Apple have done some research into this area, and concluded that the best power saving technique is to ramp the CPU up for complex tasks, then hit idle as soon as you can. Rather than dragging out the process. This sounds like what Intel is going for, with there 50 x reduction in idle draw.
Doesn't really matter. A Cortex A8 isn't that much slower than an Atom. Certainly not enough that the idle savings will offset the load power usage.
To be fair, the Atom runs at 6 Watts max, where average TDP can down to as little as 0.4W. The problem with Atom, as you say, is all of the other hardware to make it work. Its current chipset is incredibly power hungry, but they're working on that (integrating more and doing even deeper clock gating). Future Atoms will likely use even less power, with Intel already shipping chips with a max 2.4W threshold.
Right, so if you're actually doing something, you don't get to use your computer as long.
And yes, you are being unfair comparing a device which has a hard drive with hundreds of gigabytes of space and a WXSVGA screen to a handheld device with a couple of gigs of flash memory and a HVGA screen.
The Pandora has dual-SDHC slots, so you could have 64GB of space. (More if bigger SDHC cards were actually made)
Fine, an HDD is unfair, but SSD vs dual-SDHC is a valid comparison. The EEE PCs with SSDs had about 25MB/sec read/write speed. High end SDHC cards are slightly below that, and you can have two.
Now that better SSDs are available(like the Vertex), it changes things - but the Vertex is also a whole other price range.
Nobody's stopping you from making an Atom device with those components (though it will take more power right now, it'll be vastly faster than the Cortex A8, and you won't have to recompile or use highly specialized toolkits, which is a huge Intel advantage).
Nobody makes x86 programs that work on such tiny screens. I would cite the "highly specialized toolkits" as an advantage for ARM, in this case... you will need linux and those fancy toolkits. Maemo, Android, etc. all work very well on tiny screens.
And by the time Intel has an x86 Atom chip that will work in a fanless tiny device like a Pandora, ARM will have quad-core A9's available, so your point regarding performance is moot...
After all, there is no Atom that will fit in a device that small... yet. I have news for you though - my Phenom II in a cellphone (lol) beats your Atom in a cellphone.;)
I'm thinking Cortex A8's, which have been out for over a year. Stuff like the OMAP 3530(present in the Beagleboard, upcoming Pandora Handheld, and Palm Pre) consumes remarkably small amounts of power.
The Pandora developers said their device consumes around or just over 1 watt. Most of that is from the LCD. They did experiments completely shutting off certain hardware, to measure power consumption, and concluded...
CPU - about 20-40mw DSP - about 30-60mw SGX GPU - about 30-60mw
(Hard to get exact measurements due to the nature of how components interact. Anything loading the CPU probably loads up the memory as well. Anything hitting the GPU will hit the CPU, and DSP load varies greatly depending on the codec and video being decoded.)
The entire SoC uses a ludicrously small amount of power; something like 0.2-0.4w. Then add another 0.6w for the LCD, and a bunch more for wireless.
Now, compare that to the current Atoms, with 6+ watts just for the CPU/chipset, another 2+ for the HDD/SSD, at least 6-15w for the LCD, etc...
If any company can drive down their power consumption, Intel can, but that doesn't mean it'll be easy to catch ARM!
I just can't wait for Cortex A9's. Quad-core ARM in the exact same power envelope!
Ogg players are still quite common. I got an MP3 player a while ago, and was surprised to find it played ogg. I got it because it advertised FLAC support.
I would take ogg over mp3, and aac over both of those.
But right now they're using H.263, so anything is an improvement!:D
I remember when I had a perfect quality 256kbit video. I uploaded it to youtube, and it got transcoded into a blurry ~512kbit mess with audio desynced.
The facts still have to check out. It's just the slant of the article. Choice of words when describing stuff, etc.
But I've never found Wikipedia to be that unbiased, especially when it comes to topics that are still debated.
Ex: It may report a hardware device as vaporware, and state that the company creating it has a cult following that aggressively promote the devices, despite there being no evidence the device will ever exist.
Then once the device is released, it gets updated to a different slant.
The company plans to unveil its first car in London later this month, a small two-seater that weighs roughly 700 pounds.
Gee, that's some rounding error right there.
770 pounds is closer to 800, and that means minimum 900 (perhaps 1000 pounds) with a person in it. Two people and you might have 1200 pounds.
The small size would worry me in North America, but I can see this being both sellable and safe in parts of Europe. After all, some of those old winding alleys are so small you can hardly fit a truck in them.
