I can build a very fast, damn-near silent system, which can playback HDTV in realtime, etc., for less than you'll spend on an Xbox. Plus, it isn't as screwed as your Xbox when you want to put in a DVD-burner, TV-capture card, etc.
This dedication to Xbox must be from people that are dedicated to not assembling the system themselves... which isn't difficult at all.
Price was an issue until just recently. SBC/ATT dropped to $13, and Verizon dropped to $15/mo. That's less than large ISPs (Earthlink, MSN, AOL) are charging for dial-up, and only slightly more than most others (Netzero, Juno, etc) with crappy dial-up service and software.
The only excuse now is if you travel a lot, and need access all across the country.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to encode genetic weaknesses into creatures you are going to spread in such an environment, so that you can get rid of them in case they cause too much trouble?
I would say it's FAR BETTER to simply NOT INTRODUCE THEM in the first place.
This was nearly a century ago, long before genetics was advanced enough to do anything like this, anyhow.
The "invasive species" we hear about often, are almost always stow aways which pretty well precludes genetic modification of them. If we could capture them in the first place, we would be better off killing or returning them where they came from.
I doubt one could make a nanoITX mobo with a Socket 370 socket -- it would take up far too much real estate, given that the nanoITX form factor is 12 cm. by 12 cm.
A CPU socket is only a couple mm larger than the CPU itself. They omit a socket to save on cost, not size.
A wimpy CPU, with dedicated application-specific hardware, can be a better fit, than a powerful CPU without such hardware.
Yes, in very specific applications that is often true. It's not when it comes to video playback, though. I've been doing this stuff for several years.
(a) I remain unconvinced that one can decode even just HD MPEG2 in S/W without an extremely power hungry CPU,
Yes, well... If you're not prepared to believe me, and won't bother to do the slightest bit of research on your own, I can't possibly help you.
(b) other formats can be transcoded in backend machines, if necessary,
Adding only a couple days of delay to watching a DVD. How convenient.
(c) fanless cooling for power hungry CPUs gets very expensive,
We've covered that. Even some very, very fast CPUs are as low as 25W.
(d) there will always be some exotic codec for which the CPU will be inadequate in real time.
H.264 and WMV9 are not exotic, but standard codecs which WILL be used on HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, and ARE being used on current HD IMAX DVDs, as well as HD movies being shared on the internet. These are not exotic, these are standard codecs. The world doesn't move fast enough that more CPU-intensive codecs get introduced often. If you can handle these codecs at 1080, you're set, for at least the next decade.
I see compute-expensive codecs that gain popularity implemented in hardware at about the rate that consumers or cable TV providers are willing to swap said hardware.
HD-DVD players utilizing H.264 and WMV9 are already being sold at $500, and Blu-ray players using the same codecs are only a few short months away. DirecTV has already been selling their "HD Recievers" which decode H.264, which will become their primary codec shortly. Quicktime now uses H.264, and so the HD trailers on apple.com/trailers are all encoded in H.264 now.
I'm tired of reading stuff like this. And then you say, "He didn't call it a feature."
What's going on? This is like watching a political talk show on CNBC. Deny, deny, deny. Convince people to trust you instead of their own eyes.
You're either trolling, or a complete idiot. You took that single quote completely out of context. Here, let's try a few sentences just before it:
All versions of Firefox no doubt leak memory - it is a common problem with software this complicated. We look to fix the issues where we can. David Baron and others have done a huge amount of excellent work in this area.
He admits that there are memory leaks, and then goes on to explain that one reason Firefox uses up so much memory is because of CACHING. Therefore, that specific issue is NOT a memory leak at all, and your insistence that it's a actually a "problem" that is being denied, is either idiocy, or a troll.
Don't call it a feature or a misunderstanding. Don't pick a feature that can't account for many of the reported problems and say, "Aha! This is THE Firefox memory leak that's bothering everyone. See? It's a feature!"
He didn't call it a feature. In fact he was quite fair in the story. If you'd just read the link, you'd know that.
Also, if the mods had read it, they would have modded you down, instead of up, for being completely wrong.
And, if the/. editors had read it, they surely would have changed it to something less trollish, like: "it may not be a memory leak".
I suppose I could google for motherboards with particularly interesting processors, but that strikes me as an ass-backwards way of finding an integrated, quiet, system capable of rendering HD MPEG2 video.
Well, since the hottest and most important part, BY FAR, in any system is the CPU, that's exactly how you need to search for the most appropriate system, no matter what goal you have in-mind.
Are you sure? I know of no Intel or AMD chips in that form factor.
