I'd be surprised if a 2GHz P4 couldn't handle at least 5, and maybe 10 simultaneous streams. As long as the tuners are doing the encoding in hardware - and you aren't running commercial-detection or other jobs while that's happening - all the CPU is doing is routing data to the hard disk.
The PCI bus won't be much of a limitation, most of these cards encode at a maximum of 10 or 12 megabits/second, which at 10 streams comes out to 120 megabits/second - or a measly 15 megabytes/second.
Now, if you want to watch some of those as you're saving them, doing pause/rewind operations, then I can't really say - but remember that some of the commercial DVRs which can do live pause/rewind have a measly 33 MHz CPU in them. Of course, the encoding and decoding on them is done in hardware, but there's no reason that can't be the case in your machine as well.
At one place where I used to work, if you were female of of a certain racial ethnicity, you were *guaranteed* to be promoted into one of the most coveted divisions/positions within a year. Really. In fact, in the most coveted division, virtually every single person was female or from that certain ethnicity.
Oddly enough, the racism worked both ways, there were other, less "cool" ethnicities which were virtually guaranteed *not* to be promoted.
On a better note, every place I've worked in the last decade has been free of any of that silliness.
In building several-terabyte arrays from IDE drives - with dedicated fans blowing right over the drives, and HUGE fans ventilating the case - I've found that when you're talking about nearly a dozen drives, it's not long before you're going to have a failure. In large arrays of Maxtors, Seagates, and Western Digitals, I have yet to go a year without at least one drive failing.
In fact, just a couple of days ago, one of my Western Digital RAID edition drives started hiccuping, and got dropped out of an array. That particular set of drives has only been in service for about 4 months.
They do if you already have hardware laying around. For instance, I have a couple of AthlonXP 1800's sitting around, so I'm considering building a PVR out of them. The fact that they're on NForce2 motherboards with SoundStorm and SPDIF out doesn't hurt, either.
"As for cost of repairs, I don't know when I last saw a fan go on anything other than a crappy PC. Hard drives are of course the most common to go (and 73GB FCAL drives are a lot more than $10! No spares on hand for those, though--everything is mirrored, and the vendor can provide replacements in two hours), but CPUs are usually the second most common failure in enterprise servers. Sparc, Power, and Itanium chips aren't generally something you might have a few spares on hand for, either."
I've got a $4,000 *chassis*, and I've even had a fan fail on it - out of 17 or so fans on the machine, one's bound to fail in five years, because moving parts fail, and the more of them you have, the more likely that one will die. But CPUs? In two decades of this sort of thing, I've had exactly *one* CPU go bad on me that wasn't bad when I got it, and that was a Cyrix chip. Even on *crappy* PCs, I've had CPU fans fail, but not the CPUs.
Besides, while Itaniums might be different, if you're talking truly enterprise-level hardware, the better Sparc and Power servers can keep chugging along without some of their CPUs.
Well, it could be that you use this to power the computer in your car. Or it could be that you want to home-brew your UPS (charger+battery). Or it could be that you're one of the guys that produces all of their own power, and run off of batteries anyway.
Or, it could be that you just want to run your Eden-based motherboard off of some AA batteries.:-)
I don't know if I'd call it "ridiculous resolution". 99% of the claims as to the resolution of film are usually based on how high of an optical resolution they can be scanned at, or the manufacturer's claim of the size of the grain.
In the end, just because your scanner can operate at 4000 DPI doesn't mean that you get 16 megapixels from a 35mm frame, and just because they claim some absurdly low grain size doesn't mean that you get 40 megapixels from a 35mm frame. In real-world scans of 35mm film at 4,000 DPI, I've seen precious few that weren't obviously out-resolved by the scanner.
Realistically, if you want to look at how large you enlarge an image with acceptable quality, once you eliminate various detractants (poor lenses, camera shake, etc.), then it's really a toss-up between 35mm and a decent digital SLR.
The one area that 35mm has going for it is that grain is less painful to look at than noise - but the digerati keep coming up with cameras that do better and better at high ISO.