I find the statements in this article quite hilarious, considering how much Symantec and McAfee were crying back when Microsoft first announced OneCare.
Antitrust! Lawsuit! Unfairness! Well gee, looks like they did okay. Now they're just smug.
But without the qualifying statements, you get modded into oblivion anyway.
I criticized gore in games, in another slashdot thread. I said that too often companies focus on adding gore and dismemberment rather than making a game fun. I feel that most games fail to make those features in any way realistic, and poorly made dismemberment is really quite distracting. Don't you find it weird when sniping someone blows all their limbs off?
My rating: Troll -1 flamebait -1
Slashdot really has developed a mob mentality. At first all the interesting posts are modded up, but then by the end of the day only one side of the argument remains.
You're not going to get flamed for your stance. Every single article about this browser bundling thing goes in Microsoft's favour. Honest - all... six of them, so far, in the past month or so?
What I find so ludicrous is Microsoft's shoddy attempts at complying. Picture this...
Someone is mugging you with a gun, and they want your wallet. But you don't want to give it to them, so you offer them $20. They tell you to screw yourself and to give them your wallet. You offer them... a credit card, and half the money in your wallet!
Now they either shoot you or grab the wallet out of your hand.
Honestly, this won't end well for Microsoft; they want to continue business in the EU, so they are going to pay...:/...but I do feel the analogy fits remarkably well.
Back when all this stuff started, it was suggested to Microsoft that they create a tiny VB6/C# program that runs instead of the default browser or media player. The first time it runs, it offers you some web browsers or media players. You click next, it registers that as the default browser or media player, and you're done. Requirements: 1 semi skilled programmer, familiar with GUI creation and setting registry keys.
I believe the options were:
Internet Explorer 6 (Default) Mozilla Firefox Opera
Windows Media Player 10 (Default) RealPlayer (lol?) Winamp
Anyway, if they had just complied... they'd probably still have gotten sued, but at least they'd waste less money internally, and it would've been dealt with years ago.
I BOUGHT the damn DVD, stop annoying me and show me the damn movie!
Okay, you bought it - now download it so you aren't annoyed by those FBI warnings!:P (personal use backup rights should cover this; the DRM makes it ludicrously difficult to make a backup copy, but you're still entitled to one; IANAL; I'm Canadian.)
Or you can be an honourable pirate. (download everything first, and buy the good stuff)
Or you can be a dishonourable scumbag pirate. (download everything first, and laugh)
The Wii's more powerful than the most powerful gaming machines a few years ago and there were a lot of good games back then (unreal tournament 2004, Doom 3, etc). There's enough power in the console, but the creators of the game apparently can't adapt to lesser hardware, so they throw a public tantrum or water the game down so that they don't have to actually think about the problem and develop around it.
You are absolutely correct. Games like Zelda: Twilight Princess make me believe there's plenty of power in the Wii; more than enough to make something "fun".
Until this newest POP, I found The Sands of Time to be the most fun. I'm pretty sure it'd run okay on a Wii...
I once had a co-worker who had been programming for 20 years, but had no idea that the CPU had registers, what they were for, or how they would be used. That's just sad.
I learned about registers when I first learned Javascript!
A rather strange jump, but I loved Javascript's syntax, and I heard machine code(or "assembly") was faster; to make a 2D FF type game, I needed something faster than Javascript, so off I went to research it.
Turns out I wasn't smart enough to learn assembly, at the time - but it did teach me some interesting basics on how stuff works. Knowing roughly what the computer does has made me recognize all the steps that must happen when a simple call like substring(5); is used.
I never did finish that 2D FF RPG; but I did use the knowledge I gained to create a double-buffered clip-pane tile scroller, which I thought was pretty impressive. It was getting 1500fps on computers from 2004.;) Too bad that knowledge is obsolete now; I need some OGL experience!
I only talked about it in terms of integrated memory controllers because you brought up the idea that Intel parts have always been "memory starved". That statement is what I was contesting. Intel parts have only been memory starved on some workloads, relative to AMD, when AMD had an integrated memory controller, and Intel didn't. The blanket statement that this has always been the case is not true.
You should've been fighting my conclusion - they couldn't be bothered benching with the hardware they priced out. I mentioned the i7's improvement in my first post, but I'd still like some numbers on just how big a difference it makes.
As to your point that you want to see data justifying the claims that DDR2 vs DDR3 in their study isn't all that relevant, the article provides that data. One may question the workloads they chose, but the data justifying the claim within the scope of the workloads that they did choose is there.
