The grpahics core will likely be small, add an inconsequential amount of transistors, be disable-able, and or crossfire able with the main crossfire card.
However, the place I see this getting HUGE gains, is if the on board GPU is capable of doing physics calculations. Having a basic physics co processor on every AMD CPU flooding out the gates will do massive good for the implementation of physics in games, and can probably offload alot of other calculations in the OS. On board video encode acceleration anyone?
Just having a dedicated super wide parallel optimized floating point monster on the die for relatively little price penalty seems like an excellent idea to me.
I believe this is partially due to the variability of PC hardware. You can't just program the game to load on the fly due to the fact that you can't target a certain known disc speed. The person's hard drive could be nearly full (hence a commensurate reduction in seek time due to fragmentation) or what not.
What I see happening eventually, is that every console will come with a high speed 32GB SSD as a loading cache. What will happen is that at the beginning of the game there will be a long load, and then in the background the game will continue to load the entirety of the pertinent data into the SSD while the game is playing. Video cut scenes and such will remain on the disc.
This would eliminate the vast majority of load times, because as you're wandering into a new zone, the console can dynamically load the pertinent information from the SSD to the memory as you're walking there. A 10 second load time from a bluray disc (which I believe is roughly 20MB/s from an optical disc, to a dynamically cached system where pertinent data is just copied on the fly. Modern SSD's can saturate modern consoles memory banks in about 2 seconds flat. Even the 'value' 32GB SSDs run about 190MB/s. By guaranteeing a minimum baseload speed (A freakishly fast one at that) load times could permanently be eliminated as the player could never travel through the game world fast enough to outstrip the loading speed of the SSD.
And since the drive would likely be emptied and trimmed every time the game was done, drive performance would remain consistent. The lack of a swapfile would mean that the IO load on the disc would be low, meaning it would probably outlive most components on the console.
Additionally, they could sell a separate 'quick load' accessory which would slide into an external slot, and be another 32GB SSD which when put in there would allow maybe 10-15 games have the initial data for start up be present on the disc, with the primary caching SSD still there. This would allow initial game data to be read off the quick load disc and while you would still need to have the game disc inserted in the drive, would all but eliminate all semblance of long loads from the beginning of the game to the end of the game.
To sum up, all modern games have long load times because they either have a fixed (but slow) loading media for loading on the fly, or a medium speed (but of inconsistent space/speed) media, where you have to assume the lowest common denominator. Having a quick SSD, solely dedicated to caching the content for one game at a time, would give you a blistering fast minimum baseline from which you could design your game from the ground up to take advantage of, and with modern games saturating RAM would only take about 2-3 seconds, meaning that it's unlikely that the gamer would ever interact with the game in a manner that would outstrip the SSD's ability to load this.
Additionally, this would allow game developers to create more rich, vibrant worlds as less of the level would have to be in memory at a time to ensure loading times remain reasonable, allowing higher LOD within the game world being rendered at the moment, and the guarantee that when the player moves the SSD will be able to keep up the pace. Additionally, it would free up more memory by allowing certain things (like textures of the landscape being rolled in) to be streamed from the SSD instead of cached in RAM, as well as pretty much all audio samples, giving more memory available for game objects being immediately interacted with.
A small, 32GB 200MB/s read SSD would likely give the developers a LARGE amount of leeway in ensuring that loads NEVER have to happen, save a small bit at the beginning of the game, while freeing up a lot of memory (brought in by the fast pace of streaming from the SSD, and quick access times, broadening the scope of what can be streamed) All while ensuring that games don't need to be packaged with 30GB of ROM, thus saving the costs of the ROM packaging, and probably paying for the SSD in 3-4 games versus the cost of ROM.
I'd be entertained to find out if waterproof versions of this container with a variable buoyancy air bladder could be dumped out at sea, then as soon as the enemy boats get close, BAM, pop up and fire. Sort of like a new kind of mine, only it carries cruise missiles.
I really wish that laptops would come with one 2.5" bay and one 1.8" bay.