I still wonder why you keep asking me to repeat myself, instead of googling what I've just told you...
VIA C3/Eden/etc. == Socket 370 Pentium III == Socket 370
I've personally upgraded a system from a C3/800MHz (slow as hell) to a Celeron 1.2GHz. Of course I have no way to be 100% sure. Your system could be some weird prototype VIA isn't talking about, with a different socket, or with the chip soldered to the motherboard (like some cheap VIA C3 systems were infamous for).
As you can tell, I don't follow every little CPU variant from the major manufacturers.
They don't vary often. AMD used socket A for all their processors (mobile and desktop) for years, until the Opteron. Intel stuck with socket 370 throughout the life of the PIII (except for mobile CPUs). It's only recently that the issue has gotten... complex.
Well, if you had provided that information in the first place, I wouldn't continue to question the existance of a low power processor and video H/W from other than Via.
*Sigh*
You never said that you did not believe my figures, you just acted like I hadn't provided them at all. Much like the H/W decoding question you asked.
Even if you had completely doubted me, it's not like I just said "there is an AMD chip that's low power". I provided exact model names/numbers as well as the MHz rating, and watt ratings. A quick google would probably have turned up AMD's own spec sheets.
Also, mention of Intel CPUs (likely mobile ones) that you think would be adequate means nothing to me without some convincing that they are capable of rendering 1080i in real time
I'm not an Intel salesman. I just replied to mention what, IMHO, is a much better option. If you want benchmarks for these processors, google for benchmarks. You can surely find a few that will involve HDTV playback, or at least compare them to some processor you have first-hand experience with. Or you can visit the ffmpeg/xine/mplayer project, and read the mailing lists to see what hardware others are using for HDTV playback.
I was not interested in having to design and build a mobo around a processor. I wanted to purchase a fairly well integrated mobo, convincingly capable of rendering HD MPEG2 video in real time, convection cooled, in as small a form factor as possible with a strong preference for open source software.
I don't know what you're talking about, as far as "build a mobo".
It is a rather simple task to find mini-ITX bare-bones systems. Practically all of them have sound, net, video, etc. integrated. In fact, VIA's CPUs are the right architecture to be swapped with any P-III CPU, such as the very low-power P-III CPU I had listed. You can just swap the CPU in your nanoITX if you like.
You could also just go out and buy a notebook (with one of the low power processors) for the purpose. Very low-power, everything integrated, as cheap as $400, etc.
Yes, being informed on issues of politics parcticularly, certainly is a right, even if you are low-income.
Listen for air raid sirens in emergencies?
You've been watching too many movies. The air raid sirens were torn down in the 70s or so, and replaced by the Emercency Broadcast System (which has now been replaced the Emergency Alert System).
TV has been around only a short time...people kept informed without them in the past...and can still do so.
No, they generally can't still do so. In the past, you'd have dozens of newspapers in an area, each publishing morning and evening editions. Now, in many, many places, there's no newspaper at all. Television killed them, almost entirely.
No need for me to subsidize them
That's just nonsense. The switch to ATSC will MAKE more money for the government than it will spend subsudizing converters and the like for low income families...
This is not buying them something they never had, this is making up for the government's decision (the switch to digital) that completely devalued their property (their TVs).
I mean, hey, if the government decides it wants your home (emminent domain), fine. Property is a luxury. No need for me to subsidize you (fair market value).
Using Handbrake on MacOS X runs quite exactly twice as fast on a dual core system than on a single processor. That's not exactly what I would call a penalty.
No, it's a quality penalty. If you restricted it to a single thread, to maximize quality, you'd get the speed penalty.
And I would really like to know how multi-threaded video encoding would give you a quality reduction.
Video encoding is a very complicated process. You can't get great quality if you don't know all the motion vectors, macroblock changes, etc., that were used in the previous several frames. The quality penalty is significant.
Don't take my word for it. Encode the same video with the same options twice, once multi-threaded, and then single-threaded. The PSNR numbers will be several percent different.
It's a question of usage, whether in Windows or Linux. If you're going to be maxing-out your CPU most of the time with something single-threaded, SMP/multiple cores isn't worth the added expense, or the speed penalty. If you're doing desktop-type work most of the time, multitasking, etc., go right ahead and get a dual core machine.
Re:How about CPU Idle instead of mobile processors
on
Mobile Processor Showdown
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Bad Mods! No cookie! This guy is just astroturfing to sell his crappy commercial Windows software, where free programs like 8rdavcore (or cpufreq modules for Linux) will do a far, far better job.
