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What Applications Will Drive System Performance?

Posted by Cliff on from the games-are-an-obvious-answer...what-else? dept.

Foredecker asks: "Companies like AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, ATI and others are continuing to drive silicon performance to new levels. Of course, every day computing (basic web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, personal finance, and the like) don't require a Intel 3.2Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading or a AMD Athlon 64 FX and their associated platforms. Of course, there are apps that will leverage today's high performance platforms. Games are an obvious category, as is video editing. I'm looking for apps that will be widely adopted and will drive volume hardware shipments. Things that come to mind are: effective, speaker independent voice recognition, accurate repeatable object recognition in digital photos and videos (or from live feeds such as web cams). What other application categories are there that will drive the need for bigger-faster-better hardware platforms?"

106 comments

  1. Current demand isn't abating any time soon. by Mr.+Darl+McBride · · Score: 3, Funny
    Have no fear: High end systems have a long and brilliant future as penis extensions for spreadsheet-jockeying corporate accountants. These tiny men will continue to demand 3.2GHz CPUs and ATI FireGL 9600s to make clippy the fastest little bugger possible. (In this case, we can only assume that he wants to give Clippy, his only friend, his own monitor to make Excel that much more of a magical happy friend land.)

    I mean, what the hell? This isn't the first time I've seen this kind of thing. Why are the guys who are hired to pinch pennies in corporate always the ones who aren't happy until their toilets flush with freshly imported springwater?

  2. OS Bloat by PeteyG · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone seen the system requirements for Longhorn/OSXI/KDE4? they're probably gargantuan.

    --
    no thanks
  3. Windows? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's quite the resource hog.

    1. Re:Windows? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      I see you haven't had the opportunity to experience Gnome....

  4. High end by Beatbyte · · Score: 1

    Visualization (Rendering)
    Distributed computing
    Power to scale (1u capable of what only a current 2u can do)
    Science
    Encryption (Quantum, brute force cracking, etc.)
    Databases (often overlooked)
    Doom 3 ;-)

    --
    Get paid to code OSS
  5. As in all things.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Porn will lead us.

    Massive amounts of storage, and fantastic amounts of cheap processing power will lead to a generation of smart capable web spiders capable of autonimously downloading and indexing porn while avoiding banners, advertisments, pop ups, P2P spam or crap-floods and duplicates.

    The unibiquitious nature of regular porn will make it tame and uninteresting through sheer availability. This will lead a secret cabal of Japanese scientists (and school girls) to create ultra-porn which will require consumers to be at least a half century old. As the shocking depictions will require a cushion of life's experiences at least that substantial to avoid harmful or even debilitating side effects.

    In the year two thousand....

    1. Re:As in all things.... by AMystery · · Score: 2, Funny

      But you said you wanted to avoid crap-floods... What else would require japanese school girls and a minimum middle aged audience?

  6. .NET and DRM by Mr.+Darl+McBride · · Score: 5, Interesting
    A lot of the push for faster computers is going to come from applications becoming substantially less efficient. Anyone who's used the Visual Studio .NET GUI for a major project or any other code written with .NET can tell you that it's nowhere near as lean as native Windows code, yet MS is pushing to migrate applications to .NET as it offers the company much more control of the platform.

    Similarly, the applications running in curtained memory are going to stack up at an alarming rate once Longhorn and other platforms start to see pervasive digital rights management. As every bit of data being generated or passed from application to application is being tested against dozens of different filters, CPU time is going to go up in smoke, and it will be illegal to stop these activities from taking place in most countries.

    1. Re:.NET and DRM by fygment · · Score: 1

      This seems to be an excellent point echoed (less succinctly) in some other posts. Some questions come to mind:

      a) How much of an edge are we losing as we evolve software and hardware? Is bloat and inefficiency cancelling out CPU performance increase? Or are we making net gains?

      Thought: We are making net gains, so the worry is really about efficiency. But we still seem to be inside the 80/20 criteria i.e. the extra effort to increase the efficiency of software is offset by the relatively small performance increase that can be had.

      b) The remedy to pervasive DRA seems to be in OSS. Can we get to the point where OSS OS'es, wordprocessors, spreadsheets, and other office apps are "good enough" i.e. ubiquitous format and sufficient features to satisfy all but the most esoteric requirements?

      Thought: The counter to the DRA worry is that at the speeds of most office suite software, any DRA effects will pass unoticed. There is no OSS software that seems to satisfy general user needs the way the commercial office suites and OS'es do. Even amongst the OSS savvy, the use of OSS for real work is still low (sysadmins,etc. being exception).

      --
      "Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
    2. Re:.NET and DRM by Mr.+Darl+McBride · · Score: 1
      b) The remedy to pervasive DRA seems to be in OSS. Can we get to the point where OSS OS'es, wordprocessors, spreadsheets, and other office apps are "good enough" i.e. ubiquitous format and sufficient features to satisfy all but the most esoteric requirements?
      I suspect that the hurdles for OSS to avoid DRM will be legislative, not technical. I seem to remember that one senator already has pushed to enact a law that no computer without DRM be allowed to connect to the internet past some date -- take that with a grain of salt however, as Google isn't unearthing any related stories for me.
  7. The same apps that have always driven performance by skinfitz · · Score: 3, Funny

    Games and pr0n.

    And pr0n games.

  8. All technology is driven by 3 things.... by ComputerSlicer23 · · Score: 1
    Pornography, military, and gamers.

    Those are the early adoptors of nearly all technology, and drive the prices to points where normal financially sane people can afford them. Half of all technology every invented was driving by one of those three groups.

    For me personally, I use my desktop for lots, and lots of compiling. I'd like my desktop to be more responsive under heavy I/O load. I'd like it to do more things in the background. Personally, I've probably got enough CPU for my desktop. I found find a use for more, but I sure could use lots more disk I/O. I could use more memory also.

    I'd like my desktop interface to be much more sophisticated, and to have a lot more context sensitive abilities. All that takes more CPU horsepower. The eye candy is nice, but that's not that interesting to me.

    I'd like a desktop that supports 10 monitors. I'd like even more of a network transparent desktop then I have using X11. I'd like to have faster then GigaBit, which requires more CPU, more bus, and faster disks.

    I'd like to be able to do lots, and lots of streaming realtime encoded TV signal for my home built PVR (encode 3-4, while playing one that has been paused thus having 5-10 minutes of latency in the playback). I'd like to see more ability to have low latency for specific tasks (music, TV encoding, multi-medial in general).

