You ever notice how the speed of computers has kind of come to a halt? Oh sure there supposed to be faster due to two processors being on one chip and soon four on a chip. But I have to tell you a few years ago I bought a dell computer. It was the 1.6 megahertz duo processor. It was supposed to be lighting fast. I have to tell you that I have the old computer it was supposed to replace. It still works great but was having crashing issues. I finally fixed it a few days ago and it still seems faster then the duo. I don't get it. And then I started noticing things.
Have you been noticing how in fliers from like Best Buy and Circuit City they no longer mention things like megahertz speed or microprocessor speed? And it occurred to me they have stopped making computers faster and have just made them able to do more things at once. So for example if I wanted to open Word 07', Excel 07', and Publisher 07' you could get them all to open at about the same time it would take you to load up just one on my old computer. But is this fast?
No. Fast is not how many programs you can open and use opened up. Because after all how many programs can you use at the same time? It is how fast I can get my computers to start up and how fast it can understand the graphics coming off of the internet or a game I am playing. I basically use the one I am writing this article on for word processing so it doesn't have to do much but relay my words to the disk I use to then transfer them to the internet. But it just seems like it is some kind of secret.
Yes you could go with brand y but x will be just as slow. Sure more processing power but the same speed and I think there should be a disclaimer. This product goes as fast as your old computer but won't crash as often. That's really what they need. I mean I was In the computer store the other day and two guys who were in line In front of me, came up to the counter, and started complaining about a computer they previously purchased. That even though it had two processors it ran at the same speed as his previous computer and he wanted to return it and get a faster computer. So where did the faster computers go?
I'll tell you what happened, the material used to make the microprocessors shrank and shrank until it became too small and a lot of electrical heat leakage happened. There were many processor designs down the road that were trying to circumvent this problem by building bigger cooling fans to get rid of the heat but it became to big a problem. So then the big wigs at Intel decided we can't get the chips to run faster without a total over hall of the chip material lets put more then one microprocessor on a chip. That should make the speed double because more then one brain will work on the problem.
The problem is that the software has to be written to make use of this second brain in the computer and unless it is done the processor still has the speed of a single chip since only one is really working the problem. So recently IBM came out with a new material that could be used to make faster chips again so there is the dilemma. Until the new material can be used to make a faster processor should they continue with putting more and more brains on a chip and designing software to take advantage of this and make the programs super fast or should they just build faster processors and continue using the software they have now?
It is a big dilemma and it may only be solved with a mixture of new software and new faster processors. For now it seems it will be a mixture of the two with more and more brains put on a chip until a new architecture using the new more efficient material for electrical processors is found. But I think the only way we will know if a computer is fast is if we take it home and use it or we go to a website that tells you their true speed. You can look them up through goggling.
