Now has amazing connectivity. The entire campus (quite large) is entirely "lit up" with wireless hot-spots, and most buildings have an ethernet tap for every classroom seat.
To make it better, in the student housing, for some pitifully low amount ($25?), you get a 20 megabit(!) connection. All paid for by student fees, of course.
Now, I'm all for computers. But when tuition has tripled over the past ten years, parking costs have quadrupled, and student fees are going out the roof - all the time real services to students are decreasing - it makes me wonder if it's really worth it.
Am I really going to be a better engineer if I have a 20 megabit connection to my home vs. a 1- or 2-megabit? Not really. Will a sociologist find better research to study over the 20-megabit connection? Nope.
The matter extends into the classrooms - while some connectivity has a very good payoff, they've gone to such lengths that the cost has far, far exceeded the benefits. It's just plain irresponsible.
Even though two 8x slots still have plenty of bandwidth for video cards, it's going to be a tough sell to a lot of people: "You get two slots, but they're only half as fast."
On the other hand, I was somewhat disappointed to see the scores on GF 6600's in SLI mode. I had anticipated them being somewhat higher. Because the two $200 cards don't perform much better (or sometimes worse) than a single $400 card, I don't think that many people are going to go for it - only the truly obsessive addicts that are in it for the bragging rights. And while they may produce enough money to get specialty, high-end video chipsets built, they don't crank out enough to get a high-end motherboard chipset designed.
It'd still be nice to see PCI-E used for really cool stuff. Instead of 1x slots, image several 8x slots with Infiniband adapters in them - talk about a clustering dream!
steve
Do you have some sort of neurological disorder?
on
The Universal Off Button
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Personally, I am terribly annoyed by TVs in restaurants and airports: they grab my attention over and over, no matter how hard I try to ignore them,
You've got to be kidding me. Whenever I see TVs in places like that, they're always too small, too far away, and too quiet to keep my attention even when I want to watch them.
If you can't pay attention to a real human right in front of you because of a TV somewhere in the distance, maybe the television isn't the real source of the problem.
20 lanes of PCI-E, with 16 of those used for the PCI-E slot? That's the same that everyone else has been churning out. If they really want people to buy their SLI cards, why don't they produce a chipset with higher interconnectivity, so they can put two x16 slots on the board for the SLI cards, and still have a few left over for the peripherals?
I don't have to wish. Just for fun, I just looked at a good number of benchmarks for an Athlon64 3500+, a $300 processer. I compared them to an Athlon 3200+ - although the overclocked mobile would be faster in both clock speed and memory bandwidth.
In very new, hardware-intensive games, the difference was as much as 30%. In office apps, MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, and most other things, the difference was within about 10%.
So, if comparing a $300 CPU to a $85 CPU gains you only a 30% performance increase in the BEST case scenario, that's a marginal gain to me.
For an all-out gamer, if the extra $200 is worth a 30% improvement, that's fine - but I'd still argue that the extra $200 would be better put toward a better video card, and besides, the original author said that he was looking for something inexpensive.
I've got a mobile Athlon running at 2.3 GHz with a GeForce 6800GT, and I can tell you that there simply aren't any games that you can't play oh-so-silky-smooth with it. Even in Doom3 and Far Cry, with 4x AA and 8X AF, I can turn the resolution up pretty high and it's still amazing. I'd much rather have this setup than an Athlon64 with a $200 video card.
Also, companies change their minds all the time, even after press releases. Hell, I'm sure Intel could release a 6ghz system if they wanted too. Some OC'ers already have aircooled that fast.
You think so? I'd love to see a link. I haven't seen anyone hit anywhere near that with air cooling. Someone might have once been able to get the figure "6 ghz" on a BIOS screen before the chip melted into slag, but that doesn't count.
In fact, I doubt you'll find a stable overclock of 6 GHz even with phase-cooling. Liquid nitrogen maybe, but nothing less. : )
Now you don't have to feel bad about pirating games. You'll know that the designers are making money just by you playing it. You could almost imagine that you're doing them a favor by it.
