[rescue] Re: rescue digest, Vol 1 #1783 - 14 msgs

[Mike Dombrowski]

>HomePC users do need SMP if home computers are going to be used the 
way
>they were meant to be.  Sure, maybe running office doesn't require 
dual
>CPUs, but if your computer does more than one thing at a time (like 
play
>MP3s while you fix family photos to go in the latest family new 
letter,
>while said letter prints on the connected WinPrinter) then SMP rocks 
so
>much.

Um, why exactly are two cpus needed? I can do all of this fine on one 
cpu with room to spare. I'm not debating that dual cpus rock, this is a 
dual xeon, but for home use two CPUS are silly from many different 
views. And with most windows games not being multithreaded they become 
even less attractive.

>
>I think that Be had the right idea when the made 2 CPUs standard and
>offered 4 (well only select people got the 4, then they discontinued 
the
>hardware).  Be's prices weren't bad (unless they were selling at a 
loss),
>so I can't really say why they chose to give up.
>

Um, I don't think Be did 4 cpu machines. I'm decently active in the Be 
community and know a couple engineers there. I've also been following 
Be since they announced the BeBox, I've never seen anyone mention a 
4cpu Be Inc machine. They gave up because at the time there was no 
cheap MP box, when they stopped x86 MP was cheap enough for a common 
person to buy. Also, like you mentioned previously the hardware was 
pretty damn slow and it would have drained Be's resources far too much 
to design a new system.

As for market cap Yahoo finance will tell you.

>The cost savings of making the Sun laser printer dumb were so greate 
that
>it was almost as cheap to use a dedicated IPC for rendering as putting 
a
>renderer in the print.  And with an IPC for the printer, it could also 
do
>DNS or other similar tasks.  The same might be true of the Next 
printer.

I simply pointed out that the company that the orignal poster held up 
as an example of how to design hardware did the same things as what he 
admonished in the next sentence. I know why Sun, NeXT and others did 
it, it makes perfect sense. The cost savings of the windmodem might 
easily allow an increase in CPU speed which more than makes up for the 
little processing power needed by the winmodem. The end result is a 
faster computer for the same cost, is this bad?

Mike