System bottlenecks

Hi guys,
I was just trawling through the forums and thinking about how fast processors have become over the last few years, in fact they've become so fast that they may well have reached the limit that a single core can be clocked at and so they're reverting to the technique of dual cores, something that reminds me of the age when having a maths coprocessor was a selling point in a PC, back to the differences between an 8086 and an 80286, basically a long time ago.

If you think about it, having multiple processors is something we've become desensitised to as gamers because we buy graphics cards with 3D processors on without questioning their place in our day-to-day use of the PC.

It seems to me that processors and graphics cards are constantly being rated on how many frames per second they can produce for current games and although the market is becoming increasingly tailored to the mid-range buyer we're still envious of those who can get the most frames per second because theoretically they can run tomorrow's games too.

Not too long ago I would have loved to own a PC with 2 nVidia 7800 cards running in SLi but nowadays that's not really a great setup at all. The list of different shader-based tasks that we're asking 3D cards to perform is constantly growing and therefore, no matter how good your graphics card is at the moment, it seems to me that in a few months it won't be great at all, simply because its chipset doesn't feature the latest and greatest filters/shaders, so it'll be giving you good framerates but the games still won't be looking their finest, simply because we've spent top dollar on yesterday's best cards and we can't afford to upgrade to the newest technology as our wallets are still suffering from buying those 7800s.

Keeping this in mind, consider today's CPUs. I don't think much is going to change on us in terms of Intel's offerings, if we're inclined to look then we'll be aware of the 'Conroe' processors. I think that AMD are a company that likes to stick with a motherboard platform and work at it for a good while, so I think we'll see faster and cooler AM2 processors come around, but my question is this: why?

Why bother devolving graphics processing to a specialised unit and also propose that we do the same with physics calculations and then constantly up the CPU requirements? I agree that it's nice to be able to transcode your music and video in less time but how often do we spend our time doing this or playing games compared to the total amount of time that today's PCs spend in offices, idling?

I think it would be very wise for a computer manufacturer to recognise the bottleneck in today's business world and manufacture PCs with much cheaper and slower CPUs but with a stack of RAM in them to balance out the price of the system costs. How often do our work computers slow down, not because of a lack of processing power in it (and who really needs a current generation Sempron to run Office?) but because there's a system somewhere on the network that's slowing down everyone else's day because it's running low on RAM and is using a massive pagefile?

Fair enough, some games allow for surround sound, but if an avid game player is going for such a setup, surely they'd be willing to spend a few pennies on an EAX-equipped soundcard, to lighten the load from their CPU. My qualm with the current situation the PC scene poses is this:

1) We're encouraged to buy daughterboards to take tasks away from the CPU but conversely persuaded to buy faster CPUs. This suggests that no matter how good the daughterboards (sound, graphics, physics, network) get, they'll never be good enough to cope with what's coming up, so we'd better compensate with raw processing power. This suggests to me that as consumers, the items we're persuaded to buy as 'top-end' products are manufactured or marketed in such a way as to constantly make us one step behind, even though we're persuaded otherwise.

2) The way that CPU performance is advertised, such as Intel have on TV for many years, cons buyers into buying systems that won't perform up to par, simply because they're under equipped to run more than one task at a time in an office environment. I completely agree that having more than one core encourages multitasking and thereby reducing bottlenecks, for example programmers can encode their work whilst also doing the documentation. I believe that as you run more programmes at once you greatly increase the need for more RAM and this isn't necessarily something that's being considered nowadays, it's more of an afterthought.

So what do you guys think? You might want to suggest to me that companies could get their systems with lower processing power from eBay and just upgrade the RAM, but how often do companies do that? I think it's more often the case that they bulk-purchase units and leave them stock which eventually results in a slow system as more and more crap (such as software firewalls, inefficient antivirus software and user-restricting software to protect the company from malicious employees) accumulates and makes the brand-new multi-core systems perform like a 486 running Win95.