This is topic My Perfect Computer in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.
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Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 10-18-2000, 12:47 AM:
This topic is all Ken Fong’s fault.My perfect computer:
The operating system would be invisible.
It would look like the Apple G4 Cube.
It would use something like the Apple 22” Cinema display but would only cost $400.00 per monitor.
It would support up to 3 monitors.
The connection would be digital, like the new Apple Cinema display.
It would support other screens of ever increasing dimensions as long as they have the same connector.
The connections would be something you could make at home like RG6 or CAT5 wire.
The sound output would be Dolby Digital and DTS.
The “hard drive” would be non-volatile RAM.
The “operating system” would be on an E-PROM so the boot-up is instant.
The computer wouldn’t care if it were left on 400 days a year and 8 days a week. In other words, the buffer and temp files wouldn’t clog it up and need the computer to be turned off to clear them.
The “hard drive” would be large enough for all of my music and 50 hours of stored television, like the Replay TV box.
The DVD would record.
It would contain my satellite receiver.
The keyboard would be wireless.
Although it would have a remote mouse, it would also be voice activated.
It would be able to have remote monitors and speakers much like a Bose sound system.
It would be my phone system, and voice calls would be free.
Broadband would be able to transmit proper video signals.
My digital camera, cell phone and personal sound system would be integrated into my glasses, wirelessly. And they wouldn’t weigh much.
And of course, I wouldn’t need my glasses to correct my vision.
What would your's be like?
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 10-18-2000, 02:02 AM:
Hey Ian, wait about 9 months to a year and that stuff just might become a reality! 
It's amazing just how fast a top of the line computer system is outdated these days. Your kids will laugh at you for wanting a dream system "so pathetic and slow" as I'm sure they will call it.
Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 10-18-2000, 09:56 AM:
I got my iMacDV @ 400 Mhz and litterally two weeks later they had the 500Mhz on the market!I figure they'll be running at a GIG sometime soon!
I'm not too upset, though. My 400 is fater than most people's 500's. When I get to the point where I think it's too slow I'll buy the upgrade chip and install it myself.
Posted by Jason Burroughs (Member # 68) on 10-18-2000, 11:56 AM:
Within the next year or so, both Intel and AMD plan to announce processor speeds ot 2-3Ghz, and bus speeds increasing from the 100-133Mhz we see now to the 400-600Mhz range.
AMD also plans to lanuch in to the workstation/server marked with its upcomming Athalon Ultra allowing for multiple processors and increased cache.
Posted by Dave Cutler (Member # 515) on 10-18-2000, 01:40 PM:
Randy, the gigahertz barrier has already been passed. Intel's current top processor 1.13 GHz, and AMD has hit 1.2 GHz. They are both on the market right now.And yes they will be obsolete shortly, Intel already test a new chip earlier this year and it was clocking 1.5GHz, although they hadn't turned on all the juice at that time. It should run much faster by the time they fully test it.
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 10-18-2000, 02:15 PM:
Yeah, but you can't compare a Mac (PowerPC) to a PC (Intel x86) with respect to clock speed. Clock speed is a pretty meaningless comparison unless you're dealing with two processors of the same type. A 100MHz 486 isn't comparable to a 100Mhz Pentium. Similarly, a 400Mhz UltraSPARC isn't comprable to a 400MHz PII or pIII or Alpha, etc.
Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 10-18-2000, 02:32 PM:
Y'all are right about computers becoming obsolete quickly. It's funny how the equipment keeps improving speed-wise but the theory of computing hasn't changed all that much lately. We can do the same old things faster.Look at the clock speeds found in most PCs (near top of the line) in common use each year:
1981: 4.77 MHz
1984: 6 MHz
1986: 8 Mhz
1988: 12 MHz
1989: 33 MHz
1991: 50 MHz
1992: 66 MHz
1994: 100 MHz
1996: 200 MHz
1997: 266 MHz
1998: 400 MHz
1999: 600 MHz
2000: 1000 MHz
But, on the other hand, take the topic of formal languages and automata theory. Look at the 1969 and 1979 editions of a standard textbook, such as the ones by Hopcroft and Ullman, and a lot of the material is the same. I took a class in 1995 and we used the 1979 edition. It just hasn't changed much. Look at NP-completeness. We used a 1979 book for a class on this topic in 1999! It seems the theory concerning algorithms in general, and what we can and cannot do efficiently (in polynomial time), or at all 
has changed very little in the past 20 or so years. In fact, some of that theory was in place in the 1930s and 1940s before modern computers were even being built.
