Quad core chips.

Thaed

R & S talked about waiting to see how the AMD/ATI video card situation worked out prior to buying a system. To me the quad core chip is much more important than that. You can always wait until the next big computer thing and then never end up buying a system. Sometimes, a technology shift is so amazing as to really make a difference. Quad core chips are going to be that kind of a shift.

http://news.com.com/Intel+quad-core+chips+arriving+in+2006/2100-1006_3-6096192.html

Of course you can build really cheap, awesome machines now with the AMD chips that they just dropped the price on by 47%.

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/07/23/amd_slashes_desktop_processor_prices/

Apreche

R & S talked about waiting to see how the AMD/ATI video card situation worked out prior to buying a system. To me the quad core chip is much more important than that. You can always wait until the next big computer thing and then never end up buying a system. Sometimes, a technology shift is so amazing as to really make a difference. Quad core chips are going to be that kind of a shift.

http://news.com.com/Intel+quad-core+chips+arriving+in+2006/2100-1006_3-6096192.html

Of course you can build really cheap, awesome machines now with the AMD chips that they just dropped the price on by 47%.

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/07/23/amd_slashes_desktop_processor_prices/

Are you going to really need a quad-core chip? I mean, if you get a dual core chip and a reasonably good video card you can already play every game that exists at full resolution and enough fps. As a consumer what do you really need quad-core for? The only people I really see it helping are those who are doing video editing and encoding, since that takes forever and is very CPU intensive.

It used to be the case that we could create software more demanding than our hardware could handle. Now we can create hardware more powerful than our software can demand. Except for incredibly crazy enterprise applications, the most powerful hardware is not very useful except as a penis-measuring device. I think the best part about quad-core chips will be the price cuts to the dual-core chips.

Rym

My Thunderbird 1GHz with a GeForce II GTS and PC2100 RAM can run practically every pre-Halflife 2 game flawlessly. I can record, edit, and encode GeekNights easily. The ONLY reasons I'm even considering upgrading revolve around the fact that this PC is so old that it's starting to fail physically. Moreso, I can build a computer more than twice as fast for less than $500.

You have to bear in mind that few programs can even take advantage of a multiple cpu/core setup. They can always help with multitasking (provided you're running a real operating system), but most individual applications out there will see little or no benefit. Even if this were not the case, CPU speed is not the bottleneck for the vast majority of people/computer uses.

Any time your computer slows down, or can't handle a task, it is due to a bottleneck: the limiting factor for the task in question. Most things are limited these days by network speed, hard disk speed, and in the case of games video card speed. Only high-end content creation is limited by CPU speed: 3d animation, rendering, complex high-resolution video editing, etc...

Unless you are doing these things on a regular basis, there is no real advantage in faster CPUs. I'm curious as to how you think these chips will make an amazing difference. ;^)

Thaed

I have an HD video camera so I'm always doing HD video editing. Even my overclocked 4 GHz dual core machine has trouble. Windows XP does a pretty decent job of allocating the processor power. You can watch it do it in Task Manager. Two cores makes a difference.

Four cores will revolutionize computing because it will enable people to do things they have not even thought of yet. I agree with you that most lower end machines can satisfy our needs now. This is why I have six of them running in my office. Yet, faster chips are necessary for applications like robotics. The two main hold-ups right now in robotics are processor capacity and battery technology. Fix those and Ghost in the Shell becomes real.

While Ray Kurzweil is, I think optimistic, progress toward his spike or singularity or great leap forward, the concept is driven by better processors. The question is: "what will better processors let people do that they can't conceive of now," not "why do I need better processors for what I'm doing now."

La Petit Mort

Right, if ghost in the shell were real there would be crazy Christians saying cyberbrains are the mark of the beast and all that shit.