Right now i'd love to throw an SSD into my laptop for the OS, but am highly portable with my laptop (it travels roughly 6 or 7 miles a day, often in 3 or 4 legs) and don't want to deal with a cramped internal storage situation. If I could simply get a 500GB internal spinner and an 80GB internal flash drive, I would be in heaven. Note to laptop makers, please make this happen. You could even just throw it into the monitor enclosure. But i'd love an extra 1.8" slot.
If you're splashing money all around, why not mass produce a tube that the car can run in, that can be partially evacuated down to like 20% normal air pressure?
Since the car is using it's own oxidizer, oxygen being provided to the jet engine won't be as much of an issue. And the total lack of drag on the vehicle should atleast double it's speed.
One small bit to add to this. Nuclear wouldn't be the best candidate for this load leveling because running the nuclear plant at full blast 24 hours a day would significantly reduce it's lifespan. It's already hard as nails to get a nuclear plant BUILT, having to retire them 20 years early because they were worked to the bone and failed due to radiation damage and pressure damage would be a tragedy.
Sadly, tunnels large enough to carry trains, as modern subways will prove, are prohibitivley expensive.
however, compressed air is a good energy storage medium.
Assuming a 900 foot by 300 foot by 300 foot cavern was filled with compressed air with a pressure of 300 bars, would have a potential energy of roughly 50 gigawatt hours. (source: http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf) Or enough to run the entire united states for about an hour. This is a massive pool of energy, and significantly more cost effective than a battery.
HOWEVER, there lies a rub. When you compress air, you generate a massive amount of heat as the thermal energy stored in the air is highly compressed. This heat energy, unless properly reclaimed and stored (I.E. In a molten salt bath) just leaks away, stealing a huge chunk of the potential energy with it. When the air is uncompressed, there is significantly less heat energy stored in the air, and thus the expanded gas is very cold. This limits how far it can expand again, and creates a formidable problem in the form of condensation.
What you need to do to get EFFICENT compressed air storage, is either store the heat in an efficent manner, and add it back to the compressed air. OR you can gradually warm it back up to room temperature through a heat exchanger as it expands.
All in all, the challenges to attaining decent efficency are considerable.
What might be an easier way to achieve the same energy storage using similar principles, is to turn that same cavern they created into a giant hydro dam. Basically, create an enclosure of equal size below it. When energy needs to be stored, pump the water up to the higher cavern. When energy needs to be released, release it through hydro turbines into the lower cavern.
This is the fundamental reason why we don't dump all of our uneaten food into starving countries. Doing so strongly devalues the local farmer's products and makes it difficult for them to buy seed and fertilizer for the next year.
It's extremely difficult to compete with free or very, very cheap. In the corporate world, if this is done it's called 'dumping'. In the world food aid world, it's only done if the demand for food far outstrips supplies and doing so would not impact food prices significantly.
Thus, why the west can live in food glut conditions while many africans are malnourished. Suddenly feeding them all for free would collapse the mainstay of their internal economy.
usually to efficently leverage ethanol you have to have an engine designed for it. You can utilize VASTLY higher compression ratios with ethanol, because of it's massive antiknock rating. So you use a turbo, superhigh compression ratios, and boom, ethanol comes within 10-20% as efficent as gasoline. This allows you to use a smaller engine, and hence less pumping losses, opening the door for ethanol engines to surpass gasoline engines in MPG efficency.
How about using ethanol in combination with gasoline to drastically boost normal fuel efficency by achieving higher compression ratios than normally possible?
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/engine.html
This MIT engine uses ethanol injection to keep an engine from knocking, delivering significantly higher compression ratios. About 1 gallon of ethanol to 20 galons of gasoline used. And the result? Engine output per liter jumped nearly 2x. Thus, overall fuel efficency gains were in the neighborhood of 20-30%, and I doubt it'd be that much more expensive than a hybrid system. Combined with a hybrid system, this could allow stratospheric mileages easily toppling diesel in 1st place.
