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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: niceguy767 who wrote (123623)	9/8/2000 7:14:36 PM
From: xun	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571673

niceguy, a good piece from my favorite PC writer Dvorak ponders platforms By John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine September 8, 2000 6:47 AM PT I've noticed that over the past few months, when people talk about processors the notion of "who needs it?" crops up a lot more than usual. I've mostly paid little attention to this issue, since I routinely promote the idea of people buying faster chips. The question remains, though: Do we need all the processor speed we are seeing? Sound off here!! It has dawned on me that what I'm hearing today sounds a lot like what we used to hear back when we transitioned from the 286 chip to the 386. This event predated a huge boom in computing. Is it possible that we are about to see another advance in computer usage and sales, as before? You'd never know listening to today's pundits. Currently you hear the same tired litany heard back in 1987: 1) The new processors have more power than you'll ever need. There is no software that can even take advantage of the processors. They are a waste of money. (Yeah, try using a 286 today!) 2) The hard disk I/O is the bottleneck anyway. 3) These new chips are only needed by powerful servers. And while all of this makes a certain logical myopic sense, most of us are already seeing moments when the 500-MHz machine bogs down. Now, having listed those three old arguments, let's add some new stuff to the mix. How about the notion that things are changing forever and we're all going to be using offbeat devices to access the Internet? And the funniest thing I've heard recently is how Sony or Sega game consoles will take a huge chunk of the market away from the PC. In fact, none of these devices will ever do so. The Internet connections from the game consoles will be used almost exclusively for online gaming and only with what few online games actually become popular on the devices. Most online gaming will continue to be PC-dominated. X-Box Baffler More interesting is the evolving situation with the X-Box, which has everyone baffled. Despite the fact that Microsoft, if it wanted to, could find a way to ship this box tomorrow, you won't see it until late 2001 -- if then. The company, I believe, is afraid of failure and wants to see the damage done by Sony's Playstation 2. It's also possible that the X-Box is a red herring and will never be shipped. For all we know there is some sort of behind-the-scenes deal going down that Microsoft is doing with Sega or Nintendo or Sony. The X-Box is just a threat. Why else take so long to release it? Furthermore, there are crazy aspects to the X-Box. For example, why doesn't it include some trimmed-down version of Windows so that it can run regular software? The other consoles can act as computers, why shouldn't this one? The way the X-Box is architected, someone can tweak the start-up ROM and turn the thing into a cheap Linux box. Microsoft can't take a chance on that happening, and should turn it into a cheap Windows box itself. I suspect that the company does not plan on doing this since it would then look as if Microsoft were competing with various vendors of cheap PCs. It's also possible that Microsoft's X-Box is just another chapter in the company's many failed attempts to get into the home entertainment business. MSX comes to mind. With the old MSX operating system we saw a similar effort to produce a crippled product for a "dumb" home user. As many of you recall, MSX was released during the transition from 8-bit to 16-bit computing. Bill Gates had made comments that nobody needed 32-bit computing during this period, and promoted the MSX operating system and hardware standards, which were all based on old 8-bit technology. MSX was a huge flop. Perhaps it's the use of the "X" that is the giveaway. We'll see. Until then, start shopping for something speedy in the form of a real computer.