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..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
--
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
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.
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!
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!
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.
software lag and video cards
by
cheese_wallet
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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
by
ergo98
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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
by
Argylengineotis
·
· Score: 2
" 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
by
Citizen+of+Earth
·
· Score: 2
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
by
Sycraft-fu
·
· Score: 2
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
by
Dun+Malg
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
-- If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Re:software lag and video cards
by
Courageous
·
· Score: 2
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
by
Fweeky
·
· Score: 2
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
by
pclminion
·
· Score: 2
"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
by
timbck2
·
· Score: 2
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.
-- Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
Re:software lag and video cards
by
jafac
·
· Score: 2
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.
-- These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Re:software lag and video cards
by
cheese_wallet
·
· Score: 2
"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
by
cheese_wallet
·
· Score: 2
" 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
by
cheese_wallet
·
· Score: 2
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
by
cheese_wallet
·
· Score: 2
"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!
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)
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.
Re:Lazy Programming
by
Stormie
·
· Score: 4, Informative
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.
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.
--
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Re:Lazy Programming
by
NineNine
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
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".
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.
-- Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
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.
-- The Kruger Dunning explains most post on/. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
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?)
Why go for the newest?
by
I_am_Rambi
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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.
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.;)
-- The Kruger Dunning explains most post on/. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Re:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k
by
NineNine
·
· Score: 2, Funny
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.
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.
Intel bit itself in the a** here
by
GreyWolf3000
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
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.
-- Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
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?
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.
-- Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I love when they use the Internet
by
asv108
·
· Score: 4, Informative
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
by
Kaz+Riprock
·
· Score: 4, Funny
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.
-- Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Re:I love when they use the Internet
by
dillon_rinker
·
· Score: 3, Funny
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
by
Reality+Master+101
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
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.
-- Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Re:I love when they use the Internet
by
NotAnotherReboot
·
· Score: 2
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
by
alienmole
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
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
by
Istealmymusic
·
· Score: 2
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.
-- "The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Re:I love when they use the Internet
by
asv108
·
· Score: 2
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
by
garcia
·
· Score: 2
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
by
Skuld-Chan
·
· Score: 2
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
by
spinkham
·
· Score: 2
What you are talking about is called in common terms, the web. The internet is indeed a bunch of bits on wires.
-- Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Re:I love when they use the Internet
by
Citizen+of+Earth
·
· Score: 2
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
by
BoneFlower
·
· Score: 2
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
by
alienmole
·
· Score: 2
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-- The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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.
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.
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.
--
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
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.
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).
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.
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.
...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.
-- You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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.
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).
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.
Yeah, I need a 2.something ghz CPU for Word!!!
by
fmaxwell
·
· Score: 2
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!!!
by
ncc74656
·
· Score: 2
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).
-- 20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
Re:Devil's Advocation
by
hendridm
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> 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.
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).
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.
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..
-- Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
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.
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.
-- It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
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.
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.
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.
-- It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
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.
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.
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
by
unicron
·
· Score: 3, Funny
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.
-- Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Re:Lazy Programmer Syndrome
by
FyRE666
·
· Score: 2
:-) 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...
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.
-- "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala,
it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Re:Lazy Programmer Syndrome
by
victim
·
· Score: 2
Psst. I am the boss.:-)
Re:This is why Apple isn't dead
by
asv108
·
· Score: 2
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.
Building Systems
by
T-Kir
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
-- Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
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.
Re:I'd be buying hardware if I had the money
by
Citizen+of+Earth
·
· Score: 2
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.
Re:i think it's a big scam anyways
by
rmohr02
·
· Score: 2
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.
Apple loses on MHz and Price ...
by
AHumbleOpinion
·
· Score: 2
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.
Stop working on faster processors...
by
Kaz+Riprock
·
· Score: 2
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.
-- Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Moore's Law meets Marketing Dept.
by
lugonn
·
· Score: 2
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?
Re:Oh what a surprise!...
by
Zeinfeld
·
· Score: 2
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.
--
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!
by
Directrix1
·
· Score: 3, Funny
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
-- Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!
by
FauxPasIII
·
· Score: 2
> 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!!!
by
Jason+Earl
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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!!!
by
SClitheroe
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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!!!
by
Jason+Earl
·
· Score: 2
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!!!
by
Jason+Earl
·
· Score: 2
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!!!
by
guybarr
·
· Score: 2, Funny
P.S. I know you were trolling.
he wasn't trolling, he was drolling. and very nicely so, IMHO.
lighten up:)
-- Working for necessity's mother.
Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!!
by
ncc74656
·
· Score: 2
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 and other character entities?)
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.
-- That is all.
Re:Not a big surprise...
by
Sebastopol
·
· Score: 2
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.
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...
