That would indeed be some real power, but I wonder about the heat dissipation in these. My G4 laptop runs warm enough, so I can only imagine the heat sink(s) required for a dual processor laptop.
Posted on 11/16/2005 12:11:06 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Laptops will always have bottlenecks in video and disk IO.
Not with the advent of the Geforce 6800 Go and 7800 Go.
Bottlenecks are relative. Low power chips will never be as fast as hot chips.
That would indeed be some real power, but I wonder about the heat dissipation in these. My G4 laptop runs warm enough, so I can only imagine the heat sink(s) required for a dual processor laptop.
Of course not, but it's inaccurate to say laptop graphics are now a bottleneck. The burden is now on the CPU, at least until Yonah, Merom, and whatever AMD's Turion successor is.
Dual-core isn't quite the same as dual-processor, though you've got a point. I think more heat comes from the hard drive than the processor these days, though. We're about due for flash-based hard drives.
Who can keep up with it all. It did not take long after the 64 bit processors came out to see NLA on the 32 bit CPU's and motherboards. The problem being that Upgrading is no longer an option. Now it is called- Start from scratch. There is PCI-Express, ATX-12v, windows64, 32 bit printers with no drivers for windows64, 64bit processors, 64 bit motherboard. ATA hard drives. There is almost nothing you can salvage for an upgrade. The kicker is that the perfomance gain for all of this is ziltch(For a set processor speed) until windows64 is improved and software is written to run on it. By that time we will have Quad core and DDR2 to deal with, and who knows what else. We will have to start all over again.
It must be nice for those who can afford to spend $300.00 on a new video card that is nothing more than an ATX card with a PCI-Express connector. While throwing away the $300.00 ATX video card they bought a year ago.
Correction for above...ATA Sata Hard drives.
On higher end systems, this is even more evident, as we replace single cores with dual cores, to continue to improve the compute density while relieving the heat problems some.
With RAM being measured in Gbytes it wouldn't surprise me to see harddrives eliminated entirely. Load everything into RAM and leave it there like a PDA.
Not good for long-term storage, I think. Flash-based hard drives would be just like a RAM drive, but a little slower. And talk about your heat reduction...
Stability of the longterm storage might be a problem, but with PDAs and iPods the memory holds up well enough. You would probably want to burn a CD Backup of the RAM. If you treat the flash memory like a hard drive though, you still wind up routing though the IO Storage Controller Bus. If you load everything directly into memory it's all instant access. Heat can be dealt with,... mostly :)
I'm curious if there are studies on the long term storage of data on disk drives.
I have a number of CDs made five years ago which have become unreadable in storage. They are not scratched or abused. They simply show up as unformatted.
Optical media has a shelf life: those CDs you reference just naturally lost their data. I don't know if it's a property of the format or something that the manufacturers do on purpose.
Hard drives probably have the same difficulties, but over a longer period of time. There's a reason I buy Seagate hard drives: 5 year warranty? Yes, please.
I'm still not sure about ditching the hard drive completely.
I am inclined to move all my backups to hard drives rather than CDs. I do that at the companies where I do IT consulting. I have converted all backup procedures to external hard drives, rotated and taken off site.
Hard drive prices are comparable to blank tape.
Networked storage is the way to go. Get a nice drive array with secure wi-fi, and you're set.
AS couple weeks ago I had to evacuate a Brooklyn apartment due to an underground fire. I woul like to have all the family photos and documents on a hard drive that I can grab and run. Preferably cheap enough to have an off site copy.
The business servers I maintain have about 25 gigs total data to backup. We have five cheap USB drives in rotation. It's a no brainer.
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