WHat is the biggest bottleneck in PC's?

Xanathar

Golden Member
Oct 14, 1999
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Internet Bandwith. who needs processors, we just need super server farms, 100Gig ethernet links, and have raw data fed to us.
 

rc5

Platinum Member
Oct 13, 1999
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It's the Operate system, especially those buggy OSes from Microsoft.
 

Mem

Lifer
Apr 23, 2000
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Well everyone covered the top five,I say floppy drive,my grandma could read faster in the dark.
 

Goi

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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Hell, we humans are the bottleneck! Try understanding those millions of calculations per second in real time :p
 

piku

Diamond Member
May 30, 2000
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Yes the hard drive is it. My pentium 200 would be the perfect internet browsing computer if it wasn't for its slow as hell hard drive. If it was fed data instantaneously, it would be fine (tho 200 is reall pushing, 300 or so really would be perfect)
 

Modus

Platinum Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Technically the hard drive is the slowest major component in the PC, but you have to remember that software has been written with this in mind for a long time. Almost any task where speed will be factor is done entirely from memory. And these tasks invariably involve 3D graphics. Nothing else puts such a strain on modern computers. So, looking at 3D benchmarks for normal resolutions of 1024 and above, and seeing that a Duron 700 is no slower than a 1 GHz T-Bird, I would have to say that the main bottleneck in today's systems is video fillrate. It still can't keep pace with our CPU's.

After video fillrate, I'd say it goes: video memory bandwidth, CPU speed, and memory bandwidth.

Modus
 

ahfung

Golden Member
Oct 20, 1999
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I'd say Rambus and RDRAM, they are holding the whole computer industry back, and thus holding the whole world back. ;)
 

Prodigy^

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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yup, harddrives, if we all had RAM as harddrives, a computer could boot in 5 seconds I'll bet
 

Mday

Lifer
Oct 14, 1999
18,647
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definitely the HDD, CD-ROM...

then ISA.

then the PCI bus.

then memory.

CPU.

these are the stuff people use all the time.

i rarely use the floppy drive anymore.
 

BoberFett

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
37,562
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Hard drives, but that can be minimized by having LOTS of RAM and using an OS that knows how to use that RAM properly. (i.e., not Win9x)
 

Hawkeye_(BEL)

Banned
Dec 24, 1999
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If all our memory would be very fast L1-cache, we would never have to wait IMO. But yeah, who can afford a 512Mb L1 dimm... :p
 

sov05

Senior member
May 7, 2000
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we need bigger bandwidth memory and more of it, so it does not have to go to the HD.

 

RSI

Diamond Member
May 22, 2000
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Analog modems are by far the slowest component, but I wouldn't say the biggest bottleneck.

The hard drive must be the biggest bottleneck, since everything is stored on the hard drive, and everything must be retrieved from it - and it is one of the slowest components, next to analog modems (which are horribly slow).

If hard drives were as fast as today's memory (RAM or cache), computers would be many many times faster. Video fillrate also, but I wouldn't say it is as much of a bottleneck, since really we have enough of that for most things it's just in 3d gaming that people complain...

So, the hard drive is the biggest bottleneck.

-RSI
 

eelw

Lifer
Dec 4, 1999
10,228
5,343
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Lets see now;

CPU's 1GHz, 1ns
PC133 memory 133MHz, 7.5ns
Fireware 400Mbps, 20ns
100BaseT 100MBps, 10ns
PCI 66MHz, 15ns
ISA 8MHz, 125ns
HD access time 8ms
human beings 0.5s

The main bottleneck are all of the moving parts. Once we get everything to solid state devices, image the speed that we can compute at.