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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ali Chen who wrote (54713)	4/29/1998 1:34:00 AM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Respond to of 186894

No problem, we all have bad days. My point, which probably got lost somewhere, was simply that in the sub $1,000 segment, the processor in use is probably a marginal cause of system slowness. A system with a 32MB RAM or less, no L2 cache on the motherboard, a cheap video accellerator and a slow hard disk is just not going to perform well. It won't perform well with a Celeron and it won't perform much better with a K6. In that type of configuration (which is typical of sub-$1000 machines) there are just too many other bottlenecks. As a result, many of the performance advantages of the K6 will not be realized in this market segment. Since AMD is weaker in other segments, it puts them in real trouble when they try to sell their chip as a high-performance alternative to Celeron. The PC makers are smart enough to know that it won't make much of a difference, whereas the "Intel Inside" logo (and advertising dollars!) very well might. Also, it's a lot easier to sell a "faster" machine based on processor speed than to start explaining things like latency, sustained transfer rate, etc. My own PC was merely an example of how much that other stuff is slowing down systems. My "slow" 200 Pentium will blow away retail systems with promotional specs that make them look a lot better on the surface. The difference is all the other components. That said, you're right in that my swap file would be hugely oversized for Win95. When I boot the machine in Win95 mode (rarely), it is configured for only 64MB of swap space, which may be excessive too, but I have disk space to spare... mg