    It's really expensive to build just a handful of CPU's. It's much cheaper to make them in huge volumes. Thus Intel and AMD makes them in huge volumes, and they sell pretty well to the consumer, and Intel makes a killing selling the CPU's, the chipsets, and the various electronic devices they either sell or license to others. So literally the thing driving more, faster CPU's is economics. You just can't buy the old CPU's any more. When you want a new CPU to replace a 5 year old computer, you have to buy a new one.

    I'd like more ability to parse the natural english language. Thus facilitating better ability to write a content crawler that can point out urgent e-mails, while crawling the google cache finding content that I'd find amusing.

    I'd like the ability to do more and better datamining. To correlate more information about my machines and servers. More ability to automate more and more task to with computer.

    I could use more CPU power to use to secure my machines. If I could log every incoming packet and analyize more and more correlations, and deduce when people are doing bad things that'd be great. If I could use it to do more analysis of software and code. To develop more, and more sophisticated techniques of telling when software does something stupid.

    I'd like it because it means, the construction of larger, and larger software applications is possible.

    Kirby

    1. Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... by jonadab · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > Pornography, military, and gamers.

      I wish I knew where this idea came from so I could debunk it properly. The
      military I'll grant; war has always been a driving force of technology. The
      other two I question. Games are driving new technology now, and have been
      for thirty years or so, but historically that's a blip on the radar.

      I would propose a different three things (well, two of them different): war,
      communications, and entertainment. (If you like, you can group porn and games
      under the umbrella of entertainment, but I believe other forms of entertainment
      such as hunting and racing and even literature have been just as responsible
      for driving technological development as games or porn.) Some would say space,
      but that was really mostly driven by the miliary, especially at first. Some
      also would say transportation, which is arguable, but I contend that usually
      one form or another of communication was driving the development of newer and
      better forms of transportation, at least until the last century or so. At
      minimum, transportation and communication have fed off one another, as there's
      little compelling reason to go somewhere if you don't have information about
      that place.

      Think about communications, though. Writing. Paper (both early forms such as
      parchment and papyrus as well as modern paper). The printing press. Movable
      type. Telegraph and phone lines. Radio. Ethernet. TCP/IP. These are the
      technologies that really matter, the enabling technologies, the ones on which
      everything else is based, the ones without which none of the others would have
      happened.

      These big three (war, communications, and entertainment) all also feed off one
      another. Gunpowder was used in fireworks, later weapons. Rapid-loading guns
      are only possible due to the self-contained cartridge, which is based on the
      percussion cap developed for... hunting -- a sport, a kind of entertainment.
      On the other hand, intercontinental communication was driven by better ships,
      driven by naval needs, for the military -- war. And if you've ever seen Wag
      the Dog, you'll either chuckle about the notion of entertainment driving war,
      or shudder and nod, depending on your philosophical position. Either way, it
      is difficult to argue that any one of these three have not been a major driving
      force behind the development of technology.

      Transportation, as I said, also is arguable. Gaming, in recent years, is true,
      but I contend that fits under the broader category of entertainment. Maybe
      I'm naive, but I can't think of any important technology that has been driven
      to development by porn. Unless you want to say bandwidth, but I'd call that
      communications, and anyway, I'd say that bandwidth has been driven to a larger
      extent by games (entertainment) and shopping (entertainment), the military,
      and, especially in the early years, plain old garden variety communications,
      like email and usenet.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    2. Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... by jonadab · · Score: 1

      Oh, some also would say religion. The press, they would say, was developed to
      print the Bible. (This is at least partly true.) They would also point to the
      crusades as a major cause of the development of a lot of technology in Europe.

      I personally disagree with this assessment, though it has some validity.
      However, I believe that the Bible wasn't the *only* thing Gutenberg wanted to
      print. He printed it first because it was the best-known and most-revered book,
      but he wanted to print books in general, not _only_ the Bible. As for the
      crusades, religion was certainly abused to talk many people into them, but I
      believe they were organised for political, not religious, reasons. Besides,
      it is an historical coincidence (if there is such a thing) that the crusades
      drove more tech development than other wars. It is only because they got the
      warriors to physical locations they hadn't travelled to from Europe recently
      that the crusades are significant. A religious war between, say, England and
      France would not have driven any more technological development than any other
      war. So it was new-found knowledge of a foreign place that drove the new
      technology -- communication, or transportation, or both. And, of course, war.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    3. Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... by ComputerSlicer23 · · Score: 1
      Go look at the early adoptors of a ton of technology, you'll find, gamers, the military, and pornography junkies.

      Lots of early movies we're in fact pornographic. A lot of early money in the film industry was made of pornographic movies. I'd cite it, but I learned that on the "History Channel".

      VHS tapes... Know what drove down the prices on VHS players and tapes? Pornography.

      Who are the early adaptors on DVD's? Pornographers.

      Who drives highend video quality on like HDTV? Uhh, yep, that's them Porno-heads.

      Who uses all of the high end technology in DVD's? Pornographers. Other then "The Matrix", I've never heard of a movie that uses the "Angle" feature in a movie (I've never seen it in the Matrix, but I didnt' really care that much to look for it). However, I hear it's used most often in pornography.

      Who drove a lot of the work on early video compression, Pornographers. Who do you think the early adoptors on new codec's are? Porn heads.

      I'm not saying they did the work, but they are the early adoptors that spend outrageous sums of money, to make it viable economically for the masses. Which is what this guy is talking about.

      They are the ones who beta test all kinds of new technology. Pornography is the driving force behind nearly all Hi-Fi multimedia upgrades.

      Communication is relagated to a secondary position in my mind, precisely because that's almost never an early adoptor reason, it's a mass market reason. Early adoptors are critical to pushing new technology. Pornheads, gamers, and the military are the three easy to identify people who are always into the latest greatest cutting edge technology.

      Just like Warz people are part of the reason you can buy a CDROM burner for what they cost. It's my understanding that some of that was driven by pornography because it was easy, save archival. It was easy to transport. It was easy to duplicate and charge money for.

      Yep, lots of them paved the way on broadband.

      Kirby

    4. Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm not saying they did the work, but they are the early adoptors that spend outrageous sums of money, to make it viable economically for the masses.

      This is basically false. Pornographers are very quick to adopt technology soon after it has become mainstream, but you will find very few if any examples where porn is used to actually advance technology.

