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1.6GHz Athlon Computers, Via Announces KT266 chips
GimpyAMD writes: " Sys has announced 1.6GHz desktop and workstation computers that use KryoTech's cooling process to achieve that clock rate with Athlons behind them. Apparently they will be out late October to November. Also, we have Via's press release on their KT266 chipset that supports DDRSDRAM ."
There are a wide variety of compute bound tasks. They are surely less than 1% of the market, but there are plenty of scientist/engineers would love to get a machine that could run their N hour jobs 60% faster.
God, nobody's going to understand that... ;) I need to go to bed.
My Freakin Blog
Oops, is that a spark???? BANG!
Oh, the humanity...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
The killer hardware would be to have a bank of 16 "serial ATA" ports with an asynchronous drive on each port. Of course I2O would likely be better still, but that seems pretty vaprous, certainly for the consumer market...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
"Most of the CPU power is outright wasted when it's spending it's interrupt time assortedly waiting for an IDE drive, a WinModem, and such. "
Most likely they'll use ATA100 drives. If you don't recall, from UDMA33 and up (UDMA66, ATA100), the cpu doesn't have to 'wait' on the drive like before. The controller can transfer directly to RAM and the CPU can occupy itself elsewhere, at least if it's a multitasking system.
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Hee-hee. You have no idea at all how underutilized the typical game-playing PC is
/strategy / flight simulator like Longbow spent more than half the processing power at the time on keeping track of the hundreds of units on the battlefield. Very little of the processing power was shown on the screen (but Voodoo sure made it look better!).
Most every computer on earth spends more time waiting for the user than vice-versa. So yes, almost all computers are "underutilized" if you mean that they don't run at 100% CPU 24 hours a day.
But yes, playing a game can max out many CPUs (though more recent processors have more headroom thanks to the advent of consumer-level 3d graphics chips to offload processing).
Heck, there are games on the five year old PlayStation that outgun high-end PC games, which is damn amazing considering that the PS has about 1/3 the graphics power of a Voodoo 1
It depends what games you're talking about -- graphics intensive games with little "math" behind them work great on consoles -- not much processing required beyond pushing polygons around.
But there is more to the game world than first-person shooters, and a persistent war
Tetris doesn't require a P3, and neither does Quake 3 (it requires a decent 3d card), but you'd be hard-pressed to make a "big world" type of game on a playstation because it's about more than graphics.
The original poster was correct, though, that games are what pushes the technology in computers (along with video). Not many other apps can actually hit 100% CPU on a P3, and have a customer base willing to shell out the cash to improve that.
I do 3d graphics and remember the bad old days of paying $1000 for an OpenGL card with 2 megs of memory (this was like 1997, not so long ago). Thanks to 3Dfx and the game market, every consumer has 10 times that power, and it's good for us all...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I can't wait until we get to 1.21 GHz.. then I can run around saying, "1.21 GHz? 1.21 GHz?! The only thing capable of producing that much power is a bolt of lightning!!"
1.21GHz!!
-Frijoles-
...and this is in reference to...what? The story is about a company that uses a cooling unit (likely 50-60Lbs and a 400W power sink in itself) almost the size of the PC to overclock an Athlon to 1.6 GHz. You want to lug that around for a laptop? I can see it now:
(On American flight 2603 to Little Rock)
Stewardess: Excuse me sir, but you'll have to put your "laptop" away.
Cecil: What? No way, lady, the guy next to me is using his! And he's only got a Tecra! Mine's a Sys Cold-Fusion!
Stewardess: I know, sir, but your computer is taking up the entire aisle.
Cecil. Computer? See, it fit's under the seat in front of me!
Stewardess: Oh? Is THAT why the upolstery is smouldering? And that battery pack above us...
Cecil: What? The lead-acid cells are 2 lbs under the storage capacity of the overhead bin!
Stewardess: Actually, we need to stow those in the hazardous waste container at the back of the plane.
Cecil: Great! No power! You have an adapter?
Stewardess: How much power do you need?
Cecil: Oh, about 1000 Watts
Stewardess: That's just about how much the generator puts out for the whole aircraft. Shut it down, sir.
Cecil: Awww, geez, it's such a nice laptop too. All the guys on Slashdot think so!
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
You left out games
Gamers arre the people how really push the emveope.
If it wasn't for games everyone would use a mac
http://Lenny.com
nobody said a 1.66 Ghz chip is targeted at consumers for speedier IMing or word processing.. think about it.
A 1.66GHz chip in a desktop? Who in their right mind would need that kind of computing power?
And nobody will need more than 640K RAM. Just ask Bill Gates.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I have had quite a few different Kryotech PCs in my house. I first ordered an 800. Within a week or two, either the mobo or the chip had fried. Because of their proprietary chip cage, that meant dragging the whole 85-lb thing up the stairs.
When they shipped my replacement, they sent me someone else's new 900 by accident, and graciously agreed to let me keep it at no charge. This worked for a while, and then mysteriously failed one night while I was out of town. It didn't POST at all.
I asked them to replace it under warranty and I'd pay the difference to upgrade to the new SuperG. Again, they were amenable to this, and my 1GHz was on its way.
