The Scalability Problem

  • Authors:
  • Dean Macri

  • Affiliations:
  • Intel

  • Venue:
  • Queue - Game Development
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Back in the mid-1990s, I worked for a company that developed multimedia kiosk demos. Our biggest client was Intel, and we often created demos that appeared in new PCs on the end-caps of major computer retailers such as CompUSA. At that time, performance was in demand for all application classes from business to consumer. We created demos that showed, for example, how much faster a spreadsheet would recalculate (you had to do that manually back then) on a new processor as compared with the previous year's processor. The differences were immediately noticeable to even a casual observer - and it mattered. Having to wait only 10 seconds for something that previously took 20 or more was a major improvement and led many consumers and businesses to upgrade their PCs.