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Stalled technology

post #1 of 7
12/14/04 at 3:54am
Thread Starter 
Has anybody else noticed how PC specs have been stalled out for almost 2 years now?
Indeed I was able to buy a 1 gig 2.8 mhz p4 with a 120 gig hd computer jan/feb 2003. and notebooks around 2500 were coming 512 meg and p4 2.6 with 40-60 gig hd. The only thing that has advanced is the video cards.

Just thought this may mean a new growth phase may be coming OR is the PC starting to reach its limits ???

Daley
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post #2 of 7
12/14/04 at 11:06am
you can get a 3.8ghz Pentium 4 now and 400 gig hard drives. Athlon 64's also offer quite a boost in performance from what we had 2 years ago. I'd say the industry is on track, like you said the increase in graphics power has been phenomenal. Jumping up to a 4 ghz CPU just doesnt seem worth it when a next gen graphics card alone can double your performance in many games.
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post #3 of 7
12/14/04 at 11:07am
Ooooh, this could be fun

I think it's "in our heads" because CPU manufacturers are starting to quit with the megahertz games. For example, Intel is working on things like dual cores, larger caches, shorter pipelines, etc. AMD has done this for a while by rating their processors, not by frequency, but a simple overall rating that they compare to Intel's MHz/GHz ratings.

I believe you can get 100 GBs in a notebook hard drive by now, the P4-M is now outdated and replaced with Centrino (Pentium M), and quite a few notebooks can hold up to 2 GB of RAM, and sometimes more.

As for desktops, they go up to 3.4 GHz now, with up to 4 GB RAM, sometimes more, and 200+ GB hard drives do exist. Like I said, chip manufacturers, especially, are beginning to resort to methods other than frequency ratings.
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post #4 of 7
12/14/04 at 1:31pm
The pentium M is a big step forward too, let's face it the P4 was never really meant for notebooks even if it was the standard 2 years ago.
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post #5 of 7
12/14/04 at 1:41pm
Also the current CPU/PC technology is starting to hit it's maximum potential.

The heat generated by the newer processors is much greater than they expected, thus they are trying single die/multicore CPU's, and possibly CPUs made from artificial diamonds.

I can't wait to see what they have in store for the next generation of PC technology, i.e. PCI-E, SATA and 64 bit processing and how these will grow and mature.


^_^_^
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post #6 of 7
12/14/04 at 2:06pm
Completely agree that manufacturers are quitting the megahertz game.

Also, something to consider is that there has not been a killer app to trigger hardware sales until Doom 3 / Half Life 2. A lot of people have been holding off on upgrading (myself included) because there weren't any must-have applications that ran drastically better on new hardware. A card like an Ati Radeon x800XT were rare prior to HL2's release, but were impossible to find after HL2's release.

I predict that the next major killer app that will trigger hardware sales will be the release of Longhorn, and the coming of 64-bit computing.
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post #7 of 7
12/14/04 at 9:29pm
4 GHz PCs were running in the lab years ago. But manufacturers hold back and only release progessively faster CPUs, an extra 100MHz every 3 months or so does the trick! They can't just release the fastest one possible cos everyone would buy it and they'd stop making money. You think it's coincidence that AMD and Intel's latest CPUs have similar performance? Nah, they just agree to keep in step with each other.

Now that they've reached that magic 4 GHz figure there's nowhere to run so they have to move sideways with parallel processing and what not.

Doom3 was all hype like Half-life 2. The rendering engines are inefficient and the levels are designed with too much detail. But that's all right, no need write a better engine and design levels with sensible detail, just hype up the game and tell everyone to go out and buy the latest graphics card.
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