Windows crashing, was Re: Bill Gates: Teen Heart-throb!

Roger Merchberger zmerch at 30below.com
Fri Jan 21 10:33:43 CST 2005


Rumor has it that Cameron Kaiser may have mentioned these words:
>... and I wrote before...
> >
> > My 3-year-old Athlon MP box would beg to differ -- it took a couple of
> > years for Macs to catch up to *it*.
>
>If you're talking clock speed, people in the Athlon world particularly should
>know clock speed is not the whole story because AMD chips are also
>underclocked compared to the "comparable" Intel.

Correct -- and yet, seem to do more work. ;-)

Admittedly, CPU speed (not just clock speed, but overall *speed*) is 
normally not a big factor in most things computing anymore -- until you get 
into MPEG transcoding & the like. It takes a *lot* of CPU horsepower; and 
faster memory is also crucial; everything else is secondary. The 
HyperTransport busses on the Athlon MPs give a huge advantage over Xeons 
(and Macs, especially 3 years ago) in this respect, for a lot less coin.

I keep trying to justify a dual Opteron system, but I haven't seen the 
benchmarks yet; that and Iwill has yet to come out with their dual Opteron 
Small Form Factor PC yet they promised back in June, supposedly coming in 
September... vaporware bastages. :-/

I'm in the "Jim Leonard camp" on this one -- even if there is a Mac that's 
as capable as my system (and 3 years ago, there wasn't) the *software* 
required to achieve similar results will break the bank; my software cost 
was around $45 for TMPGEnc -- everything else is available free.

>  In fact, I would be very
>disappointed if list members here bought into that crap, given the fact that
>there are large numbers of heterogenous architectures used and supported.

You mean like the fact (to bring this back ontopic) that my .89MHz 6809 
processor in my CoCo2 is actually faster than the 2.4MHz 80C85 in my Tandy 
100 & 200? ;^>  That fact certainly isn't lost on me.

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger  --  SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch at 30below.com

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