I would wait for the first price cut on the K6-3 and buy then. That should tide you over for a while until the K7 has come down a bit in price.
BTW. You can now get Dual Alpha 21264 with 4 MB cache and 1 500 MHz processor for under 10K. Another processor is $3500 (about the same as a 450 Xeon with 2MB cache, but the Integer peformance is 75% higher and FP is 100% higher)
Intersting considering russian silicon technology wasn't very competitive. I guess necessity is the mother of invention. Put it togeather with a modern fab and you have something truly world class. Aint hybrid vigor wonderful.
Why are these questions of your "better"? I think the original question is quite interesting. It is difficult to answer accurately, but thoughtful attempts to answer it could be quite interesting.
Unfortunatley, no one seems inclined to even try to answer it. Rather than rising to the occasion, most of the posters to this topic are nitpicking.
So rather than nitpicking, I am going to try and start an attempt to answer the question. I don't have information readily available to me right now, so I will start by trying to better frame the question by defining some simplifying assumptions.
1. For the purpose of coming up with an aggregate value for the "total computing power" available in the world over a given time frame we should assume that the measurement for power scales linearly across a the number of systems we are measuring number of processors.
2. For the purpose of simplifying the "power" of any single system, we should assume that any two systems whose performance differs by no more than two fold have equivalent performance. This allows us to group microprocessor based systems of different architectures into similar performance categories based on processor generation. Unfortunatly, I don't know quite how to apply this to vector supercomputers and mainframe systems. Hopefully someone else can. This assumption introduces inaccuracy, but this inaacuracy only results in an error of less than two years or so.
I think the note that one FPU is for "behaviors" along with the phrase "emotion engine" is very interesting. It suggests that AI may be a serious focus for this console.
A lot of lipservice has been paid to improving game AI but when push comes to shove, R&D effort and CPU cycles go to the graphics engine. Dedicating a functional unit to this task may mean that someone is going to put their money where their mouth is.
The PPro was kept alive far to long, primarily to protect various investments in the PPro server platform. Clock speeds stayed constant after the first few months and the costs of going over 2 processors were quite high. Increacing cache sizes did little to help.
The PII made a reasonable tradeoff. 1/2 speed cache + 2x the size let them ramp clock speeds at lower cost. The fact that Intel crippled the chip by limiting it to 2 way wasn't that big a deal for a lot of people since 4 Way PPro MBs carried a huge premium anyway.
Going further. The PPro was slower than offering by sun, MIPS, IBM & DEC when it was released, definitely at the end of the pack. Intel used to to build the ASCI red because a) they still wanted to be in the super computer business and b) they didn't have a faster chip to use. (The customer selected ASCI-RED despite that fact that it used a slower chip because the PPros low cost meant they could use more of them, which helped provide a competitive memory bandwidth)
As for your last point. At this late date the PPro makes a poor basis for an SMP system. Sure, you can go to 4-way, but it won't be any faster than the fastest 2-way PII (or PIII) for most code and it isn't likely to be any cheaper.
Intel sells lower priced chips too. The Celeron's will go into the low end, these will go into the higher end and in time I bet this core finds its way into the eleron.
The have Celeron for the low end. The PII's days are numbered. We might see a PII 500 (though I doubt it), but after than the clock bumps will all go into the PIII
What AMD has is late, but it deserves a bit more respect than you give it.
1. They have Socket 7 chips that keep up with PIIs on cheaper motherboards, and have for some time.
2. They have a 3d api that actually has shipping code written for it. KNI may be better, but it has come later and it has no support.
3. The K6-3 is an incemental improvement, but given what they have done with an older bus-protocol and off-chip cache, I think it will be a competitive chip, when it finally comes out.
4. The K7 looks very cool and it may well be the fastest x86 chip around for a while after it ships (provided it doesn't slip much further)
Your 4 yold P90 had a fraction of the bandwidth and much higher latency out of cache than a Celeron or a P III. There is more to cache performance than size.
