Re: CPU Role in Printing Procedures

["Rafe B." <rafeb@channel1.com>]

At 07:55 PM 7/17/99 -0700, you wrote:
>I am planning to upgrade my PC to perform properly with a film scanner,
>Photoshop, and an Epson 1200 printer, using an AMC or Cyrix processer rather
>than a Pentium II or III. Can anyone tell me what disadvantages this may
>entail, based on personal experience?
>
>My thanks for any comments.


The Intel Pentium CPUs still have the best-
performing FPUs (floating point units) but
you can get a huge bang-for-the-buck from
the AMD K6-2 processors.

Or wait a short while for AMD's K7 chips,
which sound like they're going to be awesome.

Cyrix has announced its intention of getting
out of the Pentium-clone game, so these chips
are (or will be) getting scarce.  That leaves
AMD as Intel's sole competitor in this arena.

Graphics processing (as often as not) is done
with integer math, so floating-point performance
is not all that critical to applications like
Photoshop.  (Though certain plugins may use
the FPU more than the core program itself does.)

What's often overlooked though, are all the
other factors that influence the overall 
speed of a computing system.  The CPU is
only one part of the equation.  For example,
the amount of level-2 cache, the speed of
the memory bus, the amount of RAM and hard
disk space, the quality of the video board, 
etc., and so on.


rafe b.

-
Please: Stay on topic. Trim quoted messages.
http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions.