With
Pentium Pro,
the endless-upgrade cycle has finally tripped over its own feet
by Alan Zisman (c) 1996 First published
in Business in
Vancouver , Issue #323 January 2, 1996 High Tech
Office
column
For years,
the auto
industry profited by a neurotic market of millions of car owners
convinced
that if their car was more than a couple of years old, it was time
to trade up to this year's model. Nowadays, many people feel that
the makers of high-tech hardware and software are trying for a similar
marketing model, offering more-or-less annual software upgrades, each
requiring more and more powerful hardware just to keep the new version
running at the same speed as last year's model.
Sure, new
operating
systems and applications have more bells and whistles than the ones
they're replacing, but are you actually making use of the improvements
in your office? Or are you still doing the same tasks in pretty much
the same way, but using new versions of your hardware and software
to do it?
For many
users, the
problem with the upgrading trend became all too apparent when Microsoft
decided to market its replacement for the Windows 3 software series
as Windows 95 rather than Windows 4.0. Users began to wonder whether
this implied a Windows 96, Windows 97, and so on, with annual pressure
to upgrade. (Even without date-stamping its software, Corel
has made the spring release of new versions of its Corel Draw graphics
product an annual event.)
Maybe your
business
can justify upgrading software every year or so, upgrading hardware
every two to three years, and paying on-going training costs with
every change. But compulsive upgraders now have a problem: take
Microsoft's
newest operating system (Windows 95), and add it to hardware giant Intel's
newest computer chip (the Pentium Pro, aka P6) and suddenly you get a
combination that runs slower than last year's models. It's a
difficult situation to justify to the company accountants when you try
to explain why you need that new machine.
Here's the
problem:
the Pentium Pro performs at its best with operating systems and
software
designed to work 32 bits at a time. So if you're using operating
systems
such as IBM's OS/2 WARP or Microsoft's Windows NT, or various
flavours of UNIX, which are all pure 32-bit systems, the Pentium Pro
flies: it's as much as double the speed of the current generation
of Pentium chips, and significantly faster than Apple and IBM's
Power PCs and Power Macs.
Windows 95
is advertised
as a 32-bit operating system, but it was also designed for maximum
compatibility with older, 16-bit DOS and Windows programs, so it
includes
a great deal of 16-bit code. Run Windows 95 on your brand-new (and
expensive) Pentium Pro, and that 16-bit code slows the processor down
enough that it runs more slowly than an older (and much cheaper)
Pentium.
For the
first time,
you won't get the best performance by putting the latest software
onto the latest hardware. So if you're running Windows 3-anything
or Windows 95, you've got no reason to upgrade your hardware to a
Pentium Pro machine. And if you have purchased this supposedly
latest and greatest hardware, you may want to avoid those software
generations. For maximum performance, you'll want to load OS/2 or NT
or UNIX onto your Pentium Pro--but with any of those choices, you'll
find that your current collection of 16-bit programs may simply not
work.
Macintosh
users faced
a similar dilemma two years ago when the new, hot Power Macs also
needed new software versions to take advantage of their power. The
difference there was that Apple produced both the hardware and the
operating-system software. As a result, it has worked hard at producing
"native" Power Mac versions of its system software, and has encouraged
independent software developers to get Power Mac software products
out to market.
In the
current situation,
the hardware producer (Intel) and the software producer (Microsoft)
seem to be at loggerheads. Intel claims not to be concerned, hoping
that over time, more and more of Windows 95 will be replaced with
pure 32-bit software code or that purely 32-bit Windows NT will
eventually
be the operating system running on most desktops.
These
scenarios may become
reality in the long run, but for today, while a powerful Pentium Pro
machine may be a good choice for a network server running Unix or
NT, it will be hard to justify for the large numbers of business or
home desktops running Windows 95 or Windows 3.1. And if that slows
down some compulsive upgrading, that might not be such a bad thing.