PCs, Macs, Memory, and Processing Speed

[William Ronald]

I was talking with a friend recently about home computers, and the advances in processing speed and memory. He raised a few questions which I thought would be good to bring here.

In terms of what is on the market right now, what are the best home computers in terms of memory and processing speed? Also, what are the next big breakthroughs which should make their way to home PCs?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Greyhawk_DM]

I was talking with a friend recently about home computers, and the advances in processing speed and memory. He raised a few questions which I thought would be good to bring here.

In terms of what is on the market right now, what are the best home computers in terms of memory and processing speed? Also, what are the next big breakthroughs which should make their way to home PCs?

Thanks in advance.

Depends...
Do you mean complete systems or component parts to build a system?

 

[drothgery]

I was talking with a friend recently about home computers, and the advances in processing speed and memory. He raised a few questions which I thought would be good to bring here.

In terms of what is on the market right now, what are the best home computers in terms of memory and processing speed?

I'm going to assume you're talking about components, rather than whole systems, because it's a lot easier to write that way. I'm also going to ignore server-oriented CPUs (AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon) and AMD and Intel's new, exorbiantly priced, extreme-gaming CPUs (Athlon 64 FX; Pentium 4 Extreme Edition).

So the fastest normal desktop CPU on the market is the Athlon 64 3200, in most cases, with the 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 nipping closely on its heels (and passing it quite often). It depends on what you want to do, and what other components you get. The 2 GHz PowerPC 970 (in the fastest Power Mac G5) is competitive, but usually slower (it's also hurt because Mac OS X has more overhead than Windows XP).

Fastest memory is a bit more confusing. All high-end desktops use DDR400 memory. Intel and Apple use dual-channel memory, which improves bandwidth by a lot, but the Athlon 64 has the memory controller built on to the CPU, which improves latency by a lot. Generally speaking, though, an 800 Mhz FSB Pentium 4 (3.2 GHz, 3.0 GHz, or 2.xC GHz) with Intel's 875 chipset wins here.

Also, what are the next big breakthroughs which should make their way to home PCs?

Thanks in advance.

I don't see any big breakthroughs in the immediate future. There will be a lot of incremental improvements in the next year (some of which became available this year, and will become mainstream next year). Serial ATA hard drives don't gain much in performance (because most hard drives can't use all the bandwidth they've got), but the narrower cables are easier to work with. PCI Express video cards will replace AGP, but with 256 MB of video RAM on high-end cards, they won't go off-card for memory very often. DVD writers will get cheaper and more common. Floppies may eventually go away. LCDs will get bigger, better, and cheaper (pick any two). Intel and AMD will keep playing leapfrog in desktop CPU performance. DDR2 memory will become available, but will only be incrementally faster than current memory.

 

[Psionicist]

Fastest memory is a bit more confusing. All high-end desktops use DDR400 memory. Intel and Apple use dual-channel memory, which improves bandwidth by a lot, but the Athlon 64 has the memory controller built on to the CPU, which improves latency by a lot. Generally speaking, though, an 800 Mhz FSB Pentium 4 (3.2 GHz, 3.0 GHz, or 2.xC GHz) with Intel's 875 chipset wins here.

There are DDR 500 available from Corsair, TwinMOS etc. You have to use a higher-than-1-to-1 memory divider (5:4 mem fsb for example) to use it though, and it will run asynchronous (unless you overclock).

 

[drothgery]

I'm assuming that all components are run at their rated speeds (no overclocking). No one makes a desktop chipset (or a desktop CPU with an internal memory controller) that officially supports anything faster than DDR 400, so memory faster than DDR 400 is worthless for non-overclockers.

 

[Psionicist]

I'm assuming that all components are run at their rated speeds (no overclocking). No one makes a desktop chipset (or a desktop CPU with an internal memory controller) that officially supports anything faster than DDR 400, so memory faster than DDR 400 is worthless for non-overclockers.

Actually asynchronous FSB/memory speed is not overclocking. Most new Intel chipsets (for example) supports diviers such as 1:1, 5:4, 4:5, 3:4 and 4:3.

With a P4 2.4C with a multiplier och 12, an FSB of 200 (quad pumped) and a memory divider of 1:1 will result in 2400 MHz and 400 MHz DDR (200*2).

-However-

If you use another divider, such as 5:4, you will still run your processor at 2400 MHz but the memory speed will bump to 500 Mhz DDR (250*2).

Edit: Sorry, you were talking about chipsets. That is correct, the fastest standard supported is 400 MHz DDR.