You can make just about anything seem responsible if you "crunch the numbers properly".;-) I've worked in offices from 10 users to 20,000 users, and seen a good variety of what's deemed responsible by bean counters. And in eveyr experience that I've had, the companies that simply upgraded based on age spent a far greater amount of money - without much in return - than those that replaced them based on need. In fact, at the last job I had (the 20,000 user job), as a relatively capable machine was being replaced for no reason, I'd throw it in my cubicle, and find some use for it. It got to where I simply didn't have room to store all of the machines.
While it doesn't work as well for high-density machines like 1U servers, a good number of our servers that we've removed from service have been rendered more quiet, and used as workstations. Even if it's not cutting-edge, a dual AthlonMP with a gig of ram makes a good percentage of desktop users nicely happy.
And as for the money of repairing the machine, how much do you think it's going to cost? Are you planning on CPUs burning up left and right? It's rare for a repair to involve much more than a $10 fan, or occasionally a power supply. Because I usually buy a number of servers at a time, it's very easy to pick up a few spare parts. If hardware fails, by the time I've opened the machine to see what's wrong, I can stick in a spare and be up and running just as fast as I could make the call to Dell, let alone wait around for the tech to show up. I don't count hard drives, because they go bad anyway, and I'd have spares on hand whether I had a service agreement or not.
I'm talking about an office, too. The machines that we buy get rotated out if (a) they can't keep up with the user's software, or (b) they fail. If they fail, we have a couple of spares available, and thanks to roaming profiles, the user can be up and running within about ten minutes of notifying us. The other machine is fixed when we have spare time, and becomes a spare. That means that the time we expend doing repairs is time that we wouldn't be doing much in anyway.
The interesting bit is that about a week ago, we pulled together some of our unused equipment and decided to put it to use, and users with machines below a 1GHz cutoff would get an upgrade even if they didn't need it. We had a surprising number say "This machine works just fine, I don't really need an upgrade."
We even have some users running on some of our old server equipment. We've got machines like dual P3/1266, dual AthlonMP, and even some early dual P4 Xeons running as desktop equipment because we've had to switch entirely to 1U servers, and the pittance that the machines would earn on the used market was low enough that it made more sense to just keep using it.
The service agreements are essentially extended warranties - they're designed to make the company money, and lots of it. If you're talking about two or three machines, then it might make sense to buy them, but as the number of machines increases, the more economical it is to do it in-house.
I've had more problems with CDW than Newegg. In fact, Newegg has never failed to make me happy. In fact, last week, I placed an order at 5:00 PM mountain time with overnight shipping, and it was on my chair when I showed up the next morning!
To be fair, I don't know whether Newegg plays "favorites" with larger spenders or not, but the fact that I've spent six figures with them probably doesn't hurt.
"As long as you keep up on the replacement cycle, everything is always under warranty, which means you never waste money upgrading pc'a or servicing equipment"
Say what? By purchasing a new machine every two or three years, you don't waste money with upgrades or sevice? Do you buy a new car every time it goes out of warranty out of fear that you might have to change the brake pads? Do you buy the "extended warranty" with all of your electronics, too?
I guess I shouldn't complain *too* much, over-consumers like you boost vendors' profits, keeping hardware prices somewhat more modest for the rest of us.
Not only are their servers very well-engineered, in a worst-case scenario, my distributor can call SuperMicro and have a part drop-shipped directly to me.
For systems where I don't need that quick of turnaround, I've bought a number of Tyan Transport systems, because Opterons perform so much better than Xeons for our application - but now that SuperMicro has Opteron systems available, that's going to change. The Tyans work fine, but the design isn't nearly as good as the SuperMicros.
" They don't care you to see Area 51, but they won't say so."
It's not necessary the area or the base that they don't want you to see, it's what's inside the hangers. No, I'm not talking about alien autopsies or captured intergalactic cruisers, but research and prototype military aircraft. The military isn't a Detroit motor company, where they intentionally allow (or even arrange) "spy" photos of test cars to get the magazine-readers excited.;-)
That reminds me of something I saw somewhere... that real men didn't make backups, they do 'tar -zcf olsen_twins.mpg ~home', then upload it to a P2P network.
