You must have missed my statement:
Message 16289870
> I don't want to be lumped in with those who are saying "good enough" and believing they'll never need to upgrade again. I've been around long enough to recognize that at some point I will need to upgrade my CPUs too. But right now there are generally more important things to upgrade. <
I do not think, to quote you, that "processor speed is not and will not be an issue again." I stated that for the busienss use that _I_ deal with, right now, it is generally not a big enough issue to justify spending much money on it. I believe it will be an issue again in the future, when new software comes along that really demands the faster CPUs.
Otellini's statement the other day pretty well reinforces my feeling that rushing ahead with upgrades right now is likely to be a mistake:
"...there is a tremendous amount of application types that are on the horizon that don't need a lot more development... each one of which consumes more MIPS than the fastest processor that we can build today. Simple things like moving speech to text take 1500 MIPS. Natural language processing and 802.11a in software would require two 4 GHz processors today..."
OK, so now I know that the stuff Otellini sees pretty close on the horizon will require more processing power than I can buy for any amount of money today. I also know from personal experience that the stuff I am using (or expect to use before the end of the year) runs pretty well on most of the hardware I have today. So, from my perspective, what's the rush?
You seem to forget the basic rule. Hardware capability makes new software possible, but it's the software that makes end-customers want the hardware. Right now the software world is not chewing up the cycles quite as rapidly as it used to. They probably will again, but in the meantime I can, and will focus on other things. This is one of the rare periods in the past 20 years, when I can sit down and live with the hardware I've got.
Show me the software, I'll buy the hardware. Right now, there's precious little really new software to see. When there is, I'll be back to buying PCs and (most likely) back to buying Intel stock. For now, I have better places to put my time and money.
mg |
