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player ready...Submitted for your consideration, friends and neighbors, here is the long-awaited arrival in the Windows world of the first consumer-oriented 64-bit laptop computer.
Say howdy to the eMachines model 6810 notebook with the Mobile AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor.
Long-awaited? You can say that again on the PC side of the aisle.
Apple gave us 64-bit computers with the G5 more than a year ago, and we’ve been hearing ever since promises from Intel and AMD that a PC with 64 bits instead of 32 bits was imminent.
We waited month after month as ship dates slipped like a sidewinder in wet sand.
AMD got there first and now is putting the 64-bit technology in Gateway’s home/small business line of eMachines laptops, starting with the 6810.
Actually, you might compare this spanking new arrival to an atheist at his own funeral–all dressed up with no place to go.
We’re probably on the verge of a great migration from the long-time Pentium-type 32-bit microprocessors to a new generation of 64-bit chips that can flush data back and forth from the motherboard to the memory chips four times faster.
But it is essentially true that there is no software available to take advantage of the speed boosts that promise to revolutionize memory-intensive tasks like rendering multimedia productions, creating and manipulating CAD engineering diagrams, and playing games with more realistic environments and enhanced game options.
We’ve all been around long enough to recall wave after wave of planned obsolescence and resulting buyer remorse throughout the history of personal computing.
The Intel 8088 was the world’s fastest computer one day and a weak sister compared to the Intel 286 the next day. The 286 was eclipsed by the 386, leaving buyers of $5,000 desktops based on 286 ruing the day they bought too soon. Then came the 486, leaving 386 buyers in the dust. About 18 months later everybody had to have a Pentium, the name picked by Intel in lieu of 586.
Soon Pentium was diminished by the arrival of Pentium II which was blitzed by Pentium III which was blown out of the water by Pentium 4.
Then the industry dropped those labels and gave us buyer remorse based on chip speeds. We started in the 300 megahertz neighborhood and then moved to 700 mHz and maybe 18 months later to the 1-gigahertz chip speed.
Silicon ceiling near
Now we’re on the verge of 4 gHz chip speeds, and everybody pretty much agrees we’ve hit a kind of silicon ceiling.
The writers of software have utilized the 32-bit hardware until they have wrung every bit of possible performance out of them. Games cannot get much faster, Photoshop users cannot manipulate any bigger high-resolution TIFF files and scientists already are squeezing out fractals and other displays as fast as the 32-bit chips can accommodate.
All of those esoteric things can work much better in a 64-bit word. Think of it as two hoses, the first 1 inch wide and the other 4 inches wide. Microsoft explains that its version of Windows XP written for 64-bit chips can address memory banks as large as 16 gigabytes, compared to the 4-gb limit for 32-bit XP operating systems.
Microsoft also says it will continue to create 32-bit software in tandem with its lines of 64-bit programs.
So, you say, if we don’t need to do those supercomputing-type things, why consider updating our home and office machines with 64 bits? The reason is that it’s only a matter of time before all of our 32-bit software is redone as 64-bit code.
We lived through this same dynamic a decade ago when we moved from the 16-bit standard to 32 bits and were dismayed to find that we could only use our old 16-bit programs by using software emulators that slowed it down. The fact is that when one shops for a computer right now, the specter of the 32-to-64 switch is going to loom large whether we need it or not.
Dressed for the future
Which brings us to the 6810, all dressed up with very fast 64-bit hardware but with no software to benefit yet. It runs 32-bit stuff as fast as any other machine because unlike the shift from 16 to 32 bits, AMD built a 32-bit feature into the 64-bit architecture.
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At $1,499 for its high-end features, this is a low-priced laptop with a superb 15.4-inch screen, 512 megabytes of memory, a 60-gb hard drive, the latest Radeon 9600 video card with television capabilities and most other features in the best desktops now on the market.
It includes slots on the side for the small memory cards used in digital cameras, MP3 players, cell phones and such. It bristles with 4 USB 2.0 ports and 1 FireWire connection.
Rated at 2 gHz, that AMD 3200+ chip includes AMD’s version of hyperthreading, and so performance is right up to par for any software you care to load on and fire up.
Above all, this 6810 should be pretty much bulletproof against buyer remorse when the first 64-bit software comes down that 4-inch pipe.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.