Will I ever need another computer?

In My Humble Opinion
21

What will happen is, you will get stuck in a timewarp. Eventually, every single new piece of software will require hardware that your present machine doesn’t have. So, you will be forever mired in software of the early 2000’s. This may suit you just fine, but most people eventually succumb, and buy a new machine. I have a G5 Quad - the last of the G5 Macs. It’s still plenty fast, even for editing video, but I can see I’m going to have to replace it in the next few years - more and more software is being developed for intel-only machines. For example, Snow Leopard (10.6) won’t run on it.

And, yes you could easily handle greater than 1920 x 1080 resolution - I have two monitors totaling 3200 x 1200, and I could use more, if I had the desk space.

22

It’s a Mac. You’ll never want to do anything that requires more than 2 gigs of memory.

I on the other hand, am contemplating replacing my four with eight, or perhaps sixteen. If I had the money I’d be replacing my single geforce 8800 ultra with dual GTX 295s.

23

What does this mean?

I have 4.5 GB of RAM, and lots of folks I know have 6 or more. I don’t know anyone who owns a PC who has that amount of memory. In general, the more memory, the faster the machine runs, and the more programs you can run at the same time. Photoshop, Final Cut, Motion, etc. all like gobs of RAM.

24

We are brothers, you and I. I purchased an 8-core Mac Pro yesterday. I’d been obsessing about it for months, and at some point, my old 2x2GHz G5 just couldn’t hack it. It would start stuttering while playing an MP4 on one screen while I was doing work on the other screen, usually surfing with about 30 windows open while transcoding yet another DVD to MP4, and it just couldn’t keep up. I know, this is a little more work than they probably envisioned for that machine, and I was throwing a high-data rate MP4 at it, and asking it to scale it to the size of my screen, but hey, it’s a computer.

Now, 8 FREAKING CORES! And feeding those cores is 6 GB of 800MHz DDR2!!! Okay, the cores are only going at 2.8 GHz (the slowest number in the Mac Pro line), but you need a very fast memory bus to keep all those cores fed, and coming from 667 MHz of regular RAM, I’m looking at better than two times the bandwidth. This is good, because the work that I do involves remapping large chunks of memory, and the memory bus was actually the limiting factor for some activities.

I transcoded a DVD using Handbrake, and the OS, true to its nature, distributed tasks to all eight cores and the frame rate it was seeing was over 45 frames per second, whereas I’d gotten accustomed to as few as 8 frames per second. This is where a good OS supported by well-designed frameworks can help you.

Many singly-threaded programs will benefit from multicore processors simply by making API calls that magically return a couple of microseconds later as opposed to several hundred microseconds later on systems with fewer (and/or slower) cores. Things such as video and photomanipulation work on predictable data sets that are ideal for distribution to other CPUs.

Seriously, I have some work to do, and one benefit of my company is that Mathworks licenses us to install a copy of Matlab at home (just the basic plus signal processing libraries). This doesn’t have their parallel processing libraries, but, well, I can fill in the gaps. I have many simulations to work on.

I don’t doubt for a minute that in about four years, I’ll want to trade this in on a 200-core cell processor with a 2 TB of RAM and massive storage that we’ll probably have to invent a new numbering system to describe. If there’s a way to gain one more tenth of a dB in our radars by just using an extra 45 Gflops, the people who I work with are probably claiming we already do that…

25

When it becomes all the rage to make films with interactive holograms and tactile feedback, you’ll be wanting the Technowank 9000, trust me.

26

I’m a software developer, so I’m not at all typical…

2 years ago I was developing a GIS/mapping system that required a 4 core 16 Gb machine to run at any useful speed given the amount of data we had (deployment was supposed to be on multiple 8 core machines), so that’s what I used as the development machine. So, I’d say it’s all a matter of what you’re using them for. Usually my 6 months old macbook is quite fast enough, and my current 2 year old, 2 core desktop machine is noticably faster.

On the other hand, if you only use your machine for “office” type stuff and browsing the web (including videos etc) you can probably get away with only replacing your computer when the first non-replacable part breaks.

SF, who is still replacing his computers about every 3 years and expects to keep doing that for quite a while

27
28

I’m hitting against this. As a laptop, I have an ibook G4, running panther (10.3.9), and a gig of ram. And even for its use (word processor, web surfing, a minimal amount of website building and audio encoding) I’ve found that some softwares aren’t simply available anymore, some by virtue of my old os, some by virtue they will only run on an intel-based computer. And it can get really slow at times.

My desktop on the other hand, I’ve build it in spring 2004 (it has an amd sempron 2600+ and 1gig of ram, running xp), and altough I’m noticing a a bit of a speed loss nowadays, it’s still running very fine for my uses, and I hope I’ll be able to keep it a few more years.

29

One thing that adding more horsepower gives you is the ability to do more at once. On my new machine, it’s pretty typical for me to be doing the following simultaneously:

Surfing the web on sites with streaming media
Burning and or ripping a disc
Recording TV via DVR
Downloading media via bittorrent

All of that at once with no hiccups? Yeah, not something I could do on a machine five years ago. On my last machine, I pretty much had to walk away while it was burning a CD or it would cause errors.

30

If you think about it, a car from 75 years ago does damn near everything you need a car to do today, but apart from the occasional enthusiast, you don’t see them on the road. Marketing departments are brilliant. You will “need” a new computer eventually, just like you “need” a new car, new clothes, a new house, new stereo equipment, new toys, etc, etc, etc.

Now, that being said, I think we’re safely out of explosion of the '90s when salemen were literally calling computers that were top-of-the-line 6 months ago junk. From 1997 to 2003 I upgraded frequently and built an entirely new computer about every year and a half - and I wasn’t much of a gamer, that’s just what it took to stay within a couple steps of the cutting edge. Now I’m on a laptop that my wife bought for law school in the fall of '03 and I cannot see needing to upgrade it anytime soon (touch wood.) All I’ve done to it is double the RAM to 1Gb back around '05 and it does everything I need it to do quickly and error-free. I’ll probably upgrade when Windows XP becomes frustratingly obsolete.