6.0GHz in 2004 for the Masses

[WinkOsmosis]

Originally posted by: AMDfreak

Why would Harddrives be a bottleneck?

In today's technology, the hard drive is the utter definition of "bottleneck". Serial ATA only provides a burst rate of 150MB/s, and likely sustained transfer rates will not likely reach above 50MB/s, even with an 8MB cache. The next slowest item is the RAM, which even if you're using old EDO SIMMS will transfer data faster than a hard drive.

Being slow compared to memory etc doesn't make the hard drive a bottleneck. A car's seats don't tilt at 6500 rpm.. does that mean they are a bottleneck?

 

[Pink0]

For most people it is entirely possible to put everything in memory - thus they won't use a harddrive at all. As long as you never reboot, you'll never use the HD.

The thread of morons. Holy crap. I can't beleieve this. Something of the past: working with audio. Just forget working with future common place things like video. Let's talk about mastering a CD. Cheap burners and media are here. A lot of people rip CDs and then mix em and burn them. What about people who record themselves and then use soundforge to resample or filter it. That can take hours. All of it is 100% hard drive bound. As hard drive performance increases 10% you will shave 10% off of the hours long resample.

In some workstations, certain types of video capture (HD for one - multisample for another) require RAID0 SCSI arrays just because IDE can't maintain the sustained write speeds that it needs for that much data (uncompressed) That's just for recording video let alone working with it!

Heck, even on my own system, if I"m recording a TV show at DVD quality (compressed a bit on the fly) and open up a program which requires hard drive access, I drop frames like crazy since they can't be written to the hard drive. I have a gig of ram BTW.

Sorry, but if you think that hard drives aren't the number 1 bottleneck in PCs today, you're a moron.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: Pink0

For most people it is entirely possible to put everything in memory - thus they won't use a harddrive at all. As long as you never reboot, you'll never use the HD.

The thread of morons. Holy crap. I can't beleieve this. Something of the past: working with audio. Just forget working with future common place things like video. Let's talk about mastering a CD. Cheap burners and media are here. A lot of people rip CDs and then mix em and burn them. What about people who record themselves and then use soundforge to resample or filter it. That can take hours. All of it is 100% hard drive bound. As hard drive performance increases 10% you will shave 10% off of the hours long resample.

In some workstations, certain types of video capture (HD for one - multisample for another) require RAID0 SCSI arrays just because IDE can't maintain the sustained write speeds that it needs for that much data (uncompressed) That's just for recording video let alone working with it!

Heck, even on my own system, if I"m recording a TV show at DVD quality (compressed a bit on the fly) and open up a program which requires hard drive access, I drop frames like crazy since they can't be written to the hard drive. I have a gig of ram BTW.

Sorry, but if you think that hard drives aren't the number 1 bottleneck in PCs today, you're a moron.

I'm a dedicated SoundForge user (gotta use it for cetain stuff at church). Unfortunately, the people who make decisions there know nothing about the stuff they are deciding about, and they're really cheap, so we (myself and another guy who run the A/V equipment) are stuck with a 766MHz celeron with a 5400RPM disk drive. Applying any kind of filter to the audio (even a lowly 44100hz 16 bit stereo audio stream) takes nigh to forever. But before the hard-disk-is-not-a-bottleneck people jump on the 5400rpm disk drive and tell me that if we got a newer drive it would be much better, I've also done some editing on files of the same size on my faster (7200rpm IDE) drives at home, and it's still unbearably slow, at least if you're concerned about any bit of productivity. The only way to get good performance is to go to SCSI or high-end IDE RAID (like the 3ware or adaptec hardware RAID cards), and that's something that not everyone can afford right now.

 

[rbV5]

Funny, 2>6 GHz doesn't seem much a leap to me, We need changes in the factor of 10 fold, video/audio and distributed projects take every cycle you throw at it now, too many cycles...........bah, never.

