What Applications Will Drive System Performance?

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?"

Comments

Re:IDE, Bus speed

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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!

Application startup

[_iris]

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."

Re:Amateur filmmaking

[Sheepy]

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.