[kochi_hw_club] Black Computers Faster - It's Official!
- From: Sameer Thahir <sameerthahir@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: kochi_hw_club@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 May 2004 12:39:52 -0700 (PDT)
dear hardware club members
sorry for the long transition period , some
communication problems
anyway heres something strange
black computers run faster
dont believe it see it for urself
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Black Computers Faster - It's Official!
Confirming the suspicions of computer makers and users
down the years (largely unvoiced for fear of public
ridicule), a new study has confirmed that colour is a
powerful factor in computer performance.
One of the most closely guarded secrets of high
performance computer manufacturers is that a simple
change in the colour of a computer's case, from the
regulation beige to jet black, has a significant
impact on the performance results. Both ordinary
instruction per second and floating point results show
a boost from 7 to 16 per cent, with graphics
performance following suit.
This is not news to anyone involved with high-powered
machines. Think about it. If you've ever been in a
room full of fast workstations, how many of them are
beige? The NeXT might not have been very popular, but
it was certainly fast, and what colour was it? Matte
black. What colour's the monster machine that sends
this magazine's pages to the imagesetter? Black,
naturally. What's the favourite case colour for laptop
manufacturers always trying to squeeze the last ounce
of performance out of their miniaturised creations?
Black. What colour was the Sinclair ZX81? Black. Well,
three out of four ain't bad.
/////////////////////
New study
Dr. Amanda Butts, from the Nimbin-based Centre for
Applied Pharmaceutical Research, recently released a
research paper on the subject. In controlled tests
where 30 computers ran benchmarks for one week, 10
with beige cases, 10 with black cases and 10 with no
cases at all, the black computers consistently beat
the beige ones and the caseless machines' results
oscillated around the beige machines' scores.
"Modern computing," said Dr. Butts, "has long since
passed the point where individual bits of storage or
operations per second of processor speed make any
difference. In the olden days, when a fast processor
did 500 operations per second and a kilobyte was a lot
of RAM, case colour was an undetectably small factor
in computer performance. The fact that older computers
were often built in open plan racks, homebuilt cases
or other peculiar enclosures contributed to the
paucity of real data on case colour effects - in the
absence of a case, a user with a black T-shirt on
could have had some effect but probably not enough to
measure.
"Let's face it, there just wasn't enough to work with.
"But these days hard drives run to hundreds of
megabytes, procesors do scores of millions of
instructions per second and eight or more megabytes of
RAM is common."
//////////////////
The most logical explanation for the DCC (Dark Case
Colouring) effect relates to the well-accepted effects
of computrons, the elementary quanta of information.
Molecules in a solid object move more rapidly when
heated, and, eventually, the object melts. The melting
is caused by the loss of computrons, driven off by the
heat; without the computrons and their information on
atomic matrix location, the atoms don't "know" where
they're meant to be. This is why computers need fans,
and big computers need air-conditioned rooms; if they
were allowed to get too hot they'd lose computrons and
stop working (they'd never actually melt, though; once
the computrons start to boil off, the computer shuts
down). The use of computron beams for cooling, or the
imposition of order on chaotic systems is still in the
experimental stage.
Interestingly, it appears that the benefits of DCC are
largely directed at Complex Instruction Set Computing
(CISC) hardware - processors like the Intel 80x86
series and the Motorola 680x0. Reduced Instruction Set
Computing (RISC) chips like the Digital Equipment
Corporation Alphas used in Silicon Graphics
workstations have been demonstrated to benefit more
from pastel shades, particularly mauve. It could be
that processor complexity is directly linked to the
spectral position of the ideal case colour; the RISC
chips' comparatively simple architecture puts them at
the top (violet) end of the visible spectrum, whereas
the CISC chips' greater detail pushes them right off
the top of the visible range into the ultraviolet (UV)
and beyond - which, of course, appears to the naked
eye to be black.
/////////////
Spectrograph analysis of the radiated energy from
black CISC computers will of course prove or disprove
this hypothesis, but it raises some other important
questions - can UV radiation be implicated in the
reported incidents of dangerous radiation emissions
for computers, and could a UV-emissive coating applied
to a standard beige or other coloured case provide the
accelerative properties of a black case to users of
other machines?
It's also interesting that the complexity-modulated
DCC hypothesis appears to hold even in the case of
mechanical equipment - for example automobiles.
Compared with even a RISC CPU, a car is a very simple
system - larger and more varied, but with a simpler
schematic, even if you take into account the
low-powered processors in modern engine management
systems. This means the ideal colour for a car would
have to be lower in the spectrum than the ideal colour
for a computer - probably quite a bit lower, right
down at the red end. And we all know red cars go
faster!
///////////////////////////////
What you can do
It's clear that DCC is a real, measurable phenomenon,
and every computer user will naturally want to take
advantage of it. So what should you do?
Well, spraypainting your existing computer's case will
help, as long as you spray on the inside as well as
the outside, but a more elegant solution is to
purchase a purpose-built black case and transplant
your computer's innards into it. It's certainly
simpler than previous go-faster schemes -
refrigerating your computer room, spreading peanut
butter on your motherboard and so on.
If you try this out and get any results you'd like the
world to know about, tell us! We await with bated
breath some real-world tests of the theory.
bye
sameer
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