I have a coworker that has many ideas similar to the ones in the list that started this thread (operating system being invisible and getting rid of filesystems and hiding implementation details from the user). I just don't think a lot of the things will ever happen. I am currently working on a Ph.D. in computer science (I have an M.S. degree in computer science and a B.S. in mathematics). For a lot of things to happen, I think there need to be some advances in the underlying theory of computing. Speed is nice, but I have seen many cases where improving the algorithm (if possible) can make a program run at acceptable speed even on a slow computer. Faster computers have caused software developers to get lazy, and the code they write to become larger and more "bloated", memory hungry, and disks space hungry than ever before. Until the focus is back on efficiency and better algorithms, the trend will continue.
Operating systems have changed quite a bit during the past 15 years. I've used everything from old second-generation operating systems like MVS for IBM mainframes to VMS (VAX systems) to UNIX (many platforms) to DOS, OS/2, and Windows for PCs. I tended to like UNIX the best, although you have to run Windows to be able to run the most popular software.
I have a 933 MHz Pentium III here with Wondows 2000 and it does most things I want to do really well, but this machine cannot do multiple things at once very well without killing the user interface response time. Silicon Graphics workstations running UNIX were much better at that (running background jobs without killing performance for foreground jobs). Although Winodws 2000 is great, there will always be device driver pains and functionality that you have to add by installing 3rd-party software. I just the shell in Windows 2000 were a full-featured UNIX shell. I really wish Windows 2000 had UNIX underneath supporting it. It would be a much better system if it did.
Well, I guess I've yakked enough for now. 
Evans
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 10-18-2000, 02:47 PM:
There actually are some clones of Unix shells (bash and csh, at least) that run on Win32, and which give the user access to most of the standard GNU tools (gcc, gdb, etc.) in a Unix-like environment. I suppose that it's a nice concept in theory, but all this stuff seemed pretty half-assed to me, since this does nothing to improve the overall stability of the underlying OS and since a lot of the command-line tools that would be useful for scripting don't exist in NT (e.g. you can't write a script that adds new users by appending lines to /etc/passwd, and so forth). As far as I'm concerned, every OS ought to have a full command-line interface to every tool, regardless of whatever GUI might be slapped on top of it. There are just too many situations where one needs to access a machine remotely or automate a process using scripts for the command-line interface to be ignored; GUIs are nice, but they suck over low-bandwidth connections and for repetitive tasks.
As for multitasking, I've been pretty impressed by how much performance is gained by adding a second processor. This SS20 that I'm typing on now felt pretty slow with a single 50Mhz processor; when I added a second 50Mhz processor, it became amazingly zippy; it can easily deal with me compiling something, listening to MP3 files, formatting something with LaTeX and looking at web pages all at once. I don't know if Win2k handles multiple processors as well as Solaris (I tend to doubt it), but it would be interesting to see how much the performance improves.
Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 10-19-2000, 01:41 PM:
Scott, you're right about the second processor helping a lot with multitasking. In our research center, we have a couple of machines that have two 400MHz Pentium III equivalents running NT. The machine in my office is a 933 MhZ Pentium III. When I run a job in the background, like untarring or ungzipping a 75 megabyte SSM/I data file, my 933 MHz machine becomes practically unusable for anything else, but the dual processor 400MHz seems unaffected by it and remains usable and responsive. We have, for years, been using multiprocessor SGI servers, one of which has 8 CPUs, which is heavily used, but remains very responsive and never seems to get bogged down. (This particular machine runs IRIX, which is SGI's UNIX). I've always found it interesting that IRIX machines seem to remain responsive with a backgound task running, even if the machine has only one CPU. Single processor PCs tend to not handle background processing well at all without seriously impacting the response of the GUI.
