So addictive, in fact, that it's beginning to nibble away at my computer time just a bit. This has been a pretty busy week all around the board, with all sorts of stuff coming down the tube at supersonic speeds, and all demanding attention. In that case, what is one to do when a weekly bashing of the very machines used to create said bashing is one of them? Delegate, of course! For this week's column, I will hand the keyboard over to Toby Hudson, another like-minded person who has come to realize the absurdity of these machines (no wonder he's a regular visitor to this Website)... Some little voice in the back of my head tells me that when one does this, usually they have to put a disclaimer in here at this point. I often disagree with this voice, and although many times the advice this voice has given me would either have got me sued, put me in jail, left me dead in some ditch or something like that, but nonetheless, if I don't do what it says occasionally, it will start singing that silly song that never ends from Lamb Chops' Play Along (Apparently, while I am at work taking calls, my brain is sitting on the couch at home watching PBS or something like that.) Anyway, just remember that I'm not the one writing this stuff, so it is not necessarily my opinion, the opinion of amy of my other personalities, or even of half of the rest of the world, so don't flame me about (unless you want to be publicly LARTed or something like that. So without further ado, here's Toby:
Let the confusion begin anew!
Sometimes, the change in seasons makes me think of changes in other things, like the computer industry. For those of you who don't remember the days of 386, 486s, SX vs DX, vs DX2, and VLB vs PCI, you newbies who bask in the light of plug n play and easy to setup hardware, let me inform you that this period of relative calm we enjoy now is not natural, and probably won't last much longer.
You see, recently, I've noticed that the industry has been pretty stable. Most machines sold today are pentiums, with the exception of what pentium pros are sold for servers. There are other competing chips such as offerings from AMD and Cyrix, but they never made as big a splash as they were supposed to. Memory is cheap and simple, everything is EDO, and PCI local bus reigns supreme for adding stuff. Even the introduction of MMX, the biggest change since the 386, caused only a slight ripple. However, this peace is not to last...
The other day, AMD released their new CPU, the K6... this has really got people talking because it's beating the pentium MMX across the board for less money, and it's trying to challenge the pentium pro now. Cyrix is also planning another chip called the M2, to compete with the K6 and whatever Intel is cooking up. Intel, not wanting to look like the slow, dim-witted company it is has released it's Klamath chip which it quickly renamed the Pentium II. What IS the Pentium II? It's basically a Pentium Pro with MMX and without the cache on chip... it's not very fast. Even a Pentium MMX can outperform it at the same clock speed, but it's coming in higher clock speeds.
Now, what's coming up? Well the M2 is yet to come from Cyrix, and is expected later this year. Intel expects to have more chips coming too, with the Deschutes, a mobile form of pentium pro for notebooks early next year, the Katmai, a chip with MMX version 2 and a 100mhz bus speed in the middle of next year, the Williamette, a kind of dark horse chip that may have on chip 3D and stuff built in for late next year, and Merced, a totaly non-compatible chip for 1999. By non-compatible I mean Merced will run a new instruction set, IA-64, and be a true 64 bit chip. It will run older x86 chip software through a form of hardware emulation. How fast this will be remains to be seen. Oh and while the M2 and K6 will plug into normal pentium boards, Intel plans on changing to a new "Slot One" system starting with klamath. This means the new CPU will be on like a mini-card that plugs into the motherboard. Why? Rumors say Intel doesn't wanna be directly compared with AMD and Cyrix, they don't want the other chips running on their motherboards, and basically they want more money from YOU. Oh, and Intel has hinted that after only another chip or 2 they'll change formats AGAIN. This doesn't sound good for us end user types.
As if all this wasn't bad enough, there's new RAM types to consider. Most systems use 72 pin EDO DRAM with a speed of 60ns or so right now. However, alot of people are flocking to the new 168 pin SDRAM, which can run up to 100mhz (instead of EDO's 66) and boasts speeds of 12 or even 10ns (lower is better). Of course it would be nice if Intel actually took advantage of SDRAM and allowed speeds beyond 66mhz to be standard, but they don't. But some people set their motherboards to 75 or even 83mhz to get more performance, and SDRAM makes a difference here. Oh, and if you think SDRAM isn't fast enough, Intel is talking about nDRAM, a new type of ram for late 98 or 99 that can spew data out at more than 1.6GB per second, and runs at over 600mhz.