If I want PCIe and PCIx (or any combination in-between), SMP or single, 64- bit extensions or not; I have SEVERAL different options with Intel
If you take PCI-E off of the list, you have just as many options with AMD. And because PCI-E is generally not as important in an SMP system ("I need twin GeForce 6600's in my 4-CPU system for network testing!").
Besides, if you added scalable memory bandwidth, then you really don't have any option with Intel.
I doubt it. Their decision was undoubtedly economical - they just don't get enough yield to make it worth their while to sell them.
This competition from AMD will only serve to keep the prices down, so it makes gives Intel even less incentive to sell them. Had AMD not been around, they could have sold their 4GHz P4's for $2k each, and there would have been people who would buy them. But as it is, with AMD's "4000+" available, it puts an effective cap on how much Intel can sell them for.
Intel doesn't like to lose face. They don't like being one-upped. But in the past year or two, they've had to just suck it up and get used to it.
I think the real question is will you be upgrading just your CPU next or doing another CPU + Motherboard upgrade?
Upgrading just the CPU is rarely worth it. The performance advantage from better memory technologies and other interconnects (AGP vs. PCI-E) mean that upgrading the motherboard is usually a very good thing.
When you get down to it, if you run an Athlon64 in 32-bit mode, you're essentially running an Athlon XP with an embedded memory controller. Even at similar clock speeds, an A64 in 32-bit mode will still outperform an AthlonXP because of the lower memory latency, greater memory bandwidth, and increased cache.
Your best bang for you buck is a good NForce2 motherboard, a mobile AthlonXP 2500+, and a Zalman 7000a cooler. All together, that will cost barely more than $200, and it's highly unlikely that you'd get less than 2.3 GHz out of the chip - with 2.5GHz not unheard of. Not at all bad for a $200 setup! The Athlon64 chips are, indeed, faster - but the marginal increase in speed can cost you quite a bit.
Of course, if you want more future-proofing, wait until a good board with PCI-E is available, which will mean A64. Even though the extra bandwidth of PCI-E isn't a big factor now, the way in which video cards are able to interface with memory and the CPU are mroe intelligent than with AGP, and most all cards are going to move to it. Shoot, the 6600-series cards are enough to make you wish you had PCI-E.
Well, even though it all gets converted into heat, it's not all wasted. Some of that electricity actually does some amount of processing, so you have received some benefit from the heat.
However, a very great deal of the electrical power is just leaked through the transistors in their "off" state, performing absolutely no useful work. I believe that for the 90nm chips, as much as 75% (!) of the electrical power is leaked, so you're really only getting anything useful out of 25% of the power you pump in.
How can heat sinks keep up? If you've seen the size of heat sinks that come with these processers, you'll understand.
I built an P4/LGA system for a guy last week. The heat sink that came standard with the CPU really impressed me - it's the kind of heat sink you would have expected to see hardcore overclockers paying $60 for two years ago. Very large and well-designed!
Times used to be when heat sinks weighed one or two ounces, and came with 40mm fans. Then came the 60mm fans. Now, 80mm fans and two-pound aren't at all uncommon, with some models using 92mm fans, and some weighing three pounds or more. Copper is being used for more and more of the heat sink. Better heat conduction, more surface area, and more air. It's not rocket science. : )
Plus, on the new P4's, the chips are able to run at much higher temperatures than previous generations. The greater temperature differential between the chip and the heat sink, the faster you can get the heat to conduct.
Those benchmarks were in 32-bit mode, so there's nothing to get alarmed about.
Note that simple 64-bitness buys you no performance increase, or even a slight decrease. Moving to the x86-64 64-bit instruction set, however, does provide an increase, but it's from the greater number of available registers.
Gentoo: when you receive the car, you have to push the "compile" button and wait two days to drive it.
Only on a Ford econo-car. "Touring Sedans" will take only one day, sports cars will take 8 hours, and six-figure Italian cars will do it in 3. At the start of every Formula 1 race, we'll have a 15-second waiting period while the stripped-down versions are compiled.
