The bottleneck of 2001...

[The Rock]

What Rik said: lazy inefficient programming. It's dooming us now and it will in the future. Programmers should be FORCED to write games that play well on an accelerated P2-300.

Bart

[Rik]

Inefficient/lazy programming.

[spoogenet]

Wombat: Gotta disagree with you, too.

While processes being executed while waiting for HD access certainly is the case, that's why I said that it was a simplified model, and there are ways to avoid JUST waiting on the hard drive. But you still can't finish that process until the drive returns the data.

However when you have to read data from the drive, say read a good 50-100 MB off the drive, then it becomes a very large bottleneck. For many uses, though, it's effects aren't noticed much since other processes are executed in the mean time.

b

[xortam]

How can you possibly identify the bottleneck in a computing system without first establishing the workload characterization?

[DuRaNgO]

"TOTAL HOME AUTOMATION AND ENTERTAINMENT"

[thecurse]

dosfreak:
they have solid state hard drives right now that you can go buy, only kinda spendy for their size

[XHotKolaX]

What's that?

What's the difference b/w that and a normal HDD?

Heard of it but never knew what it was.


Rob~

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Dual PIII 500@560--386MB PC-100's--20GB Seagate UW
22GB Seagate UW--G-400 DH @153-203--Vortex2500--Princeton C2100

[Rags]

A solid state hard drive is simply a hard drive that has no moving parts. It is much like flash memory and RAM, except it is no volitale (it stays after power is shut off). The advantages to solid state are no moving parts to wear out, increased buffer speeds, decreased seek times, and others. But we are still stuck with the IDE and SCSI interfaces.

Rags

[WayneHu]

Much more optimized and fully developed drivers under Win2K... Also some patches to fix memory and resource leak problems.. These problems still exist in Win2K, even with SP1 patch...

Otherwise, I still prefer Win98 be my general-purposed and gaming machine...

In my experience, PIII-733 is quite fast enough to process most current applications. To be more realistic, to get more RAM and form a RAID-0 (Promise Fasttrak66+ IBM 75GXP 15GB * 2 ) can boost all heavy disk i/o applications. 45~60 MB/s sustained transfer rate is quite useful, especially on video edit applications.

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PIII-550E@733/1.65v, P3B-F, G400DH/32MB@140/186

[This message has been edited by WayneHu (edited 25 September 2000).]

[paulcs]

Soundcards with annual driver updates--if we're lucky. Not really a bottleneck, but it might suck anyway.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[DentyCracker]

The freakin' hard drive and slow ass CD ROM fUXx0r5 throughput, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Solid state drives hahahahhaha. When will we be able to buy a 100GB solid state HD. If HDs were as fast as SRAM now hmmmmmmm ....

[DuRaNgO]

I beieve the actual transfer between the different parts (bus, etc.) will become the problem point of the "pc" as many of the peripherals are going to get huge performance increases over the next 9 mo.
Also, because multi-tasking will become something very different
IMHO
jim

[dZeus]

Hard drive, definately...

what else?

- CPU? nah, 1.4GHz - 2.0GHz the coming year :P
- Video? G800, Gefarce 100000, voodoo Rampage, etc.... naaaahhh :P
- Memory? P4 + Rambus equals enormous memory bandwidth... next year will be the year where Rambus will show it's real potential, because it's the first time it will be used on a fast (i.e. 400MHz+) front-side bus.
- Bus? PCI-X... (wasn't that 64 bit 66MHz PCI? and AGP 8x... naaahhh :P
- Soundcard? don't be rediculous! :P
- Floppy? what's that?
- CDROM? who needs a cdrom faster than 25 - 35 speed sustained? nobody, since it rips a complete cd in 2 - 3 minutes. And cdwriters will get only faster than the current already fast ones, like 16 - 24 speed cd-writers.
- DVD-ROM? what to play on them... movies? and what speed does a movie need? right, 1 speed..

that leaves hard drives... and if they can produce 10k rpm, 20GB/platter IDE and SCSI drives for a resonable price, this bottleneck also will dissapear.. if so, the only bottleneck will be price, since almost nobody will be able to afford a pc with all these bottle-neck less devices.

On the fastest system, the bottleneck will be the user... I think the current software will be executed slower because of user actions than because of loading times :P

[paulcs]

I just wanted to bitch.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Sicna]

Like a lot of people said Hard Drives have been and will be one of the biggest bottleneck.

Why do you think they constantly change the specifications

I mean in 2 years we have ATA-66 and then the new ATA-100. Before the CPU gets what he wants from the HD he can sleep a few hours

I'm curious to see what the new Serial ATA and Fiber Channel. The first will finally bring an end to the !/$"E%"/ flat IDE cable!!

150/Mo transfert rate for starters isn't too bad

Sicna

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Asus K7V
Athlon 750Mhz
1 X 256 megs Kingston PC 133 Mhz CAS 3-2-2
Matrox G400 MAX
Soundblaster Live
Windows ME & 2000 Professionnal

What kind of party is this. No booze and only one hooker. -Bender