See, only issue with the subscription based service for me is that I end up using my allotment long before the month is over. I'm tempted to upgrade to 90 tracks a month because of my current backlog, but I'm not sure I'd have time to really absorb that much new music in a month.
Atari lost a near monopoly on the console market. Nintendo lost a near monopoly on the console market. Anyone who thinks it's impossible to "magically" (for values of magic equal to misjudging the market) lose a gigantic market lead is fooling themselves.
Way to expensive to go with either of the nascent blue laser formats. Using bog standards 80mm DVDs would have given them a cheap to implement, widely available format that would *still* hold a gig more than UMD does.
There are 80mm mini-DVDs commonly available. Capacity is 1.4GB for single layer, 2.8GB for dual layer. UMD is a bit smaller - 65mm - but has a capacity of only 1.8GB dual layer. Considering there are plenty of commondity portable players for full sized DVD, price and power aren't an issue.
There's always been a preponderance of crap in the theaters. That's nothing new.
Last year did represent a significant drop in box office revenue, but that's more because of a number of overlapping incredibly successful franchises having run their course over the previous years.
My bet is this summer puts things on an upward swing again - X-Men, Cars, Superman Returns, Pirates of the Carribean and, of course, Snakes on a Plane.;) Next year has a lot of likely hits as well - Harry Potter, Narnia, Sin City, Spider Man.
(Not necessarily a personal endorsement of any of those, though there are some I like. But box office numbers are a reasonable metric of a movie's ability to convince people to part with their money.)
Oh, forgot to mention - yeah, Intel makes quality parts generally. Their server chipsets are faboo, which is a definite weakness on the low end of the AMD server market.
(And our standard server platform at work is Intel Xeons.)
On the other hand, you're still looking at 62W for a single core part compared to 55W for a dual core. And looking a little further, it looks like AMD has added a new "EE" (energy efficient) line which run at 1.4GHz and draw only 30W.
And the memory bandwidth numbers aren't particularly interesting. They're advertising 10.6GB/s on desktop Pentium 4 boards as well (see the I975X chipset, for example), and the AMD AM2 socket chips coming out this month will have a 12.8GB/sec memory controller on-die.
The memory bandwidth provided by AMD solutions also scales with the number of processors, since you're adding an additional memory controller per processor. There are boards on the market now - like the Tyan Thunder K8QW - which boast 51.2GB/s aggregate memory bandwidth.
And the reason for different models is because, unlike Intel processors which plug into a shared bus, Opterons are have dedicated Hypertraport links between the processors. There's three lines - 1xx which has a single link and is designed for uniprocessor configurations, 2xx which has two links and is designed for dual processor configurations, and 8xx which has three links and supports four and eight processor configurations. On current parts, the individual links at 8GB/sec, which means 8xx parts have 24GB/sec in aggregate bandwidth.
That's going to change some next year, though, when they move to Hypertransport 3 (current chips use 1), which scale to a whopping 41.6GB/sec per link.
Yeah, use Itanic and bust on an Intel chip and get modded up around here, but Itaniums are good chips, and they have a market, but a fairly small one right now. They have up to 1.3GHz models that use less power than a Xeon. They use 62 Watts of power. Current Opterons use anywhere from 62 Watts to 110 Watts.
You should probably call up Intel and tell them to fix their spec sheets, because they seem to think that they're selling Itaniums clocked from 900MHz to 1.66GHz and draw anywhere from 90-122W.
AMD, on the other hand, has dual core Opterons clocked at 2.2GHz and drawing only 55W.
I think that estimate is a bit optimistic, but even if it pans out, we'll be having this discussion and saying "When a 1.6TB hard drive costs $75..."
That's ignore sustained transfer, as well. You're lucky if you can push 65MB/sec to even near-line rated SATA 3GB/s drives. The cheap consumer level drives people price when pushing hard discs as a viable medium are going to be significantly slower than that. To contrast, current LTO drives are pushing 80MB/sec and are slated to bump to 120MB/sec later this year, and then to 180MB/sec 18-24 months after that.
The problem with tape is that the capacity sucks relative to what you're backing up. The biggest tapes (as best I could find in a quick web search) hold 400GB each. The hard drive in my desktop is 500GB. My desktop's drives total 750GB. It would take two full tapes to do a single full backup.
