All’s well in processor-land. With processor speeds up(yes, once again…!), and costs down, how could they not be? Barely two weeks ago, Intel trotted out a trio of their latest-fastest-bestest chips – brand new Pentium 4s, running at 2.53, 2.4, and 2.26GHz. Designed for those who “prefer to stay at the top of the PC performance curve, ” each little wonder runs a 533MHz system bus(400 for earlier P4 chips) so you can run all those resource-hungry apps, which you’ve been lusting after all this while. And if that is not enough to make you happy, wait till the end of this year, and you’ll be able to buy a 3GHz Pentium 4, or so says the grapevine.
The never-ending hype notwithstanding, should you really be bothered? Maybe this is no more than a ploy to make consumers pay more for what they don’t even need? This might sound a bit cloak-and-dagger, but if you think about it, does the world need a 3GHz chip? What are we going to do with all that power on our desktops? What is desktop computing all about? Or in any case, what is it about, most of the time? In my experience, it’s about using a word processor, an email client, accessing the Internet, running a spreadsheet application, and maybe dabbling with a presentation package or two. Of course, there are all those MP3s to listen, and those DivX videos to watch, but a three Gig CPU? No, most of us are not going to make our own music and/or movies on our PCs, and before someone can shout games, let me say most games use more of the GPU’s processing power(what did you buy that GeForce for, eh?), rather than that of the CPU, so there.
Using Intel’s latest processors to power your PC – on which you end up writing emails, and preparing project reports – would be akin to using a 600-horsepower Lamborghini to drive down to your local supermarket, to buy vegetables. And if you don’t want a PC that’s the computing equivalent of a Lamborghini, too bad. After all, Intel are hardly doing much for those who, like me, do not “prefer to stay at the top of the PC performance curve, ” and who’d rather look at chips that get the job done, at moderate expense. An example is the new 1.7GHz Celeron(Intel’s ‘budget chip’), which in independent tests, has performed worse than the old 1.3 Celeron! To stick to some price-point which their accountants told them would earn them more money, Intel saw it fit to cut down the Celeron L2 cache size from 256KB to 128KB. Want more power? Cough up more for a new Pentium 4 chip, please, or live with the degraded performance on the new Celeron. Smacks of monopolistic tendencies if you ask me, but you decide.
Then again, maybe Intel won’t have it all their way. Not if AMD has anything to say about it anyway. AMD have given some stiff competition to Intel in the desktop computing stakes, with their Athlon XP series, and is all set to repeat the story in the server space. Recently, Intel announced the second iteration of their 64-bit chip, the Itanium 2, which will be launched in the next few months, and which they say will run applications at twice the speed of the original Itanium. Here however, it will get some competition from Opteron(code-named ‘Hammer’), AMD’s offering in the 64-bit chip space. Going by the rumours that are doing the rounds now, this is already slated for use in some of Dell’s hi-end servers. Will the sparks fly, as the titans battle it out? Wait and watch!
In the meanwhile, there are others who are looking at alternative directions that personal computing might take. Small, multi-function, mobile devices may be the “PCs” of the future, and if that turns out to be true, rest assured – you will not have to settle for slowpoke processors. Companies like ARM are already working on hi-speed embedded processor design, and recently, unveiled the ARM 11, which will, supposedly, boost audio/video playback quality on your PDA, amongst other things. MP3-players will play better than ever before, digital cameras will be faster and more accurate, PDAs will run more complex apps, and even SatNav systems will benefit.
Bottomline? Regardless of what direction personal computers take, we are not going to be running short of processing power anytime soon. The more, the merrier, so bring ’em all on…