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Vol
15, Issue 39
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September 24, 2001
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Waiting for The App
By Max Baron
 A few days ago, Intel broke through the 2GHz barrier—a
historic achievement, because of both the frequency itself
and the availability of chips in volume quantities. Really
good athletes make difficult feats look easy. And it did look
easy when, one more time, at San Jose's Fairmont Hotel, with
red lights reflecting off huge balloons, Intel told the press
it had achieved its goal. The professional presentation and
the quick demos made it all look very easy. Automotive design
applications and music ripping followed medical applications.
Rapid creation of videos was demonstrated: montages of background,
images, and sound became a real show. You walk out in awe,
thinking of the hundreds of man-years that went into this,
confident that there are more "gigahertzes" where these came
from—and then you remember the killer app.
The killer app, as it was expectantly dubbed a few short
years ago, was supposed to be a program that required top
performance (and memory) and kept coming back for more. Its
appeal was to be so great that it would trigger mass desktop
purchases by people who had never before used a computer.
Additionally, this app would make existing computer owners
run to the nearest store to buy a new, more powerful computer.
It would bring revenue growth and comfortable margins back
to semiconductor and system vendors alike.
An application has arrived, but it's not a program. Instead
of channeling more revenue into the PC area, it's taking the
money unto itself. I'm talking about the Internet. Internet
connectivity has become a sink of money or a source of major
revenue, depending on which side of the cash register you
occupy. It has also become a sink of time.
High-speed connectivity has become more important than high-speed
local processing in a desktop. Web sites use high-quality
animation to differentiate themselves from each other; audio
and video bandwidth requirements compete with downloads of
ever-increasing file sizes. Depending on a subscriber's being
inside the magic mile or outside it, the charge for ADSL can
run from approximately $40 per month to $80. Add about $20
per month if, for professional reasons, the subscriber needs
to keep an email address that was registered with a previous
access provider. A 1GHz bare-bones computer sells today for
about $700. Assuming a two-year depreciation (or a new impulse
to buy a new computer), we compare $700 spent for a computer
with $960 for ADSL, or worse, with all the problems tacked
on, to $2,400.
Leaving aside the reasons for the high cost of connectivity
and server storage, let's concentrate instead on using the
new gifts of processor performance. They should help reduce,
as much as possible, the need for bandwidth and the time spent
in searches. The compression of voice and music, still images,
and video has always been dependent on the throughput capabilities
of the encoding and decoding processors. The lower the throughput
expected at the decoding end, the more bandwidth required
for the communication itself, helping connectivity and storage
costs soar upward. With more decompression capability, we
should expect a reduction in needed bandwidth, using known
methods. More may be done to reduce bandwidth: aside from
compression that reduces sound frequency or image sharpness,
psychological effects that help compress voice and music may
be able to make further use of performance and may be extended
into video.
The new performance capabilities should also help reduce
the time users spend searching for relevant information—a
problem largely ignored until now. Search engines, rich in
storage of databases, are forcing Internet users to ask them
questions in baby talk. Worse, these engines are coming up
with answers that most of the time are irrelevant to the real
search; some of them are not even willing to prioritize by
date or "relevance" the order in which they provide answers
or support searches within subsets of searches.
Other search engines will let you "AND" two or three words
but then give you (for good measure?) all the text they can
find that contains any one of the words. How often do we get
a response that reads "24,560 documents found, displaying
the first 10?" It seems like a long time ago that there were
a few programs a user could buy to help poll several search
engines. But the programs were not much more customizable
than the search engines on the Web and quickly succumbed to
the "ask" and "mamma" type of engines. The world was too busy
making quick money by creating complex, animation- and video-loaded,
time-consuming, beautiful but hard-to-read pages and Web sites.
Many of these beautiful new Web sites couldn't be found easily,
because users had only the tools offered by the popular search
engines.
The new gifts of processor performance may be able to help
provide quality media at lower connectivity demands. Additionally,
high processor performance can increase user productivity
in text and image searches, thus removing some of the barriers
that prevent increases in general-purpose computer use. They
may help create virtual private networks (VPN) and distributed
storage that will make communications and databases secure,
easy to update, and almost impossible to eradicate.
As Intel and other semiconductor manufacturers take performance
beyond 2GHz, they may want to encourage development of a new
app that will make the Internet experience more efficient
and less costly. And in the process, they may shift some of
the revenue back to themselves.
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