Weakest Link in Current Technologies

[12th_Man]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this post, but none of them really seemed to fit.

Simply put my question is this: where is the bottle neck in state of the art systems?

I hear a lot of people say that the hard disk technologies can't keep up with the processors. Also, I've heard that stock CUPs really don't take advantage of newest 800 Mhz system buses (ie a P4 2.6 would perform the same on a 533 Mhz FSB as it would on an 800 Mhz FSB). What about memory? Is a good CPU with a fast bus choked by even the fastest memory, or are the latest RAM technologies overkill for todays processors?

I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks.

 

[JimmyDean]

A 2.6 533 Mhz fsb would be killed a 800 Mhz fsb.

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[Steven21]

I always thought HDs and PCI bus were the bottlenecks.

and i hope a P4 2.6 800 fsb is faster then a 533fsb one,
if not why are we paying more for a 800fsb when a 533fsb one is just as fast and cheaper

 

[elzt]

What about optical drives.

 

[kinney]

My guess woudl be memory technologies. Seems to be the main issue when people talk video cards, motherboard chipsets, CPUs, basically everything.

I'm sure someone could very technical, and I'm sure there are other things that are and need worked on but memory in all its varietys (cpu cache, ram, buffers) seems to be the main concern.

Case in point is the well known fact how much performance increase you'll get with 256mb of ram in windows xp over 128. Doesnt have to be that example or xp in particular but, goes to show your processor speed or bus may improve things and they will to be faster but they are marginal versus the improvement faster and more memory will do, this goes for cpus and gfx cards.
Of course somethings are changing and tomorrows bottleneck will be something else.


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[endyen]

It's the keyboard, no it's the 56k modem no its the gd server at via. In other words it is very task specific.
The greatest limiter to todays technology would have to be heat. If someone were to invent a light that took heat away then drives ram and cpus could all work much faster.

 

[phial]

Also, I've heard that stock CUPs really don't take advantage of newest 800 Mhz system buses (ie a P4 2.6 would perform the same on a 533 Mhz FSB as it would on an 800 Mhz FSB)

thats a false statement. the 800fsb is very obviously faster than the 533fsb. read anywhere. and with the new prices they are possibly the best deals around

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[knowan]

Right now the greatest slowdown is the hard drive. Past that it's the memory controller (as the AMD Opteron with hypertransport proves). Past that it's task specific, but these 2 things affect performance in all tasks.

It used to be the RAM after the hard drive, but now with dual channel the RAM itself is being bottlenecked by the memory controller.

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[soulprovider]

It's probably Windows - the more horsepower availiable, the more Micro$oft wants a slice of it for silly things like active desktop and Office assistant.

Other than that it's got to be heat. The fastest rigs on the block are using freezers to cool the CPU and a battalion of noisy fans blowing a hurricane through their cases.

We must all now be using enough heatsinks to cool the sun.

<b>Vorsprung durch Dontwerk</b>.....<i>as they say at VIA</i>