from the ground up

[RobRich]

I want a motherboard/cpu combination that runs the front side bus at the same speed as the cpu, thus yielding a cpu with a multiplier of one. Then scrap current PCI/ISA/AGP standards, and move them to a standard capable of running at the full FSB.

Also, I want the mass production of memory based hard drives. These RAM cards could finally end the major i/o bottleneck found in today's systems. A group in Europe has created a three dimensional memory model that would allow several hunderd gigabytes on a single chip setup, abut are limited to 100 mb/s sustained bandwidth (not good enough for system memory, but excellent for hdd i/o). Best part, these things are dirt cheap to manufacture in mass quanity. Current RAM drives cost many thousands, but these things cost around $50 to make.

[chipbgt]

Hardware would be my biggest change. I would have all standardized ports and connections, say firewire or usb..the hard drives, the cd roms, the mouse ports, printers, everything. More irq's would be nice, say, 400 or so http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif and everything would be hot-swapable(sp).

[richamies]

I'd make my new computer refuse to run anything that said Micro$oft.....

[jonathankeeping]

I think OS's should be hard coded into chips. This would mean that PC's would be up and ready to run as soon as you turned them on. The main bulk of the OS's would reside on the chip, while updates / drivers would remain on the HD. Also, I think all MOBO's should be designed to run two processers with two separte areas of RAM. 1 CPU and area of RAM solely for your OS and the other CPU and area of RAM for your other applications. Just think, Windows might even be able to multitask properly!!! Oh, and floppy disk drives. They need to be replaced with a newer standard. Zip LS-120 ANYTHING!!!

[Dominus]

The main bottleneck in computer systems is disk I/O. It's only running at 33-66mbps (theoretacally), while the rest of the computers bandwidth can be measured in hundreds of megs/s, or in GB/s (Athlon).

Fix that, and performance would skyrocket across the board.

[welsh wizard]

What I would want from a mother board design change.
1/ Bios that once it flahed can be jumpered so it can't be reflashed without putting jumper back on, stop those pesky viruses from writing rubbish to it.
2/ it's time we had at least a doubling of the irq's available if not quadruple.
3/ with the common use of Rewriters,DVD's fast access CDRoms, Zips ,multi harddrives, how about a couple more IDE ports as standard.
probably more but, these would do as a start.
http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif
WW

[cyphen]

just wondering - with all of the computer related talent here - how would you design a computer from the ground up - what would you change?
I'm asking because the computer industry is laden with ancient backward compatibility that i believe to be the cause of many problems. So if you could start again from scratch - what would you guys change - all the way from BIOS to x86 instructions to processor specs to software design and implementation and OS's.
For example - i'd like to see computers be infinitely expandable. (rather than expendable!) How about motherboards that could hook together so when new processors and motherboards come out - you just expand your current computer rather than replacing parts.
I'd be interested to hear some of the cool ideas you guys might have for the ultimate computer!

[daveleau]

My first change would be to expand the # of IRQs available in a system. 16 isn't enough. I'd also change the OS to a Linux type system because of stability (or Mac but with PC tweakability) with the compatibility of Win9x. I doubt this will happen soon...
Dave

[cyphen]

great replies, everyone. i especially like the Microsoft filter idea... http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif
How about this, too... an operating system that is built to evolve as hardware evolves - for instance, it has a variable bit width so when 64 bit processors come out, it's 64 bit ready, and 128, etc. Software could also be coded this way.

Definitely more IRQ's though! Or does anyone think there may be a different method of handling processor requests rather than irq's that can cause conflicts?

[SDT]

Hmmm. Software that is built to evolve as the hardware changes... 32 bit to 64 bit to 96 bit. REALLY scalable multiprocessors (like if you add a 2nd or a 3rd or a 12th processor you actually get 2x or 3x or 12x the processing power, or close to it). Sounds like OS400 to me.