Evans
Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 10-19-2000, 03:13 PM:
You're right about comapring processors.
G3's are better
I tell you if I had the cash I'd be getting one of those dual G4's they're comming out with. (A supercomputer on your desk!)
Posted by Sean M. Grimes (Member # 445) on 10-20-2000, 03:46 AM:
Ahhh screw it. I love my pentium II mmx (the bes damn chip intel has made cost wise since the 80286 hahaha just joking) with 164 megs of ram and a ten gig hard drive running through an "ultra ata 66" ide interface. The 16 meg video cards for my dual monitor setup that I picked up for fourty bucks a piece rock ass. And yes I run Win 98. Just load her up with fast ram and watch your file swap amount and god bless, it runs faster and waay more reliable then my friends 733 amd. Also if you use win 98 download Mem Turbo www.memturbo.com (it really works wonders for Win 98!!) My computer has been stable now for eight days straight.
Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 10-20-2000, 07:35 PM:
One question...What does MMX actually do?
It took me months to find out. The only answers I could get was, "It speeds up graphics..."
And, the answer is...
MMX shuts down the floating point processor and turns it over to graphics processing. Problem is that you can't do floating point math while MMX is on. You can only do integer math.
Posted by Tom Kroening (Member # 201) on 10-22-2000, 01:57 PM:
/me still loves his g4/500. Its not the MP version but it does the job for me! It emulates win2000 at very usable speeds : P While im on the subject of emulation, Playstation, SNES, and n64 are also speedy. So far, mac osX public beta is great! When i get sick of playing around in the aqua UI i just open a unix terminal window. Its FINALLY a mac OS that has multitasking!!! i.e. when you hold down the mouse it doesn't hault your computer. I also love how the whole side panal just flips down. My dream machine would be a bigger tower then this, bays and slots everywhere. 2 GB of ram, and an 80 GB raid array level 1 (stripping). Either ultra ATA 66 or Ultra scsi. Support for 3 monitors: a flat panel display, one of those sony tv glasses you can wear, and a LCD projector. Sound would be dolby digital via RCA jacks that go to my reciever. Wireless radio keyboard (not IR). That way if you have the tv glasses on you can use your computer in any room of your house. processor would be a 1ghz dual g5 or something. OS would be MacOSX. Net connection would be a full OC12 hooked into the comps built in gigibit ethernet. *droool* maybe a 32x/52x DVD-RAM. I could go on and on but ill stop here! I already have a computer loan to pay off so no more dreaming for a while 
Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 10-22-2000, 06:30 PM:
So, I've wondered about OS X.
Usually "Beta" = "Bugs" so I didn't bother with it.
Is it worth the $25 just to get a beta?
Posted by Tom Kroening (Member # 201) on 10-23-2000, 12:43 AM:
Well... it kinda is and kinda isnt. I'll be honest, I downloaded it (email me if you'd like a copy). Its got its bugs (hence the beta version). You really can't realistically use it, its more of just a toy. The passwd file isn't encrypted (or so i hear) so its not even secure right now. If you have the time and an extra hard drive partion, go for it. I don't even use X right now since classic is so slow. Email me if you'd like more details.
Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 10-26-2000, 01:31 PM:
We have one iMac and a Mac notebook in the store that is for sale if anyone is interested. Its been our rental computer for 4 months and has been replaced by a 1000mhz Athlon P.C. that cost less to build than the Mac did when it was new. The new computer runs rings around the Mac. Things are digested about as fast as you can hit the enter Key. If you ask me the iMac is a pretty pathetic computer, so slow. It may have its uses but not here in our store......
Mark
mark@getgts.com
Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 10-25-2000, 11:02 PM:
How long does it take to calculate 1,000,000 Primes?Get the code at http://www.codewell.com/Misc/bench.txt
Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 10-27-2000, 11:50 AM:
Randy,
With the P-2 300 mhz(which is a dinosaur by standards) rated at 65 seconds I would estimate that the Athlon at 1000mhz would take about 10 to 15 seconds. Please remember that the new Ultra 100 Drive spec brings EIDE with a fraction of SCSI drive read write performance and will soon surpass SCSI. This would also make a difference in doing that test so it may well indeed take lass than 10 seconds.
