RE: [TCLUG:9472] bios

[Christopher Reid Palmer <reid@pconline.com>]

On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Schoenhofen, Kelly wrote:

> I believe in a mix of centralized vs. distributed computing components.
> Maybe you don't, maybe you're looking for a cube-shaped motherboard, who
> knows, who cares. 
[...]
> I really do believe that the future of 3dvideo is going to be GPU based
> video cards.

This kind of thing goes in phases. I remember when Macs had SCSI cards
with roughly the same CPU the Mac itself had. My NeXT's DSP chip is
roughly as powerful as the CPU; same thing with the video processor. That
was because in those days, they had hit a wall with what they could do
with a CPU. Then CPUs got really powerful relative to everything else  
(P166 MMX era), and people started putting more functionality into the
CPU (e.g., MMX). Now we're back to hitting a wall in CPU power, so we get
bridged PCI video cards with heatsinks on their CPUs, and the like.

My belief is that, given a balanced set of peripherals, any CPU equal to
or better than:
	PPC: 133
	x86: 200
	MIPS: 50-100
	PA-RISC: 50-100
	SPARC: 100
is plenty for most needs, even a lot of high-end stuff. Anything else is
the stuff of pissing contests.


--
  Christopher Reid Palmer : http://www.innerfireworks.com/