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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 02/13/2008 The only
thing that counts is real time ... Today
I’ll talk about why I wanted to buy a new computer, and how it compares
with my not very old one I bought just 3 years ago. Many benchmarks
are only useful for bragging to your friends. Since the Pentium, computers
actually have become so fast that benchmarks seems to have almost disappeared
now, and all that counts is real time performance. But they can give you a rough idea of
how fast your system is performing. I
downloaded a free pc speed benchmark test from passmark.com that you can download run on your computers
to get an idea of their relative speed. The video tests are quite cool and
you see some great 3d graphics. Using this test, my 3 year old
Dell Pentium 4 computer with 1 Gb of RAM benchmarked at a rating of 212.
My new Dell Intel dual-core
processor 3 Gb RAM benchmarked at a rating of 1017, theoretically 5 times
faster overall.
But it’s all relative, and
again The only thing that counts is real time ... In recent
years I’ve found myself waiting and waiting for my pc to do jobs for me;
specifically creating cd’s and dvd’s,
and creating and editing movies with programs like Windows Movie Maker. Most
particularly movie creation, and then the subsequent burning of dvd’s
– was slowing my only 3 year old computer to where I was I/O bound
– that means you’re doing a process on your computer that is
taking most of it’s resources, and you can’t do anything else on
it. I’ll
use Windows Movie Maker to make a movie of video I’ve shot, reading in
different videos I’ve shot and editing them, and then creating a .wmv
file (windows movie) of the finished movie on my computer. The actual creation of the movie was
taking both a long time and tying up my computer. From when I clicked on the
button to create the movie, I was i/o bound for up to over an hour. And then
the biggest slowdown was when I wanted to create a dvd of the movie I had
made, as the dvd creation process adds all kinds of video drivers to your
movie to be able to play on any dvd platform. So to test
the theoretical benchmark speed of my new system – I created a DVD
using Roxio Media Creator V. 10 of 6 home movies, totaling about 110 Megs of
files. My older
Dell immediately got i/o bound while this process was running, and it took
almost an hour to burn the dvd. My new
Dell started flying through the process, and I was able to simultaneously
surf the internet, watch Youtube videos, edit a Word file, and play an online
Blackjack game all at the same time. It finished the dvd in 12 minutes. So in
this real time test the theoretical performance gain actually matched the
real time, and this is exactly what I wanted in a new computer. But then there’s other slowdowns and non-productivity gains
I’ll tell you about next week. |
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For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2008 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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