      I'll shoot down one of your examples: DVD. This was a standard that was backed by all major Hollywood studios and consumer electronics manufacturers. It was explicitly designed to be mass-market technology with near-universal adoption. Porn had nothing to do with it's success-- it was mearly along for the ride. You could make the same arguments for VHS and the Internet.

      Now, if the porn industry had developed their own consumer digital video technology maybe you'd have an argument.

    5. Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... by op00to · · Score: 1

      The porn lobby are the ones pushing the FCC to go to HDTV? All this time I thought it was the greedy networks who wanted to ensure people didn't distribute their boring content.

    6. Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... by tigersha · · Score: 1

      While it is true that "multi-angle" is a euphemism for "skinflick" in the movie industry, many music videos also use them. I have a Eurythmycs concert with multi angles.

      Music videos are cool on DVD because its currently the only mainstream way to deliver 5.1 surround sound. The video is pretty much incidental.

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
    7. Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... by jmichaelg · · Score: 1
      For me personally, I use my desktop for lots, and lots of compiling. I'd like my desktop to be more responsive under heavy I/O load. I'd like it to do more things in the background.

      Compiling will certainly soak your I/O channels which is why ramdisks are so useful. The downside to using a ramdisk to eliminate i/o as a bottleneck is it puts the cpu front and center as your bottleneck.

    8. Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... by ComputerSlicer23 · · Score: 1
      No, but the porn viewers out there, purchased a lot of the TV's when they were in the $10-15K price range for Hi-Def of any kind, and are the ones who pushed production up enough to get them into a feasible price range for the average AV junkie.

      Kirby

  9. VR porn by squiggleslash · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I'm seeing amazing graphics now. UT2003, even on my Radeon 7500 (I have a PowerBook), is awesome.

    But I suspect people programming these things are still looking at them going "Well, if we just had a bit more power, we could do X, Y, and Z". UT2003, for example, has pretty much no interaction with anything other than a handful of objects - you can't blow up a wall, for example.

    We have a long way to go before we can go for something that's virtually a complete simulation.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    1. Re:VR porn by Wolfrider · · Score: 1

      --Red Faction lets you blow up walls... And people. Lots and lots of walls. And people. Did I mention walls?

      "It's an 88 Magnum. It shoots through schools."

      http://www.fredcorp.com/vortex/reviews/j/jdanger GR .htm

      --
      .
      == WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
  10. MS Office by stinkyelf · · Score: 2, Funny

    subject says it all

  11. IDE, Bus speed by BrookHarty · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Anyone else notice how a system will pause when you put in a cdrom or format a floppy? This goes away when you have an SMP system. HT enabled p4's also remove this to some degree.

    I'd like to see some typical performance on these types of activities, things that can "pause" a system for a couple seconds.

    Loading websites with tons of thumbnails, searching hardrives with/without indexes (search pauses explorer). Programs that can Spike the CPU, use up all the buffer on a device, peg out virtual memory, freezes programs so you cant switch between them.

    More multitasking benchmarks with responsiveness being goal. All benchmarks I see are geared around 1 app, how fast can you go, not how smooth can it go. This is why everyone is so interested in Linux kernel 2.4 MM patches or 2.6 low latency patches, to make the system smooth and responsive. People notice these "lags" in windows and linux.

    1. Re:IDE, Bus speed by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 3, Informative
      This is a function of I/O design, more than CPU horsepower. With all the fancy northbridge extensions and DMA, and whatnot - The PC is still a kludge architecture. A brilliant, category changing kludge, but still no great shakes in the I/O dept, when compared against real workstations and mid-range boxes.

      Just be glad you don't use an OS w/ hooks into BIOS routines for peripher access!

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    2. Re:IDE, Bus speed by BrookHarty · · Score: 1

      We include memory, cpu, sound, gfx in benchmarks, why not basic I/O?

      Seems one of the most important areas, seems to be left out.

    3. Re:IDE, Bus speed by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 1
      A big deal w/ I/O is not just speed, but concurrency of operation.

      I can bring a MySQL server to its knees on a PC server, and remote shell to the box is impossible. On an old SPARC Ultra 80, ssh into the box isn't FAST, but it is possible for remote management.

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    4. Re:IDE, Bus speed by TheSunborn · · Score: 1

      No amount of hardware can make it up for lousy software. But they still keep trying.

      Martin Tilsted

    5. Re:IDE, Bus speed by Bronster · · Score: 1

      On an old SPARC Ultra 80, ssh into the box isn't FAST, but it is possible for remote management.

      I've had similar issues with very slow ssh on old Sun hardware - much slower than similar speed PC hardware, and I suspect that it's the lack of a good random number generator.

      I haven't done any real analysis though, because I don't need to ssh in often enough to care.

    6. Re:IDE, Bus speed by swankypimp · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Although I'm typing this on a 3 gHz P4, the... delay... when loading a program or accessing a drive still bugs me. Back when I was in college (G3 days, four or five years ago), the Macs in our computer lab impressed the heck out of me on how responsive they were. (Probably because Apple designed the OS for a specific motherboard I/O layout.) Photoshop and other apps were objectively faster on the Intel machines, but psychologically they always seemed speedier on the Mac.

      --

      --All your stolen base are belong to Rickey Henderson
    7. Re:IDE, Bus speed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Did you eliminate the obvious variable (Solaris versus Linux or whatever)?

    8. Re:IDE, Bus speed by nixman99 · · Score: 1

      Anyone else notice how a system will pause when you put in a cdrom or format a floppy?

      What OS are you using? I just formatted a floppy today on a Mandrake 9.1 system and there was no impact to any other processes. Ditto for inserting a CD.

    9. Re:IDE, Bus speed by tigersha · · Score: 1

      There is a difference between latency and bandwidth, and even on a slower machine having lowe UI latency (quicker response of SOMETHING on the screen) can make the program feel faster. Multithreading can help a big deal with this. Try BeOS one day to really feel the effect.

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
  12. Surviving a Slashdotting by Josh+Booth · · Score: 1

    You need at least an Athlon XP or Xeon (P4EE) to run all your httpd when being Slashdotted by posting that your computer can survive a Slashdotting.

    1. Re:Surviving a Slashdotting by Hulkster · · Score: 1

      FYI FWIW: A 2.4 GHz Xeon with 1 GByte of RAM was able to survive a recent Slashdot posting. Now the christmas webcam/webcontrol certainly took a pounding (what do you think the neighbors thought?!?), but the Christmas Lights continue to shine.

