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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Patriot Scientific - PTSC -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Urlman who wrote (5513)	9/11/1998 5:19:00 PM
From: Kunal Singh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8581

Don't underestimate fast I/O, Most people seem very hung up on the CPU benchmarks. But for most graphics-intensive applications (the future in my opionion as in multimedia), the I/O is almost always the bottleneck. I have a friend who has a habit of annoying computer sales people. He recently went to see the demo of a top of the line Pentium "video toaster." The CPU was one of the newest and fastest in terms of MHz. So the salesman plays some video, and of course my friend ups the frame rate. And the thing finally starts dropping frames and flickering and he decides that he doesn't need a DVD on a computer after all. Almost any computer processing video first of all tries to eliminate the bottleneck of the disks, they use RAID striping so that they can strip their data across multiple disk drives to at least deliver the maximum amount of data possible to the I/O bus. Then the I/O bus has to be fast enough to deliver the data to the CPU or memory (DMA). Then you have the problem of transferring data from the CPU or main memory to the video memory, and you may want to use either a different bus or bypass the bus altogether by putting the stuff on the same card! Some top of the line computers come with two PCI buses, so you could use one for I/O and the other for the rest of the stuff. So the point is that the real-time I/O is important if you don't want to end up dropping frames because the CPU is simply not free to process the data. Most I/O subsystems of PCs are not good at handling real-time data, and NOBODY LIKES A FLICKERING, JUMPY VIDEO!