Tracking new hardware

by George Harding August 2006

For those of us in the computing field it used to be somewhat gradual that changes occurred or something exciting came about. The original Pentium was a big milestone just as AGP graphics and the USB 2.0 bus were. Now it seems things are getting a little more confusing and harder to track. Each of the big processor manufacturers had a name for a certain core and then the speed of the CPU would fall into a certain range, other cores meant a faster CPU or had more cache memory on the die. Today a CPU at a certain speed can have three different core names, they might have a dual core with a built in instruction set that supports this or that but nonetheless it is still confusing. I see press releases every few days touting this or that feature.

To the consumer this translates into big increases in the amount of data that can be processed at one time. Memory speeds are finally creeping up to support the faster processors and the computer can handle, and will use larger amounts of memory. You get a bigger bang for the buck with about any new computer than you would have a year ago.

One thing to bear in mind is what you and I are actually able to perceive when we use the new and improved hardware. If you use large video files or photography software you will definitely see a difference. Opening a large Access, PowerPoint or Excel file will be very noticeable. Your computer can crunch the data faster but if you simply are surfing the web, and reading email you might not see the lightning speeds you’d hoped for.

The other area of excitement is the graphics processing. The AGP bus has been replaced with PCI express bus. This is a huge performance leap for almost all types of computing. Not only is speed an issue but the actual processing of information itself is taking on a new meaning. Instead of just thinking speed you have to think in terms of rendering, shading, physics processing, and video optimization. The new games are getting more realistic but you can’t see the changes without the new hardware. The line between being able to distinguish between a game and actual motion picture is getting more blurred all the time. While the games that are written for the new technology work fine on older hardware you won’t, for example, experience the robust changes in backgrounds that are getting as complicated as the characters themselves. The old school thought of frames per second is not even the most important bragging right of the video card manufacturers any more. Now that AMD is acquiring ATI the entire field of video should get very interesting real soon.

The real improvements are found in just about every piece inside the box and we are seeing faster hard drives, faster and faster memory, and gigabyte Ethernet which is one gig of data across a network card. This will be standard when Internet Two comes along, and that is for another article in itself. We never got to see a Pentium 5, simply because Intel abandoned the naming scheme, if that train of thought were followed we are probably looking at Pentium 11 or 12 only they call them Core Duo and Core 2 Duo and Viiv. Each manufacturer has 64 bit versions for each of these series and AMD is bringing out a quad core real soon.

One area you can be very happy about is the prices of this new technology isn’t the “arm and a leg” we’re used to seeing with new products. The economy is holding its own, but consumers are pickier than in the past. If vendors raise hardware prices too much they risk losing sales and this is more pronounced right now than in the past. There are products worth getting excited about and good reasons to upgrade, but most people won’t go for this thinking if prices are too high. Unlike in years past most machines people currently own can get the job done, now is just a really good time to invest in new hardware as well.