I don't remember what happened this time, but it didn't work at all either. So they sent a replacement Super G, but the power supply was dead out of the box.
By this time, of course, room-temperature 1GHz chips were widely available. It is a tribute to Kryotech that they were willing to take back the last of the Kryotech hardware and give me a full refund, but it never really worked.
I don't think I've ever said this about anyone, but Kryotech is one company that could stand to bring their *quality* department up to where their *customer service* is!
For God's sake! Enough with the "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things" posts!
Free Hans!
Yes, if you are close friends with amd(like kryotech is) and can get processors that don't have the locks.. This is all amd sanctioned..
I dont know about anyone else, but I am sick and tired of people even joking about beowulf clusters! People being serious about their comments was bad enough. If I see anyone type "beowulf" one more time I am going to go on a killing rampage!
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
Simply playing an MPEG4 movie (e.g., using the divx plugin for Windows media player) uses most of the CPU utilization of a 700 MHz Thunderbird. Creating a 2 hour long MPEG4 movie from a DVD extracted mpeg file takes about 10 hours an the same Thunderbird system. It would probably still take several hours even on a 1.6 GHz Athlon. There is the potential for a lot of cool applications if the compression could be done "live." However, even a 1.6 Athlon is not fast enough for this.
So, I think a lot of people in their right mind need that kind of computing power. As audio/video compression gets better, the processing power required to encode and decode will likely continue to increase.
Cranking up the bus speed has never been a problem :)
Cranking up the bus speed has never been a problem :)
RAM generally runs at system bus speed. SDRAM faster than PC133 (7.5 ns) is not widely available, let alone cheap.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
just cause 'desktop' implies UI, its also allowed to run some compute-heavy jobs now and then too...
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
There's two Moore's Laws.
The first (the real one) was actually uttered by Moore and deals with transistor density. Boring.
The second was concocted by Intel's marketing department and describes their past and future plans to entice you to buy a new product every couple years, guaranteeing them a nice revenue stream. The way it's usually described is Every 18 Months the performance/price of the CPU doubles. (Substitute Mhz for performance as necessary.)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
And why is it that when I knock on Mr Moore's office I can hear some muffled whimpering but no-one answers the door? :)
-Andrew.
Life's a buffer; you can only get out of it what you put into it! C:-)
Any other manufacturers? It would be interesting if someone like Dell was doing the same thing (it'd be the Pentium II all over again).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Sys Technology is pleased to announce the preliminary configuration
Haha, Dell trying to help the consumer? That's not going to happen. Compaq though has made machines with Kyrotech's technology in them. Oh, also Intel won't work with them. Also, Thunderbirds aren't clocked if you know how to use a pencil :). You can unlock clocked T-Birds by marking over the bridges.
Now, DDRam is another matter entirely. This will be the memory standard for the next few years. We all upgrade at least once a year (It IS in your budget right?) So, this WILL affect you. Why Hemos mixed a story worthy of discussion with one worthless but still dominating the discussion is a mystery to me.
"there's a point (the "absolute processing point") where the speed of a program is dependent solely on the algorithm used, and not on how fast the microprocessor is chugging along."
Huh? Can you explain that? Since any algorithm implemented on a computer is ultimately limited by the speed at which the electronics can execute it, it seems that programs will always scale with electronics speed, barring some other bottleneck.
Perhaps you were think of how an algorithm scales. A common example is fast-Fourier transform: it scales as N*ln(N) (something like that) where N is the # of points in the data set. An FFT routine cannot 'beat' that scaling factor. You can't make an FFT routine that scales by N. However, an FFT can always be sped up by using faster computers.
If that's not what you meant, can you give an example of an algorithm that cannot run any faster than a certain speed, regardless of the hardware?
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
I've got a P3 450, and in my hobby web-site coding, I use a little program that allows multi-document search-and-replace. Currently, it will S & R 300 pages in about 5-20 seconds, depending on the search string.
I'd like that to be zero seconds, for a thousand pages.
For my research, I use a custom ray-tracing program. Takes 20-60 minutes for some runs on this machine. I'd like the runs to be instantaneous.
I also like to compress (zip) my data for archival purposes. Compressing 400+ MB of files takes 10-20 minutes. I wish it were instantaneous.
I could use a faster computer.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
The main reason is because I started on a PC, and it's not worth the effort or money to switch machines.
Some people start off with a Alpha or other non-PC box, which can work very well. But switching to a different box mid- to late- game is not worth the effort to me.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Quake 3 actually does have a setting for SMP machines: r_smp 1 (ONLY do this if you actually have 2 CPUs!). I'm not sure if this affects framerate, but it is an r_ cvar (rendering), so it just might. However, SMP could help on a game server (provided it's not already being used to run DivX, hehe.)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Once again, AMD is trying to pass 100 amps through a 12-gauge wire. Expect this system to be up in smoke in about 7 months. I plan to squeeze all 10 years out of my P3, thank you. (I also have a 386SX which is about to celebrate its ninth year in my house, and it's still working [in all its DOS 3.3 glory, hehe])
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer