> You're contradicting yourself left and right here.
No not really. There's a low-end market where lots of cheap
notebooks are sold and then the high-end. Here's a hint: they
have different characteristics.
> Of course, people need performance, but not for Word or Excel. > These may be the widest used apps, but it's becoming just as
> popular for people to rip CDs, encode videos, and render 3d
> images.
Which of these have you done? I've never done any in that list
except for Word and Excel.
A coworker who has the opposite approach with laptops than me
just wants the lightest laptop available. All of the other stuff
is done on a desktop or a server. He's looking to build an X2
system but that's in the future.
As far as ripping CDs go, that's in decline, isn't it? Why
bother when you can just go with the Yahoo Music service or
with iTunes?
Encoding videos seems to be for older folks taking videos of
their kids. Maybe kids do it to if they can afford the
equipment.
I'm not sure what rendering 3-d images is as a consumer application. I do know a guy that's reading up on computational
geometry to do some data display engineering. So when do consumers render 3-D images?
> You seem to be arguing that Word and Excel won't see the
> benefit of dual core, but nobody cares.
That's for the low end.
> You also say that without 64-bits, you can't stitch together
> 50k x 50k pixel images, but again, no one cares.
That's for the high end and for the future. Who wants obsolete equipment.
> Like I said, 8MP cameras are high end, they support poster
> sized images, and consumers don't typically print larger
> than portrait sized photos of their pictures.
Do you do a lot of digital photography? What's nice about high MPs is that if you just want a piece of a picture, you can get it. Obviously, the more MPs the better. If you take a picture of a large group of people and you want to get smaller photos of individual faces, having a much higher resolution on the camera works wonders. I have an old picture taken with a panoramic camera (a consumer item BTW) taken of a tour group in China and I still sometimes look at some of the people in that picture. That's a traditional picture but if it were done with a digital camera, there wouldn't be enough resolution to do a good job in zooming in on individual faces.
Many digital cameras also have a stitch mode where they provide software to stitch together a limited number of photographs.
> What consumers do care about is audio and video, like I've
> said. These also happen to be the areas that receive the
> largest benefit from dual core.
Do you care about audio and video? Do you rip CDs? Download music? Convert formats for your player? Watch videos on a notebook screen?
> Anandtech's benchmarks show performance improvements in the
> range of 60-80%, and 64-bit doesn't even play here yet (and
> has yet to prove similar performance results).
There are engineering areas where 64-bits is a big win. RSA
encryption that I mentioned earlier is such an area. There are
other areas out there that provide improved performance but
just as importantly, they provide for additional functionality,
and, as a pragmatic issue, that's where future development is
going to go.
> To get the best new experience from your PC and mobile PC,
> you would want to go for dual core, and that means Athlon X2,
> Pentium D, or Core Duo. Single core CPUs are obsolete, far
> more so than 32-bit CPUs. 32-bit CPUs may start looking
> gauche once Vista comes out, but by then, Merom will be
> Intel's mainstream laptop CPU and the point is moot.
But the folks that bought the 32-bit PCs will be going Doh!
I think that I'll be using my 64-bit Athlon Notebook far longer
than you'll be using your Pentium M notebook. Or a 32-bit dual-core notebook.
AI
Market Data 
Markets 
