, whichever comes first). Fsck it.

OTOH if you have an _immediate_ need for gut-wrenching CPU speed, go for it. Compare the overpriced bleeding-edge x86 chip against, say, an UltraSPARC, and it will look _real_ good. But you certainly don't need to spend the money to surf the web or play games. A good video card is a much better investment for most people.

Re: My current CPU is 433MHz and doing fine...

[Skal Tura]

yeah, and less than fraction of user friendliness, smooth experience etc... etc... perhaps you can live with 433mhz, perhaps you have just born to wait? ;)

It's not coming... it's here

[Anonymous Coward]

Check the latest Thoroughbred core Athlon XP's. I'm pretty sure they already have the integrated heat spreader. Buy one now-- AMD needs the business! :-)

go server based

[asciiRider]

the reality of the matter is that most of the cpu power in our company goes unused.

we are tired of people crying about what cpu speed they have - people were writing memos with 486's and they are still writing memos with the p400's -

Sure, cpu's get faster, but do our jobs change?
Take my shipping department for example. A couple of years ago all they had was dos, dos novell, and a dos mrp program. Now they have Windows, NT for networking, Outlook/Exchange, Internet, network laser printers. You name, I gave it to them. Then I look around and I see them doing the same stuff they always did. Printing shipping orders. Talking to customers. Printing more shipping orders. Nothing changed except the technology. I wonder if it was worth it???

At my company, we are tired of the upgrade cycle. We are going server based, win2k + Metaframe. Yeah, we will buy the new cpu's, but they will end up in the data center where they belong and where all users will benefit from them.

geez - i've got a p200 at home that does everything I need it to do. Games, Inet, Star Office, everything.

I don't want faster CPU's at my company. I want faster workers who don't sit around and blame the stinking CPU !

Re:software lag and video cards - more than that!

[cheese_wallet]

Also, I don't want to upgrade my CPU anymore, I want to add CPU power to what I already have. Give me a scaleable hardware architecture (with a lot of empty CPU slots), with the OS supporting it. Add a 'cheap' factor. THIS would be my ideal computer... for now! ;-)

I agree with you. One of the computers we designed at work had 4 cpus, along with some shared memory, but most of it was unshared. The cool thing was that the cpu's didn't need to run at the same speed, they were effectively independent computers all on the same backplane. they also had some interesting methods of inter-processor communication.

Anyway, I'd like a computer that I could throw a cpu into, and have it be treated like a separate computer. I shouldn't say it, but it could be like a single box beowulf cluster with a high-speed interconnect.

I guess that is sort of what the super computers do.

Henry Ford's strategy

[GPS Pilot]

Henry Ford was a prime SOB, but one thing he did right was pay his workers $5/day (a high wage at the time), realizing that he'd never sell enough Model A's unless his workers could afford them.

Actually, while this shows Henry to be a generous soul, it is not a sound business strategy to pay workers more than you have to in order to retain them.

Yes, his workers could afford to buy the product, and their high standard of living had a ripple effect on the local economy -- but I would guess outside of a 20-mile radius of a Ford plant, there was no measureable effect.

But he was marketing his cars to the entire nation, not just to the 1% of Americans who lived within 20 miles of his plants. And if he wanted the other 99% to be able to afford his cars, the best strategy would have been to pare production costs to the bone -- yes, including labor costs. This also would have been the best strategy for increasing the standard of living of the other 99%.

By praising the way Ford workers were treated at the expense of Americans in general, you, sir, are sticking up for a special interest group. There's far too much of that going on these days.