The inexorable bang-per-buck conveyor belt

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

While I was packing away after last month’s CPU Megatest, I came across an old Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955, left over from a previous Labs. It runs at a blazing 3.46GHz, and when we reviewed it back in Issue 146 it was one of the fastest processors around. At around £650, it was also one of the most expensive.

I was curious to see how well this veteran CPU had aged (and it’s not like I had anything else to do this week), so I dropped it into our testing rig and kicked off the benchmarking process. A few hours later, the results were in: the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 had scored 1.19. That’s far from disgraceful, but today, you can get a CPU that achieves that sort of score for as little as £90. To put that into context, I’ve tweaked our CPU graph (click for full-sized version) to show how the 955 would fit into the mainstream market if it were launched today.

If you take any sort of interest in computing – and let’s face it, you’re reading the PC Pro blog – you’ll have seen similar scenarios play out many times before. I remember my father paying £100 (around £350 in today’s money) for our first family computer, a Sinclair ZX-80. A year later, the ZX81 appeared, costing half as much and bringing numerous technological advances, including floating point arithmetic and a screen that didn’t go blank every time you pressed newline.

A more recent example: three months ago, I reviewed the Samsung 1TB Spinpoint F hard disk. I liked the drive, but felt that at £185 it was too expensive. Today that drive is selling for £96. Now it looks like a bargain – but of course in another few months we’ll be looking back at the days when we used to pay £100 for a terabyte drive and laughing at how naïve we were.*

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