Our quickbooks file which takes on average 30 seconds to load up and update from our network. With the 1000mgh machine it only takes 4 seconds.
Again, we have one iMAC in green and a notebook in Blue for sale.........reasonably priced.
Mark
Posted by Jason Burroughs (Member # 68) on 10-30-2000, 05:18 PM:
My dream computer. Dual (maybe quad) Athalon Ultra processors maybe even their upcomming "hammer" series Those puppies are going to be 32/64bit processors 
Add in a nice RAID arrray oh wait, this is just suppsoed to be a desktop? Yeah that'll work. I recently installed some Dell 6300 and 6400's quad pentium III Zeons running at 550Mhz They ran VERY nicely. But WHEW what a pain trying to get them into a rack!
Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 11-10-2000, 08:07 PM:
Just upgraded my CPU from a 500 mhz Katami P-3 slot 1(running at 600 mhz) to a 700 mhz P-3 Coppermine socket 370 in slotket adaptor(running solidly and cool at 814mhz). The 500 running at 600 ran at 138 deg f. The new Coppermine runs at 101 deg f. No water cooling needed here. A drastic difference in efficiency! More transistors, smaller chip, faster speed, smaller heatsink, and less heat. The MB is an A-Bit BE6-2 with 256mb ram. Ultra ATA 100 adapter card instead of the on board Ultra ATA 66.
Mark
Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 11-10-2000, 08:30 PM:
I just finished replaceing the main machine in my shop
The machine I built is a
AMD K6 500MHz MMX processor
256Meg ram
Scsi 40 gig raid array
ATI 16meg video card
THe system is setup with BootMAgic for the following OS's in their own partitions
OS2 Warp4 Connect
Win98
PC Dos7.2
BeOS
Linnux
Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 11-13-2000, 08:31 AM:
Just was able to nudge my 700mhz coppermine from 845 to 903mhz and is still rock stable. Had to increase the core vcc from 1.65 to 1.7 volts and this resulted in a slightly hotter cpu temperature but still way within reasonable limits and with nothing other than a standard Aavid heatsink and fan! I do have a small program that calculates the first 30,000 prime numbers and that takes .359 seconds. If this is a linear process which I would assume it is then it would take 11.9547 seconds to do the first 1,000,000 primes.
Mark
Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 11-13-2000, 06:23 PM:
It would depend on what the method of calculating is..."Brute Force" would not be linear because prime numbers get farther and farther apart as they get bigger. If you used a "seive" (which is what smart programmers do) then it might be linear up to a point.
Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 11-14-2000, 12:57 PM:
At any rate I'm really happy with the performance so far. There is obviously a huge difference between the old P-3 and the Coppermine version. I couldn't get that much extra speed out of my 500 mhz P-3 no matter what. I have built several Athlons but none could come close to overclocking 200 mhz faster. They all started to crash after about 50 mhz speed increase for what ever reason. Don't know if it was the CPU or the motherboard there. The board I am using now is an A-bit BE6-2.
Mark
Posted by Jason Burroughs (Member # 68) on 11-15-2000, 02:15 PM:
I know that most people on here already know this, but over clocking a CPU does several things, 1 it voids the warranty on the CPU, 2 it voids teh warranty on the motherboard, 3 it may also void the warranty on other components ie video cards. 4 it can introduce instability that is unseen by the user, it may seem to be running fine, but beneath the surface problems may be lurking. There is not much manufacturing difference between say a 700Mhz processor and a 900Mhz processor, infact they are usually the exact same chip, sometimes even off the same waffer, but thorough testing, known as speed binning, establishes what speed the processor can be run reliably.
Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 11-15-2000, 02:45 PM:
Ah! But pushing the limit is fun 
Until it crashes. 
------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 11-16-2000, 06:37 AM:
IMHO, overclocking isn't worthwhile at this point. In most desktop machines, the limiting factor for performance is not the CPU, but rather disk I/O. The difference between, say, 800 and 900 MHz should be minimal for most typical end-user tasks.
