Posted by
michael
on from the penny-pinching dept.
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..."
My current CPU is 3+ years old
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
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.
Lazy Programming
by
unicron
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
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.
-- Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
id Software owns the Chip Market
by
edeity
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
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.
Devil's Advocation
by
Jahf
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
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:)
-- It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I'd be buying hardware if I had the money
by
Crag
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
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.
-- Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Not till I see nickel on the core�.
by
(H)elix1
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
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...
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.
Re:Precisely
by
Jason+Earl
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
Of course nobody's buying.....
by
theflea
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
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:Yeah, I need a 2.something ghz CPU for Word!!!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
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:Next step:Quiet, cool running small PC STANDARD
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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.
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.
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.
... 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).
... 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)
:)
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
It may have 2 very cool side-effects, though:
1) Pervasive computing may become more
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
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
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.
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.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
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...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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. . . .
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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.
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.
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.
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.