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Subject: Re: Is This Year Crafty's Best Chance To Win The World Championship?

Author: ShaktiFire

Date: 17:18:50 05/21/00

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Really, most users right now do not need super processing speed.
Five years, ten years ago, faster speeds were needed for almost
every application.  But in the past 3 - 4 years, there has been
a lack of a must need application that requires cpu speed.  The only
must need applications are internet and games.  Internet is primarily
limited by modem bandwidth.  Games need lots of speed, but this is
being taken up by video cards, which are at this time doubling pixel
rate throughput every 6 months.  In fact, video cards are now promoting
3d transform and lighting processing since they have attained 3d
high resolution rasterizing and need to find more to do.  The 3d transform
calculations were being done by cpu but soon they will be done by video
card.  This must terrify the cpu manufacturing, since there will be even
less need for speed on cpu.  The only other application that must need
speed is the speech recognition stuff.   And of course, the chess engines
which have no limit to there requirements.

>On May 21, 2000 at 19:05:58, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>You are missing my point.  Within 5 years, a single microprocessor chip is going
>>to have more than one cpu.  There are already prototypes.  Several vendors have
>>done this already, although none that are "PC" aware...
>>
>>But a dual or quad cpu chip is coming.  Quicker than you might think.  And it
>>will still be able to run in a palm or whatever, if the computational demands
>>continue to increase..
>
>I think multiprocessor machines are great, but my question is why are they
>useful for the average person, given current software?  The average person isn't
>doing more than one CPU intensive thing at once, if they are doing any CPU
>intensive things, ever.
>
>The software has to take advantage of multiple processors so that it can speed
>up tasks for single-processor humans, and that is a bitch.
>
>Aside from chess programs, I don't do anything that is CPU-intensive, except
>maybe some games, which seem to run fine now on my 550 mhz Intel machine.  In
>fact, everything seems to run fine now.  If I have to sit and wait for something
>it is typically modem bandwidth (56K modem here) or internet lag.
>
>So if they are going to be common, why?  What is the upside for the typical home
>user or semi-casual business user?
>
>bruce



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