Since the link in your post goes the website of a fictional organisation that Doctor Who belongs to, perhaps the moderation of your post as 'informative' was a little misplaced?
For mainstream use, you need an easy way to program it for general-purpose computing. The real problem here is software
One nice way to use FPGAs is by using the compiler to do the optimisation. Write your software for a large general purpose CPU that could fit in the FPGA, then throw out all the bits of the processor that never get used by your program, and concentrate on the parts you do use.
At it's bluntest, this leads to simple optimisations like dropping the FPU if there's no floating point, or only having the logic to do barrel shifts 2 bits left if that's the only barrel shift your program happens to need, but incorporate a bit of feedback (hey, we only do a multiply once in a blue moon, how about using successive addition and powers of 2 here?) and some odd things (need to refer to 7 different constants? Ok, we build a CPU with 7 opcodes that simply return those values!) and the resulting chip can really fly.
This de-junking concept has great applications in portable devices, the power and cost savings in (for example) a mobile phone that has a CPU specially designed to run the embedded rom software only could be massive.
Our exams rely on 'coursework' for grades, so a parent who wants to 'help' their child can practically pass the exam for them, which the teachers love because they have their work done for them.
The teaching profession has never grasped the mind-numbingly simple concept that if a pupil knows a topic, they don't need to keep on 'learning' it by doing homework about it.
If teachers were to reward comprehension with exemption from homework, then they would give pupils the perfect incentive to learn. The way our system works does not test learning or comprehension, it tests merely attendance and dilligence - or at worst, the ability of a child's parent to write convincingly childish essays.
5 months after Apple has a finished product in the shops, Intel manages to cobble together a working knock-off prototype?
This is the sort of tactic would I expect from a no-name box-shifter, not a supposed market leader in technology. The Mac Mini makes sense as a switcher's 1st Mac, as a cheap means to play with OSX, or as a design Icon (with an expensive pretty Apple LCD, wireless keyboard and mouse) in a high-tech setting, but this box has none of those factors in it's favour.
The only market for a small and pretty 'PC mini' that sacrifices upgradability for size is as a media centre, which puts this box into direct competition with those other recently announced small-box media centres the Xbox360 and PS3, where it's going face insurmountable competition on spec, price, and availability of games. If Intel really had the right stuff to be in this market would all 3 next gen boxes (and the Mac Mini for that matter) be using a different processor supplier?
Time to ditch the slogan 'intel inside' in favour of 'too little too late'?
Cheap ones.... at least as far as IBM is concerned. A large chunk of the money customers are paying is no longer going to be poured straight into the bank account of their competitor, Intel. They can either make huge mark-ups, or more likely bump up the specs to amazing levels to add to the buzz around Cell.
IBM's long-term strategy always has been to position the Power architecture as the successor to x86, so this is a logical move, after their success in ensuring that every console game programmer in the world will be writing for their chips. IBM wants your next computer to be Power or Cell based, running either OSX or Linux. Just like PC makers always do, they are putting their top-of-the-line chip into servers first, then when production ramps up, it will trickle down the range.
What I'm wondering is if they would have better throughput with the triple-core chip that's going into the Xbox360, which seems at first glance to be a better general-purpose device.
Actually, Jitter is a real, audible and nasty issue in certain specific applications... but not this one.
It's not a problem you are ever likely to come across outside a big recording studio where several devices are talking to each other digitally with DAC clocks drifiting compared to each other (oh, and it's easliy solved, the solution is to slave everything to a master clock).
The problem of sending a 44.1kHz signal from one end of your house to another is trivial compared to feeding a broadband signal from your ISP to your computer, and you never have jitter issues there.
Diamond is the best heat conductor known to man, if long thin cylindrical diamonds were available, they would be in huge demand to pipe heat out of CPUs.
Diamonds are ridiculously strong when used in composites, if you thought plain old glass-fibre and carbon fire were strong, simply replace the glass or carbon with diamond, and you have a strength to weight ratio that is unheard of.
Diamonds can be amazingly transparent and durable too of course.
If diamonds become cheap enough, our laptops will have diamond as the substrate for the chips, as heat-pipes, as reinforcement in the cases, and as the top layer of the screen.
As the song (nearly) says... Diamonds are a geek's best friend!
It's not clear if this includes 1.8 teraflops from the graphics chip, even without that it would seem to put a single PS3 at about number 86 on the top 500 supercomputer list, which is patently riduculous!