I think so far this is only on simulations, but if it were to break into the market, Ethanol could find it's home not only as an alternative fuel, but more importantly boosting the efficency of all of the other straight gasoline engines out there. All it takes is customized design for the fuel application.
Because once you squish the algae for use in diesel fuel you can use the left overs as animal feed.
If we produced enough petrochemicals from biodiesel to run all of america's cars, trucks trains and ships, which is about 147 trillion liters, then we would have an equivalent amount of animal feed (oil algae is only half oil.)
Assuming that this weighs HALF as much as the oil does, this provides us with roughly 16,000,000,000 tons of animal feed, which i'm sure can make a NOTICEABLE dent in the fuel supply, and free up more corn for hungry people in the best case scenario, or ethanol in the worst case.
Disclaimer: Math in the feed calculations may be off by up to an order of magnitude if I goofed.
This may be a longshot..
But I think by far the largest source of easily extractable carbon on the earth at this point is coal, not oil. And we have enough of that for hundreds of years.
And I suppose gunpowder, papermaking, woodblock printing and movable type printing, the early lodestone and needle compass, gunpowder, toilet paper, early seismological detectors, matches, pound locks, the double-action piston pump, blast furnace and cast iron, the iron plough, the multi-tube seed drill, the suspension bridge, natural gas as fuel, the differential gear, the hydraulic-powered trip hammer, the mechanical chain drive, the mechanical belt drive, the raised-relief map, the propeller, the crossbow, the cannon, the rocket, and the multistage rocket were all invented by white people too?
Ancient China had everyone beat technology at one point. They just lost their edge when they stopped expanding.
But to assume that white people were the originators of all technology is clearly false, as numerous examples around the world demonstrate that other civilizations often had inventions hundreds if not a thousand years before the west.
A good example of this is the Chinese who, according to Wikipedia under the Chinese inventions section, managed to isolate testosterone and estrogen from urine and successfully use them to treat hormonal disorders around 1150! This would not be reinvented in the west until sometime in the mid-late 19th century.
Taking your shoes off was a countermeasure put in place because original X-ray scanners/metal detectors did not reach the shoes. The shoebomber showed the airport security guys that not even the humble shoe was necessarily safe anymore. Thus, the policy of taking off your shoe.
How do you get much better quality out of a good 35mm photo print than a typical 5MP digital shot?
Or do you?
It atleast used to be the case that film cameras outgunned digital for alot of print purposes. Now, if you had a situation where only certain printers could print 8MP+ photos, and printers were decently expensive, you might have a situation much like vinyl and CD, where that's still true.
However, it requires good conditions (good player, clean vinyl) to get the best sound out of vinyl, something CDs have an inherent advantage in.
This technology would be supremely useful for all of the people who got piss drunk and can't remember where they left their camera or parked their car.
You put in oxygen. It's stated in the summary that the bacteria cannot survive in an oxygenated environment. It would be relatively simple to just kill off the entire population.
Finally, Macs will have access to a huge game library.
I can see the i'm a mac comercials
I'm a mac
And i'm a PC
So Mac, did you hear that I signed up to this sweet new gaming service that gives me access to hundreds of games a year and I can pay by the hour so if I only pay a few hours a month I don't have to pay like $50 to play the newest title?
Yeah, PC. I signed up too. It's pretty sweet.
PC: Wait.. you play games? Competition. Crap.
*cut to shot of PC and Mac having a halo competition with X-box 360 pouting in the corner, and PS3 being like 'WTF'*
Slashdot Mirror
The grpahics core will likely be small, add an inconsequential amount of transistors, be disable-able, and or crossfire able with the main crossfire card.
However, the place I see this getting HUGE gains, is if the on board GPU is capable of doing physics calculations. Having a basic physics co processor on every AMD CPU flooding out the gates will do massive good for the implementation of physics in games, and can probably offload alot of other calculations in the OS. On board video encode acceleration anyone?
Just having a dedicated super wide parallel optimized floating point monster on the die for relatively little price penalty seems like an excellent idea to me.
