ATI Radeon 9700 Dissected
Bender writes "The guys who laid out the future of real-time graphics a while back have now dissected ATI's Radeon 9700 chip. Their analysis breaks down performance into multiple components--fill rate, occlusion detection, pixel shaders, vertex shaders, antialiasing--and tests each one synthetically before moving on to the usual application tests like SPECviewperf and UT 2003. You can see exactly how this chip advances the state of the art in graphics, piece by piece. Interesting stuff."
Again, Pixar is notorious for this. ("We modelled the threads on the screws, even though you couldn't see them!")
How else would the objects stay together? Magic? Sheesh.
If you're putting pieces together and considering them as a whole, that's synthesis.
If you're taking pieces apart and considering them separately, that's analysis.
If you're explaining this on Slashdot, that's anal-retentiveness.