It depends. If you're trying to play a video game 18" from the monitor, probably. If you're working on a large, high-resolution photo, then it wouldn't be.
Yesterday, we took an old drive out of a server as a preemptive measure, and for fun, we popped it in another machine, booted it up, and pulled the top off of the drive. Today, we got tired of watching it run, so we did various destructive things to it as it ran.
The point is that once things are in your disk cache, it's rather boring - it's a spinning disk and an arm that's stationary, or doesn't move much. To make things really exciting, you've got to get some really good random seeks happening. "updatedb" does a good job, but only the first time - after that, it's all coming out of disk cache.
Sure, some guy loading his favorite game will hit the disk a bit, but unless he's gone out of his way to fragment his drive really badly, I don't think that it's going to be all that fun to watch. Of course, if he's short enough on memory to cause the thing to thrash to the page file, that might be kind of fun... but that sort of defeats the point of having a Raptor, doesn't it?
CS2 is still a 32-bit app, both on the PC and the Mac, and can't thus can't use more than 4 gigs - in fact, it won't use more than about 3, because right about in there is the limit as to what the OS can hand it, with the exact amount depending on hardware as well as running software. You can try to enable a 3-gig split on XP with SP2, but Photoshop itself is still 32-bit, and has the inherant memory-allocation limitations. Considering the mathematical nature of what Photoshop does, I would imagine that working in 64-bit could also give a noticeable performance boost.
While the OS can run 32-bit and 64-bit apps on an A64, current 64-bit versions of windows require 64-bit drivers. I don't believe that a 64-bit program (the kernel) can use code from a 32-bit DLL, as you'd be switching the same program between 64- and 32-bit modes in the middle of execution. Of course, I could be wrong.
64-bit windows mainly failed because of lack of driver support. I don't run it on my dual Opteron because I can't find drivers for a few key pieces of hardware, and the same has been said by a lot of users of Opterons and Athlon64s.
Interestingly enough, one of the few desktop apps that really need 64-bit support right now is Photoshop - yet even if Adobe had made CS2 a 64-bit application, printers are one of the largest areas where 64-bit drivers are simply not available.
Actually, the servers that I manage for a day job add up to a lot more than that. We're about to get another rack simply because of electrical needs - we're at over 75% draw on two 20-amp lines during heavy days right now, and to keep up with growth, we'll have to add at least 5 more dual-CPU machines and another 4-way machine as well. Then figure in the cost of cooling the data center!
Nope, like I said, it's an Eden CPU. Even running full-tilt at a gigahertz, the *max* power draw of the chip is 7 watts. The entire motherboard, including CPU, is rated at about 20 watts, and figure 10 for the hard drive - but the CPU is barely doing anything other than just ticking over with BitTorrents, so 20 or 25 watts is about right.
By the way, my home router is a dual Pentium 133 running a customized version of Coyote. Because the CPUs never do anything (even maxing out my 6 megabit line with multiple bittorrents, the load never goes above 0.03), I've plugged it into a watt-meter, and it draws just 45 watts - even after power supply losses and inefficiencies. My P3/650 file server with 3 drives draws jut 65 watts under use. Now my gaming machine is a little different, with an overclocked athlonXP 3200 and a GF 6800GT, it'll draw 300 watts from the wall.
If your power bill is high, maybe it's not the computer. Even if you're getting charged 25 cents per KW/H, a 20-watt machine running 24 hours/day for a month only uses (20*24*31/1000)=14.4 kilowatt-hours, for a grand total of... less than $4. If $4 is breaking the bank, then you're *really* in a predicament.
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I'd be surprised if a 2GHz P4 couldn't handle at least 5, and maybe 10 simultaneous streams. As long as the tuners are doing the encoding in hardware - and you aren't running commercial-detection or other jobs while that's happening - all the CPU is doing is routing data to the hard disk.