    2. Re:Surviving a Slashdotting by ldspartan · · Score: 1

      ticalc.org survived /.'ings several times, before on a 486dx, and now on a dual PPro 200mhz machine. Its all about what you're serving - ticalc.org pregenerates just about every page served, and has a giant pipe. /. hasn't killed us yet :)

      --
      lds

  13. Animated paperclips by cabalamat2 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Animated 3-dimensional paperclips, obviously.

  14. Amateur filmmaking by GuyMannDude · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Right now CGI is still expensive enough that most independents and hobbyists don't include it in their films. Affordable, rapid CGI could be a possible killer-ap for high-performance hardware. Currently, professional moviemakers must agonize over the creation of any CGI effect. It's a tedious process that involves using wire-frame animation, rendering and so on. If this process could be speeded up and simplifed, it might encourage more widespread adoption of CGI effects among hobbyists, giving them the ability to make movies they never could have before with their limited budgets.

    Imagine being able to 'direct' a VR character almost as easily as you would direct a real life actor. When the technology gets to that level, we could see an explosion of new movies by people outside the Hollywood cookie cutter. Filmmakers with radicially new ideas who are too young to have developed a 'rep' in Hollywood could be creating some very professional looking films. Think of it this way: right now there are lots of people who write fanfics of their favorite movies or TV shows. But actually creating an episode of Star Trek, for example, is just not possible right now. With improved technology, perhaps these creative individuals might very well be able to make their own episodes, largely using CGI. Imagine taking a sci-fi movie that you like for the most part but hated the ending of. You load your CGI software with images of the main characters and battleships from the DVD and create CGI models of them. Now you can create a new ending that's more to your liking. Better yet, you can burn the new version of the movie with your ending (forget the "Director's Cut", this is "Mike's Cut") onto DVD and trade with your friends.

    Right now we are all still pretty much at the mercy of Hollywood to make films that we like. Very soon, the balance of power will shift and creative individuals who have lots of ideas but budgets nowhere near those of studios will be able to create some very impressive looking films. And then Hollywood will have to get their ass in gear and show us something that we couldn't do ourselves in our own living room.

    GMD

    P.S.: Several people have mentioned that pornography has historically been a big driver of technology. Can you imagine that boom that the adult market will get when people can make their own adult films using CGI characters? Think plots of porn flicks are stupid? Wish for something better? Hell, just load your CGI software with images of Jenna Jameson and make your own film with her as the star.

    --
    watch this
    1. Re:Amateur filmmaking by Sheepy · · Score: 2, Informative
      GuyMannDude: But actually creating an episode of Star Trek, for example, is just not possible right now.

      You might want to reconsider that ;-)

      Fan-Made Star Trek Episode Available for Download

      Starship Exeter

      'Star Trek' reborn in online episode

      The fresh episode is a digital product of a personal-computing revolution that has allowed amateur moviemakers to duplicate once-pricey television- and movie-production techniques on shoestring budgets.
      But classic "Star Trek" special effects added an eerie air of authenticity. Some effects, such as certain phaser-fire and force-field scenes, were the result of a reflective camera attachment. Jimm Johnson digitally added others using image-editing software on his home computer. He also used his Apple iMac to create digital backdrops, such as star fields and the control- and screen-festooned walls of the U.S.S. Exeter bridge, and to winnow 16 hours of raw footage down to one 35-minute show.
      He says each minute of the finished show required some 20 hours of painstaking digital editing. This involved mixing still and moving imagery with dialogue and other audio elements, such as a music culled from classic "Star Trek" soundtracks.

    2. Re:Amateur filmmaking by crisco · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The bottleneck in CGI is human time, not computer time. It takes much longer to create realistic effects and CGI than it does to render them. Simplification (and therefore a reduction in CGI costs) is going to come through software improvments, some of which will take additional CPU and most of which will involve long hours of tedious programming and tons of IP locked up by the producers of high end 3D software.

      --

      Bleh!

    3. Re:Amateur filmmaking by the+argonaut · · Score: 1

      Right now we are all still pretty much at the mercy of Hollywood to make films that we like. Very soon, the balance of power will shift and creative individuals who have lots of ideas but budgets nowhere near those of studios will be able to create some very impressive looking films. And then Hollywood will have to get their ass in gear and show us something that we couldn't do ourselves in our own living room.

      While I won't defend the "quality" of most of Hollywood's mainstream products, I must say you have far more faith in the ability of the average Joe to make a quality flick than I do. I would venture that 99% of fanfics SUCK; I fear what their movies would be like.

      --
      fuck you.
  15. Lazy coding by jbrandon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What applications will drive the market? The same ones we have now, but written in python using bubblesort.

    Well, maybe not bubblesort. But non-optimal algorithms, slow languages, and copying memory instead of passing a reference/pointer will increase.

    That's not even a totally awful thing, because it means that the performance of already efficient applicatoins/languages/coders goes up as well. It also means that it's easier to start writing code without mastering TAOCP first.

    So encourage your friends to write game engines in perl.

    1. Re:Lazy coding by jo42 · · Score: 1


      Java

  16. I can't run Gnome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I can't run Gnome, which is why I mentioned Windows. I do not yet have a 6 ghz Colosseon (AMD chip) system with 4 tera ram and the 500 gig HD space required to run Gnome adecquately.

  17. One word: movies by AtariAmarok · · Score: 1

    Movies. That's the ticket. iPods that hold 4000 movies/TV shows, and desktop machines that handle them with the same ease that today's machines handle MP3's.

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
  18. Here's one. by torpor · · Score: 1

    Software synthesis...

    I can think of a few others, but this one is the most fun.

    --
    ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
  19. Video editong by calidoscope · · Score: 1
    Video editing is the most likely application to drive the mass adoption of 64-bit platforms.

    If Apple has any brains they would be busy porting their multimedia software to run on a full 64-bit version of OS X.

    Another application that could always use more performance is finite element analysis - but that's more of niche than video editing.

    --
    A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
  20. If Apple had any brains by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No, Apple is too busy designing disposable iPods (disposable thanks to having ludicrously overpriced batteries with replacement costs approaching that of the entire iPod). This is the same company that thought a bent paperclip jammed into a tiny hole was a BETTER idea for media ejection than having a button to press.

