Intel Unveils Controversial Chip nytimes.com
One final OT on PIII/Katmai. And one little excerpt, from my cheap hardware guy perspective:
''This isn't really a push to promote a processor. It's more a push to arrest the slide down the slippery slope toward less expensive personal computers,'' said Van Baker, director of market research at Dataquest, a San Jose, Calif. high-tech research firm.
That makes sense for Intel business wise, but on the broader economic front, it's counter to the "appliance" mantra. The article goes on to state how PIII is cool for 3d graphics and other computationally intense stuff. Which is, indeed, cool, but personally uninteresting, my hand-eye coordination was never that good, the gaming scene is beyond me. From the broader business standpoint, I got to wonder too, as the bread-and-butter apps just don't need this stuff. Maybe voice recognition or video compression will become essential, I don't know. I think it would be pretty short sighted for business to invest big time in hardware for apps that aren't really ready yet, though.
Then there's NT2K, which will no doubt soak up plenty of compute power, but won't be helped by the signal-processing style horsepower in the PIII. And by the time NT2K becomes mainstream, today's hardware will be obsolete, anyway. Not to mention that a big, bloated OS is not the ideal platform for stuff that has a large real-time element. It's all pretty weird. Written word guy makes no predictions.
Cheers, Dan.
|
