« Dead pixel disappointment | Main | How accurate is Sysmark? »
Software developers must clean up their act
With regards to the article in your July 2005 issue on PC performance (p44), Gordon Laing is quite right that acceptable performance may be had for much lower supply power and that top end processor chips give a poor speed/power quotient.
Of course chips that get very hot and live fast also die young, and this has advantaged the industry in the past. However, at the root of actual PC performance is the operating system and software - and huge, unweildy and innefficient software has long been masked by increase in hardware power.
It is possible to get the processor to power down when nothing is happening. The advent of fast, cheap flash memory means that accessing the hard disc all the time and taking ages to boot up and idle is quite unnecessary.
So pressure must be put on the software writers to clean up their act - the power wasted on Internet servers for example must be quite enormous and PCW has reported on cost savings that can be obtained to justify efficiency gains (July issue, p23 news).
Leon Di Marco
Post a comment