    1. Re:If Apple had any brains by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, its the company that figured out that you shouldn't have to hit any button at all

    2. Re:If Apple had any brains by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      Well, if there were a button to press, that detracts from the overall user experience, in which there should be approximately 106 buttons - the power button, the mouse, and a 104 key keyboard (approx).

      Actually, I did like that Apple floppy drives ejected their disks automatically, and that they recognized new disks. That's IT.

    3. Re:If Apple had any brains by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      104 keys? Don't forget the original Mac didn't even come with arrow keys ... I don't think any version of the Classic MacOS ever totally supported the PC layout. (insert, del, home, end, etc)

      The Apple floppy drive was quite nice, although it would have been nicer if there was a software-driven eject button on the case.

  21. Business Prospective by saden1 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    In my line of work Image, PDF, SGML and XML processing in our production environment take way too much time on a single machine so we spread the task of processing these files between several machines using RPC. The bottle neck, however, is no longer with the CPU but rather I/O Read/Write operations. Of course multi-core CPUs would reduce our overall costs of having to purchase multiple machines but unless the I/O bottle neck is removed we really don't care for the improvements in CPU speeds.

    --

    -----
    One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
  22. calculation intensive programs... by josepha48 · · Score: 1
    ... such as 3D modeling, DNA analysys, protiens analysys, or anything that has to do with biomedical engineering.

    I know that the leasing package that I work on would gladly take advantage of this. Not just our end of period stuff, but also our interactive stuff. In fact this new hardware is making for great servers these days and replacing much of the old HP / Sun servers.

    --

    Only 'flamers' flame!
    Does slashdot hate my posts?

  23. What Applications Will Drive System Performance? by Tandoori+Haggis · · Score: 1

    Spam,
    W*nd*ws,
    Home entertainment platform format PC's,
    De-fragging 500 Gb HDD's,
    Decision making s/w for window lickers,
    Cybersex suits - (plenty of scope for worms and virusses there),
    3-D holographic projection displays,
    Biofeedback or retina controlled MMI, (Man Machine Interface),
    Replicator units, /. proofing websites

    --
    My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
  24. Inefficient or unintelligent coding by tchdab1 · · Score: 2, Funny

    How about the extension of lazy coding, coding by automated consultant or AI coding?
    Theoretically, code gets bigger as the interface gets easier (practically, it seems to just get bigger no matter the interface). As the coding interface is progressively automated, the code can theoretically get progressively larger.

    Vision: in 10 years Google has given rise to Hackle, where you can write a simple request for any program and have it ready to download in 5 seconds. But the result is Huge.

    Yow - I've got to lay off the Christmas cheer....

  25. Processing speed at either end of the bell curve by Glonoinha · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Processing power becomes very important at the two extremes of the Hertz chart :
    Things measured in units per second (ie, frames per second, transactions per second, connections per second) will always benefit by faster performance on a faster machine.
    Things measured in many 10's of minutes (ie, an hour or more to process one transaction) will also benefit from a faster box. This would be cryptography, video compression codecs, and physics models.

    When the transaction time is more than 1 minute but less than 10 minutes you really do not gain anything by increasing the performance of the machine (unless you can increase it to the point it runs in less than a minute. If you compile code on a computer that takes 7 minutes to compile it, buying a new computer that is twice as fast still has you compiling for 4 minutes. No real difference between the two, really, from a user's perspective.

    When the transactions are measured in per second, the difference between 15fps and 30fps is the difference between unusable, and usable - particularly when we are talking about first person shooters. The difference between processing 150 visitors a second and 300 visitors a second is the difference between getting slashdotted and not.

    When the transactions are measured in hours, being able to double the performance makes the difference in whether or not a particular transaction is even possible. Nightly backups are not particularly effective if they take 28 hours to process. Nightly runs of an accounting system .. ditto. Decrypting a message saying that Pearl Harbot is going to get bombed in 12 hours doesn't do us much good if it takes 14 hours to decrypt.

    As long as we have applications that take more than an hour to run, and as long as we are measuring applications in X per second (frames per second in the range of 1 to 100, transactions per second of more than 1,000 and less than 50,000) - we will benefit by having faster computers.

    --
    Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
  26. Fucking Idiot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Your a fucking idiot.

  27. Application startup by _iris · · Score: 2, Informative

    Most applications have a good chunk of code they execute on startup (generating lookup tables, building graphs, etc). As processors get faster, applications will slowly move toward performing these functions in an on-demand manner. This will decrease application startup time, which seems to be what most MS Office users and Internet Explorer users want to eliminate when they say "My computer is _so_ slow."

    1. Re:Application startup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      MS Office and IE* are some of the fastest starting apps you can find. Maybe you meant "OpenOffice and Mozilla users"?

      (* Try it on NT4 without the shell integration crap. It's still fast.)

  28. Data Crunching/Visualization by biodork · · Score: 1

    As the amount of data available to individuals increases, visualizations that allow people to acutally understand what is going on (and the number crunching to get the visualizations) will/are driving system performance.

    In the pharmaceutical world, for most scientists, there isn't near enough computing power for what they would like to do on a daily basis. Grid computing is making major inroads because of that. Still day to day work could make better use of things, if it didn't take 1hr to get the picture you want.

    --
    Gavin Fischer
  29. Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv by Glonoinha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Almost forgot.

    Any difference is performance that requires a stopwatch or a special timing demo application to measure - isn't a difference.

    183fps = 200fps in Quake.
    pc3200 RAM = pc2700 RAM = pc3500 RAM
    28fps in UT2003 = 30fps in UT2003
    specINT 93158 = specINT 96452

    Pentium4 3.06GHz = Pentium4 3.2GHz = Pentium4 2.8GHz.

    Until you are talking about performance games of roughly 300%, or one machine being 3x as fast as another machine - it isn't worth replacing the machine. It would be silly to replace a 486DX2-50 with a 486DX2-66, even though you would get a 30% boost in processor speed. You wouldn't replace a PII/300 with a PII/366 even though you would get a 20% boost in processing speed - they are effectively the same speed and you probably wouldn't notice the difference. Replace that PII/300 with a PIII/900 though, go 3x as fast, and all of a sudden you can see big differences and a major improvement. Same thing with replacing the PIII/900 with a P4/2.8GHz.

    --
    Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
  30. Consumer Application For More Power? by Babbster · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I don't see important new applications for the desktop causing people to care about ever-increasing processor power again - outside of the examples cited in the question, of course. What I do see as being important is smaller, cheaper and more powerful devices of other stripes.

