The bottleneck of 2001...

[DuRaNgO]

OK

Which component of the PC will be the biggest bottleneck one year from today?

and why
jim

[DosFreak]

HD
Floppy


9gb SCSI Fibre HD's on Pricewatch for $50 each. Only prob is expensive controllers/cables.

8 9gb Seagate HD's = 72gb of HD GOODNESS for only $450!

[Wombat]

Bus Bandwidth and memory (specifically, RAM) speeds.

[Rags]

Most definitely, it will be (and arguably already is), memory/chipset bandwidth.

Rags

[Jorden]

Modem, floppy drive and amount of IRQs we can use. We should all get ourselves a SCSI RAID-5 system if we want to keep up

Memory & CPU then? Not bloody likely if M$ keeps saying all you need is a 486 with 32Mb of RAM to run your NT/Win ME on Or a P133 for Win2k, with 64Mb of RAM (when it wants 128Mb to start to work )

Jord.

[Humus]

Memory.

It's already a huge bottleneck and will probably continue to be.

[spoogenet]

Hard drive.

While memory may be a big bottleneck, the hard drive is a bottleneck of higher orders of magnitude. Think about it. Run a 1 GHz clock, that's 1 ns per cycle. If you're running 6 ns RAM, then you have a 6 cycle delay for any memory access. However your hard drive, which might have a 4.9 ms access time, that's 6 orders of magnitude off from your memory, and now you have a million cycle delay for disk access. And the HD has much lower bandwidth than memory.

This is simplified, however, and not a perfect model.

Fortunately stuff is designed well enough that it's not quite that simple and you're not just waiting for the HD to return the data. However it is a massive bottleneck.

As far as gaming performance and stuff, if you've got enough RAM, then the disk is only really needed for loading, but once playing it's all in memory, in which case your memory will tend to be a bottleneck.

And for anybody talking about floppy's being the bottleneck of the future? Well, they won't be in the computers of the future. The industry is heading towards ditching floppy drives alltogether. Just like an iMac.

b

[Rags]

The floppy is dead??? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...please say it aint so. I just spent my lunch money on an awesome sony floppy. This thing is quiet, fast, and reliable.......

Rags

[DosFreak]

When HD's go solid state then we'll all be very very happy.

[Humus]

[xortam]

Reminds me of when the industry was producing diskless workstations in the '70s and '80s. Once they shipped, first thing they did was come out with a hack to add a disk device.

The biggest bottleneck in the PCs of 2001? The user!

[Wombat]

Modem: being phased out where possible, V.92 coming out for other places.
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Floppy Drive: Slow, yes. Bottleneck, how? You don't do anything serious with them, and a bottleneck is something you can't avoid.
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Gotta disagree on the hard drive, spooge. With caching and predictive execution the way they are today, hard drives are not a factor as often as one might think. Besides, with today's OS's, going to the HD just means another process will execute for a while.
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# of interrupts is phasing out as a problem as more systems support device polling. It certainly isn't the issue it once was.
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At least, that's what I think.

[DosFreak]

Video capture and disk speeds can be a huge bottleneck.

[superfly]

Definetly bus and and memory bandwith issues,it alredy doesn't allow us to reach the full potential of recent video cards and cpu's.

Did everyone see the preliminary benchmarks of the p4???,the chip is no faster than a p3 at equal mhz,as long as the new SSE 2 instruction set isn't being used,but what made q3 go almost 50 fps faster... one word bus speeds.

And this was on a early revision chip and board where the AGP and chipset drivers are not final yet...WOW!!!!!.

[Dualbuzz]

Heat (are you ready for Voodoo 7000? and noise from PC. Noise is particularly annoying and I'm ready to trade a hundred Mhz
of my proc speed to a total silence.