QX9770(DDR3) vs QX9775(DDR2)?
Mem Latency +60% Crysis FPS Avg -21% Crysis FPS Min -32.5% (below 30FPS; expect stutters/jolts with VSYNC enabled) FarCry2 FPS Avg -35% FarCry2 FPS Min -34% UT3 FPS Avg +13% UT3 FPS Min +4.5% HL:EP2 FPS Avg -7%
Particle Sim Bench FPS Avg (?) +13.8%
Worldbench - FF + Media Player -8% Worldbench - Nero CD Authoring -7%
I'm too tired to check the rest. I left out a few that were nearly equal.
My point? If they are going to rate the best value based on certain hardware, they have to bench with that hardware, or their chart is a bunch of hooey.
I will agree though that the AMD processors didn't take any serious hit from DDR2.
the sensitivity going from DDR2->DDR3 is small.
I guess I don't consider 30-35% in a few games to be "small". Crysis and Farcry2 are pretty good indicators for how future games will be affected, so I do feel it should move the CPU around on the value charts.
Slashdot Mirror
Paypal is 30 cents, and... 1.5-2.5%. You can't go beyond that before you're just being unrealistic.
50 cents? 3.5%? Bleh!
Who cares when the new consoles come.
Best selling non-handheld console of 2005/2006? PS2.
I predict the PS3 will be a great selling console until at least 2010, even if they could push something better out the door today.
Apple have done some research into this area, and concluded that the best power saving technique is to ramp the CPU up for complex tasks, then hit idle as soon as you can. Rather than dragging out the process. This sounds like what Intel is going for, with there 50 x reduction in idle draw.
Doesn't really matter. A Cortex A8 isn't that much slower than an Atom. Certainly not enough that the idle savings will offset the load power usage.
Oh? Interesting.
All I had available for reference was a smaller/older EEE PC.
I assumed the bigger LCDs would use more juice, but it looks like the newer ones may use less.
I take it you measured with a device like the Kill-A-Watt?
I suspect that the name has a big part of it.
Altavista? MSN? Windows Live Search?
Nope. People want something funny and easy to remember.
Google! Bing! Yahoo!
I'm waiting for BamPow!
To be fair, the Atom runs at 6 Watts max, where average TDP can down to as little as 0.4W. The problem with Atom, as you say, is all of the other hardware to make it work. Its current chipset is incredibly power hungry, but they're working on that (integrating more and doing even deeper clock gating). Future Atoms will likely use even less power, with Intel already shipping chips with a max 2.4W threshold.
Right, so if you're actually doing something, you don't get to use your computer as long.
And yes, you are being unfair comparing a device which has a hard drive with hundreds of gigabytes of space and a WXSVGA screen to a handheld device with a couple of gigs of flash memory and a HVGA screen.
The Pandora has dual-SDHC slots, so you could have 64GB of space. (More if bigger SDHC cards were actually made)
Fine, an HDD is unfair, but SSD vs dual-SDHC is a valid comparison. The EEE PCs with SSDs had about 25MB/sec read/write speed. High end SDHC cards are slightly below that, and you can have two.
Now that better SSDs are available(like the Vertex), it changes things - but the Vertex is also a whole other price range.
Nobody's stopping you from making an Atom device with those components (though it will take more power right now, it'll be vastly faster than the Cortex A8, and you won't have to recompile or use highly specialized toolkits, which is a huge Intel advantage).
Nobody makes x86 programs that work on such tiny screens. I would cite the "highly specialized toolkits" as an advantage for ARM, in this case... you will need linux and those fancy toolkits. Maemo, Android, etc. all work very well on tiny screens.
And by the time Intel has an x86 Atom chip that will work in a fanless tiny device like a Pandora, ARM will have quad-core A9's available, so your point regarding performance is moot...
After all, there is no Atom that will fit in a device that small... yet. I have news for you though - my Phenom II in a cellphone (lol) beats your Atom in a cellphone. ;)
Wish there was an edit button. :)
Found the link: http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?s=&showtopic=48259&view=findpost&p=733993
If interested, you can search the forums for more info, and look up the Palm Pre battery life.
good architecture
Don't you mean ludicrously good architecture?
I'm thinking Cortex A8's, which have been out for over a year. Stuff like the OMAP 3530(present in the Beagleboard, upcoming Pandora Handheld, and Palm Pre) consumes remarkably small amounts of power.
