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Chip Makers Selling Fewer High-End CPUs
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An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
software lag and video cards (Score:5, Insightful)
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:yeah (Score:2, Insightful)
Neither do I. My year and a half old processor (Athlon 1.1 Ghz) still runs new games (read Unreal Tournament 2003 demo) at 1600x1200 at acceptable fps -- granted I have a Geforce 4 ti4400.
>>The economy is a huge driver in this, and if they don't see that, they are silly.
Good point. You wonder if they are falling into the same trap the recording industry has fallen into in overlooking the obvious.
Don't get me wrong, I want the fastest processor possible (if I can get it for free), but right now I just can't find anything I do that DEMANDS that I have 2+ Ghz power.
-Pride
Intel bit itself in the a** here (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.
Re:yeah (Score:3, Insightful)
Precisely (Score:5, Insightful)
Why in the world would anyone want to spend the money on a top of the line processor when they can buy an entire computer based on a value processor for $299 at Walmart.com? Heck, instead of spending $1500 or more on a new computer, I can buy three computers over the next year and be pretty sure that the computer I buy six months from now will be faster than the expensive computer I am buying now. So what if these computers are crap. At these prices I can afford to purchase another.
Besides, I don't want to spend my money on a processor. I don't run an processor intensive apps. I want more memory, a bigger monitor, and a faster hard drive. Spending money on a fast processor is just a waste.
The funniest part about this is that the killer application that would drive people to buy new processors is multimedia sharing. Encoding and decoding multimedia sucks down cycles like crazy. Instead of making it easy for people to share multimedia files Intel and AMD are busy making it as hard as possible. If sales are bad now, imagine when Intel and AMD's new products come out that treat their customers like criminals.
Re:Happy but fearing (Score:2, Insightful)
We should be encouraging them!
Building Systems (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.
Re:I love when they use the Internet (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.
Re:yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's really so strange how being laid-off from a job that paid mid 5-figures up to near six-figures or more, scraping by on unemployment, really cuts down on consumers' willingness to plonk for newer technology. But companies saved staffing costs...
Especially when their "old" (2-3 years) home desktop or notebook PC works just fine for email and surfing job-search websites.
Henry Ford was a prime SOB, but one thing he did right was pay his workers $5/day (a high wage at the time), realizing that he'd never sell enough Model A's unless his workers could afford them. Today's overpaid and overprivileged corporate executive class seems to have lost sight of this. Refusing to pay more than rock-bottom wages destroys demand for their own high-tech products.
Re:I love when they use the Internet (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lazy Programming (Score:2, Insightful)
No, you see, when you have a JOB, you have to do what your BOSS says. PROFESSIONAL programmers usually have a BOSS which gives them a DEALINE. Kid, when you come down from your collegiate ivory tower and get a job, you'll see what I'm saying. A month for a few milliseconds? You're fucking crazy. That's like telling a company, "we can speed this program up for you by a few milliseconds, but it'll cost you about $10K".
Get a job.
Re:yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Precisely (Score:2, Insightful)
Wrong. Multimedia encoding takes lots of processor power, but multimedia sharing takes comparatiely little. Just think about it. How many of the people on the net are actually ripping and encoding the files they're sharing, and how many are just downloading them and passing them along? I'd guess that there are dozens or hundreds of people who only copy for every one who actually encodes something.
Re:software lag and video cards (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [microsoft.com], yet Windows XP specifies that you need a 233Mhz or higher processor [microsoft.com]. 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 [computerhope.com]. 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.
1 GHZ is point of diminishing return (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Devil's Advocation (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps, but I think much of the research will shift to making existing technology smaller and cheaper. Perhaps next year when they we are discussing the latest-and-greatest here on Slashdot, it will be part of a $299 machine at Walmart. Ok, maybe not quite that soon
Seriously though, I don't think we need all that much innovation on the desktop anytime soon. I would like to see them focus on software innovations and technology like making USB more reliable. Remember, mainstream 64-bit is just around the corner too, which will probably mean more spending once the prices reach acceptable consumer levels.
I'm still waiting for an open-source version of Visual Studio to show up on SourceForge.
Re:GAME DEVELOPERS are the true terrorists!!! (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!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Speed freaks... (Score:1, Insightful)
Me: "So, how many frames/sec does your video card do now on those games?"
Him: "120."
Me: "Ah.. and the advantage to that is.. what? I mean, even the best monitors only have a vertical refresh rate of like 85Hz.. thats only 85 frames/sec that your *monitor* can display."
Him: "oh.. yeah. But I get great texturing at lower refresh rates."
Me: "Yeah.. and you just got married... how much gaming do you really do these days?"
Funny... now that he has a wife (and a *life*), suddenly having the fastest machine in the state isn't quite such a big thing anymore.
Me.. I'm still running a P3/550 at home (although I did just aquire a 1Ghz machine, when I get around to setting it up). I don't really play games all that much, and the 550 really works fine for word processing, web browsing, and downloading software. If the 1Ghz had cost me money, I wouldn't have it... but, for free, I guess it'll help me crunch Seti@home and RC5 workunits faster.
Time for home uber servers (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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
They need Female Models/Sex Appeal (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:software lag and video cards (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Uh-oh (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, it was fun while it lasted.
-Paul Komarek
Re:Precisely (Score:2, Insightful)
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.