-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 2010-06-19 18:51, Felix Miata wrote:
On 2010/06/19 11:03 (GMT-0400) Adam Tauno Williams composed:
But spending dollars to save *TIME* [and equivalent frustration] is always a worthwhile;
_Not_ always, not when supply of time is abundant and/or time saved is contextually small, or when initial investment funding is limited.
Agree. But replace a P4 system with an i7 system and there is no
Likely the preponderance of P4 users are not i7 candidates at this point in time.
confusing that for mere change; its *progress* when procedures that took minutes complete in seconds.
I can't imagine a typical I/O bound process on a Cedar Mill P4 taking magnitudes less time on an i7 absent costly I/O cost premium to thwart the bottleneck, which would be comparing beets to raisins. For a process taking mere seconds on an i7 using mainstream I/O systems to take minutes I'd expect the elder CPU to be sub-1GHz or a first generation Duron or P3 Celeron or slower, and its HD bus to be sub-ATA3.
I have both a slow, ten years old, P-IV, and a new core 2 quad, so I can compare. I can see differences in speed, mostly due to slow memory and bus (it was already bad when I bought it), and disk. The new machine is certainly more comfortable, but the speed difference isn't often more than twice. The old machine has "only" 1 gigabyte ram and it shows with big programs. There are exceptions. Video conversion with ffmpeg can take, literally, days on the old machine, and at most an hour on the new one. But if you work, say, editing a large file with oowrite, the difference is not that easy to notice. The end result is that an old machine is quite useful, except for demanding tasks. It just needs software that is maintained (kept free of security bugs). There are many valid reasons to upgrade hardware, but saving energy is not one. - -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 11.2 x86_64 "Emerald" GM (Elessar)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkwdFjUACgkQU92UU+smfQWECACfTvoDoFLXC+3uEIChUm3etELC HJIAnAgi31d/IZ9fxFkRuntRB1l6X5oe =ChIF -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org