"Scott Fraser" wrote:

I think "faster computer" is something you can definitely count on,
rather like the sun rising in the east. And it will be announced the
week after your next computer purchase.



For the first time ever, I'm starting to wonder if that's the case
anymore? My recent look at laptops revealed machines that are much
slower than my two year old Vaio. The focus now seems to be on heat and
power efficiency. This has come at the expense of raw performance.

In the case of desktop machines, it seems like the clock race is slowing
down. Look how quickly clock rates climbed for the P4. How long ago
did we get ~3GHZ CPUs? One might expect that we should be seeing 4GHz
models by now, but it seems like attention is being devoted to other
matters than raw speed.

Apple has added horsepower at the top of the line, but the rest of the
stable seems to be concentrating on nifty over nasty.

Admittedly we are now seeing boxes that can do more than one thing at a
time (multi-core and multi-cpu), and somewhat more efficient internal
busses, but it makes me wonder if the muscle race is slowing down.

All this from one who knows only just barely enough about computers to
run a Pro Tools session and post a message on usenet! g

--
"It CAN'T be too loud... some of the red lights aren't even on yet!"
- Lorin David Schultz
in the control room
making even bad news sound good

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