I see two ways this could be a massive boon to the slashdotter community.
Fast external harddrives. 7gbps could make a wicked fast SAN in a shoebox. Since it would only need a power cable, cable routing would be a non issue.
This could also make a slick replacement for SATA if executed correctly. No more snaking SATA cables.
And the second, is an HDMI analog. No more stupid display wires? Awesome!
I'm not an electrical engineer, just some percolation from my mind.
I believe this is partially due to the variability of PC hardware. You can't just program the game to load on the fly due to the fact that you can't target a certain known disc speed. The person's hard drive could be nearly full (hence a commensurate reduction in seek time due to fragmentation) or what not.
What I see happening eventually, is that every console will come with a high speed 32GB SSD as a loading cache. What will happen is that at the beginning of the game there will be a long load, and then in the background the game will continue to load the entirety of the pertinent data into the SSD while the game is playing. Video cut scenes and such will remain on the disc.
This would eliminate the vast majority of load times, because as you're wandering into a new zone, the console can dynamically load the pertinent information from the SSD to the memory as you're walking there. A 10 second load time from a bluray disc (which I believe is roughly 20MB/s from an optical disc, to a dynamically cached system where pertinent data is just copied on the fly. Modern SSD's can saturate modern consoles memory banks in about 2 seconds flat. Even the 'value' 32GB SSDs run about 190MB/s. By guaranteeing a minimum baseload speed (A freakishly fast one at that) load times could permanently be eliminated as the player could never travel through the game world fast enough to outstrip the loading speed of the SSD.
And since the drive would likely be emptied and trimmed every time the game was done, drive performance would remain consistent. The lack of a swapfile would mean that the IO load on the disc would be low, meaning it would probably outlive most components on the console.
Additionally, they could sell a separate 'quick load' accessory which would slide into an external slot, and be another 32GB SSD which when put in there would allow maybe 10-15 games have the initial data for start up be present on the disc, with the primary caching SSD still there. This would allow initial game data to be read off the quick load disc and while you would still need to have the game disc inserted in the drive, would all but eliminate all semblance of long loads from the beginning of the game to the end of the game.
To sum up, all modern games have long load times because they either have a fixed (but slow) loading media for loading on the fly, or a medium speed (but of inconsistent space/speed) media, where you have to assume the lowest common denominator. Having a quick SSD, solely dedicated to caching the content for one game at a time, would give you a blistering fast minimum baseline from which you could design your game from the ground up to take advantage of, and with modern games saturating RAM would only take about 2-3 seconds, meaning that it's unlikely that the gamer would ever interact with the game in a manner that would outstrip the SSD's ability to load this.
Additionally, this would allow game developers to create more rich, vibrant worlds as less of the level would have to be in memory at a time to ensure loading times remain reasonable, allowing higher LOD within the game world being rendered at the moment, and the guarantee that when the player moves the SSD will be able to keep up the pace. Additionally, it would free up more memory by allowing certain things (like textures of the landscape being rolled in) to be streamed from the SSD instead of cached in RAM, as well as pretty much all audio samples, giving more memory available for game objects being immediately interacted with.
A small, 32GB 200MB/s read SSD would likely give the developers a LARGE amount of leeway in ensuring that loads NEVER have to happen, save a small bit at the beginning of the game, while freeing up a lot of memory (brought in by the fast pace of streaming from the SSD, and quick access times, broadening the scope of what can be streamed) All while ensuring that games don't need to be packaged with 30GB of ROM, thus saving the costs of the ROM packaging, and probably paying for the SSD in 3-4 games versus the cost of ROM.
I'd be entertained to find out if waterproof versions of this container with a variable buoyancy air bladder could be dumped out at sea, then as soon as the enemy boats get close, BAM, pop up and fire. Sort of like a new kind of mine, only it carries cruise missiles.
For a moment, it stretched around the world. Or, atleast to the Americas.
I really wish that laptops would come with one 2.5" bay and one 1.8" bay.
