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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Stichnoth who wrote (30248)	9/23/1999 1:11:00 PM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

John, Sounds interesting--What do you do on your machine, and what apps are you using? And, do you think these apps will improve just with a new processor, or do they draw on RAM a lot, so that the memory bus will have to be faster sooner rather than later? The actitivities that bring the system to it's knees are things like opening 100M PCX files in Paint Shop Pro and saving them as 7M JPG files (as a batch process). Also printing these large files. Scanning doesn't seem to slow down the system, but gets slowed down very easily as other things happen. Also, large database queries against the IDC PC Tracker database, plus several other large MS Access databases and CD-based database applications. (again, in some cases the applications slow down the system, in some cases the other things slow down the application). I also run two background processes; the first looks for large Mersenne primes (http://www.mersenne.org/), the second helps the SETI folks analyze the signals they've received (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/). (Actually, I have other background processes as well that do things like synchronize the system clock to the time servers on the Internet, allow me to download my address book to a REX card, chat, etc., but the two above are the most compute-intensive -- they both do Fourier transforms on datasets). <edit: also forgot some of the Norton products running in the background, like Anti-virus and Crashguard.> Activities that I don't do yet but plan to, include watching movies on the system (which may include downloading them from the Internet), and converting home movies to some digital (DVD) format (as soon as a standard is nailed down). Finally, I also want to leave room for growth. With all of the 3D enhancements being included in graphics cards and processors, I expect some innovative changes to software front-ends. Also voice recognition. I'd really like to develop a laundry list of apps that will benefit from rambus, say with an 800 or 1000 Mhz processor in the next year or so. I have no idea how the individual improvements of a faster processor, faster hard drive, more memory, and faster memory will affect the performance individually, but then I don't plan on putting individual components together myself -- I'l buy an assembled package. Support and service are very important to me. I've had 2 Gateway systems, and they've been fine, but I'll probably buy a Dell next. They continually rank at the top of service/support ratings, as well as being very competitive on a price/performance basis. As long as they're still there when I'm ready to buy, I'll look at the performance systems they offer and pick one of them. Hope this helps. Dave