 

[kgraeme]

6GHz in 2004? Wow, by that time Apple might finally have a cpu over 2GHz! :Q

 

[Hulk]

jliechty-


If you apply a cpu intensive filter to an audio file on a computer with a relatively slow cpu then it doesn't matter how fast the drive is, it (the drive) will be waiting for the cpu to render the audio data.


Also, to say that you can only get good audio (or video for that matter) editing performance by using SCSI drives is not quite correct. Take a look at storage review and you will find that in non-server oriented applications (i.e. audio and video editing) the fastest IDE drives are quite close to the fastest SCSI drives. The important specification to look at is overall transfer rate at the outer and inner tracks. In addition, most audio files are under 1000MB, not really huge file these days. Even my ancient P4 1.9 with a 60GB WDC drive can move files of that size around reasonably quickly. And, that is a looooong bit of audio. Yes, SCSI is faster but not the ONLY way to get good performance.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: draggoon01
link

and i'm always left wondering, why do the masses need that speed. what new function will be allowed with that speed which can't be accomplished with current speeds. games, video encoding, and professional apps seem the only things to benefit.

but the pentium 4 scales like no other

Well there you have it.

Sorry, but if you think that hard drives aren't the number 1 bottleneck in PCs today, you're a moron.

From the technical standpoint, they're the biggest bottleneck, at least for constant use; of course, CD-ROM's and floppy drivesr are probably slower, but if you're getting video off a floppy, there's other issues to work on.
Most of the rest of the computer deals with Gigabytes/second. The hard drive is stuck at Megabytes/second. And yeah, I guess the PCI bus is stuck at 133MB/sec (I pretty sure that's it) - isn't PCI-express on the way? True, the hard drive isn't the only bottleneck, but it's usually considered the most serious because of the higher access times (milliseconds and not nanoseconds) and the slow sustained transfers.

 

[fluxquantum]

wow, 6 GHz.

 

[CrazySaint]

Originally posted by: Hulk
Even my ancient P4 1.9 with a 60GB WDC drive can move files of that size around reasonably quickly. And, that is a looooong bit of audio. Yes, SCSI is faster but not the ONLY way to get good performance.

Um, since when is a P4 1.9 with a 60GB WD HDD ancient??

While it may not be the latest or greatest, its still a VERY fast computer.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: Hulk
jliechty-

If you apply a cpu intensive filter to an audio file on a computer with a relatively slow cpu then it doesn't matter how fast the drive is, it (the drive) will be waiting for the cpu to render the audio data.

Also, to say that you can only get good audio (or video for that matter) editing performance by using SCSI drives is not quite correct. Take a look at storage review and you will find that in non-server oriented applications (i.e. audio and video editing) the fastest IDE drives are quite close to the fastest SCSI drives. The important specification to look at is overall transfer rate at the outer and inner tracks. In addition, most audio files are under 1000MB, not really huge file these days. Even my ancient P4 1.9 with a 60GB WDC drive can move files of that size around reasonably quickly. And, that is a looooong bit of audio. Yes, SCSI is faster but not the ONLY way to get good performance.

Oh, well I guess I'm mistaken. But anyway, CPU usage doesn't seem to limit the 766MHz celeron nearly as much as a slow hard drive does...opening 100MB audio files and running them through the normalize filter (that basically does a quick scan over the entire file about 3 or 4 times, and each time it has to read it from the disk) is quite a long task. Maybe I can convince the "church improvement committee" that we need a new computer, and then get one (or build one) with IDE RAID and some nice WD Special Edition drives...but most likely if they do anything they'll think they know better than I do and go get some 2.8GHz Dell with 128MB of RAM and another 5400RPM hard drive, because "it's faster."

 

[BD231]

Originally posted by: grant2

Originally posted by: BD231
Jesus......, just saying 6ghz leaves me dumbfounded and asking myself, "WTF would I do with a 6 gigahert computer?". I think the ghz thing is getting a bit outlandish. When are these guy's going to start working on more efficient processing????

"a bit outlandish" ?? Does it offend your religion or something to know that high-frequency processors exist?

"these guy's" are making processors that perform more complex programs, faster. Are you unhappy at the complexity, or the speed? Maybe you'd like to go back to dos 4.0 on a 286-12?

