posted
As for the overkill, 1.5GHz may seem a bit much, but I've a lingering paranoia since I bought the P166, 5.5 years ago. At the time I bought the P166, MMX had not hit the market, but the fastest chip you could get was a Pentium Pro 200. I thought I was pretty safe getting a P166 w/32MB, and I was, for about a year. But it was rapidly superseded by the likes of the PII 266 - 300 range, which could run a whole new generation of games. Perhaps I just bought at a bad time.
Maybe the market is a bit different now, and the chip technology is reaching a limit. People say that the software isn't able to keep up with machine specs, and maybe it would be safe to go for a more modest setup.
[ July 10, 2001: Message edited by: Gurgeh ]
-------------------- "Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing. To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
The Battle of the Pelennor Fields.
Registered: Mar 2000
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Chip tecnology is in no danger of reaching any sort of limit for two decades yet.
The reason CPU's have gotten ridiculously fast is that Intel, for the first time in years, has decent comptetition.
Yeah, Startopia is out. The reviews in magazines I trust have been giving it high 80s, saying the only problem is the missions in single player mode are a bit short. And the thing needs a really, really good computer too.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Although, due to constantly fluctuating speeds and whatnot, the best price-performance CPU is sometimes an Intel, and sometimes an AMD.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
quote:Chip tecnology is in no danger of reaching any sort of limit for two decades yet.
I don't know if I'd go along with that. From what I've heard, the whole process is limited by the width of the channels on the chips, which is just under 0.1 micrometres, at the moment. The challenge for manufacturers is to make the channels narrower. Perhaps they can compensate with other factors in the chip design, caches etc.
-------------------- "Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing. To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
The Battle of the Pelennor Fields.
Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
That's the figure for silicon chips (I think. It could be a bit less), so it only applies if chips continue to change the way their do now. They'll reach a point where physics will step in and say "stop".
Of course, by then, they'll have surely thought of something else.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Da_bang80
A few sectors short of an Empire
Member # 528
posted
The AMD Athalon 1.2 GHZ processor outpreformed the Intel pemtium 4 1.4 ghz in nearly every test, except when they tried Quake 3. P4 alsoneeds RDram. which is ALOT more expensive than SDram.and it only works for the P4.
i wonder how long we have to wait for processers to get into the terahertz range. they already have supercomputers with about a terabyte of HD space ( that's about a thousand gigabytes). it's true, i've seen it. it was used at a satelite tracking station outside my town. they track the landsat and seasat satelites.
-------------------- Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I cannot accept. And the wisdom to hide the bodies of all the people I had to kill today because they pissed me off.
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