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To: Scumbria who wrote (42673)	5/21/2000 6:56:00 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 93625

Hi Scumbria; Re "The speed of the microprocessor--your computer's brain--has increased tenfold since 1994, but the speed of memory chips hasn't kept pace." I agree with what you said, and decided to add some more thoughts to your analysis of that gross simplification... They could have made exactly the same statement about disk drives. CPU speeds have increased 10x since 1994, but the bandwidth out of hard drives hasn't kept up. Therefore, disk drives severely limit the performance of new high-end PCs. While this is all true, the fact is that most instructions are executed out of cache memory, and DRAM is unused. All the chip designers have to do to reduce the performance degradation of slow memory is to increase the size or effectiveness of cache. This they have done. If it were free to get higher bandwidth, than go to! But it isn't. It is a design tradeoff of great complexity, and it isn't subject to facile analysis in Money Magazine, any more than they would publish useful instructions for mom and pop on how to perform a heart bypass operation. -- Carl