Do we need all this CPU power?

Flinx · Jul 30, 2003

Its not the processor power I begrudge them. It is the cost of the electricity to power the PC's and the AC to cool them.

The loving are the daring!

MaximumGoat · Jul 30, 2003

you can change priorities in windows (XP at least) too, totally agree about with power consumtion and cost of electricity issues.

the day a 3 ghz a64 comes out that uses 10watts, even if fastest cpu is 10ghz, i will buy it.

TheRod · Jul 30, 2003

I'm doing multitasking. And my tiny XP 1800+ can handle it! It's thay I may have to wait a little more, but who cares! I'm satisfied with the performance I have. I based my decision on with I do with my PC! And the job is done with my little monster!

If you NEED the power of 3GHz, you will buy it and will get bangs for the bucks! But if you buy a 2.8G or 3.0G based on someone biased opinion you will probably never use 100% of the power you have between your hand.

I just built a system for a friend that wanted to not spend too much. He wanted a P4. I told him that an Athlon XP would do the job for him for less! I saved him 200$CA on the system by buying a basic Athlon (with nForce2) system. And now the 200$CA he saved will be spent on a good 3D cards.

200$CA might not seems much for hardcore PC users but when you have a limited budget it's a lot. Is upgrade cost him 518$CA (tax and everything included). A P4 system would have cost him about 695$CA, so it'S a 175$CA difference he save more than 30%. Sometimes you must give up some POWER to respect your budget. And by the I bench his system to prove him he made the right choice and it's performance are equivalent to a P4 2.3GHz.

If he had the budget I would have bought him a P4 2.4GHz or 2.8GHz with an MSI NEO2 board... But this was not the best bangs for the bucks for him!

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Would you buy a GPS enabled soap bar?

slvr_phoenix · Jul 30, 2003

you can change priorities in windows (XP at least) too

I know that you can in Win2K too. I'm also pretty sure that you even could in NT4. (I haven't used it in a few years though, so 2K could be clouding my memory.) I'd dare say that even earlier versions of NT might have had this ability as well, but not having ever used a version of NT prior to 4, I don't really know.

But basically, I think Win9X/ME are the only versions of Windows where accessing the actual running processes and threads were not possible. (Well, I think it's also still possible with specially written software, but not possible through the Windows GUI itself.)

And really, it makes sense. Win9x/ME are not professional OSs. They're for home users who are usually barely even smart enough to run a PC. If you want professional features (like process and thread priorities) then you need a professional OS (like NT4 or NT5-based, or Linux, Unix, BSD, BeOS, etc.)

"Let's see what Paragraph 84-B has to say about it." - Thief from <A HREF="http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=030724" target="_new">8-Bit Theater</A>

CaptainNemo · Jul 30, 2003

I do a lot of 3D & 2D animation on my PC, so I often use 100% of the CPU (most games do as well). I have an XP2100+ (Pal), so I am not exactly in the fast lane...

However, there are more important things than CPU speed. My 1Ghz laptop (PIII) only has 256Mb of memory, so doing things like previewing/thumbnailing a 512Mb CF card takes much longer than it should. My desktop has 1024Mb...

You will appreciate more speed (even it if costs a fortune). When I bought my latest comp, windows and menus used to appear more quickly than I could react; I had been using a PII 300Mhz for the previous 5 years. Nowadays, the speed of my current setup doesn't shock me anymore, and I even get impatient with it sometimes!

TheRod · Jul 30, 2003

The more we have, the more we want!
This drives Humans!

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Would you buy a GPS enabled soap bar?

TheRod · Jul 30, 2003

the soap bar have a little speaker that signal proximity. So, even, with soap in your eyes... The soap bar can guide you by emiting beeps!

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Would you buy a GPS enabled soap bar?

pIII_Man · Jul 30, 2003

naw thats not technologically advanced enough...i would say that the soap from the soap bar magnetically charges your body...so when you drop it it charges an electromagnet and the soap bar magically floats back to you....

Besides in a shower there are echoes...how are you gonna know which beep is the actual bar of soap?

3 386DX-25's...12 volts...glue some ln2 and a wicked amount of overclocking and you get a willamantee minus 36 pins, 33.75 million transistors and a couple hundred mhz... 😎

TheRod · Jul 30, 2003

When your hands get closer to the soap bar, the sounds change. So you know when you are getting closer to the bar!

