[geeks] RE: [the processor speed wars...]

[Brian Hechinger]

On Fri, Jul 20, 2001 at 01:25:49PM -0400, Ken Hansen wrote:
> Well, my point was that after a certain speed, the benefit is almost non-existant (for the general user).

i should probably put my anti-PC opinions in here at the very least, something
i didn't do last time. :)

> Sure, faster is better, but honestly, how often do folks sit around complaining about how slow their 300 UltraSPARC system is? or their 500 MHz Celeron *BSD workstaion is?

they don't, since in general they aren't doing much more than running a web
browser (which take 20 mintes to load on a dual 750Mhz SunBlade 1000, so it
doesn't much matter what sorta machine you have) and a couple xterms.  that's
why i don't have anything faster than this sparc20, i honestly don't need it.

> I can remember line editing on a TTY, and that was slow...

300 baud dial-up to a BSD box.  i know slow. :)

> With a reasonably modern video card and a PII/400 or up, you will probably not notice *any* screen refreshes/redraws under typical use (sure, you could run 50 ico sessions and slow down the display ;^)...
> 
> Did I say stop making faster CPUs? No. I was only commenting on the real value of anything significantly faster than a PII/500 or so for *most* users.

my anti-PC opinion is this:

until someone does something about that horrendous motherboard design, you are
probably wasting your money on any CPU faster than 500Mhz.  doesn't matter
how fast your CPU is if the rest of the system can't keep up.

> I doubt anyone here (by the simple virtue of *being here*) is considered a "typical" user...

i'm sure we all go FAR beyond "typical"  :)

-brian (how many VMS clusters do YOU have he asks knowingly)