Quote:
Originally Posted by Diligent
Excuse me farkedup, but.. come on! Don't be so negative, lol
You've heard about clustering, right? In Linux among other OS's? For video encoding? 
The bottlenecks commonly thought of, aren't that bad today first of all...
Second of all, if clustering with all it's bottlenecks is beneficial for video encoding and other more massive computing, multi-core computing is as well.
Sure, all the other aspects could be improved to (and most likely will be), but there's a lot to gain with multi-core, period.
On the topic of SSD by the way... what about M-RAM ("Magneto RAM") technology?
Shit, when that is developed fully for consumer computing and has become consumer affordable, it'll whoop Flash/similar based SSD's ass, big time!  : |
What you're talking about "clustering" is the real solution here. Clustering is bringing multiple WHOLE COMPUTERS together and tieing them together to solve problems. using whole computers complete with standalone CPU bus's, RAM banks, hard drives is completely different than a single set of CPU's tied to a single bank of RAM and 1 or so hard drives
When they invented "dual channel ram" you know what bottleneck that was targetted for? For every single CPU core they NEED to have at least 1 dedicated stick of RAM and a direct pipeline from the RAM to that CPU core. pair that with more CPU cache itself and you're in business.
In the future I'd like to have 8 CPU cores and a bank of either 8 or 16 1-2Gb sticks of RAM but at this time 64 bit windows just isn't anywhere near ready. Maybe when windows 7 comes out we'll have better luck?
Compilers for everything have been out for a while now to help with multi threading but there is still quite a ways to go. You have to remember that having 2 CPU's in a computer is a relatively new mainstream thing. Not all of us had dual 1Ghz P3's, hell I had SMP in my work stations back before that even... I was a big pentium pro fan (think 200Mhz area)
SO while you guys look at quad core chips, don't bother for another year or so, buy the same priced higher clock speed dual core for now. unless the only thing you do all day is video encoding and wishing your penis were bigger, quad core doesn't do much good right now. I've been on an E6300 since around the time they came out and have overclocked the hell out of it but I'm still planning on throwing down the cash for the higher bus speed, more cache chip. Generally the best bargin CPU's are the ones in the $250 or less bin, once you go above that you start wasting money fast. I used to keep top notch systems all the time back when I got all the hardware for free but the second I started paying for shit again I quit with that ;) generally run through yearly upgrade cycles. I don't game on the PC so I can get away with that...