LTO-4 is slated to hit this year @ 800MB native. And backups are pretty universally compressed. And leveled, so you're only backing up changes.
So with this new technology, the tape capacity will still have slipped from 80% of the capacity of the largest single drive to 50% of the capacity of the largest single drive. And this ignores things like perpendicular storage, which have the potential to add an order of magnitude to all of those numbers.
The expected growth in capacity doesn't ignore emerging technology, it relies on it. They're not going to reach those capacities by waving a magic wand.
The industry predicts that with the newer drive head technologies coming out, HD capacity will double every 12 months.
Most current estimates peg 2TB "around 2010", not in two years. And frankly, anything analysts say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. We were supposed to be running 8GHz machines with 1.6GB hard drives by now.
And regardless of increases to areal density, there's not likely to be a market for drives that large. An 8TB in 2010? The average person isn't going to need enough room to store nearly 3000 hours of 1080p video or 120,000 uncompressed music tracks. It's much more likely you'll see drives optimizing for speed, size and power consumption. Expect 2.5" drives on the desktop and 1.8" or 1" drives in the portable segment. And consumers are already buying more notebooks than desktops.
My guess is that even though areal density has certainly increased, we're going to see overall drive capacity level out as the industry moves to 1.8" drives in notebooks and 2.5" drives in desktops.
When they said "15x the current capacity," my first thought was "When can I get one?" When they said "5 years," my second thought was "By then, 15x the current capacity will be too small."
If you could substantiate your timeframe for hard drive capacities, you might be more convincing.
When are backup storage vendors going to actually get ahead of the density curve instead of lagging decades behind?
Hyperbole much? Even one decade back the state of the art drive held 2GB, only 1/200th of the native capacity of current backup generation, and 1/400th of the drives being released later this year.
There's a reason why tape technology is still strong, and it's not "BIZNESSES R STOOPID LOL!"
The other points have some validity, but different divisions of a single company don't stick to using in-house products. Even years before IBM spun off the drive division most of the drives they shipping in machines came from other vendors.
Umm.. $500 is not "much less" than a stand-alone HD-DVD player. You can walk into Best Buy and pick one up today for less than that (well, a penny less, but still).
What's your evidence that the HD-DVD player is easier to build and cheaper? Or that the Blu Ray player will around $800-$1000? I've heard credible arguments that the HD-DVD discs are cheaper to produce, but no one has given any evidence that the player will be, given that both HD-DVD and Blu Ray support precisely the same complement of codecs. What's your reasoning here?
Seriously, this is pretty common knowledge. There are HD-DVD players actually available for $500 now, and not a single Blu-Ray player announced with a price below $1000 (aside from the PS3). They chose to focus on maximizing capacity rather than minimizing hardware cost and it shows.
Yeah, comparing the Celeron is a bit daft. Still, you can pick up something like an Inspiron E1505 with the same processor (1.83GHz CoreDuo), memory (512MB DDR2-533), hard drive (60MB 5400RPM SATA), optical drive (DVD/CDRW), video (Intel 950), wireless (802.11b/g) and virtually identical battery (advantage Apple by 2WHr) for $878 USD. It's about a pound heavier, but that's priced out with a 15" WSXGA (1280x800) TrueLife screen. Upgrade to the WSXGA+ (1680x1050) and you're at $949. Upgrade to a 256MB Radeon X1400 on top of that and you're at $1078, still short of Apple's price.
They're competitively priced, but not fantastic. Their main weakness is that they don't offer many configurations, and neglect the low end entirely. There are plenty of people who are served just fine by something like the Inspiron B120 (Celeron M 1.4GHz, 512MB, 40GB 5400RPM, CDRW/DVD), especially at less than half the price of Apple's entry level box ($499 v $1099).
You'd think by now people - at least the ones who read slashdot - would get that MHz != performance. The PPE elements in the Xenon are clocked high, sure. So was the Pentium 4, which was abandoned in favour of the slower clocked Core architecture. And the individual cores are in-order, only two issue, and the L1 caches are fairly small (32k) considering they're servicing two threads and only two way associative. The L2 cache is a bit more advanced, but again it's fairly small (1MB shared) and runs half-clocked (1.6GHz in this case).
