I Smell A Wumpus!

My new computer is getting close to fully configured now. So I'm starting to see the effect of the extra 1000 marketing megahertz. What, you're not familiar with marketing megahertz? Well, they're closely related to MIPS, which used to be a common way to measure the speed of a processor. MIPS used to stand for Millions of Instructions Per Second, but then got redefined as Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed. After MIPS died people seemed to become enamored of megahertz and then gigahertz, largely thanks to the efforts of Intel.

Unfortunately for consumers, megahertz (MHz) and gigahertz (GHz) are no more useful than MIPS for figuring out how fast a processor, or a system, will be. AMD decided to get off the treadmill by naming their processors with an equivalency number. So an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ was supposedly equivalent to an Intel Pentium 4 running at 2 GHz (2000 MHz). The AMD Athlon XP 2000+ itself ran at something like 1600 MHz.

Unfortunately for AMD, the game has changed again. It turns out that processor makers are now up against the wall on MHz/GHz and are having to do other things to make their processors and systems better. Since MHz and GHz are no longer the dominant differentiators, Intel has dropped them from processor names and AMD has been left with a marketing megahertz number on their processor that doesn't really help much in figuring out which Intel processor to compare it to.

But I digress (though, to be fair, isn't that the point of a blog?). Anyway, my old system had an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ running at 1600 MHz or so while my new system has an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ running at 1800 MHz or so. It's only about 200 MHz faster in some oscillator, but it's a whole thousand more in marketing MHz!

Of course, the interesting question is, is it any faster? Well, I dunno. Downloads of stuff are still limited by my 1.5 Mbps DSL line. Uploads are even more limited by the 384 Kbps limit of my ADSL connection (why does no one call it ADSL anymore?).

OOH, ooh! I could try some games! Okay, I fired up adventure. I'm still clueless. How about wumpus? Wumpus still gets me every time except for the times I fall into a bottomless pit. Screw the games. Business apps? Darn, doesn't seem to echo my keystrokes any faster in OpenOffice.org than it did before. I know, personal communications! Crap! AIM (actually, gaim) doesn't seem any faster. Still limited by my typing, network, AOL's servers, and the attentiveness and typing skills of the people I converse with.

So what was the point of this upgrade? Well, for one thing, the old system was breaking somewhere in the memory interface and was locking up far too frequently. Running Linux, I'd gotten used to not dealing with the BSODs and lockups that still plague my wife's computer. And second, I couldn't stand the thought of spending a couple hundred dollars and not getting something that was, at least theoretically, faster. And this one is, theoretically, faster. By 1000 marketing megahertz.