    A good example would be Palm-type devices. As big-processor speed increases, there is also an increase in small-processor speed and efficiency (limited more by heat than anything else). This has given people a smaller, more powerful Palm-type device today than they could have bought five years ago. Another example is the DVR/PVR. The new two-tuner satellite HDTV receiver/recorders can handle the receipt and recording of two high-definition streams while decoding and playing back a third - my ancient Showstopper (ReplayTV), on the other hand, starts to chug when encoding/saving an NTSC transmission (at highest quality) while watching another (I paid &700 for my 20-GB Showstopper back "in the day" while the new 250-GB HDTV units will go for $1,000 and come down from there).

    It will be interesting to see how long non-PC devices take to catch up to current top PC speeds and what applications (especially portable, non-notebook apps) spring from that.

  31. AI combined with Databases or search by UserChrisCanter4 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Language translations.

    I recall seeing an algorithm that partially ignored traditional dictionary-type translations and relied more on a relational database. For example, rather than work word by word through a given sentence, it attempted to relate that sentence to other sentences and solve in that matter. If it sounds confusing, it's mostly because I read about it quite a while back, and really can't recall most of the details. A sentence such as "Comment Allez-Vous?" would literally translate as "how are you going", or something to that effect (Allez is the second-person plural of 'to go' in French), but is obviously more colloquially translated as "How's it going?" Rather than concern itself with the meanings of the individual words, this algorithm would know the meaning of that phrase and use it as sort-of guidelines for how an unkown phrase would translate. And I'm sure doing that properly, in realtime, with no errors would require a ludicrous amount of processor power and be ridiculously useful. Go ahead an couple that with the above-mentioned truly accurate voice recognition and you've got the legitimate workings of a device most would consider to be science fiction.

  32. CASE tools and re-engineering tools by Mycroft_514 · · Score: 1

    I can already peg a processor for several hours running reports off of about 1/3 of the databases we ahve in my current company. If I wanted to process the Peoplesoft databases, well, I can run it all weekend.

  33. In the Future ... by kalidasa · · Score: 1

    There will be no grammar ...

    Foredecker : "Of course, every day computing don't require a Intel 3.2Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading."

    "Computing" is an abstract singular noun. "Don't require" is a contraction of "do not require", and "do require" is a plural verb. I assume you were going for "doesn't."

  34. Duuhhh by JDWTopGuy · · Score: 1

    What's driving faster CPUs? Distributed.net statsmongers!

    The G4/G5 is the best chip for RC5, by the way. :)

    --
    Ron Paul 2012
    1. Re:Duuhhh by JDWTopGuy · · Score: 1

      DOH! Shudda used preview button. Distributed.net.

      Slashcode should auto-detect those screwups.

      --
      Ron Paul 2012
  35. neeeeeeed moorrreeee cpuuuu by Muggins+the+Mad · · Score: 1


    Gentoo.

    (or any from-source system)

    I find applications still need a lot more speed too. And it's not just inefficient coding I think. Detecting and removing most of the spam from my mailbox takes my mail filters about 2 minutes a day, seemingly regardless of the mail client I use.

    Virus scanners (and possibly other security methods) are still a big slow down. And I can't see things improving on that front.

    - Muggins the Mad

    1. Re:neeeeeeed moorrreeee cpuuuu by Zork+the+Almighty · · Score: 1

      For linux at least, I think binary packages are on their way out. Too much hassle trying to manage dependencies across multiple versions. Everything will be compiled from source when you install it. I think many more applications will be written in Java as well.

      --

      In Soviet America the banks rob you!
    2. Re:neeeeeeed moorrreeee cpuuuu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This comment shows some insight. Massive CPU will basically make "static binding" a thing of the past, even for software written in C or C++.

      It's a scary thing to say, but Gentoo is probably the future.

  36. Been There, done that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Apple's already released 64-bit point upgrades for many of its pro apps.

    Apple doesn't need a full 64 bit version of OS X (yet).

  37. Virtual Machines! by ph4rmb0y · · Score: 1

    This is the only real reason that I need more power than what I have (P4 2.4G, 1G ram).

    PC Virtual machine technology has completely changed the way that I design systems.

    More power? Bring it on!

  38. Desktop Environments by bobo+the+hobo · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Crazy new next-generation desktop environments will require a hefty speed boost to keep things snappy, for example I'm thinking of Java's desktop they're trying to create, with a 3d interface and lots of graphical bells and whistles.

  39. Voice recognition? by mnmn · · Score: 1

    Take a hint. Voice recognition has been vaporware since the 60s. Every futuristic movie shows a pretty lady talking to her house turning on lights and making coffee. We've got way too much CPU power in hour houses for that, so wheres voice recognition?

    The truth is, we dont need it. As impressive as voice recognition sounds, its application is limited to archival and military use.

    Next you'll say NVIDIA and AMD will design their systems around Duke Nukem Forever.

    --
    "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
  40. weather forecasts by hassr · · Score: 1

    Better, as in faster, cluster computing for one. Maybe we can get accurate weather predictions in the pacific north west. Say 99% chance of rain instead of 100%.

  41. Aliens by agent+dero · · Score: 1

    SETI@Home stats, that's how I choose my new PCs ;)

    --
    Error 407 - No creative sig found
  42. Computational Mathematics by timdaly · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A certain portion of mathematical research will require computers. The algorithms are hard, run for very long times, and use amazing amounts of memory. When used as a research tools to discover counterexamples or evaluating cases in proofs future mathematicians will use all the horsepower we can generate. Making a computer a useful tool for mathematical research is still an open problem.

    1. Re:Computational Mathematics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      considering that the most inefficient algorithm on the hardware layer is ANY floating point calculation. that's a major reason that Flops determine the Top 500 Supercomputers and as for distributed computing, it's needed for power because they use an operation called Discrete Fourier Transform (a Fast Fourier Transform on n points, rather than the entire real number system) plus compiling a program in C++ is quite inefficient. ANSI C is MUCH more efficient (decently close to GOOD hand assembly) this is true only because the wanted to work at it. From a management level, OOP (including C++) is good. C++ just sucks at implementing it. C++ code: Microsoft Windows* Microsoft Office Almost every game made recently(with some assembly inline) Xerces parser Windows system calls in POSIX mode and Win32 mode (as of NT4, windows could do POSIX). etc.

  43. Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv by Webmonger · · Score: 1

    Dear Glonoinha,

    You can convert between units per second and seconds per unit using this special formula:

    1 / unitspersecond = secondsperunit

    I hope this helps.