The PCI bus won't be much of a limitation, most of these cards encode at a maximum of 10 or 12 megabits/second, which at 10 streams comes out to 120 megabits/second - or a measly 15 megabytes/second.
Now, if you want to watch some of those as you're saving them, doing pause/rewind operations, then I can't really say - but remember that some of the commercial DVRs which can do live pause/rewind have a measly 33 MHz CPU in them. Of course, the encoding and decoding on them is done in hardware, but there's no reason that can't be the case in your machine as well.
At one place where I used to work, if you were female of of a certain racial ethnicity, you were *guaranteed* to be promoted into one of the most coveted divisions/positions within a year. Really. In fact, in the most coveted division, virtually every single person was female or from that certain ethnicity.
Oddly enough, the racism worked both ways, there were other, less "cool" ethnicities which were virtually guaranteed *not* to be promoted.
On a better note, every place I've worked in the last decade has been free of any of that silliness.
steve
In building several-terabyte arrays from IDE drives - with dedicated fans blowing right over the drives, and HUGE fans ventilating the case - I've found that when you're talking about nearly a dozen drives, it's not long before you're going to have a failure. In large arrays of Maxtors, Seagates, and Western Digitals, I have yet to go a year without at least one drive failing.
In fact, just a couple of days ago, one of my Western Digital RAID edition drives started hiccuping, and got dropped out of an array. That particular set of drives has only been in service for about 4 months.
steve
They do if you already have hardware laying around. For instance, I have a couple of AthlonXP 1800's sitting around, so I'm considering building a PVR out of them. The fact that they're on NForce2 motherboards with SoundStorm and SPDIF out doesn't hurt, either.
"As for cost of repairs, I don't know when I last saw a fan go on anything other than a crappy PC. Hard drives are of course the most common to go (and 73GB FCAL drives are a lot more than $10! No spares on hand for those, though--everything is mirrored, and the vendor can provide replacements in two hours), but CPUs are usually the second most common failure in enterprise servers. Sparc, Power, and Itanium chips aren't generally something you might have a few spares on hand for, either."
I've got a $4,000 *chassis*, and I've even had a fan fail on it - out of 17 or so fans on the machine, one's bound to fail in five years, because moving parts fail, and the more of them you have, the more likely that one will die. But CPUs? In two decades of this sort of thing, I've had exactly *one* CPU go bad on me that wasn't bad when I got it, and that was a Cyrix chip. Even on *crappy* PCs, I've had CPU fans fail, but not the CPUs.
Besides, while Itaniums might be different, if you're talking truly enterprise-level hardware, the better Sparc and Power servers can keep chugging along without some of their CPUs.
steve
Well, it could be that you use this to power the computer in your car. Or it could be that you want to home-brew your UPS (charger+battery). Or it could be that you're one of the guys that produces all of their own power, and run off of batteries anyway.
:-)
Or, it could be that you just want to run your Eden-based motherboard off of some AA batteries.
steve
I don't know if I'd call it "ridiculous resolution". 99% of the claims as to the resolution of film are usually based on how high of an optical resolution they can be scanned at, or the manufacturer's claim of the size of the grain.
In the end, just because your scanner can operate at 4000 DPI doesn't mean that you get 16 megapixels from a 35mm frame, and just because they claim some absurdly low grain size doesn't mean that you get 40 megapixels from a 35mm frame. In real-world scans of 35mm film at 4,000 DPI, I've seen precious few that weren't obviously out-resolved by the scanner.
Realistically, if you want to look at how large you enlarge an image with acceptable quality, once you eliminate various detractants (poor lenses, camera shake, etc.), then it's really a toss-up between 35mm and a decent digital SLR.