It seems confirmed that the Broadway will be an evolution of the existing Gekko architecture, but that's about it. For all the information out there, this may even be a multi-core version of the processor. Regardless, what we know about the last generation is that it combines an eight-way associate L1 cache with locking, on-die full speed L2 cache, and is designed around the use of 1T-SRAM, which makes a lot of the "tricks" employed in the Xenon (and Cell) to minimize latency (1T-SRAM has latency in the 5-6ns range, compared to 50+ for traditional DRAM technologies).
As for texture memory, the 360 and PS3 will almost certainly trounce the Wii. They need to, they're trying to push HD resolutions. Both systems, though, store texture in external memory, whereas the Wii will undoubtetdly have texture cache integrated into the GPU (btw, the Flipper had 3MB, so expect at least that much.:P)
How does it all translate into real world performance? There's no way to know. Even if Nintnedo published every last detail, it's nigh impossible to predict how games will run until they're running. I'll bet dollars to donuts that it will fall short in raw horsepower, but will be plenty competitive at SD resolutions. Smart move, if you ask me. By the time HD sets are really pervasive it'll be time to launch another generation, and hardware to support it will be commodity by then.
That happened less than six weeks ago and didn't even make it on Slashdot. Calm down, put on some, maybe make a cup of herbal tea. There will be no dire consequences if you don't lambast people for not keeping on top of the news about your favourite operatiing system.
I already said this in another post, but with the cheaper ($299) XBox configuration you get wired controllers, wired networking, and no cabling aside from power and composite video. And because there's no hard drive you can't save games or play XBox Live; if you want to do that, you need to buy a 64MB "Memory Unit" for $40.
Pricing an item too cheap is a sure way of getting across the message "we're crap", even if it's not true. A strike price of $249 sounds just fine in my opinion; perfect if they include two controllers in the box (my guess is they do).
Sure, the XBox 360 Core system is only $299, but that's got a wired controller, no WiFi, and no storage. Once you add in $100 for the wirless adapter, $50 for a wireless controllers, and $40 for a memory card (64MB?? The Wii comes with 512MB internal, and can take bog standard SD cards for expansion) and it suddenly doesn't look very competitive, even if they chopped $100 off the price.
Yeah! Sales of the console will create a market for blu-ray discs, which will create a market for a $600 game console! It's perfect!;)
Seriously... it is slated to be the lowest price blu-ray player in the near future, but there's no market for right now because there's no discs.
And even when the handful of titles slated for release this year do hit the shelves, they'll be fighting competition from HD-DVD, which already had both hardware and content available, and realistically will be cheaper for both in the forseeable future. Combine that with a lukewarm market for any "next generation" format and a less than tech savvy public who probably won't trust a game machine as a video player, and things don't look so rosy.
I mean, I think what makes the most eat on my computer is the power supply and -although you won't find any in an office- a big old 17" CRT.
The power supply doesn't "use" power, it converts it and supplies it to the components in your machine. Granted, no power supply is 100% efficient (more like 80%+ for the latest rev of ATX12V), but the amount of power lost is going to be directly related to how much power the components (like the cpu:) the components are drawing.
And a 17" CRT draws probably about 100-120W of power, which is higher than most single-core CPUs, but the CRT isn't installed inside your case, so it's hardly going to be a heat problem. (On a side note, I work in an office and have a big 21" CRT on my desk.)
And besides that, don't all CPU's produce about the same temperature when not overclocked?
Not by a long shot. The current Xeons are rated at up to 150W. Pentium D up to 125W. Athlon X2 up to 89W. Athon 64 up to 67W (dropped quite a bit in the current stepping). Core Duo is less than 35W.
Even at the low end of that scale (i.e. the Duo), the only thing you're likely to see running at a higher draw are the monster video cards some people run.
Slashdot Mirror
See, only issue with the subscription based service for me is that I end up using my allotment long before the month is over. I'm tempted to upgrade to 90 tracks a month because of my current backlog, but I'm not sure I'd have time to really absorb that much new music in a month.