  44. Mozilla drives the upgrade frenzy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Of course, every day computing (basic web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, personal finance, and the like) don't require a Intel 3.2Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading or a AMD Athlon 64 FX and their associated platforms.
    Someone hasn't been using Mozilla lately
  45. two things by natefanaro · · Score: 1

    SETI and consumer stupidity (I know it's not an app.) When I used to do tech support for a PC manu, most people would ask "Hey, I want the biggest, fastest PC that you have... What is it?" I like how the poster has mentioned that we don't need a 3.2 Ghz machine to run word, check mail, or view sites but that's what most consumers do.

    I wonder what would happen if chip makers stopped making faster chips. How long would it take for most apps to catch up and for people to notice?

    1. Re:two things by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > I wonder what would happen if chip makers
      > stopped making faster chips. How long would it
      > take for most apps to catch up and for people
      > to notice?

      Look at the demo scene for the C=64. Much of the stuff from the last few years was considered impossible on an 8 bit, 1MHz machine. Of course, they work with absolutely fixed hardware, not like a PC where at that level, every different board or GPU would require unique code (outside of Windows/Linux anyway).

  46. Elder Care by jayrtfm · · Score: 1

    As our population ages, there's going to be a need for technology that lies somewhere between a human home healthcare aid and "the clapper" / roomba / "I've fallen and can't get up" panic buttons.

  47. It's useful! by MacFury · · Score: 1
    The truth is, we dont need it. As impressive as voice recognition sounds, its application is limited to archival and military use.

    I disagree. Though I haven't used it recently, back in the days of MacOS 9, I used Apple's speakable items quite often.

    Being able to lay in bed and ask the computer what time it is, if I have new emails, who's currently online, etc. is useful. (being able to control things with X10 even more so)

    Retail would be another application where voice recognition may be useful. Customers of a store could simply ask a computer if the store carried a particular product, no typing neccessary.

    1. Re:It's useful! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And the difficulty there isn't so much voice recognition, though accents and illness can give our brute force solutions a little trouble, it's parsing the language. There probably is a brute force attack for that, but it's not cost effective, and so it lingers on the island of not-ready-for-prime-time inventions (across from the island of misfit toys). Maybe Happy will see it into a new year when he retires, but I doubt it.

  48. Maximally pessimal sort by Jerf · · Score: 1

    This seems like a fine time to mention Slow Sort, which makes bubble sort look downright efficient and clever. From this paper (PDF).

    (The paper is fun if you know computer science, the c2.com link is in "normal English". Try the paper if you think you'd enjoy it; it has a dry wit and pursues its task of sorting as slowly as possible with great gusto.)

  49. Killer movie making app by jamienk · · Score: 1

    I want an app where you can write a screenplay and choose from a list of predetermined actions and actors, or create your own, and have the whole thing rendered out in at least pretty good CG. The actors and actresses could be thinly veiled versions of famous actors.

    You'd choose from drop-downs:

    Scene: Exterior; City Street; Bad neighborhood; Crowded; Night; Drizzling rain

    Actors: #1: 40s Italian American wise guy; #2: 30s African American smart aleck (here, you'd flip through characters and choose associated voices, clothes)

    Mood: Fast tempo; Mysterious

    Music: Mysterious

    Cameras: Over the shoulder of #1; Dolly back (here, you'd manipulate a bird's eye schematic)

    Actions: #1 stands on corner; White Volvo pulls up; # gets out of drivers seat, walks to #1; #1 gives #2 a black breifcase

    Dialog:
    #1: What took you so long?
    #2: Sorry, man, my woman kept me late...
    #1: You better ditch that woman if she makes you late like this...
    #2 I know man, I'll do better...

    Then you'd click RENDER and, after a while, get a good MPEG2.

    My 2 cents.

  50. Bogus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Right now we are all still pretty much at the mercy of Hollywood to make films that we like.

    If that has anything to do with CGI, you have pretty crappy taste in movies.

    Let me summarize your post: "I want to direct my own spaceship battles! bew bew boom!".

  51. Software Defined Radios by Detritus · · Score: 1

    Software Defined Radios (SDR) have a huge appetite for processor cycles. I use radio in the general sense, to include audio, visual and data transmission. Imagine plugging an antenna or cable into an ADC (analog to digital convertor) board on your PC. You could then run applications to listen to AM, FM or digital radio, watch analog or digital television, get the current time from GPS, receive IP packets from a wireless LAN or microwave link. Almost anything you now do with dedicated hardware could be replaced by software. The military is pushing the technology because it makes it possible to give a soldier one radio that can communicate with all of the existing legacy military and civilian radio systems, foreign and domestic.

    --
    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  52. Spam filtering by The+Clockwork+Troll · · Score: 1
    Soon enough, filtering spam with 100% accuracy is going to rival emulation of the human brain.

    It will be the Turing test of the 21st century.

    --

    There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
  53. Raytracing!!! by paradesign · · Score: 1
    So that i can get my Maya/Rhino/StudioTools renderings done ASAP. If i can shave but an hour off of a 35hr rendering, its a blessing.

    There will never, NEVER be enough cpu horsepower for raytracing. I will always want (todays highend)^2 power in my boxes. And strangely enough, i dont see my render times coming down at all. (Mmmmmmm... soft shadow precision. Mmmmmm... higher poly radiosity meshes. Mmmmmm... photons. Etc. etc).

    --
    I want 2D games back.
  54. CFD by vogon+jeltz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    To answer the question:"What Applications Will Drive System Performance?" Scientists and engineers need *raw* computing power. They need lots of RAM (and even more) and they need GHz, lots of them. They need fast GPUs for 0. Consider Computational Fluid Dynamics. Most problems today are calculated on off the shelf PC hardware. I know this for a fact. Today, you don't buy Indys or Sparcs anymore, they're much too expensive bang-for-bug wise. They're nothing but dead. People use dual Athlons with 3 Gigs or RAM to run their jobs, mostly one job per CPU, because parallel processing in most cases is not there yet (solving the Navier Stokes equations in parallel is still a major PITA). So in
    short, those people will always buy the fastest PC stuff available, because for them it makes a huge difference whether a solution converges in two or in four days.

  55. Compilers and emulators by Saiai+Hakutyoutani · · Score: 1

    For me, the performance of a particular emulator was the key issue when I last replaced my processor. I know a lot of people running Gentoo and Slackware, though, and for them, compilation times are a key issue.

