Sunday, January 4

Marshall Brain's Blog  

From Marshall Brain's Blog:

Prepare to Upgrade!

It would appear that, about a year from now, it will be time to upgrade in a big way. Some of the things coming down the pipe and converging in 2005 include:

• 64-bit chips for the masses - About a year from now, inexpensive 64-bit chips and motherboards should be commonplace. AMD and Intel will be fighting for dominance. The performance boost should be impressive. The last time we had a major change like this, it was when we moved from the 16-bit 8088 and 80286 chips of the old IBM PC and AT to the 32-bit Pentium.

• 64-bit Windows XP - Windows XP will be available in a 64-bit version in late 2004 or early 2005, opening the doors for software that can really take advantage of the 64-bit platform.

• High speed RAM - RAM will see a major (factor of 5 to 10) speed boost in 2005. For example, Toshiba plans to ship XDR memory running at 3.2GHz in about a year. Attach 2 gigabytes of it to a 64-bit processor and that should be a decent gaming and video editing platform.

• New DVD format - The new DVD format will be appearing, able to put 20GB or so on a single disk. See also this.

• Terabyte hard drives - 2005 will probably be the year of the terabyte hard drive. Running on the high-speed buses of the new 64-bit motherboards, performance should be improved as well.

Having all of this happen at about the same time should make for some impressive performance improvements.

My response:

• 64 bits - Who cares? I don't see demand for 64 bit chips other than servers building much until at the earliest 2006, and probably more into 2007. The only positive for current 64 bit chips is the bigger memory, and that's why I can see a demand for servers. General computing? The demand for >4 gigs of memory isn't there yet in that category. And good 64 bit software is still somewhere in the pipeline. Recompiling an existing program for 64 bit code might get a little extra performance out of it, but just to go faster? When we're past 3GHZ in CPU speed now?
  
  Also, we don't have a standardized bus that allows us to do everything we need to do with the 64 bit chips. SATA-2 might go along and help some of this out. That still won't help out the SCSI crowd (mostly affecting servers), or other expansion cards.
  
  
• 64 bit XP - See above. Although it is a start in the 64 bit direction (but notice I'm not saying that it's the right direction...)
  
  
• High speed RAM - Ever since the P3 came out (let alone the P4), the speed of the CPU versus the speed of everything else has been problematic (with the possible exception of video cards). From memory, hard drives, CD/DVD drives, USB, Firewire, and so on, they are always much slower than the CPU. High speed RAM is going to help.
  
  
• New DVD format - As long as there are DVD±R and DVD±RW drives, that's a good thing. Only DVD-ROM would be a bad thing. It's still not big enough though. To back up that terabyte hard drive that is described next, you would still need 50 DVD discs to back it up (assuming it was full). Even at 50%, that's still 25 discs.
  
  
• Terabyte hard drives - No duh. 500MG-1TB drives should be out by 2005. Damn the consequences, full speed ahead!

As far as performance improvements, they are going to have to be impressive to even be noticed. But we've already known that for some time. It's not been worthwhile to upgrade your computer system unless you can get at least a doubling of speed when you do it. Otherwise it's just not that noticable. Of course, here I pound on a 450MHZ P3, and believe me, I would certainly notice the difference with a 3+GHZ P4 running.

Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 1/04/2004 11:09:00 AM    Links to this post

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