Every time I buy new servers, I'm shocked as to how fast they are. At work we've just specced out a few 2x quad core Xeon servers. That's 8 cores per server all clocked at the same speed as the last set of dual-core servers - it is insane. I know that as a computer scientist I should be fully aware of Moore's law - as Wikipedia puts it:
Expressed on a shorter timescale, however, Moore's Law equates to an average performance improvement in the industry as a whole of close to 1% per week.
I urge you all to upgrade your hardware, you'll be impressed as to how fast it'll be. To be honest, we really need some sort of subscription service for servers: "I'll buy X times the same fixed price server every six months".
The flip-side of this observation is that we bought our largest slab of servers at $work in 2003. Intel Xeons running at over 2GHz, 2-4 Gb of RAM, fast SCSI disks... and they are still "fast enough".
The idea of upgrading them is nowhere on the radar yet. Moore's law has sort of become irrelevant.
Although my own PC could be upgraded and I wouldn't mind. 1.3GHz is slow.
