Intel: Software needs to heed Moore's Law

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The thing about Moore's Law...

I'm sure that the Core2 Duo and the upcoming AMD line of CPU are all fine and dandy. I use an Athlon XP Barton and think that it has more horse power than I can use for the next 3 years or so doing my day-to-day tasks. I think that the market should be NATURALLY evolutionary rather than being dictated by an artificial law of such that doesn't bring much to the table for the majority of the users.

...is that it was originally based on observation of what was going on in the chip industry when it was first postulated. And for the time it's been around, chip makers have more or less kept up the pace. It's not so much a LAW that reads something like "THOU SHALT DOUBLE THE NUMBER OF TRANSISTORS ON CPUs EVERY 18 MONTHS." It's more a benchmark of progress.

For what it's worth, it's all well and good that your Athlon XP is more than enough for YOUR needs. But your personal needs do not necessarily reflect the needs of EVERYONE else. My old Athlon XP based box takes at least twice as long to handle certain tasks (video re-encoding) than my Athlon 64 box. My next upgrade will be retiring my Athlon XP board/chip/RAM and upgrading it to an Athlon 64 X2 based board and that should cut processing time down even more.

While the Athlon XP chip was great in it's day, and it's still adequate for simple tasks - surfing the web, email, writing invoices and running simple spreadsheets, it's not up to snuff on handling more exotic tasks. My time is valuable to me.

Posted by: Wolfie2K3   Posted on: 05/29/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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