The one area that 35mm has going for it is that grain is less painful to look at than noise - but the digerati keep coming up with cameras that do better and better at high ISO.
steve
You can make just about anything seem responsible if you "crunch the numbers properly". ;-) I've worked in offices from 10 users to 20,000 users, and seen a good variety of what's deemed responsible by bean counters. And in eveyr experience that I've had, the companies that simply upgraded based on age spent a far greater amount of money - without much in return - than those that replaced them based on need. In fact, at the last job I had (the 20,000 user job), as a relatively capable machine was being replaced for no reason, I'd throw it in my cubicle, and find some use for it. It got to where I simply didn't have room to store all of the machines.
While it doesn't work as well for high-density machines like 1U servers, a good number of our servers that we've removed from service have been rendered more quiet, and used as workstations. Even if it's not cutting-edge, a dual AthlonMP with a gig of ram makes a good percentage of desktop users nicely happy.
And as for the money of repairing the machine, how much do you think it's going to cost? Are you planning on CPUs burning up left and right? It's rare for a repair to involve much more than a $10 fan, or occasionally a power supply. Because I usually buy a number of servers at a time, it's very easy to pick up a few spare parts. If hardware fails, by the time I've opened the machine to see what's wrong, I can stick in a spare and be up and running just as fast as I could make the call to Dell, let alone wait around for the tech to show up. I don't count hard drives, because they go bad anyway, and I'd have spares on hand whether I had a service agreement or not.
steve
I'm talking about an office, too. The machines that we buy get rotated out if (a) they can't keep up with the user's software, or (b) they fail. If they fail, we have a couple of spares available, and thanks to roaming profiles, the user can be up and running within about ten minutes of notifying us. The other machine is fixed when we have spare time, and becomes a spare. That means that the time we expend doing repairs is time that we wouldn't be doing much in anyway.
The interesting bit is that about a week ago, we pulled together some of our unused equipment and decided to put it to use, and users with machines below a 1GHz cutoff would get an upgrade even if they didn't need it. We had a surprising number say "This machine works just fine, I don't really need an upgrade."
We even have some users running on some of our old server equipment. We've got machines like dual P3/1266, dual AthlonMP, and even some early dual P4 Xeons running as desktop equipment because we've had to switch entirely to 1U servers, and the pittance that the machines would earn on the used market was low enough that it made more sense to just keep using it.
The service agreements are essentially extended warranties - they're designed to make the company money, and lots of it. If you're talking about two or three machines, then it might make sense to buy them, but as the number of machines increases, the more economical it is to do it in-house.
steve
I've had more problems with CDW than Newegg. In fact, Newegg has never failed to make me happy. In fact, last week, I placed an order at 5:00 PM mountain time with overnight shipping, and it was on my chair when I showed up the next morning!
To be fair, I don't know whether Newegg plays "favorites" with larger spenders or not, but the fact that I've spent six figures with them probably doesn't hurt.
steve
"As long as you keep up on the replacement cycle, everything is always under warranty, which means you never waste money upgrading pc'a or servicing equipment"
Say what? By purchasing a new machine every two or three years, you don't waste money with upgrades or sevice? Do you buy a new car every time it goes out of warranty out of fear that you might have to change the brake pads? Do you buy the "extended warranty" with all of your electronics, too?
I guess I shouldn't complain *too* much, over-consumers like you boost vendors' profits, keeping hardware prices somewhat more modest for the rest of us.
Not only are their servers very well-engineered, in a worst-case scenario, my distributor can call SuperMicro and have a part drop-shipped directly to me.
For systems where I don't need that quick of turnaround, I've bought a number of Tyan Transport systems, because Opterons perform so much better than Xeons for our application - but now that SuperMicro has Opteron systems available, that's going to change. The Tyans work fine, but the design isn't nearly as good as the SuperMicros.
steve
" They don't care you to see Area 51, but they won't say so."