Interesting... samne clock and ram size as the Xbox360 (if I recall correctly?) but 2.18 claimed teraflops versus 1.0 for the Xbox. Surprised not to see UMD in the list of supprted formats.
Where are you getting this info from? The 3 links in the article are unupdated, 1 line of hype and refusing to serve pages respectively, plus engadget and gizmondo are dead too.
I'd contend that Sony probably want all the consoles to miss 2005, since that leaves a grand total of 1 new big-ticket device in the market, their PSP, and the later the consoles launch, the better their launch line-up will be.
If 3.2 Ghz triple-core PPC chips were available, they would be in short supply, and go into high-end Apple machines, not low-end games consoles. IBM has only just got a 2.7Ghz single core chip into the shops with Apple, and the combined might of Apple's cash mountain and IBM's desire to take the x86 market away from AMD/Intel couldn't do it any faster.
'Control of the living room' is laughably temporary. As soon as a better console comes along, people switch, as Atari and Sega proved the hard way. If it's not true already, every new home computer will soon be a delivery device for on demand high-res movies, as will the PS3, and whatever jumps into the gap left when Tivo dies.
As for what Microsoft did to Apple in the 90s, I seem to recall they invested $150m and signed a guarantee to port Office ot the Mac!
Thank you Mr Xenophobic American for that insight. Here in the rest of the world (you know, the people you don't bother to invite to the 'World Series' of your sports) we know that Britain is part of Europe, and Europe is a bigger market than North America and Japan put together. Messing up Europe is a bigger deal to console manufacturers than (for example) the Xbox's dismal Japanese performance.
If any of the big 3 does actually get into the shops this year, it will be a miracle, but even if they do rush some samples out the door in order to win the marketing race, they certainly won't have the volume to fulfill the Christmas season demand in all territories, let alone a decent games line-up.
All the new machines will arrive in British shops mid 2006, at high prices, and a round of price cuts will happen in the lead-up to Christmas, when games start appearing in volume.
2005's Christmas console race is already decided. The PSP will be in the shops with a lot of games. Any next-gen machine won't have the manufacturing volume or the games line-up to compete.
The west already isolates groups. Tall, silm, rich beautiful people rarely interbreed with the short fat ugly poor people, and if any of those traits are genetic, I think we'll see a pretty rapid divergence of races.
I have a system that can record 32 streams of data 44,100 times per second. It's called a recording studio, and I make music with it.
If your data streams are continuous, and can be represented as audio data, then you are pretty much dealing with a solved problem, and your other problem of selecting from large number of possible 'instruments' is solved by an audio patchbay.
If this isn't feasible, then a number of solutions might be appropriate (spreading the load over a number of machines/huge ram caches/buffering/looking at the problem and thinking of a less intensive sampling strategy/etc.) but without more information on the sort of data you are collecting, and exactly how quickly you need to access it, it's very hard to be specific.
Since Sony are widely expected to demonstrate the machine in 2 days time, being "not even ready to demonstrate it" isn't that relevant, especially when you consider that Microsoft are currently claiming they will have the Xbox360 in shops this year and they were ""not even ready to demonstrate it" until about 17 hours ago.
Lik Sang are quoting a reduced price of 135UKP (195 Euros) for an import, which makes me wonder what the japanses street price is? Can anyone with a better grasp of Japanese than me and my browser tell us the street price for the 'Standard Pack' in yen?
The RIAA is a criminal cartel that buys their own cops The MPAA is a criminal cartel that buys their own laws
(oh and if any lawyers representing either of those organisations are reading this, please sue me for sying that, I'd just love the chance see the expression on your faces when a judge agrees with me)
Yes, but on an old MacOS 9 machine... looks like you need OSX to see the maps, as the last Mozilla and Netscapes for the old box won't show them either.
It's a pity they didn't offer a Flash version (yes I know I'm the only pro-Flash voice on Slashdot!), because that would give them their functionality on most odd browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the link in your post goes the website of a fictional organisation that Doctor Who belongs to, perhaps the moderation of your post as 'informative' was a little misplaced?
...or possibly unable to finish commenting in time for this article.
For mainstream use, you need an easy way to program it for general-purpose computing. The real problem here is software
One nice way to use FPGAs is by using the compiler to do the optimisation. Write your software for a large general purpose CPU that could fit in the FPGA, then throw out all the bits of the processor that never get used by your program, and concentrate on the parts you do use.