Atari lost a near monopoly on the console market. Nintendo lost a near monopoly on the console market. Anyone who thinks it's impossible to "magically" (for values of magic equal to misjudging the market) lose a gigantic market lead is fooling themselves.
Way to expensive to go with either of the nascent blue laser formats. Using bog standards 80mm DVDs would have given them a cheap to implement, widely available format that would *still* hold a gig more than UMD does.
There are 80mm mini-DVDs commonly available. Capacity is 1.4GB for single layer, 2.8GB for dual layer. UMD is a bit smaller - 65mm - but has a capacity of only 1.8GB dual layer. Considering there are plenty of commondity portable players for full sized DVD, price and power aren't an issue.
There's always been a preponderance of crap in the theaters. That's nothing new.
;) Next year has a lot of likely hits as well - Harry Potter, Narnia, Sin City, Spider Man.
Last year did represent a significant drop in box office revenue, but that's more because of a number of overlapping incredibly successful franchises having run their course over the previous years.
My bet is this summer puts things on an upward swing again - X-Men, Cars, Superman Returns, Pirates of the Carribean and, of course, Snakes on a Plane.
(Not necessarily a personal endorsement of any of those, though there are some I like. But box office numbers are a reasonable metric of a movie's ability to convince people to part with their money.)
Oh, forgot to mention - yeah, Intel makes quality parts generally. Their server chipsets are faboo, which is a definite weakness on the low end of the AMD server market.
(And our standard server platform at work is Intel Xeons.)
Interesting, their datasheet seems to be out of date. They don't mention the low power part.
On the other hand, you're still looking at 62W for a single core part compared to 55W for a dual core. And looking a little further, it looks like AMD has added a new "EE" (energy efficient) line which run at 1.4GHz and draw only 30W.
And the memory bandwidth numbers aren't particularly interesting. They're advertising 10.6GB/s on desktop Pentium 4 boards as well (see the I975X chipset, for example), and the AMD AM2 socket chips coming out this month will have a 12.8GB/sec memory controller on-die.
The memory bandwidth provided by AMD solutions also scales with the number of processors, since you're adding an additional memory controller per processor. There are boards on the market now - like the Tyan Thunder K8QW - which boast 51.2GB/s aggregate memory bandwidth.
And the reason for different models is because, unlike Intel processors which plug into a shared bus, Opterons are have dedicated Hypertraport links between the processors. There's three lines - 1xx which has a single link and is designed for uniprocessor configurations, 2xx which has two links and is designed for dual processor configurations, and 8xx which has three links and supports four and eight processor configurations. On current parts, the individual links at 8GB/sec, which means 8xx parts have 24GB/sec in aggregate bandwidth.
That's going to change some next year, though, when they move to Hypertransport 3 (current chips use 1), which scale to a whopping 41.6GB/sec per link.
Yeah, use Itanic and bust on an Intel chip and get modded up around here, but Itaniums are good chips, and they have a market, but a fairly small one right now. They have up to 1.3GHz models that use less power than a Xeon. They use 62 Watts of power. Current Opterons use anywhere from 62 Watts to 110 Watts.
You should probably call up Intel and tell them to fix their spec sheets, because they seem to think that they're selling Itaniums clocked from 900MHz to 1.66GHz and draw anywhere from 90-122W.
AMD, on the other hand, has dual core Opterons clocked at 2.2GHz and drawing only 55W.
I think that estimate is a bit optimistic, but even if it pans out, we'll be having this discussion and saying "When a 1.6TB hard drive costs $75..."
That's ignore sustained transfer, as well. You're lucky if you can push 65MB/sec to even near-line rated SATA 3GB/s drives. The cheap consumer level drives people price when pushing hard discs as a viable medium are going to be significantly slower than that. To contrast, current LTO drives are pushing 80MB/sec and are slated to bump to 120MB/sec later this year, and then to 180MB/sec 18-24 months after that.
The problem with tape is that the capacity sucks relative to what you're backing up. The biggest tapes (as best I could find in a quick web search) hold 400GB each. The hard drive in my desktop is 500GB. My desktop's drives total 750GB. It would take two full tapes to do a single full backup.
LTO-4 is slated to hit this year @ 800MB native. And backups are pretty universally compressed. And leveled, so you're only backing up changes.