Right now i'd love to throw an SSD into my laptop for the OS, but am highly portable with my laptop (it travels roughly 6 or 7 miles a day, often in 3 or 4 legs) and don't want to deal with a cramped internal storage situation. If I could simply get a 500GB internal spinner and an 80GB internal flash drive, I would be in heaven. Note to laptop makers, please make this happen. You could even just throw it into the monitor enclosure. But i'd love an extra 1.8" slot.
Here's an idea to make it stay on the ground.
If you're splashing money all around, why not mass produce a tube that the car can run in, that can be partially evacuated down to like 20% normal air pressure?
Since the car is using it's own oxidizer, oxygen being provided to the jet engine won't be as much of an issue. And the total lack of drag on the vehicle should atleast double it's speed.
One small bit to add to this. Nuclear wouldn't be the best candidate for this load leveling because running the nuclear plant at full blast 24 hours a day would significantly reduce it's lifespan. It's already hard as nails to get a nuclear plant BUILT, having to retire them 20 years early because they were worked to the bone and failed due to radiation damage and pressure damage would be a tragedy.
Oops. Sloppy editing. 50 gigawatt hours is roughly the amount of energy generated by a large nuke plant, in about a day.
Sadly, tunnels large enough to carry trains, as modern subways will prove, are prohibitivley expensive.
however, compressed air is a good energy storage medium.
Assuming a 900 foot by 300 foot by 300 foot cavern was filled with compressed air with a pressure of 300 bars, would have a potential energy of roughly 50 gigawatt hours. (source: http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf) Or enough to run the entire united states for about an hour. This is a massive pool of energy, and significantly more cost effective than a battery.
HOWEVER, there lies a rub. When you compress air, you generate a massive amount of heat as the thermal energy stored in the air is highly compressed. This heat energy, unless properly reclaimed and stored (I.E. In a molten salt bath) just leaks away, stealing a huge chunk of the potential energy with it. When the air is uncompressed, there is significantly less heat energy stored in the air, and thus the expanded gas is very cold. This limits how far it can expand again, and creates a formidable problem in the form of condensation.
What you need to do to get EFFICENT compressed air storage, is either store the heat in an efficent manner, and add it back to the compressed air. OR you can gradually warm it back up to room temperature through a heat exchanger as it expands.
All in all, the challenges to attaining decent efficency are considerable.
What might be an easier way to achieve the same energy storage using similar principles, is to turn that same cavern they created into a giant hydro dam. Basically, create an enclosure of equal size below it. When energy needs to be stored, pump the water up to the higher cavern. When energy needs to be released, release it through hydro turbines into the lower cavern.
This is the fundamental reason why we don't dump all of our uneaten food into starving countries. Doing so strongly devalues the local farmer's products and makes it difficult for them to buy seed and fertilizer for the next year.
It's extremely difficult to compete with free or very, very cheap. In the corporate world, if this is done it's called 'dumping'. In the world food aid world, it's only done if the demand for food far outstrips supplies and doing so would not impact food prices significantly.
Thus, why the west can live in food glut conditions while many africans are malnourished. Suddenly feeding them all for free would collapse the mainstay of their internal economy.
Tricky, isn't it?
usually to efficently leverage ethanol you have to have an engine designed for it. You can utilize VASTLY higher compression ratios with ethanol, because of it's massive antiknock rating. So you use a turbo, superhigh compression ratios, and boom, ethanol comes within 10-20% as efficent as gasoline. This allows you to use a smaller engine, and hence less pumping losses, opening the door for ethanol engines to surpass gasoline engines in MPG efficency. How about using ethanol in combination with gasoline to drastically boost normal fuel efficency by achieving higher compression ratios than normally possible? http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/engine.html This MIT engine uses ethanol injection to keep an engine from knocking, delivering significantly higher compression ratios. About 1 gallon of ethanol to 20 galons of gasoline used. And the result? Engine output per liter jumped nearly 2x. Thus, overall fuel efficency gains were in the neighborhood of 20-30%, and I doubt it'd be that much more expensive than a hybrid system. Combined with a hybrid system, this could allow stratospheric mileages easily toppling diesel in 1st place. I think so far this is only on simulations, but if it were to break into the market, Ethanol could find it's home not only as an alternative fuel, but more importantly boosting the efficency of all of the other straight gasoline engines out there. All it takes is customized design for the fuel application.
