Sidney

Both AMD and Intel aren't making good profit from Quad; the price will get back up. Dual and single core will remain mainstream for another two to three years at least. How many people own CS3 at this forum?

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lazyman

Opteron 165 (2) @2.85 1.42 vcore AMD Stock HSF + Chill Vent II

Kougar

There was an article linked from Madshrimps a little while ago regarding Microsoft Office performance, going from 97 to the current Office 2007 suite. The simple sheer program complexity/weight has greatly increased with every new revision, and in many cases completely offset gains made from the performance difference from Pentium II's to Core 2 Duos. That's quite a large range of performance, yet MS Word or Excel files still open up slightly slower today than they did back with Office 97 on a PII or PIII.

My point is that program code/complexity is already an issue, that mess of code is going to need still further increases in hardware to offset the lost efficiency. DualCore support helped alleviate this, so it was embraced. I don't see this tendline changing anytime soon, although I would bet it will take longer for the jump to Quads, compared to the already made jump to Duals.

Sidney, I own Photoshop CS3 because I got tired of the **** that was Adobe Photoshop Elements. Don't get me ranting about Elements, the software made a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 feel like a 500Mhz Thunderbird and still had problems/bugs.

Rutar

Lost Planet and Supreme Commander have catched up with quadcores


I think, the challenge for the next Office is to keep on track, reduce a few functions and focus on speed.

Sidney

Great, at least we have one.

I own a copy too, not installed because I don't have the need until I get myself a better camera.

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lazyman

Opteron 165 (2) @2.85 1.42 vcore AMD Stock HSF + Chill Vent II

wutske

Hardware manufacturers don't have to make faster hardware to compensate messy code, programmers should write code as optimal as possible. Even tough mainstream program get more complex, they still don't need multiple cores to run smooth. Multiple cores are only advantageous when you have to process a huge amount of data or have to calculate complex algorithms (best example is video processing, complex algorithms have to be applied on a huge amount of data).
Office doesn't use heavy algorithms or has to process a lot of data .

jmke

tell that to Microsoft;

Win2000+Office2000 runs faster on older hardware than Vista+Office2007 on newest hardware

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Kougar

That's exactly my point. If nothing else, ever increasing software bloat will force common applications to migrate to quads eventually. It's happened to duals already.