Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia The New Conspiracy Theory

I was having a conversation with Ken (not his real name), an executive from one of the major semiconductor houses last week, and he offered an interesting sidelight to something all PC owners have observed.

It all started when I said that I had recently upgraded computers and switched from a 900-MHz P3 to a 2.42-GHz P4. Unlike most power users, I’m mostly a Word, Excel, and e-mail guy. I don’t get into heavy graphic editing programs, and I rarely do much with digital photographs other than inspect incoming contest entries and a few home snapshots. I’ve tried a bunch of demos and programs for assorted applications, but I rarely keep them on the system. Nonetheless, it seems that however conservative I am, the super-duper computers I buy become outmoded and slow after about three years of use. Consequently, I join the periodic upgrade bandwagon with everyone else.

Of course, we all know why this happens. I’ve mentioned in a number of editorials how new versions of bloatware obviously caused these problems and necessitated increasing processor speed. I was relating all this yet again when Ken impatiently interrupted my quite logical explanation and added an unbelievable enlightenment to the reason: "Nope! It’s a conspiracy between Intel and Microsoft! It’s the EDR!"

EDR? I was thinking to myself that I know about pipelined instruction processing, look-ahead caching, parallel processing, etc. What the heck is the EDR?

"I’m surprised you’ve never heard of the EDR." I wasn’t quite sure if he was serious or not, but I continued to listen. "EDR stands for Efficiency Degeneration Register. It’s something that Intel and Microsoft cooked up to keep their business rolling. Hidden inside every Intel processor there’s an EDR register. The EDR contains a negotiated starting efficiency and the rate at which Wintel has decided system efficiency should degrade. You might have bought a 2.42-GHz machine today, Steve, but a couple years from now it will seem like about a gigahertz.

"When you install the operating system and run the machine for the first time, Microsoft reads the EDR and puts it in the battery-backed BIOS as an efficiency-degeneration counter. From then on, every time your machine checks the date or you install new software, it decrements the counter. You’ve heard of built-in obsolescence haven’t you? Well, here’s how they guarantee it. The idea is that within a few years you’ll be at about 50% of what you started with. When you see that everyone else’s new machine is blazingly fast in comparison to yours, you’ll have to upgrade. Simple, sweet, and secret."

Certainly, if it had been a face-to-face conversation, my expression would have conveyed, "Are you nuts?" But, in this conspiracy-rich millennium punctuated by corporate lies and government excess, all patriots are supposed to turn and salute the Department of Homeland Security and believe that anything is possible. This was really farfetched. But, after 55 years of Area 51 fables, people relish the thought of a little intrigue at Microsoft. I laughed and continued to listen as he adamantly made his case for conspiracy.

"Remember all those demo programs you tried? It decrements the counter even if you uninstall it. If you’ve tried a dozen programs, it’s like still having them all bogging down your system. And, you want to know the real crime?" he persisted, "The Linux guys don’t have this problem. When you run Linux, it’s just as fast next year as today. It’s because Microsoft isn’t involved and Linux doesn’t read the EDR."

Of course, I didn’t counter with my theory that people with the intelligence and expertise to be using Linux weren’t the type to be installing Microsoft bloatware to begin with, and that’s probably why they didn’t notice big drops in efficiency. "Wow, Ken, that’s a tough one to swallow, but in deference to conspiracy-theory advocates, I’m sure they love it."

Of course, people who might believe all this rarely understand that correlation isn’t necessarily causation. It makes a great story nonetheless, and I thought that you might find it as humorous as I did. Do you have to worry that I might do something similar? I think you are OK until you suddenly find that your past magazine issues have faded because of disappearing ink and that we suddenly have a sale on back-issue CD-ROMs.

 

steve.ciarcia@circuitcellar.com

Published: July 2003