91–100 of 162 posts
What a time to be a kid then. We had a hand-me-down DEC x86 desktop at home with a Pentium II running at 233 MHz until I want to say 2002? This was around the time I learned how to build a PC since doing that was cheaper than buying one and no-one in my family had the money for that! I saved whatever money I could to buy a 128MB stick of RAM from Staples (maybe it was 256MB?), a few other things from TigerDirect/Newe…
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Reaching 10 GHz for a CPU will never be done in silicon. It could be done if either silicon will be replaced with another semiconductor or semiconductors will be replaced with something else for making logical gates, e.g. with organic molecules, to be able to design a logical gate atom by atom. For the first variant, i.e. replacing silicon with another semiconductor, research is fairly advanced, but this would increa…
Overclockers are pretty close.
For the latter case, 6 GHz has been barely reached, in CPUs that cannot be produced in large quantities and whose reliability is dubious.
What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?
What would be the benefit? You don't need a 10GHz processor to browse the web, or edit a spreadsheet, and in any case things like that are already multi-threaded. The current direction of adding more cores makes more sense, since this is really what CPU intensive programs generally need - more parallelism.
To browse the web is debatable. But for svchost.exe, Teams, Office 365 and Notepad, you definitely need one. /s
Programming is a lost art.
What a time to be a kid then. We had a hand-me-down DEC x86 desktop at home with a Pentium II running at 233 MHz until I want to say 2002? This was around the time I learned how to build a PC since doing that was cheaper than buying one and no-one in my family had the money for that! I saved whatever money I could to buy a 128MB stick of RAM from Staples (maybe it was 256MB?), a few other things from TigerDirect/Newe…
The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
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Anytime you upgraded from a 4 year old computer to a new one back then - from 16Mhz to 90Mhz, or 75Mhz to 333Mhz, or 333Mhz to 1Ghz, or whatever - it was immediate, it was visceral. SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change. The software, in those days, was similarly making much bigger leaps every few years. 256 col…
> SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change. For me they were. I still remember the first PC I put together for someone with a SSD. I had a quite beefy machine at the time and it would take 30 seconds or more to boot Windows, and around 45s to fully load Photoshop. Built this machine someone with entirely low-end (t…
So it was the only way to get that visceral improvement in user experience like CPU and platform upgrades were in the mid 90's to very early 00's.
The experience of just slapping a new SSD in a 3 year old machine was similar to a different generation of computer nerds.
Nothing could really match the night and day difference of an entire machine being double to triple the performance in a single upgrade though. Not even the upgrade from spinning disks to SSD. You'd go from a game being unplayable on your old PC to it being smooth as butter overnight. Not these 20% incremental improvements. Sure, load times didn't get too much better - but those started to matter more when the CPU upgrades were no longer a defining experience.
The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
SSDs were such a revolution though, and a really rewarding upgrade. I'd fit SSDs to friend and family computers as an upgrade.
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I had the same inclination back in the 90s when I upgraded my Cyrix 486 SLC2 50MHz without a heat sink (which seems like a no-no in retrospect) to Cyrix MediaGX 133MHz. The stocker fan was immediately noticeable. I thought I had done something wrong.
Upgrading and Repairing PCs 4th edition even says directly, that some shady resellers will put a heatsink on a chip that they're running beyond spec, but that Intel designs all their processors to run at rated speed without one.
I bought a whole bunch of parts with my first Athlon. I think I bought a Soundblaster, and a Radeon GFX card if I am remembering the timeline right. The soundblaster came with a demo of a Lara Croft game that used the then incredible spatial audio processing to great effect. The industry promptly forgot about that technology, and to this day game audio rarely matches the potential of real time spatial dynamics that w…
Couple a modern AAA title (like Battlefield 6, etc.) with a proper Atmos sound system and you will likely be pretty amazed. Even a simple 5.1 setup is pretty decent for hearing footsteps behind you/etc. which actually does help with gameplay.
I haven't kept up on it as my computer gaming area doesn't lend itself towards a proper speaker setup these days, but playing with headphones on lately has made me start to look into this again. I need to find some high quality tiny cube speakers or something to be able to put in weird spots on the ceilings/walls.
The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's Law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law ) the steady across-the-board increase in processing power didn't equate to programs running much faster, e.g. Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago. SSDs provided a huge bump in performance to each in…
Nowadays, you really don't get these magical moments when you upgrade, not on the device itself. The upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 was basically just more ads. Games released today look about as good as games released 5-10 years ago. The music-making or photo-editing program you installed back then is still good. Your email works the same as before. In fact, I'm not sure I have a single program on my desktop that feels more capable or more responsive than it did in 2016.
There's some magic with AI, but that's all in the cloud.