-- That is all.
This is quite understandable
by
Matthew+Luckie
·
· Score: 2
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
by
miracle69
·
· Score: 2
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
-- Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Speed up but not performance
by
woogieoogieboogie
·
· Score: 2, Informative
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.
-- ... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
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!
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...
Re:Not till I see nickel on the core�.
by
ottffssent
·
· Score: 2
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�.
by
ottffssent
·
· Score: 2
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�.
by
Dahan
·
· Score: 2
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�.
by
Kredal
·
· Score: 2
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...
-- Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
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?)
It's cause were all F@CKIN UNEMPLOYED
by
43PercentBurnt
·
· Score: 4, Funny
See subject.
-- There will be plenty of time for smoking doobies when your living in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER.
Re:This is why Apple isn't dead
by
Styx
·
· Score: 2
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.
-- /Styx
Re:This is why Apple isn't dead
by
adam613
·
· Score: 2
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.
Warranted by the warranties
by
mmol_6453
·
· Score: 2
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.
-- What's this Submit thingy do?
Real vs. perceived speed of the internet
by
swb
·
· Score: 2
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..
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.
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.
-- Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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
Cheaper, cooler, more efficient
by
AT
·
· Score: 2
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"(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.
-- "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Re:Obvious, looking at prices
by
martissimo
·
· Score: 2
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
This will hurt Intel
by
Groo+Wanderer
·
· Score: 2, Informative
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.
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!
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?
-- If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Resource is a many plundered thing
by
fm6
·
· Score: 2
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!
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.
--
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
If Intel thinks it's bad now....
by
frovingslosh
·
· Score: 2
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.
-- I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
-- Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Re:Oh what a surprise!...
by
Zeinfeld
·
· Score: 2
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.
--
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
All good news for VIA/Cyrix
by
n9fzx
·
· Score: 2, Informative
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).
-- ...-.-
Time for home uber servers
by
philipsblows
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
Next step:Quiet, cool running small PC STANDARD
by
csoh
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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!
Its impressive, but not so useful...
by
coene
·
· Score: 2
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.
Intel plans to blame their sales on online file sharing.
Re:Obvious, looking at prices
by
VAXman
·
· Score: 2
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:This is why Apple isn't dead
by
rodgerd
·
· Score: 2
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).
shop for HW on price but spend big $'s on SW
by
Wansu
·
· Score: 2
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.
-- Wansu, th' chinese sailor
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.
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.:-)
They need Female Models/Sex Appeal
by
insane8
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
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
by
MtViewGuy
·
· Score: 2
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
by
goingware
·
· Score: 2
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.
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".
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?
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.
-- ~REZ~
#43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
You are smoking crack... and it shows.
by
Skwirl
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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....
by
evilviper
·
· Score: 2
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)
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.
-- Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
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?
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:just get everyone to upgrade to win 2k
by
MtViewGuy
·
· Score: 2
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:My current CPU is 3+ years old
by
ncc74656
·
· Score: 2
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.)
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:This is why Apple isn't dead
by
asv108
·
· Score: 2
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.
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.
Re:software lag and video cards - more than that!
by
cheese_wallet
·
· Score: 2
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.
Re:Is a palladium-free processor worth the price?
by
Jason+Earl
·
· Score: 2
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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).
Sent from your iPad.
...It's worked for MS for years.
May we never see th
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.
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.
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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
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?
I.O.U One Sig.
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.
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....
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
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.
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.
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.
THEN I'd be happier with the speed of my computer.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
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?
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
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.
That is all.
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.
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.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
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!
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 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
How to rationalize theft.
See subject.
There will be plenty of time for smoking doobies when your living in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER.
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.
/Styx
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.
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.
What's this Submit thingy do?
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..
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.
/Styx
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!
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.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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...
Mozilla.
/. "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.
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
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...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
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.
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.
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.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
"(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.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
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
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
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!
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!
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.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
it's the economy stupid
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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).
...-.-
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.
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!!!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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!
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.
Intel plans to blame their sales on online file sharing.
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.
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).
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.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
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.
thats what dad said huh?
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..
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.
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.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
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
cat /dev/random > neededfile.dat
... or something. (:
if (neededfile.dat == null)
{BSOD();}
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
It is the big parallell processing gray mass just above shoulder height that must run real slow for you to use AOL...
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?
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.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.)
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)
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
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?
Why would you pay mucho extra cash for the faster CPU?
geek penis envy.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I also have monitor problems though. I have this aweful Vivitron 15" on my server which makes me feel ill at 1024*768.
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.
I'm waiting for the hammer. Why get something a little faster now, when I can get something revolutionary in a few months?
It's been a long time.
Or are you just stupid?
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.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.