Has computing as we know it hit a brickwall???

[Bob The Great]

Thats a good point King-o-Pain! Take the PS2 for an example. How fast is it? 266Mhz?!? Yet it's graphics are almost PC quality (actually in some games like grand tourismo 3, even better). Our software really needs to catch up to our hardware (though Intel doesn't want you to know that, and AMD can't afford that).

[jman01pa]

Originally posted by willy_ph
You have to take into account that the majority of people do not have the latest and greatest.



What really needs to happen is a boom in the PC market. The boom would see many people replacing their old machines with new and faster ones. Until then, the software manufacturers are stuck waiting for the technology of the majority to catch up.

True. Most people will never have the top of the line. And there was a boom in the PC market, really not that long ago. Did we forget about Y2K? While two years is a life time in the PC world, to a lot of people (not counting us) their 2 year old computer is still brand new....


J

[bdj]

I think you have to look at the needs of different groups of users.

You have business vs. home users. Gamers vs. Non-gamers (the need for ultrahigh speed and mem. for graphics and audio).

I'll restate what I said in an early post of mine. My PIII 800mhz 100fsb with 128 mb of ram, a 20gb ata66 hdd and 8mb agp matrox has more power then I'll ever need. As I'm not into "HEAVY GAMING", I can not afford to keep up with all the hardware changes.

bdj

[Brangwen]

Some good points are made. With the eye candy screen mods and so on, an XP processor does little more than a 450 PII or III. It seems not much is coordinated in a PC. The CPU is too fast for the PCI bus speeds, the HDDs don't seem to sync with the other devices ... and none of the OS's seem to optimize the hardware. The application software is another bundle of variables. Yes, in a word, I think the systems of today as a whole are not "synchronized" so as to take full advantage of the various components. Perhaps the components should be more universally standardized so that the parts meld together more efficiently, to say the least. This is not what I'd call seamless technology vis-a-vis all the different items that are part of the PC of today. A brick wall of sorts has been hit. Something revolutionary is needed. Frankly, for experts in the computer field, this seems to be an exciting challenge.

Brangwen

[SaTaNcLaUz]

Originally posted by Brangwen
Yes, in a word, I think the systems of today as a whole are not "synchronized" so as to take full advantage of the various components. Perhaps the components should be more universally standardized so that the parts meld together more efficiently, to say the least.

standards? why, standards would cut into profit! are you nutz?! i will be dead and gone by the time anything that resembles "standard" hits the market, there is too much money to be made in buzzwords and how-fast-can-you-go marketing.

i do agree that a few things need to mate better than they do, but its all pipe dreams i suppose we are all at the mercy of the "average" consumer, they want "cool" and "fast" and "latest and greatest"... whereas we just want it to work right!


just my $.02

[ClubMed]

Imagine what life would be like if we could store a few petabytes on a disk the size of an MD?

Or if networks were fast enough to allow such an amount of data to travel from A to B in a matter of seconds or minutes?

If computers would develope into powerful handheld devices that would be compatible with all kinds of peripherals?

If everything used satelite connections and would work in your office, in the park, at the beach in Aruba or the Sahara desert?

That would be nice...

[Ming]

Getting back to the brick wall, I think it is more of a problem of today's products not using the technology available. A 64 bit pci bus with a modern U160 scsi card running all drives would help the bottleneck. Unfortunately one doesn't really see these 64 bit pci busses except in servers or some workstation boards. IMO, end users rarely get to enjoy the power of a workstation for gaming. Most people I know are worried about only the Mhz, and sometimes whatever the video card is. Hard-drive, oh some ATA/66 5400 rpm drive that is probably connected with a regular 40 pin IDE cable.

Mac must be somewhat software/hardware opimized... Look what they can do with half the CPU speed it takes a P4 or XP chip to do... Maybe I'm wrong too.

-Whir

[Herb]

And it came to pass, that Otheos wrote:
>>Given the fact that all CPU's spend 99% of their time idle (please no DC arguments here )

I'm not in any games, but before entering DC , my only game on the PC was, to squeeze it as much as possible, to achieve less than 25% CPU-idle
Running MP3 encoders, wav-trimmers, recording vinyls and surfing the web all at once

Apart from MP3, I'm going to do the same with video stuff with my new P4/2Ghz toy. Speed isn't just enough, to do it real time, I want it been done yesterday

[jmichna]

Generally speaking, software, then hardware, tend to leap-frog each other in terms of capability/performance/requirements. As others have said, today's software is a bit behind the hardware... BUT, from my perspective, that's a good thing! My hardware will remain usable longer.

Also, on the hardware side, the mainboard bus and subsystems haven't kept up with the processors (and to an extent, with the video processors), so we could use some rapid evolution in this area. Then we'd really see out apps fly!!!
jmichna