Chaos Manor Awards 2003, Part 2

By Jerry Pournelle

January 26, 2004

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Column 282 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Bus Speeds

The dramatic increases in CPU speeds were the most obvious trend in hardware improvements in 2003, but just as significant were the faster bus speeds. As 2003 opened nearly all systems had Front Side Bus speeds of 133 with older systems stuck at 66. Now it's hard to find motherboards that slow. I'm writing this on a relatively old Pentium 4, and it has a bus speed of 533. My newer systems go at 800. AMD systems are a bit slower, but it's not a critical difference.

Games were the chief beneficiary of the new bus speeds, but I'm told that nearly all software was instantly able to take advantage. The big advantage here is for video intensive programs like video editors, and of course systems that take in real time data.

Software vs. Hardware

Microsoft was built through betting on Moore's Law. While other software houses struggled to make their software work better with what was on desktops at the time the product was released, Microsoft was satisfied if it worked at all. Get it out there, and the inevitable growth in hardware ability will take care of the rest.

It was a strategy that worked very well indeed. As an illustration: When Office 97 came out, I got an early pre-release copy and was appalled at the amount of disk space it wanted. I called it "bloatware" despite the strenuous and horrified objections of some pretty good friends in Microsoft Press Relations. The laugh was on me, though: About the time the product was released and that review came out, disk drive space/dollar more than doubled, and the entire Microsoft Office Suite installed in about twenty bucks worth of drive space. Sure it was big—and who cared? It worked.

Today, with the exception of video editing, it's hard to think of software capable of using, much less overwhelming, the hardware capability available for commodity prices. Hardware no longer limits what our machines can do—at least in the realm of what we are used to.

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