;-)
It's not necessary the area or the base that they don't want you to see, it's what's inside the hangers. No, I'm not talking about alien autopsies or captured intergalactic cruisers, but research and prototype military aircraft. The military isn't a Detroit motor company, where they intentionally allow (or even arrange) "spy" photos of test cars to get the magazine-readers excited.
steve
That reminds me of something I saw somewhere... that real men didn't make backups, they do 'tar -zcf olsen_twins.mpg ~home', then upload it to a P2P network.
steve
Out of 3 Fatal1ty motherboards I've bought, one arrived DOA, one failed within a few days, and one remains operational. Hopefully the mice are better.
steve
It depends. If you're trying to play a video game 18" from the monitor, probably. If you're working on a large, high-resolution photo, then it wouldn't be.
steve
Easy. BitTorrent.
steve
Yesterday, we took an old drive out of a server as a preemptive measure, and for fun, we popped it in another machine, booted it up, and pulled the top off of the drive. Today, we got tired of watching it run, so we did various destructive things to it as it ran.
The point is that once things are in your disk cache, it's rather boring - it's a spinning disk and an arm that's stationary, or doesn't move much. To make things really exciting, you've got to get some really good random seeks happening. "updatedb" does a good job, but only the first time - after that, it's all coming out of disk cache.
Sure, some guy loading his favorite game will hit the disk a bit, but unless he's gone out of his way to fragment his drive really badly, I don't think that it's going to be all that fun to watch. Of course, if he's short enough on memory to cause the thing to thrash to the page file, that might be kind of fun... but that sort of defeats the point of having a Raptor, doesn't it?
steve
Just 14 days? That must mean... I'm... above average!
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/320005.html
CS2 is still a 32-bit app, both on the PC and the Mac, and can't thus can't use more than 4 gigs - in fact, it won't use more than about 3, because right about in there is the limit as to what the OS can hand it, with the exact amount depending on hardware as well as running software. You can try to enable a 3-gig split on XP with SP2, but Photoshop itself is still 32-bit, and has the inherant memory-allocation limitations. Considering the mathematical nature of what Photoshop does, I would imagine that working in 64-bit could also give a noticeable performance boost.
While the OS can run 32-bit and 64-bit apps on an A64, current 64-bit versions of windows require 64-bit drivers. I don't believe that a 64-bit program (the kernel) can use code from a 32-bit DLL, as you'd be switching the same program between 64- and 32-bit modes in the middle of execution. Of course, I could be wrong.
steve
64-bit windows mainly failed because of lack of driver support. I don't run it on my dual Opteron because I can't find drivers for a few key pieces of hardware, and the same has been said by a lot of users of Opterons and Athlon64s.
Interestingly enough, one of the few desktop apps that really need 64-bit support right now is Photoshop - yet even if Adobe had made CS2 a 64-bit application, printers are one of the largest areas where 64-bit drivers are simply not available.
steve
Sure thing. This Dax or Collin?
steve
Actually, the servers that I manage for a day job add up to a lot more than that. We're about to get another rack simply because of electrical needs - we're at over 75% draw on two 20-amp lines during heavy days right now, and to keep up with growth, we'll have to add at least 5 more dual-CPU machines and another 4-way machine as well. Then figure in the cost of cooling the data center!
steve
Nope, like I said, it's an Eden CPU. Even running full-tilt at a gigahertz, the *max* power draw of the chip is 7 watts. The entire motherboard, including CPU, is rated at about 20 watts, and figure 10 for the hard drive - but the CPU is barely doing anything other than just ticking over with BitTorrents, so 20 or 25 watts is about right.
By the way, my home router is a dual Pentium 133 running a customized version of Coyote. Because the CPUs never do anything (even maxing out my 6 megabit line with multiple bittorrents, the load never goes above 0.03), I've plugged it into a watt-meter, and it draws just 45 watts - even after power supply losses and inefficiencies. My P3/650 file server with 3 drives draws jut 65 watts under use. Now my gaming machine is a little different, with an overclocked athlonXP 3200 and a GF 6800GT, it'll draw 300 watts from the wall.
steve
If your power bill is high, maybe it's not the computer. Even if you're getting charged 25 cents per KW/H, a 20-watt machine running 24 hours/day for a month only uses (20*24*31/1000)=14.4 kilowatt-hours, for a grand total of... less than $4. If $4 is breaking the bank, then you're *really* in a predicament.
steve