What is the new bottleneck in computer technology?

Years ago, when we started to see single-core P4's breaking 2.0ghz, the processor speed was usually considered the bottleneck in a computer. The hard drive could feed information fast enough, the RAM could keep up, but everything had to wait on the processor trying to compute data.

Nowadays, we have dual and quad core processors that seam to rarely peak out at 100%. It seams that the processor is no longer struggling, but waiting for data to be fed to it. How many of you ever see both your processors exceed 80% on a regular basis?

So, with the processor (as I believe) no longer the bottleneck, what is now slowing our computers down? What area of technology needs to be upgraded to keep up with the processors?

Obviously, we need to feed information to the processor faster now to take advantage of its increased power - something I don't believe is currently being done well enough.

What do you believe needs to be improved upon now?

1. faster hard drive? SSD drives are an improvement, but still not as instantaneous as say true RAM
2. FSB, northbridge, southbridge speeds? Do we need to redesign these? Do we need to get rid of them all together?
3. Flash-loading the operating system into the RAM on startup?
4. increasing RAM speeds even further?
5. more pipelines feeding into the processor?

open the discussion! tell me i'm wrong if I am!

 

It depends on what you do, what applications you use.

If you play video games, as far as I know the GPU has always been the bottleneck (and it still is).

 

Personally, I would say the software.
Since most software out there cannot make use of the new multicore CPU's we have. Once that starts to happen for most applications, we should see pretty big performance increases.

 

Hard drive.

 

Probably hard drive. Though SSD is a much improvement. Also software but also becoming much more improved pretty fast. The dual-core cpu was probably one of the best advancements on computers in history.

 

Software, storage drives, graphics cards.

 

Gamer: Graphics Card
Average Non Gaming User: Hard Drive

 

The harddrive and RAM have been far slower for decades. You have to go back to the mid 90's or so *at least*, before RAM speed was not a problem.

However, it depends entirely on what software you're running. For games, the problem is usually the GPU. CPU and RAM may in a few specialized cases limit performance, but generally, it's the GPU.

For other applications? Some still depend on the CPU (some on single-thread performance, some on multithreaded), some on RAM and some on harddrives and other I/O.

 

For the general user I'd say the hard drive. You still have to wait 40 seconds to several minutes for the OS to start up, for most users that's the longest wait. Hard drive also applies to editors of large files.

For gamers I'd say generally the video card.

For me? The CPU. I estimate it will no longer be a bottleneck for me in approximately 2017 (no joking; extropolating Moore's Law). It affects mainly strategy games for me now, but used to affect FPS as well (more so than GPU in some cases). Hard drive comes in second. The CPU is the bottleneck in some games. Dual-core only helps with new games, and not all of those at that.

 

The intraweb!
and then hard-drive second...

 

The bottleneck that you speak of varies from system to system. Generally it's the slowest component in your computer - it can be the hard drive, the processor, the RAM; anything.

It's hard to speak based purely on technology - the latest and greatest is not always there for mass consumption.

 

No doubt that the main bottleneck for games is th GPU. We all know how a game like Crysis eats GPUs for breakfast.
Flight Simulator X seems to be CPU dependant.
And the list can go one, but it all depens on what type of app you run. The bottleneck can be the whole system,if it`s ancient,or a single part,the main problem thus being that you can never have everything coordonated in such a way that the CPU,GPU,RAM,HDD are all syncronised...one time the CPU might be waiting for the hdd or ram, othertimes the gpu might be choked to death by a shader intensive rendering...etc

The main bottleneck today is the average pocket lacking money, IMO.