On Jun 4, 2005, at 10:52 PM, James Sanderson wrote:
I know what you say is true, Bruce. However, not trying to sound
flip, but as has been proven over and over again, build and they
will come. Remember the 80 MB drives that were more than we ever
needed? Or the 6 GB hard drive for the 7100 that had soooo much
space and cost an arm and leg? Who would ever need 128 MB of memory?
Actually, none of those were actually true, (nor did Bill Gates ever
say 'All anyone will ever need is 640 Megs.').
I remember filling up these drives and 128 Megs of ram was never
really adequate, merely enough to sort of get done what we wanted.
OTOH, aside from gaming, which is all that's really driving the
industry now (and that mostly in video subsystems, which is where the
Mac REALLY lacks...it is, as they say, 'teh suxxor' to have to pay
hundreds of dollars for a video card that costs a PeeCee gamerboy
$70...), most people AREN'T filling up those 160 Gig drives, using
the 1G of memory, or really notice the difference between 1 Ghz and 2
Ghz processors.
I had a professor come in last week and ask for a quote a laptop: his
needs? e-mail. web browsing, MS Word, Powerpoint and Photoshop to put
captions on the images his microscopes generate. But he was willing
to pay an extra $150 (iirc) to go from 2.8 to 3.2 GHz. Why? Because
it's more MHz, and he who dies with the most MHz wins.
He'd been perfectly served by something at 1.5 Mhz or so, and been
rewarded with more than an hour and a half of battery time the faster
processor would consume.
When we made the switch from 8-bit to 16-bit, then to 32 bit systems,
we were pushing the limits of those architectures. Remember '32-bit
clean'? I do!
MOST people aren't pushing the limits of 32 bit architectures.
Going from 16 to 32 bit was faster because, first, they made the
chips a lot faster, the inexorable MHz march began with that transition.
As witnessed by BOTH IBM and Intel's struggles to make chips faster,
the days of *easy* speed gains are likely over, barring a new
breakthrough.
Secondly, all of those previous systems were bumping up against the
memory limits.
32 bit memory space is 4 gigs...and we're not pushing that.
The speed differences with the G5 have nothing to do with it being 64-
bit, but with the much faster memory bus and faster drive I/O. Intel
routinely makes 32 bit systems with those same busses.
There isn't a huge need for most people to go to 64-bit systems right
now; the only advantage over existing 32 bit systems is the ability
to address more than 4 Gb of memory; and we don't see people
screaming for that in their laptops.
But unfortunately, the 'He who dies with the most MHz wins' marketing
wars started by Intel have conditioned people to believe that faster
is invariably better.
Well, by that logic we should all be shopping for Bugatti Veyron's
for our daily commutes...<http://www.gizmag.com/go/4070/>
--
Bruce Johnson
"no matter where you go, there you are", B. Banzai
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