Is the Athlon XP-M 2500/2600. Unlocked multipliers, hand-picked cores, and cheap to boot. You're pretty much guaranteed that one will hit 2.3 GHz, and with good air cooling, 2.5 GHz is even possible.
What's better, because of the unlocked multiplier, you can throw fast memory on the board, and overclock the memory/FSB as far as the motherboard will go, *then* turn the clock speed up. I'll bet that one of those would have beaten the entire lot that they tested.
I think we now have so many laws that the respect has been watered down.
While I don't necessarily share your views on some of the items you mentioned, I certainly agree with you on the statement I quoted.
The other night, a friend was over at our house, and I asked if she wanted a copy of any of our DVDs. She looked at me, and asked "Is that... legal?"
My first thought was "Who cares?" My second thought was "Wow, she must worry about a LOT of little things." (She is, actually, a diagnosed germophobe.) Over the next couple of days, though, I started thinking more and more about just how many laws I routinely break. I've copied copywrited material. Sometimes at 3 a.m., I don't wait for the light to change. I speed quite regularly. I've used paint cans for things other than their intended use (no, I wasn't huffing with them.) I've taken a narcotic pain pill for something OTHER than which it was prescribed to me. Shoot, there have even been some times when I took a medication that had been prescribed to someone else.
After thinking about those and other things, I realized that not only have I committed quite a good number of crimes in my life, I've committed a good number of felonies. It made me feel kind of funny. I've never thought of myself as a criminal, much less a felon. Maybe I need a black leather jacket or something.
I get the distinct impression that you don't really have much of an education in biology. Am I wrong? I'll certainly be willing to eat crow if I am. And if you do have more than a passing education in it, I'll be happy to explain in detail why each of those is nothing more than applied chemistry.
There are, of course, some aspects that aren't chemical. In particular, some significant portion of population genetics is nothing more than statistical analysis. However, that only covers the easy problems, and all of the easy work as probably already been done. To do anything useful, you're going to have to grasp and apply the underlying chemical processes.
Life really isn't anything more than a big summation of chemical processes. You can look at it from a very high-level point of view ("This muscle moves in this direction", "The heart pumps blood", "This animal has canine teeth"), and while it doesn't take chemistry to do that, if you want to do anything useful with that information ("What happens in that muscle during anaerobic conditions?", "Why isn't this heart beating regularly?", "How closely related is this animal to animal X?"), you can only get a pretty simple, cursory answer before you start having to rely on chemistry.
As a chemist, I must say its very odd to watch the prize in chemistry being awarded for what is, essentially, biology
Biology really isn't anything more than the summation of a very large number of chemical processes. It's nothing more than applied chemistry.
And as for chemistry and physics, the two overlap so well that I really consider them different areas of emphasis on the same subject matter.
I'm not a chemist, physicist, or biologist by title or trade, but I've had at least three years of courses in each of chemistry, physics, and biology. I like to think I've had a good exposure to all three, but hey, would I realize it if that weren't the case?
but perhaps the Nobel committee should create a separate biology prize so the chemists can get their due!
Even if it's labeled biology, there's not much exciting research going on in it that isn't chemistry, pure and simple. Trying to figure out why a particular protein mis-folds some times? Chemistry. Trying to figure out how a particular ion pump channel works? Chemistry. Trying to design a molecule to block some receptor site? Chemistry. Trying to develop a method for DNA repair? Chemistry.
Your statement - to me, at least - sounds like a mechanical engineer saying that civil engineers shouldn't get an engineering degree. : )
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Now has amazing connectivity. The entire campus (quite large) is entirely "lit up" with wireless hot-spots, and most buildings have an ethernet tap for every classroom seat.
To make it better, in the student housing, for some pitifully low amount ($25?), you get a 20 megabit(!) connection. All paid for by student fees, of course.
Now, I'm all for computers. But when tuition has tripled over the past ten years, parking costs have quadrupled, and student fees are going out the roof - all the time real services to students are decreasing - it makes me wonder if it's really worth it.
Am I really going to be a better engineer if I have a 20 megabit connection to my home vs. a 1- or 2-megabit? Not really. Will a sociologist find better research to study over the 20-megabit connection? Nope.
