General computer questions need answered

[heffer]

1) When do you think we will see quad cores in laptops for consumers?

2) How much do hard drive speeds (5400, 7200, 10,000, SSD) impact a game's frame rate? Not installation or load times or anything like that, just in terms of frames/sec.

3) 90nm, 65nm, 45nm, When we talk about fabs what exactly are these numbers measuring? the diameter of the transistors, or the spacing between two adjacent ones or something else?

4) Core i7 will be multi-threaded, so does that mean a quad-core will appear to have 8 cores in Windows Task Mananger? and a server based octo-core will appear to have 16?

5) Does XP or Vista have a limit to how many monitors you can have? I want to buy a 790i 3-way SLI motheboard. But I won't be using it for SLI gaming, I plan to eventually have 5 monitors and an interactive tablet display hooked up to my machine. that means i'll need 6 DVI ports, which is why I need 3 video cards. Can this be done?

thanks.

 

[Lexluethar]

1) before next summer (2009)
2) generally speaking not much. If you are using a 5,400 RPM drive yes it will be a bit slower, but not much. Go with 7,200 and you'll be fine.
3)nano meters, and yes we are talking about the 'gateways' between each transistor. So the smaller the NM, the more transistors, equating to more processes within a given chip set. The trend now is smaller, and smaller chips cause less heat and more processing power in the same space. Soon you won't see chips much smaller because at a certain point we are talking about dyameters the size of atoms.
4)I do not believe so, multi-threading is a characteristic of a single processor to allow it to process multiple processes SIMILAR to multi-processing, but not as efficiently. Once we made multi core processors then multi-threading was obsolete because efficiency wise, you are already multi-processing, which was the goal of multi-threading.
5)not sure on this one, i know they both support multiple monitors, but how many is really up to the graphics card.

 

[wafflehammer]

there are already quads in some laptops..most cost like $3000 though