Understanding Minimum Computational Requirement (MCR)
June 13, 2007 10:46 Filed in:
Technology 3.0
Ever notice that your fastest computer is the little one in your pocket?
Consider some of the daily tasks you need technology to accomplish, read e-mail, check your calendar, answer the phone, listen to a song. You can browse any e-mail in seconds, as long as you use your Blackberry. Similarly you can find and play any song or video in seconds, as long as you use your iPod.
Unfortunately, it typically takes longer to perform these "simple" tasks on your office desktop or laptop.
Although the computational capacity of
your office computer is higher than your Blackberry (about 25x),
the Blackberry is somehow better at meeting the computational
requirement of e-mail. Call the Blackberry an over achiever, but it
wastes much less of its Unit Computational Capacity (UCC) on
activity other than what you are using it for. In more technical
terms, your Blackberry is computationally more efficient at running
e-mail than your PC. It is able to dedicate more UCC to MCR or ...
more simply said, it wastes less of your time.
Before you can check your e-mail, your big, fast, office computer must go through a lengthy start-up process and then the e-mail program must go through its own start-up process ... before you can check a single message. After you've waited through a process of 1) loading an Operating System, 2) loading drivers, 2) initiating services, 4) authenticating security credentials, 5) checking for viruses, 6) loading a desktop explorer, 7) launching an e-mail program, and 8) checking for spam, ... you might think that 9) showing you e-mail is the absolute last thing your computer wants you to do ... and of course, you would be right.
The computational capacity of computer systems has grown each year since they were first invented. An Intel 386 PC that ran the Lotus' ccmail for Windows fifteen years ago has less than one hundredth (1/100th) the processing, RAM and disk capacity of a desktop PC running Microsoft Outlook today.
The computational requirement of software has grown as well. In 1993, an e-mail format was either rich text or plain text rendered in B&W, 4-bit grey or 8-bit color. Today there are additional HTML and embedded Object formats and there is support for millions of colors.
But the computational requirement has not grown as much as computational capacity on our systems. Rather than walk through an arduous proof, consider again the Blackberry. With processing, RAM and storage capacity much closer to the 25Mhz Intel 386 than the modern PC, it supports both fast and reliable e-mail editing and review for all modern standards. If the computational requirement for e-mail had really grown by a factor of 100, it wouldn't be faster on a Blackberry. Given computational capacity required to simply load the Microsoft Outlook program (it requires four times more than the total storage on most Blackberries), it is safe to assume it would not even run. Given the capacity of a Blackberry vs a 386 PC, it is safe to assume that the computational requirement for e-mail has grown less than a factor of four (4x) over the same fifteen year period.
Thus a question that faces us is this, "If the computational capacity of computers has grown roughly (and we are using very rough science here) twenty-five times (25x) the computational requirement, what happened to all the excess capacity?"
A second and even more important question is this, "If our computers are spending 25x more resources on tasks outside the computational requirement, what impact is that having regarding the system's ability to perform the primary function?" Does this explain why a PC, with all its capacity sometimes more difficulty meeting the requirement?
Much of the answer to question 1 is in the second paragraph above.
to be continued
Before you can check your e-mail, your big, fast, office computer must go through a lengthy start-up process and then the e-mail program must go through its own start-up process ... before you can check a single message. After you've waited through a process of 1) loading an Operating System, 2) loading drivers, 2) initiating services, 4) authenticating security credentials, 5) checking for viruses, 6) loading a desktop explorer, 7) launching an e-mail program, and 8) checking for spam, ... you might think that 9) showing you e-mail is the absolute last thing your computer wants you to do ... and of course, you would be right.
The computational capacity of computer systems has grown each year since they were first invented. An Intel 386 PC that ran the Lotus' ccmail for Windows fifteen years ago has less than one hundredth (1/100th) the processing, RAM and disk capacity of a desktop PC running Microsoft Outlook today.
The computational requirement of software has grown as well. In 1993, an e-mail format was either rich text or plain text rendered in B&W, 4-bit grey or 8-bit color. Today there are additional HTML and embedded Object formats and there is support for millions of colors.
But the computational requirement has not grown as much as computational capacity on our systems. Rather than walk through an arduous proof, consider again the Blackberry. With processing, RAM and storage capacity much closer to the 25Mhz Intel 386 than the modern PC, it supports both fast and reliable e-mail editing and review for all modern standards. If the computational requirement for e-mail had really grown by a factor of 100, it wouldn't be faster on a Blackberry. Given computational capacity required to simply load the Microsoft Outlook program (it requires four times more than the total storage on most Blackberries), it is safe to assume it would not even run. Given the capacity of a Blackberry vs a 386 PC, it is safe to assume that the computational requirement for e-mail has grown less than a factor of four (4x) over the same fifteen year period.
Thus a question that faces us is this, "If the computational capacity of computers has grown roughly (and we are using very rough science here) twenty-five times (25x) the computational requirement, what happened to all the excess capacity?"
A second and even more important question is this, "If our computers are spending 25x more resources on tasks outside the computational requirement, what impact is that having regarding the system's ability to perform the primary function?" Does this explain why a PC, with all its capacity sometimes more difficulty meeting the requirement?
Much of the answer to question 1 is in the second paragraph above.
to be continued
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