The matter extends into the classrooms - while some connectivity has a very good payoff, they've gone to such lengths that the cost has far, far exceeded the benefits. It's just plain irresponsible.
steve
Windows would be twice the cost of the computer. And that's supposed to stop people from pirating it?
steve
I mean - holy crap, we still design entire networks around the mighty "T1" and they cost a friggin fortune ... and do you know WHY they cost so much?
Because they're prohibitted from charging less than the standard tariff.
steve
Even though two 8x slots still have plenty of bandwidth for video cards, it's going to be a tough sell to a lot of people: "You get two slots, but they're only half as fast."
On the other hand, I was somewhat disappointed to see the scores on GF 6600's in SLI mode. I had anticipated them being somewhat higher. Because the two $200 cards don't perform much better (or sometimes worse) than a single $400 card, I don't think that many people are going to go for it - only the truly obsessive addicts that are in it for the bragging rights. And while they may produce enough money to get specialty, high-end video chipsets built, they don't crank out enough to get a high-end motherboard chipset designed.
It'd still be nice to see PCI-E used for really cool stuff. Instead of 1x slots, image several 8x slots with Infiniband adapters in them - talk about a clustering dream!
steve
Personally, I am terribly annoyed by TVs in restaurants and airports: they grab my attention over and over, no matter how hard I try to ignore them,
You've got to be kidding me. Whenever I see TVs in places like that, they're always too small, too far away, and too quiet to keep my attention even when I want to watch them.
If you can't pay attention to a real human right in front of you because of a TV somewhere in the distance, maybe the television isn't the real source of the problem.
steve
20 lanes of PCI-E, with 16 of those used for the PCI-E slot? That's the same that everyone else has been churning out. If they really want people to buy their SLI cards, why don't they produce a chipset with higher interconnectivity, so they can put two x16 slots on the board for the SLI cards, and still have a few left over for the peripherals?
steve
I don't have to wish. Just for fun, I just looked at a good number of benchmarks for an Athlon64 3500+, a $300 processer. I compared them to an Athlon 3200+ - although the overclocked mobile would be faster in both clock speed and memory bandwidth.
In very new, hardware-intensive games, the difference was as much as 30%. In office apps, MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, and most other things, the difference was within about 10%.
So, if comparing a $300 CPU to a $85 CPU gains you only a 30% performance increase in the BEST case scenario, that's a marginal gain to me.
For an all-out gamer, if the extra $200 is worth a 30% improvement, that's fine - but I'd still argue that the extra $200 would be better put toward a better video card, and besides, the original author said that he was looking for something inexpensive.
I've got a mobile Athlon running at 2.3 GHz with a GeForce 6800GT, and I can tell you that there simply aren't any games that you can't play oh-so-silky-smooth with it. Even in Doom3 and Far Cry, with 4x AA and 8X AF, I can turn the resolution up pretty high and it's still amazing. I'd much rather have this setup than an Athlon64 with a $200 video card.
steve
Also, companies change their minds all the time, even after press releases. Hell, I'm sure Intel could release a 6ghz system if they wanted too. Some OC'ers already have aircooled that fast.
You think so? I'd love to see a link. I haven't seen anyone hit anywhere near that with air cooling. Someone might have once been able to get the figure "6 ghz" on a BIOS screen before the chip melted into slag, but that doesn't count.
In fact, I doubt you'll find a stable overclock of 6 GHz even with phase-cooling. Liquid nitrogen maybe, but nothing less. : )
steve
Now you don't have to feel bad about pirating games. You'll know that the designers are making money just by you playing it. You could almost imagine that you're doing them a favor by it.
steve
If I want PCIe and PCIx (or any combination in-between), SMP or single, 64- bit extensions or not; I have SEVERAL different options with Intel
If you take PCI-E off of the list, you have just as many options with AMD. And because PCI-E is generally not as important in an SMP system ("I need twin GeForce 6600's in my 4-CPU system for network testing!").
