Asides from the obvious (lewd) ones which I will not go into I am dreaming of an i7 Core with USB v3.0. Yup, those are the two biggies for me. Of course gratuitous amounts of memory (4+ gigabytes, which means i would need a 64bit OS which again means i would need a realtively powerful [or at least new] computer), a really fast hard drive etc but right now I need a fast processor and speedy external storage.
I am working on three huge tasks which require CPUs of the workhorse variety.
Task #1 Graphics: I have about 35,000 photos that I am sifting through and organizing. This involves everything from image stitching to geotagging to retouching to IPTC keyword tagging etc and in large batches.
Task #2 Audio: I have about 28,000 songs to sift through, the sifting is apparently the most laborious part as I have whole albums that I only one 2-3 songs out of but there is other stuff such as adding acoustical fingerprints, MusicBrainz IDs, finding duplicates, etc.
Task 3# Video: I have video from the internet, and tons of video from the past 8 years of digital camera ownership. I want to start chopping, cropping, combining, and editing this stuff into something watchable (to just string all the stuff together would be insanely boring to watch).
Geekness (techno geek, not the chicken head eating geek): This isn't a task but is a point dealing with techno-lust. I love linux, i don't use it nearly as much as i would like primarily because the majority of applications i need are windows only (though the things i use the most , like Opera, are also available in linux). There is a way to run two operating systems at once (wrap your head around that!) with virtualization but that requires heaps of memory and a hefty CPU doesn't hurt. As I alluded to previously a 32bit operating system has a 2 gigabyte memory limit, that is i don't think it can use more than 2gb of memory no matter how much memory you actually have installed so to run dual operating systems (running windows 7 inside of linux) would require alot of memory and in order to use all the physical memory installed you need a 64bit OS)... got it? Not to mention that alot of video/audio/graphic editing (especially batch editing) requires insane amounts of memory.
All of the above requires semi-to-very serious processing power (which the i7 will handily be able to provide) and serious storage (not to mention read/write speeds). A geek reading this might say “what about eSATA?!” but if you look at the USB v3.0 speeds (4gbit/sec) compared to eSATA II (3Gbit/sec) there is no comparison. Of course the biggest problems now are that
#2 USB v3.0 isn’t expected to be out en masse until mid 2010, Windows 7 doesn’t even have drivers for it yet.
As painful as it will certainly be I am thinking I need to hold off until the second quarter of 2010 at least before I get something. By then hopefully USB v3 will be out, prices will have come down, software support will be out (with major bugs fixed)… but damn that’s a long time to wait.
Posts
