Santa Rosa - performance update

Hey guys,

any comment on this article

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=2985

As dell is not joining the bandwagaon by not realsing any Santa Rosa based notebooks for Home Users, i thought it would be interesting for you.

 

I personally think it's pretty funny. About every 6 months, the computer industry releases new products promising incredible and life-changing performance. I'm 28 years old, and to this day, I can remember 5 things that have truly changed the way I think about computer and how they changed the industry...

Radeon 9700 Series
Wireless Internet
AGP 4x
Dual Core CPU's
DDR memory

Everything else inbetween, IMO, has been a marketing gimmick, and it continues with Santa Rosa. Sure there's a performance increase, and it will continue with time as software adapts, but I see absolutely no reason whatsoever to buy hardware before the software... (Vista anyone?). To be 100% honest, I was not surprised to read the benchmarks and reviews all over the internet, same as I will not be surprised when DX10 isn't all it's cracked up to be. Spend wisely, not wildly.

-Josh

 

I will also add Windows 95 it was a huge step foward from windows 3.1

 

While I agree with you that the tech world is full of hype and over-blown performance expectations. I have to disagree with your list of industry altering milestones. I have a few more years under my belt and possibly remember things a little different from the way you see them.

CPUs:
I think the biggest milestone in processor history was the Pentium processor. This was not an evolution in CPUs, it was a revolution. It layed the ground work for all of todays modern processors. There is a reason that the pentium named lasted for 13 years. Dual core processors are nice, but it is still just an evolution of what has been happening in the workstation and server market for many years. It was done on 2 seperate processors, now we just put them in one package. I fondly remember my Dual Pentium 200 MMX computer.

Graphics cards:
While the 9700 series was a great step for ATI, NVIDA is still here and the 2 companies have been battling it out for quite some time. On the other hand the introduction of the RIVA TNT graphics card was the beginning of the end for 3DFX. This was probably the first consumer graphics card to offer good 2D and 3D performance in a single card. Prior to this you need 2 graphics cards to perform the same function (the original SLI.) The Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo 3 were never able to restablish their market hold. 3DFX could never recover from the hit they took when NVIDIA came on the scene and no longer exists. It's not everyday that a single product spells the end for an entire company.

I do agree with your take on AGP. The PCI bus was never going to hold up and AGP is another reason that NVIDIA was able to take down 3DFX.

I think wireless networking is a good addition to the list. The home network is probably a more important milestone because it moved our computers from standalone machines with one purpose to opening up the myriad of possibilties that we have today with all our connected devices. But the mainstreaming of wireless was probably the biggest factor for the widespread home networking we have today. So score another one there.

Operating Systems:
I have to agree with mtor on this one. Windows 95 was definately a milestone worthy of this list.

Obviously everyone has thier own opinions and they will all be different and the same. So lets see if others agree or disagree.

 

It's a little disappointing, but not surprising per se. I mean, all you really got was a faster FSB, but that's not going to provide earth-shattering performance improvements. I think the wireless n card is more important for Centrino moving forward, and I still haven't figured out what the problem with Robson is.

In regards to PC milestones, I will agree jcaully on most fronts, except the OS. Now, I'm too young to really pinpoint the OS that changed things for me, but I remember that going from DOS to Win95 was pretty easy for me, because my mother (a computer programmer) had a GUI utility set up on DOS that had a desktop and everything. And that jump is not even as small as the Win 3.1 to Win95. And I think the main reason everyone points to Win95 was its huge compatibility and GUI, but Mac OS was a completely GUI-based system, and was out long before Windows 95. So I'd say the biggest advent of Windows 95 wasn't really in what it did, but what it seemed to allow people to do with their computers through things like networking, Internet, etc.

 

Windows 95 a milestone? Maybe for the consumer, but for us professionals, NT 3.51 was a giant leap from 3.0/3.1/3.11. Going from a switch-tasking OS where one badly written app can take down the entire OS to a more stable multi-tasking OS is monumental, IMO.

///Michael

 

You also get (in all but T7100) twice as much L2 cache. That's going to be a big perf improvement. You'll also get a much improved chipset.

There's a lot more to SR than just the 800MHz FSB. Personally, I think we'll see better benchmarks once the chipset matures.