The Pandora developers said their device consumes around or just over 1 watt. Most of that is from the LCD. They did experiments completely shutting off certain hardware, to measure power consumption, and concluded...
CPU - about 20-40mw
DSP - about 30-60mw
SGX GPU - about 30-60mw
(Hard to get exact measurements due to the nature of how components interact. Anything loading the CPU probably loads up the memory as well. Anything hitting the GPU will hit the CPU, and DSP load varies greatly depending on the codec and video being decoded.)
The entire SoC uses a ludicrously small amount of power; something like 0.2-0.4w. Then add another 0.6w for the LCD, and a bunch more for wireless.
Now, compare that to the current Atoms, with 6+ watts just for the CPU/chipset, another 2+ for the HDD/SSD, at least 6-15w for the LCD, etc...
If any company can drive down their power consumption, Intel can, but that doesn't mean it'll be easy to catch ARM!
I just can't wait for Cortex A9's. Quad-core ARM in the exact same power envelope!
Ogg players are still quite common. I got an MP3 player a while ago, and was surprised to find it played ogg. I got it because it advertised FLAC support.
I would take ogg over mp3, and aac over both of those.
But right now they're using H.263, so anything is an improvement! :D
I remember when I had a perfect quality 256kbit video. I uploaded it to youtube, and it got transcoded into a blurry ~512kbit mess with audio desynced.
That was supposed to be funny, right? I can't imagine anyone going to that much effort. Are you also running it in a virtual machine?
Anyway... I scanned with it, and it found nothing. But since my browser has no history, maybe that's affecting it.
The facts still have to check out. It's just the slant of the article. Choice of words when describing stuff, etc.
But I've never found Wikipedia to be that unbiased, especially when it comes to topics that are still debated.
Ex: It may report a hardware device as vaporware, and state that the company creating it has a cult following that aggressively promote the devices, despite there being no evidence the device will ever exist.
Then once the device is released, it gets updated to a different slant.
The company plans to unveil its first car in London later this month, a small two-seater that weighs roughly 700 pounds.
Gee, that's some rounding error right there.
770 pounds is closer to 800, and that means minimum 900 (perhaps 1000 pounds) with a person in it. Two people and you might have 1200 pounds.
The small size would worry me in North America, but I can see this being both sellable and safe in parts of Europe. After all, some of those old winding alleys are so small you can hardly fit a truck in them.
Good point. Lately I just buy everything on Steam. It lowers the chances, and if I do get a Trojan(Starforce DRM?), I can at least get a refund.
Can't get a trojan from an mp3, but you sure can from a cracked game!
I find the statements in this article quite hilarious, considering how much Symantec and McAfee were crying back when Microsoft first announced OneCare.
Antitrust! Lawsuit! Unfairness! Well gee, looks like they did okay. Now they're just smug.
But without the qualifying statements, you get modded into oblivion anyway.
I criticized gore in games, in another slashdot thread. I said that too often companies focus on adding gore and dismemberment rather than making a game fun. I feel that most games fail to make those features in any way realistic, and poorly made dismemberment is really quite distracting. Don't you find it weird when sniping someone blows all their limbs off?
My rating: Troll -1 flamebait -1
Slashdot really has developed a mob mentality. At first all the interesting posts are modded up, but then by the end of the day only one side of the argument remains.
You're not going to get flamed for your stance. Every single article about this browser bundling thing goes in Microsoft's favour. Honest - all... six of them, so far, in the past month or so?
What I find so ludicrous is Microsoft's shoddy attempts at complying. Picture this...
Someone is mugging you with a gun, and they want your wallet. But you don't want to give it to them, so you offer them $20. They tell you to screw yourself and to give them your wallet. You offer them... a credit card, and half the money in your wallet!
Now they either shoot you or grab the wallet out of your hand.
Honestly, this won't end well for Microsoft; they want to continue business in the EU, so they are going to pay... :/ ...but I do feel the analogy fits remarkably well.
Back when all this stuff started, it was suggested to Microsoft that they create a tiny VB6/C# program that runs instead of the default browser or media player. The first time it runs, it offers you some web browsers or media players. You click next, it registers that as the default browser or media player, and you're done. Requirements: 1 semi skilled programmer, familiar with GUI creation and setting registry keys.
I believe the options were:
Internet Explorer 6 (Default)
Mozilla Firefox
Opera
Windows Media Player 10 (Default)
RealPlayer (lol?)
Winamp
Anyway, if they had just complied... they'd probably still have gotten sued, but at least they'd waste less money internally, and it would've been dealt with years ago.