Outlandish= peculiar, odd, unnecessary*. Processors have been getting much faster, and much hotter. No I dont want a 286-12 as I'm sure your smart enough to know that so dont ask such stupid questions. I'm not attacking you, I'm just stating how I feel about a jump to 6ghz, get over it.

 

[MaxDSP]

Originally posted by: Jellomancer

Originally posted by: AMDfreak

Why would Harddrives be a bottleneck?

In today's technology, the hard drive is the utter definition of "bottleneck". Serial ATA only provides a burst rate of 150MB/s, and likely sustained transfer rates will not likely reach above 50MB/s, even with an 8MB cache. The next slowest item is the RAM, which even if you're using old EDO SIMMS will transfer data faster than a hard drive.

Being slow compared to memory etc doesn't make the hard drive a bottleneck. A car's seats don't tilt at 6500 rpm.. does that mean they are a bottleneck?

No, but then again your comparison is not relevant to the term "bottleneck". What does moving a car's seats have to do with the actual performance? If you're talking about the battery that the seat uses for power, then in reality performance would actually go down because it would take more energy to move the seat at "6500 RPM" (whatever that means) as opposed to 3500 RPM.


A more relevant comparison would be the gas tank or the fuel nozzles being the bottleneck in the car, since their performance directly affects the performance of the car. (I dunno much about cars so that may be a bit off)


The term bottleneck pretty much means that the system can only go as fast as the slowest component (which is the hard drive)

 

[MaxDSP]

Originally posted by: BD231

Originally posted by: grant2

Originally posted by: BD231
Jesus......, just saying 6ghz leaves me dumbfounded and asking myself, "WTF would I do with a 6 gigahert computer?". I think the ghz thing is getting a bit outlandish. When are these guy's going to start working on more efficient processing????

"a bit outlandish" ?? Does it offend your religion or something to know that high-frequency processors exist?

"these guy's" are making processors that perform more complex programs, faster. Are you unhappy at the complexity, or the speed? Maybe you'd like to go back to dos 4.0 on a 286-12?

Outlandish= peculiar, odd, uinnecessary. Processors have been getting much faster, and much hotter. No I dont want a 286-12 as I'm sure your smart enough to know that so dont ask such stupid questions. I'm not attacking you, I'm just stating how I feel about a jump to 6ghz, get over it.

uninecessary, eh? I learn something everyday...

 

[BD231]

uninecessary, eh? I learn something everyday...

Thanks for the heads up.

 

[Sohcan]

Originally posted by: Pink0

For most people it is entirely possible to put everything in memory - thus they won't use a harddrive at all. As long as you never reboot, you'll never use the HD.

The thread of morons. Holy crap. I can't beleieve this...Sorry, but if you think that hard drives aren't the number 1 bottleneck in PCs today, you're a moron.

First of all, Dullard in no way deserves to be called a moron. If you can't present your argument without resorting to insults, please do not present it at all.

Secondly Dullard's point is completely valid. He is not implying that most computers can fit all data from their hard drives into memory, but that system memory is easily capable of holding the working set in memory. Look at any data for systems running jobs that are on average CPU bound; once the working set fits into memory, page faults/sec quickly become negligible. Obviously I/O bound workloads such as transactional databases and media authoring is limited by I/O speed, but by their very nature they behave differently than CPU bound workloads, such as high-performance computing. These CPU bound programs are far more limited in performance by conditional branches and average memory latency than I/O latency. While my serious work (microarchitectural simulations) is completely CPU bound, you're going to be hard-pressed to convince me that "on average" I/O bound workloads are more important/prevalent than CPU bound workloads, and vice versa...FYI, I am a graduate student in computer science studying computer architecture and systems, the latter of which is generally far more interested in I/O.

Regardless, when it comes to the "majority" of computer users doing web browsing and using office applications, the largest inhibitor of performance is user input.