Oh, and then there's motherboard types, to confuse us even more. Intel has it's "Triton" 440 series of boards for pentiums. The 440FX was pretty crappy. The HX, or "Triton 2" was pretty popular and had lots of nice features and stuff, but it still uses EDO DRAM. The VX version uses SDRAM, but it wasn't made right so it was too slow and it basically sucks too, plus it doesn't have lots of the HX's features. The latest addition is the TX, which fixes the SDRAM problem of the VX but STILL doesn't have all the nice stuff the HX chipset had. Intel is talking about even ANOTHER LX chipset but nobody knows much about it yet. If you don't like Intel, SiS has a chipset that supports alot of features similar to the HX chipset AND supports SDRAM, but I've heard it's not always that reliable. VIA makes chipsets too, and AMD, makers of the K6 is reportedly working on it's own motherboard chipset that will blow the current intel offerings away.
But the confusion doesn't end! Noooooooo, that would be too easy to leave it at that! In case nobody's noticed, the graphics card industry has been REAL quiet lately. Why? Intel is releasing a new type of local bus called AGP, which stands for Advanced Graphics Port. This socket is 5x as fast as PCI, and you'll need a new graphics card made for AGP if you wanna use it. AMD's motherboard should support this too when it comes out. Also, some people are talking about PCI based sound cards now... but not Creative Labs, they say you can't do true soundblaster compatible stuff over PCI.
Oh and don't forget disks! Not only do we have DVD coming, the new 4.7GB cd-rom like disc that's used to play full length high quality movies, we have new hard drive technologies! For those of you still on IDE or EIDE drives (ugh!) you don't know what you're missing. SCSI dries are far superior in that they don't bother your CPU while reading or writing. So one program could be doing something on your hard drive while others run doing other things, and nothing slows down. Really nice if you have big programs that use alot of swapping. However, even this is not the ultimate storage! Currently, the fastest SCSI is UltraWide, which is a 16 bit channel that supports 15 devices (not just drives, any SCSI device like a scanner or tape drive or cd-writer) at a maximum speed of 40MB/sec. The research types (those guys in the white lab coats) have shown hints at Ultra-2, Ultra-3, and Ultra-4 SCSI speeds (each one double the speed of the last) as well as a new 32 bit SuperWide format (which doubles speed AGAIN and allows 31 devices per channel). So when Ultra-4 SuperWide drives see the light of day in a few years they'll be running along at about 640MB/sec. However, even this may not be the ultimate speed! Many people are talking about FireWire. FireWire is weird. It's kinda a hybrid between the new USB and SCSI. It can run 63 disks or other peripherals, it's very popular with the audio/video people, and there are already camcorders and VCRs that use it that can plug right into your computer. It can also be used for networking, like ethernet. FireWire runs at 100, 200, and 400Mbps. That's not MB/sec. One is Megabits, the other is MegaBytes, and of course a Byte is 8 bits so it's 8x faster. So 400Mbps = 50MB/sec or a little faster than SCSI currently goes. There's talk of 1600Mbps FireWire. But it's best feature is it's CHEAP! You could easily wire every room in a house with FireWire for about what it would cost to do it for a stereo system. Oh and if this isn't fast enough we already have FibreChannel in use in some servers today. FibreChannel already runs over 100MB/sec and can have 126 drives connected at once, over a distance of up to 6,000 meters (that's FAR). Plus that's only the tip of the iceberg, there are faster speeds to come. This one can also be used for networking, there's a prototype that runs at 4248Mbps (in contrast a T-3 is only 43Mbps, a T-1 is 1.5Mbps, ISDN is 0.128Mbps and a 33.6 modem is about .004Mbps).
I don't know about you, but I'm already scared. And neither Microsoft nor FDISK was even mentioned yet!
Actually, myself, I haven't seen the PC graphics industry being very quiet as of late in my own experience. At work, the subject of 3D-accelerated video cards has been a topic of endless discussion between members of the team I am on. About the only thing we can agree on is that the Matrox cards pretty much suck (of only because the things are a real pain to configure.) There are those of us who go with the Virge/S3D chipset, but I have found that the most common ones (the Stealth 3D series) tends to be a little on the slow side in the frame reat department. My team lead seems to go with the Rendition chipset, which doesn't seem to be very popular, but he says it runs really fast on a lot of stuff. Myself, I am beginning to side with the VooDoo/3DFX chipset for a video card. Although it takes 2 PCI slots for the card, the frame rates on the 3DFX cards are amazing. At GameWorks (a really big expensive video arcade that has recently opened in Seattle) I have seen several of the games there that are based on the 3DFX chipset. The graphics on these puppies are not only really smooth, but fast. Granted, you almost have to take out a loan for a trip to GameWorks, but that's a different story entirely.Anyway, Toby has e-mailed me several other things, including a very long story about his own battles with technology over many years time. As soon as I can convert these into HTML, they will be added to the archives. Watch for them (they make the battle to keep these three machines current, fast and sane look like a squirtgun fight in comparison.) But I guess that other than us, there's probably nobody out there who constantly fights an uphill battle with the tide of the Information age, right? Didn't think so.