Not fast enough for you?
If you want to enjoy your SimCity, you better own a Cray, otherwise, the response might be a tad sluggish:
Scott Evans agreed. The Dallas-based IT manager recently purchased SimCity 4 thinking that his Athlon 1900 with 1.5 GB of memory would be more than adequate. Instead, he found that after playing for a while, the game ran so sluggishly he could no longer enjoy it.
Let's propose a distributed parallel processing center for games, say, based in Costa Rica, or Colombia. We can connect that thing using a T3, which we will dedicate to our higher purpose, of course, and then establish a data pipe between a humongous Linux cluster in charge of processing the info for all the players and the corresponding actions in their screens. The fee would be a measly $5 per moth, so as to cover connection costs, and since it is Costa Rica we could have PhDs running the center for a fraction of the cost. Rent would be only about US$5000 a month, but instead of charging this to the players, we would have a captive audience for Corporate Sponsored Buildings on the City.
Soon after reaching the 100.000 player, the center would be self supporting, and then we would be able to move to higher and better things.
Beats having to pay for upgrades, requires DSL or cable connection, and needs a licensing agreement with EA and a dose of reality.
Not appearing soon on your desktop, but we may dream.