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Would you buy a GPS enabled soap bar?

pIII_Man · Jul 30, 2003

i dunno...i think an electromagnetic soap bar and ionic lather beats your motion sensing beeping method

3 386DX-25's...12 volts...glue some ln2 and a wicked amount of overclocking and you get a willamantee minus 36 pins, 33.75 million transistors and a couple hundred mhz... 😎

Groveling_Wyrm · Jul 30, 2003

...ionic lather...

ROFL!!! That was just the laugh i needed before I go home!

 Ok, so you have to put your "2 cents" in, but its value is only "A penny's worth". Who gets that extra penny?

Solstice · Aug 4, 2003

I'm with Crashman on the time is money thing. In addition I have to have the best componets out at the time of purchase. I'm in IT and everyone expects me to have an insane PC. On the flip side I don't spend just to spend, I just bought a 2.4c instaed of 3.2. I have a shitty sound card. Not to mention its a hobby, I mess around with my PC daily.

My mom plays solitare on a cele 333, she will never upgrade or need to upgrade.

"Bush+Rumsfield=Dictatorship"

wolverinero79 · Aug 5, 2003

I don't know about the whole argument of "if game developers will want people to buy games, they will make the games run on average computers". I think games, more than anything else (even video encoding) has been the major driver of a lot of computer enhancements for the consumer pc market. Ya, you'll be able to run hl2 on an 866 with 256 RAM, but you know it will look either pixely or choppy. People with bad computers will still buy the game and play it like that! But once they play for awhile, you know they're going to notice screenshots online, or graphics on commercials. They'll say "Hmm, how can i get my game to look like that?" and behold, they'll buy newer hardware.

I'm not just speaking randomly here, i know quite a few families in my neighborhood that i've helped computerize (computer, networking, internet, etc.). There's always someone who plays some games and wants to know how to make it better. Yes, it's usually a guy (sorry, it's the truth), i think because typically guys have a fascination with building things and improving things (making things run faster/better).

So to make a long post longer...hardware will keep going because people will continue to enjoy computer entertainment. Remember to include consoles, because the consoles of today (and tomorrow) are based at least partially on the hardware in PCs. The closer to reality computer games get, the more time we're likely to spend playing games instead of watching TV and movies (why watch something passively instead of interacting with something you can change?).

I'm just your average habitual smiler =D

redstar · Aug 5, 2003

for the last 17 years, i have been waiting for holographic games.

we have only a fraction of the needed computing power today.

but its the same argument, then it was bill gates saying who would ever need 640k of memory.

why did you go and get that 286 when you can play jet just fine on an 8086!? moron!!

hehe, lets have some vision people

(also closer than holo-games, i have been waiting for enough power to run battlefield sims...where air/sea/ground sims are all combined into one mega game. We are getting closer to this, but not quite there yet.)

ChipDeath · Aug 5, 2003

Yeah - Holo games would be cool... :evil:

Just a quick thought though people - another bad thing about the relentless march of technology is the tendency of programmers to become lazy...
Why write the most efficient code possible when it's gonna run lightning fast on next month's system anyway?
Why write tight, space-saving code when hard disks/RAM are doubling every 6 months?

Just thinking back to what coders used to be able to do on things like a 48K spectrum.. Anyone every played "Driller"?It was a FULL 3D engine... Okay it ran at about 5FPS, and didn't actually use textures (just different shades), but the game was HUGE, and fitted into 48K of RAM, and ran on a 3.5Mhz Z80A processor...

Nowadays bloatware is all the rage.. If the PC did not evolve for, say 5 years, games and apps would still keep getting better, as the coders get better at using what's available, rather than being able to sit and watch as tech becomes available that runs what they've written easily.

Just look at something like Tekken on the PS1 for example.. The first one was great, but doesn't look too good by todays standards, but the second and third progressively improved everything, while running on exactly the same hardware...

I know there are always going to be exceptions to this, but it's just my take on this stuff.

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$hit Happens. I just wish it would happen to someone else for a change.

slvr_phoenix · Aug 6, 2003

**applause**

I couldn't agree more ChipDeath. The software industry in general could really use a lesson in optimization. I'll readily admit that I don't squeeze every last drop out of the resorces that I could get when I program, but that's only because I like to keep that balance between optimization and code readability. I do however optimize wherever it doesn't significantly impede the readability (and thus supportability) of my code, and if all software developers out there did at least half of the optimization that I do the world would be a much better place.

<pre><A HREF="http://www.winamp.com" target="_new">Winamp3</A> and freeform skins, the best thing since sliced llama loaf. (Now with more beef.)</pre>

ChipDeath · Aug 6, 2003

I'm more or less the same myself...

