Saturday, September 08, 2007

Power-efficient CPU a non-issue ?

I find it interesting nowadays that CPU builders, and Intel in particular keep bragging about their power-efficient CPUs. It's like, this is getting more important than speed or number of cores.

My point is: who cares about that ? I want my CPU to be fast first, eventually have multiple cores and some fast way to talk with my memory. It would be nice to also consume little power, but that's a nice touch so to speak.

I assume 90% of the CPU buyers don't have server farms to worry about their electrical bill so why induce this trend ?

I think the solutions is clear: Intel / AMD cannot increase speed easily anymore. Therefore they are convincing consumers that this is what's important about a CPU: power consumption. The result: you see all kinds of uninformed users wondering how much the CPU consumes as if they would see the difference.

I don't want my CPU to consume less than my graphics card or my hard-drive. I'm buying it to work so I expect it to take some power. I would gladly take the power-hungry fast CPU than the low-consuming slow CPU.

As far as I know the operating system or any other software in this world isn't influenced by how much power the CPU takes, but it sure matters if the CPU is faster or has more cores (or some multi-threading per CPU).

So, congratulations to the marketing departments of Intel for convincing people that it's not speed or threads that matter (you know, the stuff people need) but power consumption.

Probably the PC already consumes less than my fridge, old TV or hair drier, but God-forbid it consumes more and gains some speed. No way, we have to be power efficient :-)

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

I saw Vista for the first time yesterday

Yesterday a neighbour of mine bought a new computer. It was a decent-ish desktop (3.0Ghz with HT, 1G Ram, 300G HDD, 19" LCD, 5.1 speaker system) but way overpriced. Could have bought an iMac probably with those money.

Anyhow, since I'm the computer guy in the building, they came to me to get it started. First, because they had no sound. Also, because they have a speaker system with 5 or so satellites and only a 2 way sound card.

And this is how I saw Windows Vista for the 1st time. I was really weird as I haven't used any Windows in a while but Vista made me even more uneasy as I just couldn't find the settings I was used to in the XP-using days.

So, fast-forward 1 hours or so after I've installed the sound drivers. The strange thing was that the system was rather slow and unresponsive, especially while installing stuff. I mean, this is better than any machine I own so I expected it to fly. But no, it was just about as slow as my iBook G4.

About those accept/deny dialogs I've read about on the internet, I have to say I only noticed them a few times. I guess if you let Vista be, it doesn't bother you with messages :-)

But the thing this experience showed me is just how foreign Windows looked to me. Mostly due to Vista but the point was that Windows in general is something I don't know much about anymore.

I've used so much other operating systems that I've become more or less a Windows beginner.

I think that generally there isn't a need for Microsoft anymore. Windows is redundant with OSX / Ubuntu, MS Office easily replaced by OpenOffice, Explorer by Firefox.

They don't actually seem to have any product anymore I would need. And this is a nice feeling.

The Trouble with Harry time loop

I saw The Trouble with Harry (1955) a while back and it didn't have a big impression on me. But recently I rewatched it and was amazed a...