Besides, if you added scalable memory bandwidth, then you really don't have any option with Intel.
steve
Because to use the 1066 bus, you need 533MHz memory. Although 533MHz DDR memory does exist, it's not at all standardized, sanctioned, or endorsed.
JEDEC has, of course, been far too slow to adopt new memory timings - as the looooong wait for DDR-400 to be adopted testifies.
steve
I doubt it. Their decision was undoubtedly economical - they just don't get enough yield to make it worth their while to sell them.
This competition from AMD will only serve to keep the prices down, so it makes gives Intel even less incentive to sell them. Had AMD not been around, they could have sold their 4GHz P4's for $2k each, and there would have been people who would buy them. But as it is, with AMD's "4000+" available, it puts an effective cap on how much Intel can sell them for.
Intel doesn't like to lose face. They don't like being one-upped. But in the past year or two, they've had to just suck it up and get used to it.
steve
I think the real question is will you be upgrading just your CPU next or doing another CPU + Motherboard upgrade?
Upgrading just the CPU is rarely worth it. The performance advantage from better memory technologies and other interconnects (AGP vs. PCI-E) mean that upgrading the motherboard is usually a very good thing.
When you get down to it, if you run an Athlon64 in 32-bit mode, you're essentially running an Athlon XP with an embedded memory controller. Even at similar clock speeds, an A64 in 32-bit mode will still outperform an AthlonXP because of the lower memory latency, greater memory bandwidth, and increased cache.
steve
Your best bang for you buck is a good NForce2 motherboard, a mobile AthlonXP 2500+, and a Zalman 7000a cooler. All together, that will cost barely more than $200, and it's highly unlikely that you'd get less than 2.3 GHz out of the chip - with 2.5GHz not unheard of. Not at all bad for a $200 setup! The Athlon64 chips are, indeed, faster - but the marginal increase in speed can cost you quite a bit.
Of course, if you want more future-proofing, wait until a good board with PCI-E is available, which will mean A64. Even though the extra bandwidth of PCI-E isn't a big factor now, the way in which video cards are able to interface with memory and the CPU are mroe intelligent than with AGP, and most all cards are going to move to it. Shoot, the 6600-series cards are enough to make you wish you had PCI-E.
steve
Well, even though it all gets converted into heat, it's not all wasted. Some of that electricity actually does some amount of processing, so you have received some benefit from the heat.
However, a very great deal of the electrical power is just leaked through the transistors in their "off" state, performing absolutely no useful work. I believe that for the 90nm chips, as much as 75% (!) of the electrical power is leaked, so you're really only getting anything useful out of 25% of the power you pump in.
steve
How can heat sinks keep up? If you've seen the size of heat sinks that come with these processers, you'll understand.
I built an P4/LGA system for a guy last week. The heat sink that came standard with the CPU really impressed me - it's the kind of heat sink you would have expected to see hardcore overclockers paying $60 for two years ago. Very large and well-designed!
Times used to be when heat sinks weighed one or two ounces, and came with 40mm fans. Then came the 60mm fans. Now, 80mm fans and two-pound aren't at all uncommon, with some models using 92mm fans, and some weighing three pounds or more. Copper is being used for more and more of the heat sink. Better heat conduction, more surface area, and more air. It's not rocket science. : )
Plus, on the new P4's, the chips are able to run at much higher temperatures than previous generations. The greater temperature differential between the chip and the heat sink, the faster you can get the heat to conduct.
steve
Those benchmarks were in 32-bit mode, so there's nothing to get alarmed about.
Note that simple 64-bitness buys you no performance increase, or even a slight decrease. Moving to the x86-64 64-bit instruction set, however, does provide an increase, but it's from the greater number of available registers.
steve
Never mind that WIndows now "powers" a hell f a lot of cars and that doesn't ever happen.
What about the BMW car that ran on Windows? I recall them being plagued with all kinds of odd failures.
steve
Gentoo: when you receive the car, you have to push the "compile" button and wait two days to drive it.