  56. But really, it's not that you can't.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    it's that you don't. I don't blame you, after all who has that kind of time.

  57. Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv by Tim+C · · Score: 1

    Until you are talking about performance games of roughly 300%, or one machine being 3x as fast as another machine - it isn't worth replacing the machine.

    That's only true if you are talking about games. If you're talking about video encoding, or simulation work, or other real number-crunching stuff, then an increase of 50% might see your run times cut from 24 hours to 18 hours. That may well be worth the money, depending on how often you're performing those runs.

    That said, you appear to be talking specifically about games, in which case I pretty-much agree with you. For what it's worth, my two major upgrades have been Celeron 266 -> P3 700, then P3 700 -> P4 2400. I don't see myself holding out for a 7.2GHz processor before my next upgrade, though :-)

    --
    It's official. Most of you are morons.
  58. Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv by Glonoinha · · Score: 1

    It looks like you have been upgrading about every 24 months to 30 months .. maybe 3 years on the far stretch between complete machine upgrades. I am guessing your current system is less than a year old, and suits your current needs real well (I have two 2.4GHz machines, one is only about 2 months old and I am happy with both of them.) Flash forward 24 months from now and Moore's law says that the pimp machines are going to be running 3.2GHz (current fastest machine) times 2 (doubles every 18 months) to the 1.3 power (24 months / 18 months) = 7.2GHz. I would be willing to bet that the next machine you buy is at least 5GHz or the performance equivalent, with a Gig of RAM, and a quarter terabyte of drive space. Maybe half a terabyte. For about $2000 tops.

    As for the 24 hour run times, that is out on the freaky far edge of the bell curve, with 100fps being one side and 6+ hours being on the other side - the thing is, if it is taking 24 hours to process a hardcore run of video encoding, encryption, or simulation ... cutting it from 24 hours to 18 hours doesn't buy you anything. You still need to have the machine tied up for a full work day, and you still don't get the results until tomorrow. It isn't worth the downtime to install all your apps, move all your data, reconfigure everything, users, networking, system prep ... to cut a run time from 24 hours to 18 hours.

    Now if you can cut it from 24 hours to 8 hours ... that is a worth while venture. Now you can start a run when you get there in the morning and have results before you go home. 300% boost in performance - that buys you something, a payoff for the effort it takes to bring a new machine up to replace the old one.

    At that end of the bell curve, it would be a better ROI to come up with a way to invoke RAIC (redundant array of inexpensive computers, and yea I coined that term) and a way to spread the load across half a dozen machines. It works with video rendering, number crunching, simulation work (maybe), encryption, etc. You get that working and can throw 12 boxes at the problem and all of a sudden you can reduce the 24 hours to about 3 hours (I added some overhead for the distributed processing, nothing scales 100%.) That is worth it, if you can get it working.

    --
    Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
  59. Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv by texaport · · Score: 1
    You left out the equation that Intel Centrino1600 = AMD Duron550.
    As for "What Applications Will Drive System Performance?"...

    I'd say 2003 software suites for the latest notebooks requiring
    2005 mobile hardware to run like 2001 desktop systems!

  60. what apps drive performance by cinnamon+colbert · · Score: 2, Interesting

    At my company, we do a lot of engineering design with solidworks and pro/e. For our needs, we don't need more raw power. Some of the engineers have graphics cards in the multikilobuck range, so an increase in power/$ would mean a lot to us. We also do a lot of science apps that involve analysis (= science version of photoshop) of tiff files that can be 200 - 500 Mb each. I can certainly envision needing to work with 50+ of these files at a time, say do a diff between file 1 Vs. file 2 - 50, and plot out the results. The cost of computers to handle these in real time (20 seconds) is prohibitive.

  61. lots and lots of processing power by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    crack encryption keys.
    find huge pi number.
    find primes.
    accurately calculate missile trajectories in milli-
    meters.
    simulate nuclear explosions.
    predict the weather.
    simulate complex molecules in "real-time".
    computer aidded manufacturing in near "real-time"(*).
    analysing stock-market(*2).
    playing UT2005 in a 2048 x 1024 resolution.
    build robots. ...

    (*) imagine something like a printer in your room
    now, but bigger and that can "print" any form from
    any material in sizes .5 m x.5 m x.5 m.

    (*2) imagine a server box in one corner of your
    room that is your personal stock broker doing
    nothing but looking at he stock market and sending
    you emails or SMSs with promissing stocks etc =
    a $money$ generating refrigerator or video player
    kinda thingy-appliance.

  62. Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv by CTho9305 · · Score: 1

    That equation doesn't work out the way you want if there is anything going on in parallel for left to right, or if you have queing delays when going right to left.

    --
    My server
  63. Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv by Webmonger · · Score: 1

    No, it always works. 10 frames per second means .1 seconds per frame. No exceptions. Ever.

    If units are the inverse of each other, measurements on those units are the inverse of each other.

  64. Money...... by Slashamatic · · Score: 1

    You may have heard that these days, banks are no longer able to fly blind. They need to know the risk exposure of their financial positions in near to real time. This gobbles CPU. Particularly because some of them are coded in Excel or VBA!!!!!

  65. Multiple PCI by Slashamatic · · Score: 1
    Many years ago, maybe mid nineties, I was using an Alpha system. The CPU was pedestrian by modern standards but the I/O was fast. Already Digital had their fibre channels, but what really was interesting was that they supported a standard PCI bus. I think around 16 of them. Yep, that is 16 separate PCI busses.

    I know this cost a lot of $ in those days, but couldn't this be done a lot cheaper now by having multiple busses?

  66. It's about shifting complexity by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

    There are many apps that people love to use today that simply couldn't be done in assembly language, without increasing time and cost significantly.

    So, we wind up with, say, an app using Swing running on AWT, running on Java in a JVM running on Windows, running on a bunch of DLL's running in a C++ runtime (compiled to assembly), on a BIOS, on a RISC x86 emulator, which runs on microcode eventually, all so we can have a IM app with tons of features.

    Now, could somebody implement all that in straight assembly? Sure. How long would it take? Maybe 5 years? We'd rather have the app in 6 months, though, and the abstraction layers let us do it. We have the hardware to make it feasible, and it's really pretty cheap.

    It's unlikely this trend will stop until we have as featureful apps as we can stand, or hardware just can't get any faster (they doomsayers still say it'll happen).

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)