At 10:00 AM -0800 11/30/98, lcs Mixmaster Remailer wrote:
There used to be a rule of thumb that you'd want roughly a megabyte per megahertz. Today, with our 200+ MHz processors, we tend to have considerably less memory than this. My Gateway PC from a couple of years ago came with a 200 MHz Pentium Pro but only 32 MB of memory.
Most PCs today are not well balanced architecturally. They should really have a couple hundred megabytes of memory. Memory is cheap enough today that this can be added, but the motherboard configuration may limit the amount. If you had this much memory, swapping to disk would be a smaller problem.
Some of us are more balanced... My G3 Powerbook has 160 MB of RAM for a 240 MHz processor. My recollection is that "Amdahl's Law" was only a rule of thumb within an order of magnitude or so. I'm not a computer architect, so I don't what a good ratio today would be. --Tim May "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, just the way the President did." ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments.