duncan brown wrote:
and computers that are around now are overpowered, people don't need moreNot exactly. It's overpowered for *normal* usage (with this I mean web browsing , listening to mp3s , watching DVDs , etc).
than 3ghz, hell, most people don't need more than 700mhz (given enough
ram). the new direction in chip fabrication needs to be slower, more
efficient, smaller and less power hungry.
For people who work with computer science and computer related researches , every extra clock cycle is usefull. For example... Imagine that you are a network researcher and you've just written a new protocol for a wireless sensor network. Then , you start running it on NS (a network simulator). You need to gather data corresponding to 1 day of network usage. If you have , let's say , a Pentium 2 machine with 256MB of ram , this may take months. If you have a Pentium 4 3Ghz or a Athlon 64 3200+ with 1GB of ram , this may take *only* one or two weeks (which is a considerable economy , given that usually programs dont work perfectly when you first compile them.. And is most considerable when you need to run this simulation about 30 times to get data to write a paper about your project) .. And I'm not joking. I dont work with NS , but my brother does.. His simulations usually run for two days only to gather data about 1 Hour of network usage...
Or imagine you have a mailserver running Fedora + postfix + spamassassin + amavisd for a domain that has about 1000 users. In my last work , we had a mailserver (Pentium 4 , 2.8Ghz , 1Gb ram) running suse + postfix+spamassassin and it works fine. We know that we need a especial machine only for running amavisd (we were on a subdomain of the university. The main server for the university was a dual xeon server and it usually didnt survive the workload caused by amavis). So , 3Ghz may be the *minimum* in certain circunstances..
So , it may be overpowered in some circunstances.. like for my mother , who uses her computer only to read e-mail and browse the net (but she uses a 486 DX2 80mhz for that)... Anything above 400Mhz would be unnecessary for her...
-- Pedro Macedo