I BOUGHT the damn DVD, stop annoying me and show me the damn movie!
Okay, you bought it - now download it so you aren't annoyed by those FBI warnings! :P (personal use backup rights should cover this; the DRM makes it ludicrously difficult to make a backup copy, but you're still entitled to one; IANAL; I'm Canadian.)
Or you can be an honourable pirate. (download everything first, and buy the good stuff)
Or you can be a dishonourable scumbag pirate. (download everything first, and laugh)
Nope, you won't. It was stated in his article that HTTPS is immune.
You could also dump all cached content when the browser closes. (That's what I do)
The only thing that can get me is cookies!... but they're so useful and tasty...
Oh, heck yes. That game was hectic with everything going on! Tons of fun, and one of the first Sega games I played.
I had a SNES, Sega, and later an n64/PS1. :) The Sega had the most sprite-heavy 2D games.
I imagine as a developer, it must've been a blast! Too bad the Sega controller was so bad. Sticky buttons!
Speaking of tons of sprites... now that I think back, I'm really impressed by how many coins flew everywhere in Sonic whenever you get hit!
16bit? Yeah, but the Genesis was a beast as far as raw throughput and pixel pushing.
Look at games like Gunstar Heroes.
(although this only further supports you stating they're different)
The Wii's more powerful than the most powerful gaming machines a few years ago and there were a lot of good games back then (unreal tournament 2004, Doom 3, etc). There's enough power in the console, but the creators of the game apparently can't adapt to lesser hardware, so they throw a public tantrum or water the game down so that they don't have to actually think about the problem and develop around it.
You are absolutely correct. Games like Zelda: Twilight Princess make me believe there's plenty of power in the Wii; more than enough to make something "fun".
Until this newest POP, I found The Sands of Time to be the most fun. I'm pretty sure it'd run okay on a Wii...
I once had a co-worker who had been programming for 20 years, but had no idea that the CPU had registers, what they were for, or how they would be used. That's just sad.
I learned about registers when I first learned Javascript!
A rather strange jump, but I loved Javascript's syntax, and I heard machine code(or "assembly") was faster; to make a 2D FF type game, I needed something faster than Javascript, so off I went to research it.
Turns out I wasn't smart enough to learn assembly, at the time - but it did teach me some interesting basics on how stuff works. Knowing roughly what the computer does has made me recognize all the steps that must happen when a simple call like substring(5); is used.
I never did finish that 2D FF RPG; but I did use the knowledge I gained to create a double-buffered clip-pane tile scroller, which I thought was pretty impressive. It was getting 1500fps on computers from 2004. ;) Too bad that knowledge is obsolete now; I need some OGL experience!
I only talked about it in terms of integrated memory controllers because you brought up the idea that Intel parts have always been "memory starved". That statement is what I was contesting. Intel parts have only been memory starved on some workloads, relative to AMD, when AMD had an integrated memory controller, and Intel didn't. The blanket statement that this has always been the case is not true.
You should've been fighting my conclusion - they couldn't be bothered benching with the hardware they priced out. I mentioned the i7's improvement in my first post, but I'd still like some numbers on just how big a difference it makes.
As to your point that you want to see data justifying the claims that DDR2 vs DDR3 in their study isn't all that relevant, the article provides that data. One may question the workloads they chose, but the data justifying the claim within the scope of the workloads that they did choose is there.
QX9770(DDR3) vs QX9775(DDR2)?
Mem Latency +60%
Crysis FPS Avg -21%
Crysis FPS Min -32.5% (below 30FPS; expect stutters/jolts with VSYNC enabled)
FarCry2 FPS Avg -35%
FarCry2 FPS Min -34%
UT3 FPS Avg +13%
UT3 FPS Min +4.5%
HL:EP2 FPS Avg -7%
Particle Sim Bench FPS Avg (?) +13.8%
Worldbench - FF + Media Player -8%
Worldbench - Nero CD Authoring -7%
I'm too tired to check the rest. I left out a few that were nearly equal.
My point? If they are going to rate the best value based on certain hardware, they have to bench with that hardware, or their chart is a bunch of hooey.
I will agree though that the AMD processors didn't take any serious hit from DDR2.
the sensitivity going from DDR2->DDR3 is small.
I guess I don't consider 30-35% in a few games to be "small". Crysis and Farcry2 are pretty good indicators for how future games will be affected, so I do feel it should move the CPU around on the value charts.