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Technology Stocks : Seagate Technology - Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stitch who wrote (133)	11/11/1998 7:15:00 PM
From: Frodo Baxter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1989

>You are going to have to explain the logic here as it totally misses me. Or maybe I am hung up on an imperfect analogy? I can go faster in my car if there is less traffic. We can transfer files, browse, download news, store data, faster, if bandwidth allows it. What the heck am I missing? In fact, I say non sequiter because above, you say yourself, bandwidth is an enabler. An enabler of what if not higher transfer rates? Oh, all right already! Here's the technical explanation you mad dogs have forced me into. The way the technodroids have architectured it, there is always sufficient bandwidth. They never allow bandwidth to become a bottleneck. (Note: internet bandwidth is a different story) >I can go faster in my car if there is less traffic. Not if you're already driving at the maximum speed! In that case, widening the highway doesn't make you go faster. That's my basic point. By the time you get a faster car, the autobahn has been widened already. So the road is almost never the problem, as long as it is widened before the new cars come... which has always been the case. As I've mentioned before, the UltraDMA/33 spec is over twice as fast as the theoretical maximal internal data transfer rate of current hard drives. There is no bottleneck. wdc.com System bandwidth operates on the same principle. Your system (it doesn't matter what particular system you own) has enough internal bandwidth such that the processor is not crippled. For example, your processor may run at 333Mhz, 5 times as much as the 66Mhz memory bus. This, however, is not prima facie evidence of insufficient bandwidth, because this design is internally arbitrated by L1 and L2 caches. Multitasking is an irrelevant issue. If you have ten tasks running instead of one, you don't get the same performance ten times over. Instead, the processor time is sliced up ten ways. Therefore, the bandwidth math remains the same. In other words, if you upgraded your system with Rambus memory and an UltraDMA/66 interface without the attendant upgrade in processor and hard drive, your system will not be demonstrably faster, not even if you multitask. That is, your cars are already going as fast as they can. Future systems (faster cars), though, will benefit from higher bandwidth (wider roads). And they will get it. If I fail to be persuasive, it is only my inability to make these concepts clear, as all these facts are incontrovertible.