On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 09:13AM -0600, Rick Engebretson wrote: > With all the GHz CPUs filling the market, I think a note of caution is due. > Does anybody really need such a CPU?? Check your CPU load meter and you > will likely find a large excess capacity. I have a PIII-500 at home and it's perfectly fine. The biggest bottlneck is the memory -- only 128MB -- and the disk -- regular IDE, does 33MHz DMA I think. The network is also a bottleneck, but I suppose I have little to complain about with a cable modem that usually pulls about 2 megabits/second. My firewall/NAT box, which also runs Apache, Postfix, OpenSSH, an IMAP server, an NFS client to my PIII -- despite all these things, usually has a load average of 0.00. Maybe 0.10 if there's a couple people logged in to it. In fact, I'm ssh-ed in right now, let's check it with our friend ":r!w" ... 12:20:46 up 4 days, 1:10, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.01, 0.00 Not too busy. And that's a 375MHz processor. In a machine architecture class I took in college, I got the impression that most modern chips (this was only a few years ago) spent most of their time waiting for data from memory. I know that intelligent caching and whatnot can reduce this, but it seems like the hardware folks should be concentrating on speeding up memory and buses until they can feed data to a cpu as fast as it can take it. (of course, I'm not terribly current on these technology issues, so I may very well be talking out of my ass here) That said, I *do* want chip that runs 1GHz or faster, simply because "1000MHz" (or 1024MHz, for those of you with emotional attachments to powers of 2) is so much cooler than even "999MHz" because of the four digits and all. :) Dan -- | 4699 BDCB B1A5 28B6 7F8A F8DF EB6A BC2A B0A1 99BF (GPG) | Dan Drake <drake+tclug at lemongecko.org> | http://lemongecko.org/drake/ | public key: email <drake+gpg at lemongecko.org> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20020110/b8047d4a/attachment.pgp