The author DOES NOT ASSUME that a notebook CPU runs with 100% load. Power figures for both idle and 100% loads are listed, and the author mentions that notebooks will likely be idle more often than not.
Why the hell would they put DRM on the emergency alerts?
How are they going to have DRM on the shows, but make exceptions for things like the EAS? The system doesn't work that way. It doesn't matter anyhow; who would have their TV tuned to a channel they couldn't watch, just waiting for an emergency to happen?
And I take it, from your post, you've never used anything other than Windows. Other operating systems don't NEED a second processor to prevent lock-ups.
My main reasoning, though, is that people have a primary task, which they want to get done as quickly as possible. If you're doing extensive video encoding or playback, encryption, etc., you'll get a speed PENALTY with those dual core system (or a quality reduction if you do eg. multi-threaded video encoding).
They mention in the beginning that MTs are lower power than MLs (they are 25W vs. 35W T.D.P. in fact), yet they didn't throw one into the comparison.
That's lower power, and faster, than even the infamous Core Solo (T1300 1.66GHz 27W TDP).
There is a 1.666GHz Core Duo LV which is lower power. But, if you don't have much use for dual-core, AMD seems the way to go.
With all the talk about AMD not yet on 65nm it would seem AMD is still, not just competitive, but ahead of Intel in low-power CPUs, and performance. (It seems like nobody is talking about the benefits of SOI, for some reason)
What silent (and by silent I mean fanless) system do you have that can do 1080i?
This thread feels distinctly like I'm slamming my head against a brick wall...
I already provided a good list of 5 or 6 very low power Intel/AMD CPUs, which run cool enough that they could easily be operated in a fanless case. They are all more than fast enough to do realtime 1080i@60fps MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding in software, and the faster ones should even handle 1080 WMV9.
lavc's H.264 codec isn't very far along right now. When it gets some performance optimizations (in the near future), I expect H.264 playback in realtime will be possible on the same hardware.
I'd recomend the mTurion MT-34 (1.8GHz 25W TDP), or perhaps an Intel Duo LV-L2400 (1.66GHz 15W TDP).
Even better, you can recover deleted files on ext2 with automated tools. This is impossible with ext3
Just about anything that works on Ext2, should also work on Ext3. They are 100% compatible.
On reiser, you can also pretty easily recover deleted files with, eg., reiserfsck --rebuild-tree and the like. If you do it with your actual partition, you risk completely hosing it, and destroying other data on there. So you either need a second disk of the same size or larger, or perhaps you could use qemu's copy-on-write feature.
When you lease a car, it isn't yours. When you rent a tool, it isn't yours.
Rent/Lease != License.
If we buy a license for our movies, we would get free replacements when the physical media cracked, or when it comes out on different media, since it's a license for the content, not the media, that we own.
If we are buying the physical media the movies come on, then there is practically no restriction as to what we can do with it.
The MPAA wants it both ways, but that doesn't make it legal. Sooner or later, the situation is going to come to a head, and the courts will probably decide which it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I can build a very fast, damn-near silent system, which can playback HDTV in realtime, etc., for less than you'll spend on an Xbox. Plus, it isn't as screwed as your Xbox when you want to put in a DVD-burner, TV-capture card, etc.
This dedication to Xbox must be from people that are dedicated to not assembling the system themselves... which isn't difficult at all.
Price was an issue until just recently. SBC/ATT dropped to $13, and Verizon dropped to $15/mo. That's less than large ISPs (Earthlink, MSN, AOL) are charging for dial-up, and only slightly more than most others (Netzero, Juno, etc) with crappy dial-up service and software.
The only excuse now is if you travel a lot, and need access all across the country.
They are doing exactly that. At the current rate, it'll take over a century before the problem is under control... So a better solution is warranted.
I would say it's FAR BETTER to simply NOT INTRODUCE THEM in the first place.
This was nearly a century ago, long before genetics was advanced enough to do anything like this, anyhow.
The "invasive species" we hear about often, are almost always stow aways which pretty well precludes genetic modification of them. If we could capture them in the first place, we would be better off killing or returning them where they came from.
Well that completely eliminates the possibility of exchanging CPUs right there. So my previous post was just a waste of time...
Yes, well, at this point we've established that there is a lot you don't know. Let's see. How about these:
http://www.ascent.co.nz/ProductSpecification.aspx
http://www.atiosys.com/us/html/products/product.a
http://www.atiosys.com/us/html/products/product.a
http://www.atiosys.com/us/html/products/product.a
A CPU socket is only a couple mm larger than the CPU itself. They omit a socket to save on cost, not size.
