Tech Update 2004
Yeah, so I'm not going to cover the entire year, just a couple key points that have cropped up in the last...oh...16 hours or so.
First of all, bigzoo.com is terminating service of their pre-paid long distance. Bah. There goes my 4 cents a minute long distance and now I'll actually have to figure out what to do about long distance. I've grown quite accustomed to that service and really liked it. If any of you out there use bigzoo.com, you might want to take a look at their homepage.
Also, Nate pointed out the price of a Pentium 4 processor to me this morning. With a little searching around newegg.com, we found that the Pentiums are actually looking better than the AMD processors now in terms of "bang for your buck." Right now, you can get an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ processor (with 512K L2 cache and 400 MHz front-side bus) for $200. You can get a comparable Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz processor (comparable in terms of operating speed) for $219 and the P4 has a 1 MB L2 cache and a 800 MHz front-side bus. For those of you that have no idea what I just said, the P4 seems to be a clearly superior processor for an additional $19.
Why do I care? Well, because 9 months ago, that just wasn't the case. AMD's processors have long been the "choice of geeks" because we've known enough to realize that the AMD processors were just as good as the over-priced Intel processors and could save us plenty of coin. My box at home, which I built in '01, runs an AMD processor. For the time being, that trend seems to have changed. Right now, the Intel processors have come down in price to be very competitive with the AMD processors. That's great news. Apparently, AMD has grabbed a large enough foothold on the CPU industry that Intel has had to take notice. Awesome. That means cheaper, faster computers.
Now, if only those folks made cars and could do something about gas mileage.
In all fairness, I didn't find any of this information. I bow to the superb technological awareness of Tron, for he is all-knowing and was kind enough to get me "in the loop."
First of all, bigzoo.com is terminating service of their pre-paid long distance. Bah. There goes my 4 cents a minute long distance and now I'll actually have to figure out what to do about long distance. I've grown quite accustomed to that service and really liked it. If any of you out there use bigzoo.com, you might want to take a look at their homepage.
Also, Nate pointed out the price of a Pentium 4 processor to me this morning. With a little searching around newegg.com, we found that the Pentiums are actually looking better than the AMD processors now in terms of "bang for your buck." Right now, you can get an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ processor (with 512K L2 cache and 400 MHz front-side bus) for $200. You can get a comparable Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz processor (comparable in terms of operating speed) for $219 and the P4 has a 1 MB L2 cache and a 800 MHz front-side bus. For those of you that have no idea what I just said, the P4 seems to be a clearly superior processor for an additional $19.
Why do I care? Well, because 9 months ago, that just wasn't the case. AMD's processors have long been the "choice of geeks" because we've known enough to realize that the AMD processors were just as good as the over-priced Intel processors and could save us plenty of coin. My box at home, which I built in '01, runs an AMD processor. For the time being, that trend seems to have changed. Right now, the Intel processors have come down in price to be very competitive with the AMD processors. That's great news. Apparently, AMD has grabbed a large enough foothold on the CPU industry that Intel has had to take notice. Awesome. That means cheaper, faster computers.
Now, if only those folks made cars and could do something about gas mileage.
In all fairness, I didn't find any of this information. I bow to the superb technological awareness of Tron, for he is all-knowing and was kind enough to get me "in the loop."
posted by MC at
Friday, December 03, 2004
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