Intel Announces 65nm Breakthrough

[Valan]

Who will buy the next round of chips?

Even the 3d video industry will be satisfied soon with the progress of software efficiency bringing down rendering times.

Hardware is at the stage where most of the market is already satisfied.

[mikeymike]

There are potential uses for computers that have been put on hold because the processing power hasn't been available.  Some functions can be accomplished in a completely different fashion just because (for example) it can be relied upon for the host machine to have 2GB RAM.

It's not necessarily a case of just getting more eye candy in new software.  It is annoying when that happens, admittedly.

There are other downsides to increased system resources.  Users tend to waste them as well.  The size of the average systray icon collection is increasing with new customers' machines that I see.  The 1GB RAM mark seems to make my life more difficult :-)

I'm sure similar things were said about passing the 100, 200, or 500MHz barriers... "why do we need that much processing capacity?"... "who's going to use this then?".  Sadly, the reason tends to be Windows, rather than increased application capability.  Games seem to be the only real signs of the hardware frontiers being pushed.  I think we're just as unproductive as ever.

[toRus]

Move over Newton and Einstein. It's Moore's "Law" that drives this world. :lol:

[Leo42]

Or in the GPU world. For quite a while GPUs were trippling in performance every 18 months. Of course, competition is much tougher in that industry.

The Moore has nothing to do with speed, but rather with the amount of transistors fitted in a processor. Even if this has a direct consequence on the speed, these are 2 different things.

Leo.

[mikeymike]

And of course, the transister count increasing is a bad thing if you're trying to keep down heat wastage and power consumption...

[whabang]

I'm sure similar things were said about passing the 100, 200, or 500MHz barriers... "why do we need that much processing capacity?"... "who's going to use this then?". Sadly, the reason tends to be Windows, rather than increased application capability. Games seem to be the only real signs of the hardware frontiers being pushed. I think we're just as unproductive as ever.

Exactly!

100 MHz: The 060 was still on par with early Pentium CPUs. 3D-rendering at home got a serious boost.

200 MHz: Amiga users atarted to complain that noone needs that much CPU-power (Until the PPC-boards were released, that is).

500 MHz: Amiga users had given up whining about CPUs (and bus-arches). People who couldn't afford modern equipment complained about uneccesary eye-candy.

1 GHz: Gamers cheered. Soon we will be able to pirate even more advanced games that we can't play because the HW-demands will be too high.
Intel lost the GHz barrier-battle, but rushes P4 developement by aiming at MHz instead of performance.

2 GHz: Gamers cheer again. Owners of 1 GHz-machines complain about XPs eyecandy.
Mac-users says that you only need 1 GHz CPUs, but goes out the next day to buy a dual CPU-system instead.

3 GHz. Gamers barely stopped cheering about the 2 GHz-barrier before Intel was at it again. Unable to push further, the Mac crowd was given right when Intel put dual cores into their CPUs.

Now, ask yourself how much the functionality of productivity applications has increased during this period.
 :-D

Personally, the only major benefit I got from getting a newer system was a queter system, and a higher max. amm. of system memory.
I went from AGP to PCI on the Gfx-front, as I doubled the ammount of Video-RAM. The new card was considerably faster, BTW.