Personally, I'd rather have a slower multiprocessor machine than a fast single-processor machine. I'm surprised that dual processor hardware hasn't become more common lately, since the performance gain is significant. (OK, raw speed is good for some uses, but is not super-critical for the typical end-user.)
I keep seeing PC hardware for sale which is equipped in very odd ways, usually with super-fast processors, but slow 5400 rpm IDE disks and low (64 megs) RAM. This sort of configuration is pretty crazy, since the fast processor speed is wasted due to bottlenecks in other areas, but I suppose that this sort of thing is done for marketing reasons (since speed sells) rather than purposes of achieving good performance.
Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 11-16-2000, 01:44 PM:
I agree with you Scott.I cruise the web, answer email, update my website and play, very minimally with photos on my computer. I write the odd letter and create a few small spreadsheets. I am sure that my Compaq laptop with 500 MHZ ADM with 64 MEG RAM is grossely overpowered for what I do.
My Father has an old Toshiba laptop with 100 mhz and I don't know how much ram running Win '95. What are the two or three things I can do to improve his performance? Will installing '98 help or hurt? I guess more ram is a good thing.
Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 11-16-2000, 06:43 PM:
Actually Scott, there is a huge difference in performance both in benchmark testing and visually on the monitor. I don't really care if it voids the warranty or not, this isn't big bucks were talking about here. Its really all in the fun like John P. says and getting the extra performance you can squeek out of a computer for free. But what it does boil down to is that certain processors are more overclockable than others and also as you may not know Intel has sold the 300 mhz Celeron CPU under different higher rated speeds even though they were really not. They got away with it because it performs so well and is so overclockable. AMD Athlons typically won't overclock much, unless you modify the laser cut points on the CPU itself. While this is easy to do and many have done it they still run alot hotter than the Coppermine P-3 does. My last CPU ran for over a year overclocked from 500 to 600 mhz. I just replaced it with the 700 running at 900 cause the new CPU was cheap but I am now 100 mhz past the limit of my MB as well. For the old P-3 100 to 150 mhz over was about the limit without fancy water cooling. Since my computer has an ATA 100 hard drive that spins 7200 rpm I can take more advantage of that. My HD benchmark now pegs out! My old drive an ATA 66 tests only a little better than it did. I can certainly see yours and others point about not putting in faster drives as well. You'd choke the CPU for want of throughput. Sure if you upgrade one without the other....not much gained. Now, with ATA 100, SCSI may soon become a thing of the past. ATA-100 will soon be exceeded as well by ATA ??? and right now ATA 100 is not far behind SCSI, so yes, if done right allot is gained for little or no cost in some instances.
Mark
Posted by Jason Burroughs (Member # 68) on 11-16-2000, 07:51 PM:
Ian, for the Win95 Laptop, I'd stay with 95, 98 is a little bit more resource intensive, and probably wouldn't provide much improvement. Best way to better performance for any computer is RAM. I've literally seen a 286 runnig Windows 98 but it had a BUNCH of RAM.AMD is acutally marking some of their 1.2Ghz as 800,900,1000Mhz processors, and selling them accordingly, however they perform at 1.2Ghz. They're doing this because the value of the FAB declines as time goes on, and untill demand can catch up with supply it makes more sense to that. They've also lowered the price of the 1.2Ghz's as well.
Main reason the coppermine runs cooler is that is uses .15micron copper technology instead of .18 aluminum that the predecesors did, same goes for the newer Athalons produced in FAB30 in Germany, FAB25 in Austin still uses aluminum, but they primarily make K6's etc. I'm sure Intel is about on par wiht the abilities of AMD in manufacturing, FAB30 can produce chips all the way down to .10microns, providing possibilities for 3 and 4Ghz processors VERY soon.
Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 11-17-2000, 08:11 AM:
After I installed Win 98 on my old 120 mhz Pentium Toshiba Laptop and it stopped the occasional crashing. It seems to be allot more stable than 95 ever was on any computer for that matter. It did slow down a bit but that is a small price to pay as it has not crashed in over 2 years now.
Mark