Only on a Ford econo-car. "Touring Sedans" will take only one day, sports cars will take 8 hours, and six-figure Italian cars will do it in 3. At the start of every Formula 1 race, we'll have a 15-second waiting period while the stripped-down versions are compiled.
steve
You could take all of the useful information that has ever been posted to a BBS, and make the film out of it.
steve
Is the Athlon XP-M 2500/2600. Unlocked multipliers, hand-picked cores, and cheap to boot. You're pretty much guaranteed that one will hit 2.3 GHz, and with good air cooling, 2.5 GHz is even possible.
What's better, because of the unlocked multiplier, you can throw fast memory on the board, and overclock the memory/FSB as far as the motherboard will go, *then* turn the clock speed up. I'll bet that one of those would have beaten the entire lot that they tested.
steve
Sorry to burst your bubble, but acronyms can have more than one meaning, and CGI means a couple of other things, too.
steve
I think we now have so many laws that the respect has been watered down.
While I don't necessarily share your views on some of the items you mentioned, I certainly agree with you on the statement I quoted.
The other night, a friend was over at our house, and I asked if she wanted a copy of any of our DVDs. She looked at me, and asked "Is that... legal?"
My first thought was "Who cares?" My second thought was "Wow, she must worry about a LOT of little things." (She is, actually, a diagnosed germophobe.) Over the next couple of days, though, I started thinking more and more about just how many laws I routinely break. I've copied copywrited material. Sometimes at 3 a.m., I don't wait for the light to change. I speed quite regularly. I've used paint cans for things other than their intended use (no, I wasn't huffing with them.) I've taken a narcotic pain pill for something OTHER than which it was prescribed to me. Shoot, there have even been some times when I took a medication that had been prescribed to someone else.
After thinking about those and other things, I realized that not only have I committed quite a good number of crimes in my life, I've committed a good number of felonies. It made me feel kind of funny. I've never thought of myself as a criminal, much less a felon. Maybe I need a black leather jacket or something.
steve
Maybe molecular biology & biochemistry are. How does your statement apply to:
* Systematics & Taxonomy
* Population biology / Pop. genetics
* Developmental biology
I get the distinct impression that you don't really have much of an education in biology. Am I wrong? I'll certainly be willing to eat crow if I am. And if you do have more than a passing education in it, I'll be happy to explain in detail why each of those is nothing more than applied chemistry.
There are, of course, some aspects that aren't chemical. In particular, some significant portion of population genetics is nothing more than statistical analysis. However, that only covers the easy problems, and all of the easy work as probably already been done. To do anything useful, you're going to have to grasp and apply the underlying chemical processes.
Life really isn't anything more than a big summation of chemical processes. You can look at it from a very high-level point of view ("This muscle moves in this direction", "The heart pumps blood", "This animal has canine teeth"), and while it doesn't take chemistry to do that, if you want to do anything useful with that information ("What happens in that muscle during anaerobic conditions?", "Why isn't this heart beating regularly?", "How closely related is this animal to animal X?"), you can only get a pretty simple, cursory answer before you start having to rely on chemistry.
steve
As a chemist, I must say its very odd to watch the prize in chemistry being awarded for what is, essentially, biology
Biology really isn't anything more than the summation of a very large number of chemical processes. It's nothing more than applied chemistry.
And as for chemistry and physics, the two overlap so well that I really consider them different areas of emphasis on the same subject matter.
I'm not a chemist, physicist, or biologist by title or trade, but I've had at least three years of courses in each of chemistry, physics, and biology. I like to think I've had a good exposure to all three, but hey, would I realize it if that weren't the case?
but perhaps the Nobel committee should create a separate biology prize so the chemists can get their due!
Even if it's labeled biology, there's not much exciting research going on in it that isn't chemistry, pure and simple. Trying to figure out why a particular protein mis-folds some times? Chemistry. Trying to figure out how a particular ion pump channel works? Chemistry. Trying to design a molecule to block some receptor site? Chemistry. Trying to develop a method for DNA repair? Chemistry.
Your statement - to me, at least - sounds like a mechanical engineer saying that civil engineers shouldn't get an engineering degree. : )
steve