Japan has had this tech since about 2006. Here is a Toshiba printer that uses the exact same technology. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6174052.stm
Because once you squish the algae for use in diesel fuel you can use the left overs as animal feed. If we produced enough petrochemicals from biodiesel to run all of america's cars, trucks trains and ships, which is about 147 trillion liters, then we would have an equivalent amount of animal feed (oil algae is only half oil.) Assuming that this weighs HALF as much as the oil does, this provides us with roughly 16,000,000,000 tons of animal feed, which i'm sure can make a NOTICEABLE dent in the fuel supply, and free up more corn for hungry people in the best case scenario, or ethanol in the worst case. Disclaimer: Math in the feed calculations may be off by up to an order of magnitude if I goofed.
Only from the black ice mod
I once played a shadowrun game where my decker took a round out of combat to reply to slashdot.
Okay, maybe I should rephrase that. China lost it's edge because it sealed itself in and was content to exist as a diplomatic shut-in.
This may be a longshot.. But I think by far the largest source of easily extractable carbon on the earth at this point is coal, not oil. And we have enough of that for hundreds of years.
And I suppose gunpowder, papermaking, woodblock printing and movable type printing, the early lodestone and needle compass, gunpowder, toilet paper, early seismological detectors, matches, pound locks, the double-action piston pump, blast furnace and cast iron, the iron plough, the multi-tube seed drill, the suspension bridge, natural gas as fuel, the differential gear, the hydraulic-powered trip hammer, the mechanical chain drive, the mechanical belt drive, the raised-relief map, the propeller, the crossbow, the cannon, the rocket, and the multistage rocket were all invented by white people too? Ancient China had everyone beat technology at one point. They just lost their edge when they stopped expanding. But to assume that white people were the originators of all technology is clearly false, as numerous examples around the world demonstrate that other civilizations often had inventions hundreds if not a thousand years before the west. A good example of this is the Chinese who, according to Wikipedia under the Chinese inventions section, managed to isolate testosterone and estrogen from urine and successfully use them to treat hormonal disorders around 1150! This would not be reinvented in the west until sometime in the mid-late 19th century.
Taking your shoes off was a countermeasure put in place because original X-ray scanners/metal detectors did not reach the shoes. The shoebomber showed the airport security guys that not even the humble shoe was necessarily safe anymore. Thus, the policy of taking off your shoe.
How do you get much better quality out of a good 35mm photo print than a typical 5MP digital shot? Or do you? It atleast used to be the case that film cameras outgunned digital for alot of print purposes. Now, if you had a situation where only certain printers could print 8MP+ photos, and printers were decently expensive, you might have a situation much like vinyl and CD, where that's still true. However, it requires good conditions (good player, clean vinyl) to get the best sound out of vinyl, something CDs have an inherent advantage in.
This technology would be supremely useful for all of the people who got piss drunk and can't remember where they left their camera or parked their car.
Running with your concept, wouldn't the first and foremost mutation that would likely come out of that situation, be RADIATION RESISTANCE?
You put in oxygen. It's stated in the summary that the bacteria cannot survive in an oxygenated environment. It would be relatively simple to just kill off the entire population.
Finally, Macs will have access to a huge game library. I can see the i'm a mac comercials I'm a mac And i'm a PC So Mac, did you hear that I signed up to this sweet new gaming service that gives me access to hundreds of games a year and I can pay by the hour so if I only pay a few hours a month I don't have to pay like $50 to play the newest title? Yeah, PC. I signed up too. It's pretty sweet. PC: Wait.. you play games? Competition. Crap. *cut to shot of PC and Mac having a halo competition with X-box 360 pouting in the corner, and PS3 being like 'WTF'*