At it's bluntest, this leads to simple optimisations like dropping the FPU if there's no floating point, or only having the logic to do barrel shifts 2 bits left if that's the only barrel shift your program happens to need, but incorporate a bit of feedback (hey, we only do a multiply once in a blue moon, how about using successive addition and powers of 2 here?) and some odd things (need to refer to 7 different constants? Ok, we build a CPU with 7 opcodes that simply return those values!) and the resulting chip can really fly.
This de-junking concept has great applications in portable devices, the power and cost savings in (for example) a mobile phone that has a CPU specially designed to run the embedded rom software only could be massive.
Our exams rely on 'coursework' for grades, so a parent who wants to 'help' their child can practically pass the exam for them, which the teachers love because they have their work done for them.
The teaching profession has never grasped the mind-numbingly simple concept that if a pupil knows a topic, they don't need to keep on 'learning' it by doing homework about it.
If teachers were to reward comprehension with exemption from homework, then they would give pupils the perfect incentive to learn. The way our system works does not test learning or comprehension, it tests merely attendance and dilligence - or at worst, the ability of a child's parent to write convincingly childish essays.
5 months after Apple has a finished product in the shops, Intel manages to cobble together a working knock-off prototype?
This is the sort of tactic would I expect from a no-name box-shifter, not a supposed market leader in technology. The Mac Mini makes sense as a switcher's 1st Mac, as a cheap means to play with OSX, or as a design Icon (with an expensive pretty Apple LCD, wireless keyboard and mouse) in a high-tech setting, but this box has none of those factors in it's favour.
The only market for a small and pretty 'PC mini' that sacrifices upgradability for size is as a media centre, which puts this box into direct competition with those other recently announced small-box media centres the Xbox360 and PS3, where it's going face insurmountable competition on spec, price, and availability of games. If Intel really had the right stuff to be in this market would all 3 next gen boxes (and the Mac Mini for that matter) be using a different processor supplier?
Time to ditch the slogan 'intel inside' in favour of 'too little too late'?
"What kind of servers *ARE* these??"
Cheap ones.... at least as far as IBM is concerned. A large chunk of the money customers are paying is no longer going to be poured straight into the bank account of their competitor, Intel. They can either make huge mark-ups, or more likely bump up the specs to amazing levels to add to the buzz around Cell.
IBM's long-term strategy always has been to position the Power architecture as the successor to x86, so this is a logical move, after their success in ensuring that every console game programmer in the world will be writing for their chips. IBM wants your next computer to be Power or Cell based, running either OSX or Linux. Just like PC makers always do, they are putting their top-of-the-line chip into servers first, then when production ramps up, it will trickle down the range.
What I'm wondering is if they would have better throughput with the triple-core chip that's going into the Xbox360, which seems at first glance to be a better general-purpose device.
Actually, Jitter is a real, audible and nasty issue in certain specific applications... but not this one.
It's not a problem you are ever likely to come across outside a big recording studio where several devices are talking to each other digitally with DAC clocks drifiting compared to each other (oh, and it's easliy solved, the solution is to slave everything to a master clock).
The problem of sending a 44.1kHz signal from one end of your house to another is trivial compared to feeding a broadband signal from your ISP to your computer, and you never have jitter issues there.
That's just one of it's impressive properties:
Diamond is the best heat conductor known to man, if long thin cylindrical diamonds were available, they would be in huge demand to pipe heat out of CPUs.
Diamonds are ridiculously strong when used in composites, if you thought plain old glass-fibre and carbon fire were strong, simply replace the glass or carbon with diamond, and you have a strength to weight ratio that is unheard of.
Diamonds can be amazingly transparent and durable too of course.
If diamonds become cheap enough, our laptops will have diamond as the substrate for the chips, as heat-pipes, as reinforcement in the cases, and as the top layer of the screen.
As the song (nearly) says... Diamonds are a geek's best friend!
It's not clear if this includes 1.8 teraflops from the graphics chip, even without that it would seem to put a single PS3 at about number 86 on the top 500 supercomputer list, which is patently riduculous!
Looks fake to me - 2.18 teraflops in a box with no air vents at all? Typeface from 'Spider-Man' on the top?
Interesting... samne clock and ram size as the Xbox360 (if I recall correctly?) but 2.18 claimed teraflops versus 1.0 for the Xbox. Surprised not to see UMD in the list of supprted formats.
