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The canonical solution to this problem is not to buy absolute top-of-the-line hardware; it's seldom good value for money. (Yeah, I know, sometimes you just got

• hga 17y ago
  I've generally found myself satisfied by looking at a price-performance graph and buying the processor just before the knee. Sure, I'd like more CPU, but up to now more memory and disk have been the better tradeoffs. Especially memory: there are some things that just aren't practical when your working set gets too large (e.g. you start constantly paging), whereas a somewhat slower CPU just requires a bit of patience for what I do (which isn't number crunching or anything else that keeps my CPU pegged). All that said, the next major machine I build should be in 2011-12 and I'm really looking forward to having bunch of cores with more cache than, say, the 16MB of RAM I bought in 1991 for my 486 Windows machine. As it is now, wouldn't it be hard to buy "normal" CPU that doesn't have at least as much cache as the address space of a PDP-10 (18 bits of 36 bits words, or a megabyte of 9 bit bytes)? And cache has become the new RAM, RAM the new disk, and disk the new tape. Wild times for someone who started out with punched card FORTRAN on an IBM 1130 (64KB max, more likely a lot less, 1-10 MB disk, probably closer to the former).