Yes, in very specific applications that is often true. It's not when it comes to video playback, though. I've been doing this stuff for several years.
Yes, well... If you're not prepared to believe me, and won't bother to do the slightest bit of research on your own, I can't possibly help you.
Adding only a couple days of delay to watching a DVD. How convenient.
We've covered that. Even some very, very fast CPUs are as low as 25W.
H.264 and WMV9 are not exotic, but standard codecs which WILL be used on HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, and ARE being used on current HD IMAX DVDs, as well as HD movies being shared on the internet. These are not exotic, these are standard codecs. The world doesn't move fast enough that more CPU-intensive codecs get introduced often. If you can handle these codecs at 1080, you're set, for at least the next decade.
HD-DVD players utilizing H.264 and WMV9 are already being sold at $500, and Blu-ray players using the same codecs are only a few short months away. DirecTV has already been selling their "HD Recievers" which decode H.264, which will become their primary codec shortly. Quicktime now uses H.264, and so the HD trailers on apple.com/trailers are all encoded in H.264 now.
You're either trolling, or a complete idiot. You took that single quote completely out of context. Here, let's try a few sentences just before it:
All versions of Firefox no doubt leak memory - it is a common problem with software this complicated. We look to fix the issues where we can. David Baron and others have done a huge amount of excellent work in this area.
He admits that there are memory leaks, and then goes on to explain that one reason Firefox uses up so much memory is because of CACHING. Therefore, that specific issue is NOT a memory leak at all, and your insistence that it's a actually a "problem" that is being denied, is either idiocy, or a troll.
Because humans didn't evolve from monkeys. That's just the Hollywood, sound-byte interpretion of evolution.
That actually wouldn't surprise me at all. Raise your hand if you had your tonsils removed as a kid...
Bad mods!
He didn't call it a feature. In fact he was quite fair in the story. If you'd just read the link, you'd know that.
Also, if the mods had read it, they would have modded you down, instead of up, for being completely wrong.
And, if the
Well, since the hottest and most important part, BY FAR, in any system is the CPU, that's exactly how you need to search for the most appropriate system, no matter what goal you have in-mind.
I still wonder why you keep asking me to repeat myself, instead of googling what I've just told you...
VIA C3/Eden/etc. == Socket 370
Pentium III == Socket 370
I've personally upgraded a system from a C3/800MHz (slow as hell) to a Celeron 1.2GHz. Of course I have no way to be 100% sure. Your system could be some weird prototype VIA isn't talking about, with a different socket, or with the chip soldered to the motherboard (like some cheap VIA C3 systems were infamous for).
They don't vary often. AMD used socket A for all their processors (mobile and desktop) for years, until the Opteron. Intel stuck with socket 370 throughout the life of the PIII (except for mobile CPUs). It's only recently that the issue has gotten... complex.
*Sigh*
You never said that you did not believe my figures, you just acted like I hadn't provided them at all. Much like the H/W decoding question you asked.
Even if you had completely doubted me, it's not like I just said "there is an AMD chip that's low power". I provided exact model names/numbers as well as the MHz rating, and watt ratings. A quick google would probably have turned up AMD's own spec sheets.
I'm not an Intel salesman. I just replied to mention what, IMHO, is a much better option. If you want benchmarks for these processors, google for benchmarks. You can surely find a few that will involve HDTV playback, or at least compare them to some processor you have first-hand experience with. Or you can visit the ffmpeg/xine/mplayer project, and read the mailing lists to see what hardware others are using for HDTV playback.
I don't know what you're talking about, as far as "build a mobo".
It is a rather simple task to find mini-ITX bare-bones systems. Practically all of them have sound, net, video, etc. integrated. In fact, VIA's CPUs are the right architecture to be swapped with any P-III CPU, such as the very low-power P-III CPU I had listed. You can just swap the CPU in your nanoITX if you like.
You could also just go out and buy a notebook (with one of the low power processors) for the purpose. Very low-power, everything integrated, as cheap as $400, etc.
Yes, being informed on issues of politics parcticularly, certainly is a right, even if you are low-income.
You've been watching too many movies. The air raid sirens were torn down in the 70s or so, and replaced by the Emercency Broadcast System (which has now been replaced the Emergency Alert System).
No, they generally can't still do so. In the past, you'd have dozens of newspapers in an area, each publishing morning and evening editions. Now, in many, many places, there's no newspaper at all. Television killed them, almost entirely.