So with this new technology, the tape capacity will still have slipped from 80% of the capacity of the largest single drive to 50% of the capacity of the largest single drive. And this ignores things like perpendicular storage, which have the potential to add an order of magnitude to all of those numbers.
The expected growth in capacity doesn't ignore emerging technology, it relies on it. They're not going to reach those capacities by waving a magic wand.
The industry predicts that with the newer drive head technologies coming out, HD capacity will double every 12 months.
Most current estimates peg 2TB "around 2010", not in two years. And frankly, anything analysts say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. We were supposed to be running 8GHz machines with 1.6GB hard drives by now.
And regardless of increases to areal density, there's not likely to be a market for drives that large. An 8TB in 2010? The average person isn't going to need enough room to store nearly 3000 hours of 1080p video or 120,000 uncompressed music tracks. It's much more likely you'll see drives optimizing for speed, size and power consumption. Expect 2.5" drives on the desktop and 1.8" or 1" drives in the portable segment. And consumers are already buying more notebooks than desktops.
My guess is that even though areal density has certainly increased, we're going to see overall drive capacity level out as the industry moves to 1.8" drives in notebooks and 2.5" drives in desktops.
When they said "15x the current capacity," my first thought was "When can I get one?" When they said "5 years," my second thought was "By then, 15x the current capacity will be too small."
If you could substantiate your timeframe for hard drive capacities, you might be more convincing.
When are backup storage vendors going to actually get ahead of the density curve instead of lagging decades behind?
Hyperbole much? Even one decade back the state of the art drive held 2GB, only 1/200th of the native capacity of current backup generation, and 1/400th of the drives being released later this year.
There's a reason why tape technology is still strong, and it's not "BIZNESSES R STOOPID LOL!"
Only if your backup admin is criminally incompetent. Which unfortunately many are.
Hi, I'm Matt. I don't have any particular interest in Mac OS X. I'm sure it's nice and all, but I'm comfortable with my current platform choices.
3) Why would Sony use a Verbatim DVD+R?
The other points have some validity, but different divisions of a single company don't stick to using in-house products. Even years before IBM spun off the drive division most of the drives they shipping in machines came from other vendors.
I'd say the plural of Wii is... Wii.
A $500 PS3 with no digital output and no remote control (not even a wireless controller that might double as a remote control).
Umm.. $500 is not "much less" than a stand-alone HD-DVD player. You can walk into Best Buy and pick one up today for less than that (well, a penny less, but still).
What's your evidence that the HD-DVD player is easier to build and cheaper? Or that the Blu Ray player will around $800-$1000? I've heard credible arguments that the HD-DVD discs are cheaper to produce, but no one has given any evidence that the player will be, given that both HD-DVD and Blu Ray support precisely the same complement of codecs. What's your reasoning here?
Seriously, this is pretty common knowledge. There are HD-DVD players actually available for $500 now, and not a single Blu-Ray player announced with a price below $1000 (aside from the PS3). They chose to focus on maximizing capacity rather than minimizing hardware cost and it shows.
Yeah, comparing the Celeron is a bit daft. Still, you can pick up something like an Inspiron E1505 with the same processor (1.83GHz CoreDuo), memory (512MB DDR2-533), hard drive (60MB 5400RPM SATA), optical drive (DVD/CDRW), video (Intel 950), wireless (802.11b/g) and virtually identical battery (advantage Apple by 2WHr) for $878 USD. It's about a pound heavier, but that's priced out with a 15" WSXGA (1280x800) TrueLife screen. Upgrade to the WSXGA+ (1680x1050) and you're at $949. Upgrade to a 256MB Radeon X1400 on top of that and you're at $1078, still short of Apple's price.
They're competitively priced, but not fantastic. Their main weakness is that they don't offer many configurations, and neglect the low end entirely. There are plenty of people who are served just fine by something like the Inspiron B120 (Celeron M 1.4GHz, 512MB, 40GB 5400RPM, CDRW/DVD), especially at less than half the price of Apple's entry level box ($499 v $1099).