 

[BD231]

Regardless, when it comes to the "majority" of computer users doing web browsing and using office applications, the largest inhibitor of performance is user input.

lol, gotta love that one

 

[magomago]

I dunno...my 500mhz pc i'm using right now works perfectly for the internet and word processing.

Pc Manufactorers have to learn that people will not go out and buy the "newest" pc just because it is faster. To the average joe, computers are like Kitchen supplies. Just because a 6 speed variable blender with "Smart Adjust" is released doesn't mean people will ditch their 3 speed blenders.

So I highly doubt this anyway. In they heyday of retail pcs production kept going up and up without providing a stopgap (though the first time Intel braced itself thining a slowdown would occur right in the middle of a boom where AMd made some great strides) because they thought consumers would keep upgrading computers over and over again.

And it seems programs have more and more bloatware...like I don't see why WinXP has MUCH higher system requirements than 2k or anything...

It seems they are purposely making stuff slower to find an excuse to get higher clock pcs

 

[andreasl]

I'd say the biggest bottleneck in our systems are the internet connections (cable modem/DSL etc), then followed by the harddrives. This for general desktop/internet use.

 

[Pink0]

If you apply a cpu intensive filter to an audio file on a computer with a relatively slow cpu then it doesn't matter how fast the drive is, it (the drive) will be waiting for the cpu to render the audio data.

THis is simply not true. If you read the help documentation in soundforge you will come across this:
"Since Sound Forge is hard drive intensive, faster disk access equates better performance. Therefore, the initial step in improving system performance is hard drive defragmentation."
Right from the soundforge help file under optomizing soundforge. "faster disk access equates better performance" I've proven this by resampling a 2 hour recording to 24/96 with full on anti aliasing on a athlon xp 1700+ system and an ald t-bird 1ghz. The tbird is using SD ram while the XP has DDR. Now, if the bottleneck were ram or processor, the Athlon xp would surely win, right? WRONG! The Tbird 1ghz won. It has a raid 0 array while the XP has a slower single hard drive. The "slower" tbird won by almost 10 minutes.

 

[Pink0]

what about photoshop? If I scan in a 48 bit image at 1200dpi it will take a 400 meg bitmap (8x11) now I just try to open that file up in photoshop and I'm waiting at least 2 minutes. Try to rotate it, another 2 minutes, save it as jpg, 5 minutes. And guess what, it only uses around 900 megs of ram. That leaves me with tons of ram free. The CPU is barely in use. So where's that bottleneck making me and my CPU wait for it while we do nothing? That's right, the HARD DRIVE.

 

[Nemesis77]

Originally posted by: Gonad the Barbarian

Why would Harddrives be a bottleneck? With Serial-ATA around the corner and new Hard Drives with 8MB Cache's finding a good harddrive will be the least of our worries.

You can find a good one sure, but it will still be the slowest part of any computer. Hence, bottleneck.

Yes and no. Would faster HD make my framerates in UT2K3 (for example) go up? No. It would make it load faster, but it wouldn't make any difference in the in-game performance.

 

[Pink0]

is that all that you use your computer for? A toy? Well, when you turn on your toy, would having, say, a solid state hard drive that did 2gigs a second make it boot up faster?

 

[Nemesis77]

Originally posted by: Pink0
is that all that you use your computer for? A toy? Well, when you turn on your toy, would having, say, a solid state hard drive that did 2gigs a second make it boot up faster?

Are you talking to me? Sure I use my computer for other things as well. I used UT2K3 only as an example. Faster HD's help in loading the progams and installing (and when swapping to HD). And besides, faster booting isn't really important. I boot my machine maybe 2-3 times a day, each taking about 30-45 seconds. I can easily wait that time.

 

[Degenerate]

Faster is faster. 6Ghz.. yumm =)

 

[Pink0]

I boot my machine maybe 2-3 times a day, each taking about 30-45 seconds. I can easily wait that time.

Yeah but can the guy who wants to use it as an entertainment appliance like a VCR or stereo? No. They have to be instant on. Then there's working with music and video and sometimes even just recording the video. Sorry, HDD= huge bottleneck.