vrkalak wrote:Look how far computer technology has come in the last few years.
Actually, I think the last few years have been kind of a drag. In the mid 90s, if you had a 3 to 500MHz PII, you were king of the hill. '99 rolled around and PIII's were all the rage. I remember my first computer with a 800MHz PIII and how absolutely f'n amazed I was at how fast it ran Windows 98. PIII's only ever went as fast as (I think) 1.4 or 1.5GHz, but they were produced until 2003. P4's hit the market in 2000 and stopped being produced last year. As far as I know, a production P4 (i.e., not modded or overclocked) never went as fast as 4GHz.
These days, all the rage is in slapping multiple cores into a single processor. That's all well and good, but why haven't speeds improved any for the last four or five years? As far as I know, production processors still haven't gone much past 4GHz. Unless everybody is saving up to drop the super-speed, 10GHz, 128bit processors on us for the Christmas season this year, I don't see a whole lot changing in the next year or two given current trends. (That's obviously excluding any breakthroughs in quantum computing, alien visitors giving us advanced technology, etc..)
I talk Pentium because it's all I really know. I never had a computer with an AMD chipset in it, and I don't really know of any other vendors - AMD & Intel are the big dogs in the marketplace. If somebody knows a faster (non-modded) chip, I'd definitely like to hear about it.