You are neglecting important details: Rather than catching up from behind by simply moving faster, they threw caltrops under the feet of their competitors to slow them down.
They only really beat Netscape into submission. The rest of the UNIX universe still lives on.
Open Source is immune from the kind of attacks that Microsoft has purpetrated in the past.
What this means is that partial downloads will still result in the best possible image for as many bytes as you've got.
This means for web pages images will appear to download faster (and not just come in scan lines at a time) and optimizing images for size is just a matter of chopping off the end of the file wherever you like.
This is much more significant than you may think.
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New PlayStation 2 Chip
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· Score: 1
- The only way Nintendo could play in this market is because their single chip solution keeps their costs way lower than their competitors. So they don't lose nearly as much per box.
- Xbox *cannot* be shrunk to the same degree. 1) Intel's x86's will always have baggage that make them chew up too much Si. 2) The XBOX is a PC (anyone who thinks diferently needs a boot to the head) and thus has IDE controller, southbridge, northbridge, CMOS, etc, 3) nVidia and Intel *HATE* (in the sense of Jihad) each other. There's no way in hell they will ever give each other their processor netlists -- those chips will always be seperate.
Given these facts it should be obvious that for Sony, integrating and shrinking was actually of vital importance in this crowded market. XBox can't chase them down that path and they can run Nintendo out of room. Its all about costs.
I don't know anything about the nexGen playstation CPU, but presumably they can keep playing the "backward compatibility" game by including the entire previous generation. But don't be mistaken into thinking this is any kind of advantage over XBox -- the next generation XBox will almost certainly also be an x86 running Direct X + Win2K, which means it will have software based backward compatibility.
> How many of you actually routinely (e.g. 6 times > a year) examine the output of your compiler, and > compare it to what you would have written? Well, speaking for myself I certainly do this. On the other hand I have already moved to the west coast.:o) You bring up a good point. People who have not seriously done this, let alone people like me who do this all the time, will have a hard time estimating the performance of a JIT or Crusoe let alone their compiler. So after inflating my ego, I have nowhere else to go but to present my authoritative opinion.:o) IMHO, Crusoe has its work cut out for it -- though they have a few aces up their sleeve, Java/JIT has dug itself a hole it may never climb out of and modern compilers still need work. -- Paul Hsieh http://www.pobox.com/~qed/
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I'd call this more like a "frozen solid effect" ...
You are neglecting important details: Rather than catching up from behind by simply moving faster, they threw caltrops under the feet of their competitors to slow them down.
They only really beat Netscape into submission. The rest of the UNIX universe still lives on.
Open Source is immune from the kind of attacks that Microsoft has purpetrated in the past.
- Based on globally incremental wavelets.
What this means is that partial downloads will still result in the best possible image for as many bytes as you've got.
This means for web pages images will appear to download faster (and not just come in scan lines at a time) and optimizing images for size is just a matter of chopping off the end of the file wherever you like.
- The only way Nintendo could play in this market is because their single chip solution keeps their costs way lower than their competitors. So they don't lose nearly as much per box.
- Xbox *cannot* be shrunk to the same degree. 1) Intel's x86's will always have baggage that make them chew up too much Si. 2) The XBOX is a PC (anyone who thinks diferently needs a boot to the head) and thus has IDE controller, southbridge, northbridge, CMOS, etc, 3) nVidia and Intel *HATE* (in the sense of Jihad) each other. There's no way in hell they will ever give each other their processor netlists -- those chips will always be seperate.
Given these facts it should be obvious that for Sony, integrating and shrinking was actually of vital importance in this crowded market. XBox can't chase them down that path and they can run Nintendo out of room. Its all about costs.
I don't know anything about the nexGen playstation CPU, but presumably they can keep playing the "backward compatibility" game by including the entire previous generation. But don't be mistaken into thinking this is any kind of advantage over XBox -- the next generation XBox will almost certainly also be an x86 running Direct X + Win2K, which means it will have software based backward compatibility.
> How many of you actually routinely (e.g. 6 times > a year) examine the output of your compiler, and > compare it to what you would have written? Well, speaking for myself I certainly do this. On the other hand I have already moved to the west coast. :o) You bring up a good point. People who have not seriously done this, let alone people like me who do this all the time, will have a hard time estimating the performance of a JIT or Crusoe let alone their compiler. So after inflating my ego, I have nowhere else to go but to present my authoritative opinion. :o) IMHO, Crusoe has its work cut out for it -- though they have a few aces up their sleeve, Java/JIT has dug itself a hole it may never climb out of and modern compilers still need work. -- Paul Hsieh http://www.pobox.com/~qed/