You'd think by now people - at least the ones who read slashdot - would get that MHz != performance. The PPE elements in the Xenon are clocked high, sure. So was the Pentium 4, which was abandoned in favour of the slower clocked Core architecture. And the individual cores are in-order, only two issue, and the L1 caches are fairly small (32k) considering they're servicing two threads and only two way associative. The L2 cache is a bit more advanced, but again it's fairly small (1MB shared) and runs half-clocked (1.6GHz in this case).
:P)
It seems confirmed that the Broadway will be an evolution of the existing Gekko architecture, but that's about it. For all the information out there, this may even be a multi-core version of the processor. Regardless, what we know about the last generation is that it combines an eight-way associate L1 cache with locking, on-die full speed L2 cache, and is designed around the use of 1T-SRAM, which makes a lot of the "tricks" employed in the Xenon (and Cell) to minimize latency (1T-SRAM has latency in the 5-6ns range, compared to 50+ for traditional DRAM technologies).
As for texture memory, the 360 and PS3 will almost certainly trounce the Wii. They need to, they're trying to push HD resolutions. Both systems, though, store texture in external memory, whereas the Wii will undoubtetdly have texture cache integrated into the GPU (btw, the Flipper had 3MB, so expect at least that much.
How does it all translate into real world performance? There's no way to know. Even if Nintnedo published every last detail, it's nigh impossible to predict how games will run until they're running. I'll bet dollars to donuts that it will fall short in raw horsepower, but will be plenty competitive at SD resolutions. Smart move, if you ask me. By the time HD sets are really pervasive it'll be time to launch another generation, and hardware to support it will be commodity by then.
That happened less than six weeks ago and didn't even make it on Slashdot. Calm down, put on some, maybe make a cup of herbal tea. There will be no dire consequences if you don't lambast people for not keeping on top of the news about your favourite operatiing system.
I already said this in another post, but with the cheaper ($299) XBox configuration you get wired controllers, wired networking, and no cabling aside from power and composite video. And because there's no hard drive you can't save games or play XBox Live; if you want to do that, you need to buy a 64MB "Memory Unit" for $40.
Pricing an item too cheap is a sure way of getting across the message "we're crap", even if it's not true. A strike price of $249 sounds just fine in my opinion; perfect if they include two controllers in the box (my guess is they do).
Sure, the XBox 360 Core system is only $299, but that's got a wired controller, no WiFi, and no storage. Once you add in $100 for the wirless adapter, $50 for a wireless controllers, and $40 for a memory card (64MB?? The Wii comes with 512MB internal, and can take bog standard SD cards for expansion) and it suddenly doesn't look very competitive, even if they chopped $100 off the price.
Yeah! Sales of the console will create a market for blu-ray discs, which will create a market for a $600 game console! It's perfect! ;)
Seriously... it is slated to be the lowest price blu-ray player in the near future, but there's no market for right now because there's no discs.
And even when the handful of titles slated for release this year do hit the shelves, they'll be fighting competition from HD-DVD, which already had both hardware and content available, and realistically will be cheaper for both in the forseeable future. Combine that with a lukewarm market for any "next generation" format and a less than tech savvy public who probably won't trust a game machine as a video player, and things don't look so rosy.
I mean, I think what makes the most eat on my computer is the power supply and -although you won't find any in an office- a big old 17" CRT.
:) the components are drawing.
The power supply doesn't "use" power, it converts it and supplies it to the components in your machine. Granted, no power supply is 100% efficient (more like 80%+ for the latest rev of ATX12V), but the amount of power lost is going to be directly related to how much power the components (like the cpu
And a 17" CRT draws probably about 100-120W of power, which is higher than most single-core CPUs, but the CRT isn't installed inside your case, so it's hardly going to be a heat problem. (On a side note, I work in an office and have a big 21" CRT on my desk.)
And besides that, don't all CPU's produce about the same temperature when not overclocked?
Not by a long shot. The current Xeons are rated at up to 150W. Pentium D up to 125W. Athlon X2 up to 89W. Athon 64 up to 67W (dropped quite a bit in the current stepping). Core Duo is less than 35W.
Even at the low end of that scale (i.e. the Duo), the only thing you're likely to see running at a higher draw are the monster video cards some people run.
Both of my servers at home are from 1995, though I am in the process of upgrading.