A salesman was showing me a Home PC that looks pretty sharp (Home MPC P200). 200Mhz proc. 512KB pipeline burst cache, 32 MB EDO RAM 2.5 GB Hard Drive,Advent speakers, 2MB EDO RAM, 17 inch monitor......a bit pricey though at $2899......what does all that stuff mean, anyway?

Okay, well, right on your CPU chip, you've got what's called the primary or main cache. This sucker doesn't hold much, but what it DOES hold, it can read very fast. I guess that could be kinda like the track that your CD player is currently playing. Now, in between your primary cache and your main memory can be a secondary cache. This reads information more slowly than your primary cache, but it's a lot quicker than fetching a different CD from the magazine. It's kinda like maybe a different track on the same CD that's playing right now. On a Pentium processor, they use a pipeline burst cache for the secondary cache. And, obviously, the bigger that sucker is (within reason, and up to the speed at which all this information can get checked, transferred, and read and all that), the better. Now, what's this "pipeline" shit, anyway?

Well, a pipeline burst cache is a synchronous cache built from "pipelined" SRAM (static random access memory)-called "static" because it will retain a value as long as power is supplied, unlike dynamic random access memory (DRAM) which must be regularly refreshed. It'll still lose its contents when the power is switched off (as opposed to ROM). SRAM is faster than DRAM but it's more expensive, so it's used for the most speed-critical parts of a computer (like cache memory).

Anyways, a pipeline is a sequence of "stages" which performs a task in several steps (like an assembly line in a factory). Each little unit takes inputs and produces outputs which are stored in its output buffer. One stage's output buffer is the next stage's input buffer. This arrangement lets all the stages work in parallel (which is a lot faster than if each input had to pass through the whole pipeline before the next input could enter).

Now, the tricky part is to get the stages synchronized so that the different inputs don't interfere with each other. You only get full efficiency if you can fill and empty at the same rate you can process.

Okay, so, I could go on and talk about how a synchronous pipeline has a master clock and each stage has to complete its work within one cycle (the slowest stage determines the minimum clock period), as opposed to an asynchronous pipeline which requires "handshaking" between stages so a new output is not written to the interstage buffer before the previous one has been used. But then I'd have to get into clock speeds, and cycles, and how the first 8 bytes of data are transferred in 3 CPU cycles, and the next 3 8-byte pieces of data are transferred in one cycle each, and....

Well, odds are you're not really all that interested, and really I made most of that stuff up, and, hell, I'm just a dumb figment of somebody else's imagination anyway.

Let's see. $2899 seems quite expensive, even for all the goodies you mentioned. I think you can do lots better. The 17-inch monitor is gonna nail you for a bundle, as are the name brand speakers. For the amount of time you're able to spend in front of the thing, it seems rather pricey. I'd do one hell of a lot of looking around if I were you. You might also wanna be on the lookout for one of your colleagues who wants to upgrade his recently purchased machine for something more reflective of his "manhood." Odds are you can get something pretty cheap. As far as brandnames go, I don't know as it's all that important who puts their name on the case.

Look for how the memory (that 32 megs of EDO) is configured. Can you add more without taking some out? Must you add it in pairs? How much room is there to expand (PCI, ISA, that kind of stuff). Most of the "$7,000 worth of software titles" in the package they rave about is crap. It comes without documentation, and often is only a "special edition" (AKA, not the full version). Figure out just what you wanna use the thing for. I mean, if you're gonna be using a CAD program, you might notice the difference between a 75 MHz, and a 200 MHz Pentium Pro, but to surf the web a little and do some word processing? Probably not. You don't need a three-thousand dollar CD player, ya know? Most importantly, whatever you buy, make sure you point out to your wife that it's not for you, it's for the children. And who knows how badly scrimping now will stunt their intellectual and social development?