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Technology Stocks : PC Sector Round Table -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (533)	7/2/1998 11:41:00 PM
From: Stitch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2025

Mark, <<Stitch, wasn't it hard to upgrade now, when you could have Rambus memory in 6 months? >> Not really. There is always the promise of some juicy new thing hanging out there on the horizon, no matter when you buy My other laptop was stolen some months back in Boston during a business trip. I have been limping along without, partially because I was waiting for more and better at cheaper and partially because I was weighing going to a windows CE palm top. I finally discarded that idea and decided on lugging the poundage around. My mispellings aside in my post to Pierre, I do use it in my work, and I was getting tired of coming home from trips and having so much PC work to do which could have been done on the spot or in the evenings while on the road. I was also getting tired of trying to catch up with market news and 100+ messages on my favorite threads.<G> Finally, I make a lot of presentations to clients and their customers. It is much easier to do so on a screen then printing hard copies for everyone. Best, Stitch

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (533)	7/3/1998 9:25:00 AM
From: Pierre-X	Respond to of 2025

Re: Rambus Initially I don't believe RDRAM will have much impact on desktop system performance. Speed in the memory subsystem, as far as I know, will influence server design more than desktop design. The server market is much more demanding of incremental performance per box. That's why Intel is charging so much for the Xeons. ----------------------------- Re: Graphics cards Graphics RAM is an interesting area right now. Previously the RAM on your video adapter was used as a "frame buffer" which determined the maximum resolution available to you. A 2MB frame buffer would allow up to 1024x768 at 16bit color depth. A 4MB frame buffer would allow 1600x1200 at 8bit color depth. High performance up through end of 1997 would have been 8MB, allowing high resolutions at good color depths. New applications for graphics RAM have arrive in force, however, with the large scale advent of 3D coprocessors. Now the video memory can be employed for "z-buffering" and "texture-buffering". The video subsystem's demand for texture memory is a function of the software application -- meaning that apps can be written to use as much texture memory as is available. As a matter of fact leading edge games available now already exceed the average texture buffer capacity of 2MB/txp. Good news for SGRAM/SDRAM makers. My guess is that we're not likely to see 64M video buffers in the next generation of hardware, however. The most memory current generation hardware might use that I can envision would be 32MB -- however this is an inefficient (in terms of memory utilization) configuration of an 8MB primary 2D chip and a pair of 12MB Voodoo2 3D accelerators. The next generation of boards will probably use on average 16MB. Chips like the i740, the new Maxtrox G200, S3's Savage, nVidia's TnT, 3DFX Banshee, these all are typically specified with 8 to 16MB of video memory. It's quite possible however, that two generations ahead we may see video subsystems equipped with 32 to 62MB RAM in typical configurations. ----------------------------- Re: Applications for power rigs Applications will always be there to match the computing power available. This doesn't necessarily mean paradigm-busting killer applications, but there are already a host of existing apps that can benefit materially from at least another generation of progress in CPU power. Some examples: -Media processing (e.g. video) -Writing recognition -Speech recognition -Biometrics -Games (these are always hardware hungry) God bless, PX