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As it happens, Intel announced its new Pentium II cartridge last week, so there is joy in the streets of Redmund and Sunnyvale. (Those are places with lots of software companies.)
Another chip means another round of you-gottas. And without you-gottas, the tech world is a lifeless world indeed.
What's a you-gotta? A you-gotta is anything that, appearing in your midst, forces you to change everything else in your midst. If the you-gotta is A, you will soon be buying B, C, D through Z.
It isn't like, oh boy, I can run my present programs super-fast on the sensational, sleek new Pentium II. It's more like, oh no, now I-gotta buy new everything.
Admit it, Microsoft, you're revving up a new operating system in the hangar, you devils. And once you launch that baby, every line of code on the planet becomes obsolete overnight. Don't blame the folks at Microsoft, though; they are recidivists. Blame yourself.
How dare you send that money to an orphan in Sao Paulo when it could be doing so much more good paying tech support people in Armonk (that's where IBM is headquartered) to talk you down from your very own PL (personal ledge). You will only hear from the orphan on holidays. But you will be talking to tech support once a month, in two and a half hour increments, forever.
This, for instance, is my third major-generation Intel chip column, and it fits perfectly with Moore's Law, the formula that says that every 18 months chips double in capability without costing more. Figure that out, it means I have been writing this column for (removing mittens to perform computation) 4.5 years. That's exactly how long I have been tending this little fire.
Fifty four months ago I was insecure and took pains to point out how many transistors were embedded in the first Pentium chip, and a little about the dynamics of the logic circuitry. I can tell you with some certainty that there are lots more transistors in the Pentium II (hundreds more) but all you really need to know is that it is an extension of the Pentium Pro chip, with MMX features, for displaying graphics faster.
Do not be misled by the name. Pentium II does not fit into the slot your Pentium I fits into. So if you want one, you-gotta buy a whole new computer.
Intel says that is a false deduction. The last thing they want to do is sell this breakthrough chip to plain-Pentium people like yourself. They're certainly not trying to "whet your appetite" with the current advertising and promotion blitz. Heaven forfend. The new chip is exclusively for high-level, mission-critical, white-lab-coat-wearing business applications, and that's that.
But wait a minute. Didn't they say that about the other two Pentiums? And then, "bowing to public demand," they began rushing the new breed of supermachines to consumer outlets?
No, we must be misremembering. Reports that Gateway, Dell, IBM, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Micron, Packard Bell, NEC, Acer, Digital and AST are all rushing to put Pentium II boxes on superstore shelves by summer's end are -- well, they're just preposterous.
And hey, already the company is conceding that the chip isn't perfect. It's having problems with the same area it had problems with four years ago -- floating point logic. This is the part of the chip that calculates very large numbers involving decimal points. Intel's floating point pratfalls spawned jokes in 1993 like:
Q: Why didn't Intel call the Pentium the 586?
A: Because they added 486 and 100 on the first Pentium and got 585.999983605.
The current spate of floating point errors, occurring most often when rounding off large numbers into integers, is not news, Intel insists, because no chip is perfect. You can't miniaturize umpty kazillion transistor equivalents on a wafer of silicon the size of a playing card without putting the squeeze on a few integers. Only God is perfect.
To be on the proactive side (i.e., to beat the Greek chorus of Internet hecklers to the punch) Intel has named its new error "The Flag Erratum." Word on the street is that Robert Ludlum had a hand in the naming process.
Anyway. I got an e-mail from my friend Smitty last week. After years of faithful upgrades, he is throwing in the towel.
"This is my last computer," he declared of his trusty 5-year old Zeos 486-66x2. "Even if I live another 50 years, I'm drawing the line. I refuse to be taken in ever again by this flimflammery." (Like they'll still be selling floppies for his 3.5" drive in the 2030s.)
"Smitty," I told him, "you sound so bitter. Don't you know computing just keeps getting better? And you would miss out on all the excitement? This is a bullet from the future, and it's got your name on it. Hey, buddy -- you gotta believe." x
Michael Finley is co-author with Harvey Robbins of Why Change Doesn't Work.Visit Michael Finley at his home page, or e-mail him at mfinley@mfinley.com ALIGN=LEFT> To contact Mike Finley ...
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