Where are you getting this info from? The 3 links in the article are unupdated, 1 line of hype and refusing to serve pages respectively, plus engadget and gizmondo are dead too.
I know it's confusing for you to understand that Amsterdam isn't actually in Britain, but please try to bear with me...
You are mixing up sales figures with market size. The European market isn't as saturated.
Here are the ACTUAL market size figures, according to the United Nations population divison
Population of North America: 314 million
Population of Japan: 127 million
Population of Europe: 727 million
314+127 is less than 727
I'd contend that Sony probably want all the consoles to miss 2005, since that leaves a grand total of 1 new big-ticket device in the market, their PSP, and the later the consoles launch, the better their launch line-up will be.
If 3.2 Ghz triple-core PPC chips were available, they would be in short supply, and go into high-end Apple machines, not low-end games consoles. IBM has only just got a 2.7Ghz single core chip into the shops with Apple, and the combined might of Apple's cash mountain and IBM's desire to take the x86 market away from AMD/Intel couldn't do it any faster.
'Control of the living room' is laughably temporary. As soon as a better console comes along, people switch, as Atari and Sega proved the hard way. If it's not true already, every new home computer will soon be a delivery device for on demand high-res movies, as will the PS3, and whatever jumps into the gap left when Tivo dies.
As for what Microsoft did to Apple in the 90s, I seem to recall they invested $150m and signed a guarantee to port Office ot the Mac!
Thank you Mr Xenophobic American for that insight. Here in the rest of the world (you know, the people you don't bother to invite to the 'World Series' of your sports) we know that Britain is part of Europe, and Europe is a bigger market than North America and Japan put together. Messing up Europe is a bigger deal to console manufacturers than (for example) the Xbox's dismal Japanese performance.
If any of the big 3 does actually get into the shops this year, it will be a miracle, but even if they do rush some samples out the door in order to win the marketing race, they certainly won't have the volume to fulfill the Christmas season demand in all territories, let alone a decent games line-up.
All the new machines will arrive in British shops mid 2006, at high prices, and a round of price cuts will happen in the lead-up to Christmas, when games start appearing in volume.
2005's Christmas console race is already decided. The PSP will be in the shops with a lot of games. Any next-gen machine won't have the manufacturing volume or the games line-up to compete.
The west already isolates groups. Tall, silm, rich beautiful people rarely interbreed with the short fat ugly poor people, and if any of those traits are genetic, I think we'll see a pretty rapid divergence of races.
Tell that to dog breeders, or plant cutlivators.
I have a system that can record 32 streams of data 44,100 times per second. It's called a recording studio, and I make music with it.
If your data streams are continuous, and can be represented as audio data, then you are pretty much dealing with a solved problem, and your other problem of selecting from large number of possible 'instruments' is solved by an audio patchbay.
If this isn't feasible, then a number of solutions might be appropriate (spreading the load over a number of machines/huge ram caches/buffering/looking at the problem and thinking of a less intensive sampling strategy/etc.) but without more information on the sort of data you are collecting, and exactly how quickly you need to access it, it's very hard to be specific.
Since Sony are widely expected to demonstrate the machine in 2 days time, being "not even ready to demonstrate it" isn't that relevant, especially when you consider that Microsoft are currently claiming they will have the Xbox360 in shops this year and they were ""not even ready to demonstrate it" until about 17 hours ago.
If (like me) you only have the bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it might be a very, very bad idea indeed!
If that's the case, PJ needs to look up 'believe' in a dictionary. Believe != approve of.
Lik Sang are quoting a reduced price of 135UKP (195 Euros) for an import, which makes me wonder what the japanses street price is? Can anyone with a better grasp of Japanese than me and my browser tell us the street price for the 'Standard Pack' in yen?
Don't get the two mixed up.
The RIAA is a criminal cartel that buys their own cops
The MPAA is a criminal cartel that buys their own laws
(oh and if any lawyers representing either of those organisations are reading this, please sue me for sying that, I'd just love the chance see the expression on your faces when a judge agrees with me)
As far as I can tell, it probably would.
For those who don't know, the Phantom Edit is Star Wars episode 1 with all the Jar Jar cut out. More info here
Yes, but on an old MacOS 9 machine... looks like you need OSX to see the maps, as the last Mozilla and Netscapes for the old box won't show them either.
It's a pity they didn't offer a Flash version (yes I know I'm the only pro-Flash voice on Slashdot!), because that would give them their functionality on most odd browsers.