As a matter of fact, virtually all business and home applications are not
developed to take advantage of MMX, MMX2 and the Katmai instructions of the
Pentium III.  There is really no reason for them to use such things.  The
business applications are not very demanding of the power of a PC CPU and
therein lie the reasons behind the current slump in the industry.  My
opinion is that in the late 1990, because of the Y2K issues, virtually
everyone scrambled to get a new computer.  In 1999, this would have been a
late model Pentium II running at 500 + MHz or even an early Pentium III.
 At this point, such a machine can easily run any piece of business
software and just about any game.  Since the late 1990s, there has been no
reason, no software reason to buy a faster processor, because there is
simply no software that demands higher performance than late 20th century
computers.  After posting great results in the late 1990s, computer
companies had a tough time following up on these results immediately after
Y2K.

The state of the industry is such that 20th century hardware is plenty good
enough to run 21st century software, so why buy a new computer?

This past year, the desktops have passed the Gigahertz mark, and nobody
gives a hoot.  By the end of this year, we will have desktops that are
running past 2 GHz, but the applications will be still in the 20th century.
 Currently, the only things that are selling briskly are laptops and
high-end PDAs, such as the Jornada or the IPAQ.  The latter is so great,
it's out of stock virtually everywhere, I have been searching for one for
many weeks.  Intel has just announced they are having huge shortage
problems with 1 GHz Mobile Pentium IIIs, while they are busy slashing the
prices of brand new desktop Pentium IV.

We use to decry the "software bloat" of Windows operating systems.  This is
no longer the case.  Bring it on, we say, my 2 year old hardware can take
it.  What matters a 1GB OS when the desktop disk drive is bigger than 80GB?
 In the early part of the last decade, when Microsoft announced that
Windows NT would require 16MB or memory or more to run, the world laughed
at such extravagant requirements.  This was in the days where a 4 MB board
was worth more than its weight in gold or platinum.  Now my laptop has 576
MB of RAM, of which 512 cost a little over $300.  Less than 8 years ago, a
disk drive on a PC was measured in 10s or 100s of megabytes.  My year old
laptop has an 18GB on-board with an 80 GB drive in the docking station and
I am eyeing that new 50GB drive from IBM to replace the 18GB one.

The hardware capabilities have exploded and have far outstripped the
requirements of the software.  I still use Office 97 because there has been
no compelling reason for me to move to Office 2000 or XP when it comes out.
 On my laptop, I run all sorts of graphic packages such as PaintShopPro,
Photoshop and others.  I can have all of them running simultaneously, run
some games, be connected to the Internet, have a mail client running,
develop in Visual Studio, be watching a DVD movie, and still have room for
more stuff.

The hardware has moved far beyond the applications, at the desktop (desktop
or laptop.)  This is why nobody is buying desktops and why there is such a
slump in the industry.  The killer applications of the 1990s, Internet,
email and web access are easily fulfilled with 3 year old hardware.

The gaming community has always been at the bleeding edge of hardware
technology.  However, their requirements differ from the rest of the
installed base.  Their need is more towards a balanced system, such as a
high speed CPU, memory, disk subsystem and especially video cards and sound
cards.  This is why the latest graphics card is based on the GeForce 3 with
64 MB or SDRAM.  These cards have more transistors than Pentium IV and will
cost about the same.  At this point games have emerged that take advantage
of MMX, MMX2, KNI and others and new games are being developed to take
advantage of the latest Graphics cards, but there again, the software
suffers a huge lag behind the hardware.

So as we read about newer and faster CPU, larger and larger disk drives and
bigger and cheaper memory. . . we just can't seem to get excited about it
simply because we have no need for it.  Glenn nails it right on the head
and asks a great question.  The answer is:

The software we have and use everyday just doesn't need all this power.

Yet.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com


-----Original Message-----
From:   COLE,GLENN (Non-HP-SantaClara,ex2) [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Wednesday, April 18, 2001 7:57 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
Subject:        RE: [HP3000-L] OT: more on Itanium

Denys writes:
> Another issue with the Pentium IV is that in order to get maximum speed
> the applications have to be compiled for it.

But isn't this true for most chips?
Here's a question for which I truly do not know the answer:

   Are there many applications which HAVE been compiled specifically
   for the P-III, or even for the P-II ?

Were I a vendor in that market, I most likely would compile only
for the least common denominator (i.e., basic Pentium) rather than
compile either for EACH Pentium variant (thus confusing customers),
or for the LATEST variant (thus eliminating customers).

A speed-critical application likely would be the primary exception,
and even then only until the speed was "good enough."

--Glenn

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