Rev it up, sweet memories

Just watched an episode of Modern Marvels, which dealt with the muscle cars of 50's and 60's. When an average working man could go out and buy a brand new 350 - 450 horsepower Pontiac or Chevy or Dodge for a mere $3000, which did not dent his wallet too much.

Some 50 and 60-year old guys talked sentimentally about those times, recalling the best bang for buck cars the automotive industry has seen in a century. I guess it is the feeling that once you could have cutting edge power at your fingertips, cheap and cool, which brings bitter-sweet tears in the eyes of those guys.

I can't help but draw parallels with the modern computer.

Remember these days well, my friends, cherish the old Opteron 144 (1800MHz @ 3000MHz), the A64 3000+ (1800 MHz @ 2700 Mhz), the Athlon XP 2500+ Barton (1833MHz @ 2200 MHz), the P4 Northwood (2600MHz @ 3600 MHz) and the new Core 2 Duo E6300 (2x 1862MHz @ 2x 3200 MHz). These are the processors that cost very little buck for the bang they provide. A little overclocking and you can have a $150 CPU that wastes the $999 XTREME monstrosities.

Remember these good times, for it may not always be so.
There's talk of the new AMD/ATI Fusion CPU, the one that is supposed to become modular. That's it, then. 2 cores for low end, 4 cores for midrange and 8 cores for high-end. And no matter how hard you pump those 2 cores, THEY WILL NEVER TOP THE 8 CORES. Never.

The future looks bleak.