That's just nonsense. The switch to ATSC will MAKE more money for the government than it will spend subsudizing converters and the like for low income families...
This is not buying them something they never had, this is making up for the government's decision (the switch to digital) that completely devalued their property (their TVs).
I mean, hey, if the government decides it wants your home (emminent domain), fine. Property is a luxury. No need for me to subsidize you (fair market value).
No, it's a quality penalty. If you restricted it to a single thread, to maximize quality, you'd get the speed penalty.
Video encoding is a very complicated process. You can't get great quality if you don't know all the motion vectors, macroblock changes, etc., that were used in the previous several frames. The quality penalty is significant.
Don't take my word for it. Encode the same video with the same options twice, once multi-threaded, and then single-threaded. The PSNR numbers will be several percent different.
It's a question of usage, whether in Windows or Linux. If you're going to be maxing-out your CPU most of the time with something single-threaded, SMP/multiple cores isn't worth the added expense, or the speed penalty. If you're doing desktop-type work most of the time, multitasking, etc., go right ahead and get a dual core machine.
Bad Mods! No cookie! This guy is just astroturfing to sell his crappy commercial Windows software, where free programs like 8rdavcore (or cpufreq modules for Linux) will do a far, far better job.
The author DOES NOT ASSUME that a notebook CPU runs with 100% load. Power figures for both idle and 100% loads are listed, and the author mentions that notebooks will likely be idle more often than not.
How are they going to have DRM on the shows, but make exceptions for things like the EAS? The system doesn't work that way. It doesn't matter anyhow; who would have their TV tuned to a channel they couldn't watch, just waiting for an emergency to happen?
And I take it, from your post, you've never used anything other than Windows. Other operating systems don't NEED a second processor to prevent lock-ups.
My main reasoning, though, is that people have a primary task, which they want to get done as quickly as possible. If you're doing extensive video encoding or playback, encryption, etc., you'll get a speed PENALTY with those dual core system (or a quality reduction if you do eg. multi-threaded video encoding).
Sorry guys, I left out the AMD CPU in question (to compare to the Solo): mTurion MT-34 (1.8GHz 25W TDP)
They mention in the beginning that MTs are lower power than MLs (they are 25W vs. 35W T.D.P. in fact), yet they didn't throw one into the comparison.
That's lower power, and faster, than even the infamous Core Solo (T1300 1.66GHz 27W TDP).
There is a 1.666GHz Core Duo LV which is lower power. But, if you don't have much use for dual-core, AMD seems the way to go.
With all the talk about AMD not yet on 65nm it would seem AMD is still, not just competitive, but ahead of Intel in low-power CPUs, and performance. (It seems like nobody is talking about the benefits of SOI, for some reason)
Power saving == Heat saving
This thread feels distinctly like I'm slamming my head against a brick wall...
I already provided a good list of 5 or 6 very low power Intel/AMD CPUs, which run cool enough that they could easily be operated in a fanless case. They are all more than fast enough to do realtime 1080i@60fps MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding in software, and the faster ones should even handle 1080 WMV9.
lavc's H.264 codec isn't very far along right now. When it gets some performance optimizations (in the near future), I expect H.264 playback in realtime will be possible on the same hardware.
I'd recomend the mTurion MT-34 (1.8GHz 25W TDP), or perhaps an Intel Duo LV-L2400 (1.66GHz 15W TDP).
Source: http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm
Just about anything that works on Ext2, should also work on Ext3. They are 100% compatible.
On reiser, you can also pretty easily recover deleted files with, eg., reiserfsck --rebuild-tree and the like. If you do it with your actual partition, you risk completely hosing it, and destroying other data on there. So you either need a second disk of the same size or larger, or perhaps you could use qemu's copy-on-write feature.
That's what you get for selling a book of the Death Star plans.
If you had kept them unpublished, then it would be a case of stealing a trade-secret.
Free does not mean anarchy. Free does not mean that there are no laws.
The fact that something that is illegal in the US, but legal in China, does not mean that China is more free.
Actually, that fact means that China is less-free, if you are on the other side of the widespread copyright infringement.
Imagine two countries. One free for white people, on free for black people, but neither free for the others. Neither country is actually free.
Rent/Lease != License.
If we buy a license for our movies, we would get free replacements when the physical media cracked, or when it comes out on different media, since it's a license for the content, not the media, that we own.
If we are buying the physical media the movies come on, then there is practically no restriction as to what we can do with it.
The MPAA wants it both ways, but that doesn't make it legal. Sooner or later, the situation is going to come to a head, and the courts will probably decide which it is.