|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Road Hogby Mitch Stone, Editor/Publisher Imagine walking into an auto dealership with the mission of picking out a new mid-sized family car. You find the dealership is offering two models in the size, style and price range you prefer. In studying your two choices, you discover that the car on the right labors mightily to approach highway speeds, topping out at only 35-40 mph, and for that performance drinks a gallon of gasoline about every seven miles. In fact, the car on the right burns fuel so inefficiently, the engine come with an oversized cooling system attached awkwardly to the roof. A special engine temperature monitoring system on the dashboard warns of overheating, which is common occurrence with this car. The car on the left, by contrast, has enough horsepower to cruise along at 65 mph without difficulty, and at the same time will achieve the formidable fuel economy of 55 miles per gallon -- with no special cooling system required. Will wonders never cease? But even as you begin to gravitate towards the car on the left, the ever-smiling salesman grasps your shoulder, steering you in a not very gentle fashion towards the car on the right. "You wouldn't want to buy one of those," he says in his best conspiratorial tone of voice. "Why not?" you ask incredulously. "Well, as you can see, they are a bit more expensive," he replies, "and we just don't seem to sell very many of them. All things considered, we simply don't know how much longer we can justify carrying the model." You leave the dealership without buying either car, and feeling more than a bit perplexed. A few months later, when you finally buck up the courage to return to the dealership, you find that the car on the left has indeed vanished from the lot, just as the salesman intimated it might. So you drive away in your brand new fuel-gulper with the cooling system on the roof. "I'll be darned if the salesman wasn't right," you say to yourself as you drive off the lot. "I could have been stuck with a car that they stopped selling." Halfway home, the alarm on the dashboard sounds, "Warning! Engine overheat! Shut engine off immediately!" Dutifully, you pull over to the side of the road and stop the car. "That's life, I guess," you sigh, as you wait for the engine to cool down for the rest of the trip. And it's a good thing too -- you'll need plenty of time to rationalize plunking down your hard earned cash on this lemon. As you may have guessed, this is no mere fantasy, and this keynote is not about cars. Substitute microprocessors for cars in the above tale of woe, and you'll soon see that no less of an absurd situation is occurring in the computer industry at this very moment. It happens that a 300 mhz Pentium II processor from Intel burns up an astonishing 43.0 watts of electricity, a fact which only becomes significant when compared to the 5.7 watts consumed by the G3 PowerPC processors that lives under the hood of Apple's new Macintosh machines. That's a remarkable power consumption ratio of over 7 to 1. And as even Intel's own bench tests have confirmed, the 266 mhz G3 is over twice a fast as the Pentium II in many operations. So what, you ask? Microprocessor power consumption is no trivial issue -- it's the reason why the Pentium IIs don't appear in laptop computers, for one. For another, the Pentium's appetite for power has created a burgeoning after-market in internal temperature sensors, supplemental cooling units, and yes, overheating alarms for Pentium boxes. But it is not the purpose of this site to take Intel to task, though as the lower half of what's often called the Wintel Duopoly, they probably deserve it. No, Intel has been accused before of selling sizzle instead of steak, so there's really nothing new here -- just a slight variation on a familiar theme. We certainly can't stop Intel from advertising its products as though they were Nirvana in silicon, even if we wanted to, and without a doubt it is the duty of Intel's competition to get their message across to the public. What is also old news, but none the less disturbing for it, is the complicity of the media and the commercial corps in steering the public towards products with known handicaps, like the Pentium II. What we can condemn is the tendency of the press to ooh-and-ah on cue with each new Intel product announcement, even when these announcements are for products that may be substandard, don't exist, may not arrive for years, or may even fail to appear in the marketplace altogether. Shame on the media for not being more skeptical and probing in their analysis. And shame on salespeople, who either don't know any better, or won't admit that they do know better. And shame on us for letting them get away with it. So the next time a salesman grasps you on your shoulder, smiles that smile we all know so well, and points you towards that "car on the right," simply inform him "thank you very much, I can decide for myself." You can, you know. You really can. Previous keynotes: Hip-Hip-Hooray? (20 May 1998) Published: 16 February 1998 |
I hope we shall... crush in its birth the
aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already
to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid
defiance to the laws of our country. THOMAS JEFFERSON |
|||
 |
||||||
|
|
