I had to remove windows 8 to redo my laptop, but I might dual boot to have windows 8 back. mainly to test on, for I might in the future try and build a couple apps for the metro area. Secondly is for my kids to play the metro area available games.

I've seen it mentioned that the maximum WEI in win 8 has been raised to 9.9 instead of 7.9 as in Win 7, can you win 8 chaps confirm that?

Yup! Consider that confirmed! Not that my Win 8 install can even dream to aspire to licking the boots of a ghost of half of that number.

Thanks Dave, So the bar has been raised, I can see the possibility in the future of getting the memory, graphics and disk up to 9.9 but the CPU, that's going to take some doing and will require a new approach.

If we look back over Vista and Win 7 years its been the CPU score that has been the slowest to improve, you still can't get a CPU off the shelf that can hit 7.9 unless you massively overclock it and cool it with dry ice or liquid nitrogen 

Or that was the case the last time I looked into it which wasn't that long ago.

What about multi CPU boards 

Didn't that particular fad go away in the early to mid 90's? I seem to recall reading about Intel's "latest and greatest" MoBo, having 2 Pentium CPU's and a dedicated math co-processor all on one board, and I just drooled. And of course, there was the Connection Machine, back in the 80's. I wonder...

I think they were around quite a while after the 90s, but usually two or four CPUs and of course far too expensive for most people.

Hehe, I used to have a dual CPU mobo, it was two x Pentium 200 MMX CPU's, cost far too much to make and when I look back, it wasn't very good either, but that was the technology at the time.   

The problem with 2 or more actual CPU's is the power consumption, manufacturers want to be seen as green, it just kind of goes against the ethos I guess.   

Multi core in one CPU is way its done these days.   

I can see it now, in 2019... the Intel I256EG, with 256 cores, 6GHz clock, 512 L1 caches, all 1GB in size, and a 1TB L2 cache, 128 bit address buss, capable of accessing 16 petabytes of memory, and capable of multi-dimensional quantum processing. Windows 10 WEI score? 8.6

Quote6GHz clock

Dave I hope you are wrong on this part, I hoping for a minimum of 8-10GHz several years from now.

I almost built a dual core machine about 5 years ago. I decided against it for the total build cost would have been about $6k usd. The extreme series cpu's that the motherboard was made for was close to $1k apiece. I'm really glad I decided against that build, for multiple reasons.

At this point in time, chip manufacturers are rapidly approaching a barrier in physics that will be very difficult to get around. Between insane clock speeds, and ever diminishing circuit trace sizes, they're gaining less and less performance increases, for a variety of reasons. Primarily, though, is the problem that these smaller and smaller circuit traces (the connectors between transistors within the chips) are getting so small that their width is smaller than the wavelength of the signal it carries, and so these conductors can't carry the signals properly, because they attenuate (dampen) that signal, creating signal loss, and thus, data loss. I'm certain that someone will either find a way around the problem, or even come up with a totally different approach, but until then, we're still coming up fast on a currently impassible barrier.

BTW, this is one reason why CPU makers went to multiple cores on the same die. Rather than having one chip and trying to make it run faster, they just stack multiple chips together to do the same job. So now you have up to 8 "bucket brigade" operations that run a bit slower, instead of only one, which may run a little faster, but still can't handle the throughput of the 8.

I think it is about time they moved away from silicon, and find/use an better alternative.  I also always wondered what our WEI score on the cpu side would be for a human brain 

For most folks, probably in the range of 8.9-9.4 - I don't think that my Brother could even GET a WEI score, since the minimum is 1.0.

LOL Dave  , but I got to say ... I feel for your poor brother 

Quote from: sybershot on May 07, 2012, 03:21:38 AM
Dave I hope you are wrong on this part, I hoping for a minimum of 8-10GHz several years from now.

I wouldn't hold your breath on that speed Syber, well not for the average home user, the increased power problem arises when you start to clock the CPU at those kinds of speeds.

Unless they can go a lot smaller in transistor size, like Dave said, and we know they are reaching the limit there already.

The trend now is to make the CPU do more work per cycle rather than increase cycles, that and multi core on one die. 

I would like to see Intel release a CPU that doesn't have the graphics onboard and uses that space on the die for a few more cores, for people with mid to high end range graphics cards in their rigs its got to be a better way to go.

Come on Intel     

You're all thinking 'silicon' and the inherent problems of semi-conductors.

You need to be thinking 'graphene', a semi-metal. NS link here.

All semi-conductors have higher resistance the smaller they get (in the nano scale we're now approaching, at least). Graphene's resistance goes down at small scales. The main problem to a working technology is 'gating' graphene. The 'gate' current is still too high when the transistor is 'off'.
All materials have their natural working frequencies. Graphene's is in the 100-1000 GHz range. Fast enough?

Graphene transistors have been made but not perfected (1947 for the 1st semi-conductor transistor). Expect some hybrid tech in the next 10 years. Who knows after that?