Of course you are forgetting the third thing - horribly unoptimized code that is also near enough totally incomprehensible. I was trying to fix an application, but ended up re-writing the thing from scratch because it was just too much of a mess 😱 . turned out much the better option though.

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$hit Happens. I just wish it would happen to someone else for a change.

slvr_phoenix · Aug 6, 2003

Of course you are forgetting the third thing - horribly unoptimized code that is also near enough totally incomprehensible. I was trying to fix an application, but ended up re-writing the thing from scratch because it was just too much of a mess 😱 . turned out much the better option though.

Ugh. Don't even get me started on that. **ROFL** I've had more than my share over the years. Hiring interns to write highly-customer-visible software is never a bright idea. Hiring them for a period of time not even long enough to complete the software development is even worse.

Not that it was entirely the intern's fault though, really. She did a pretty good job considering what she had to work with. (Since what she had to work with was a completely horrible example program written in Visual Basic 5 and in French for that matter. Comments and naming conventions do very little good when they're written in a language that you don't know. **ROFL**)

But anywho, from upgrading almost impossible-to-follow 16-bit x86 Assembly to 32-bits to correcting bad FORTRAN76 code (where all of the IF statements were in reverse logic because it was an IF ... GOTO instead of an IF ... THEN system and where all of the program-wide global variables were common blocks where the components of the blocks weren't even given the same variable names across the different components of the software) to upgrading pure ANSI C with no concept of object-oriented coding (and a plethora of global variables) to VC++ with actual classes to even completely re-writing an entire program in Python because it was originally bad code written in VC++ that had been made an even worse port to Java for cross-platform use (basically the code was so bad that in the end all that I could do was start over from scratch and use the software's functionality as the only guidance) to porting that previously mentioned VB5 project to VC++6 (and again rewriting most of it from scratch) I've just about seen the worst examples of software engineering that could ever be imagined.

Actually ... wait. The worst I've seen yet was when we outsourced the upgrade of a project to India to convert a VC++ program to Qt and C++. You'd be amazed how much more stable their code became when I did the very simple act of setting pointers to NULL after every delete command. Validating by checking if the pointer is non-NULL means nothing if you only set invalid pointers to be NULL a quarter of the time. If that gives you any idea of the quality of their work. (Or the fact that they claimed time and time again that it would compile under GCC for a Linux executable when it wasn't even ANSI C++ compliant. That took a little while to hunt down and fix the cause since they were ever so helpful.)

And to think, that's just getting me started on the subject. **ROFL**

But basically, yeah, the world would be considerably better if people actually wrote good and readable code. I try. I can't guarantee perfection, but at least I try, which sadly is far better than most from my experience.

And I've re-written several programs over from scratch by now and it really is almost always the best option. It might take more time initially (and sometimes depending on how bad the code is it might actually take less time), but maintanance is just so more efficient afterwords that it's always worth it to me. At least assuming that whomever is doing the re-write can write readable code and documents well.

<pre><A HREF="http://www.winamp.com" target="_new">Winamp3</A> and freeform skins, the best thing since sliced llama loaf. (Now with more beef.)</pre>

vagabond · Aug 6, 2003

Actually I myself prefer sonic showers. About 10 seconds you're done in your clothes and you feel fit again. No soap in your eyes. 😱)

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VAGABOND

veni,vidi, and ended up in THGC

dhlucke · Aug 7, 2003

You are too verbose. How fast do you type?

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ChipDeath · Aug 7, 2003

Hiring interns to write highly-customer-visible software is never a bright idea.

That is probably true... But I did some myself when I was a £50 a week work-placement student guy.. (4 years on, still at the same place - must've done something right..)

Also, the example I quoted was written by a highly-paid analyst... a lovely mess of huge procedures (which had usually been adapted to so many purposes that they were impossible to follow), meaningless variable names and access violations... Throw in the fact that it was originally written to run on a Paradox database, and was then ported - in the fastest, shoddiest way possible - to run on Interbase instead (but still shoved all the results into a temporary paradox table.. for some reason. ), and you have a complete nightmare.
Fixing any one bug usually caused 8 others to appear :frown: , so I just gave up and re-wrote it based on what I thought it was supposed to do..
[slightly smug]
So now it's faster, smaller, easier to use, more readable..
[/slightly smug]

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$hit Happens. I just wish it would happen to someone else for a change.

phial · Aug 7, 2003

Bf1942 is framerate limited by my CPU

it doenst run good on a 1700+

any game i use uses all my cpu. =P 100%

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Do we need all this CPU power?

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