Also, the Alpha's are a different animal. They have an on chip L2 cache. The 2 & 4 MB caches are on the motherboard (or chip carrier) and have higher latency and lower bandwidth than the cache on the celeron or the P3.
Yeah, except for putting a media coprocessor on the chip it brings nothing new to the table.
Like it or not, this chip will define Intel's high end desktop offerings. If you buy intel, this is where you are going to find your highest clockspeeds.
It isn't screen real estate. It is the text input area, just like the keyboard on my computer.
On the other hand, it does take up realestate on the device and on something this small, that can be a bit of a waste.
This particular omission doesn't really bother me, but it would be nice if the input area was also display area, then it could be used for something else.
Still very little reason to upgrade fomr Palm Pro
on
Pictures of the Palm V
·
· Score: 1
How will a color screen contribute significantly to the utility of the platform?
The PalmIII added IR, which allows Palm owners to share information. This enables Palm owners to share information easily. This makes it easy to exchange notes, contact information, appointments, etc. Any environment with a large number of PalmIII users will see huge advantages from this feature.
The PalmIII also improved the formfactor, which, I have argued elsewhere, is an very important part of the Palms feature set. The easier the device is to carry the more likely you are to carry it and the more useful it will be to you. Similarly if it is easier to hold you will use it more and longer.
Granted, neither of these was enough reason for me to upgrade from a Pro.
The PalmV, on the other hand, may just do it. More compact than a PalmIII while including IR support and an improved screen. I have already explained the size advantage. The improved screen will make it easier to read the display which will make quick accesses even quicker and long accesses much less painful. I have read news & things on my Pro and while I find it treamendously useful to have such a compact, portable and up to date information source, it can cause horrible eyestrain under all but the best lighting conditions. (the rechargable battery should also be useful although its biggest benifit is in enabling a more compact form factor.)
I should also note that there is expected to be a Palm IV, or somesuch, which will improve upon the III with more memory and an expansion slot. This will enable larger custom applications on the platform which can be quite useful in verticle markets.
After that is the Wireless Palm, which I agree, will be a big step up, but it will also be expensive. However, having a vast network of information at your hip will be tremendously useful.
Color, on the other hand, just seems like a gee-whiz feature. I would like to see it in the future, and I think it will help expand the market for the platform, but it will add expense and decreace battery life which will, in turn, decrease the devices general utility. Until the tradeoff for color is less significant I would rather 3com focus their efforts elsewhere.
I think color brings little when compaired to the overall utility of having a pervasive personal information utility. Hell, even on my PC, there is little I do on my color display that I couldn't do just as well on a good B&W display.
Even with hard disks going for well under $100/GB, this PC week article is a waste of space.
The PIII may not offer much that people will use right now but it will be adopted because it is the future of the mid-range x86 line. To the extent that people want high end desktops, this chip will be bought simply because intel will offer no alternative.
More interesting, from my point of view, is a news.com article that observes that AMD systems are dominating in the retail channels.
Lots of good ideas here for avoiding A/D D/A conversion losses, but what about the issues with recompressing compressed audio? Is there anyone out there with a smart way to minimize these effects?
One thing to keep in mind when pricing flat panels, the stated size represents the active image area, unlike CRTs. The 15" apple display we just bought has the same image area as a Sony Trinitron display and I must say, the image is fantastic. The viewing angles are quite broad, the image as bright and the subsampling is very well done so things look good even below screen resolution.
The price was just over $1000. A bit high, but not a totall killer. In a month or two they should have a 17" for about $1500 with the same active image area of a 19" display.
English borrows heavily from Latin. Does that mean that Latin isn't "out"
Beyond that. BeOS is not Mach based, though it does have a POSIX interface, as does NT. Same goes for MacOS 10. This doesn't make any of them "UNIX" or even UN*X.
Slashdot Mirror
Kick Ass!
They bring down prices on old models to the point where you can get them for $149.
Once again, it isn't screen real estate. It is the text input area. It can't display anything.
Its the Form factor and the UI/apps you are paying for. If price were the only issue, I would say that I could get an emachine for $500.
I would wait for the first price cut on the K6-3 and buy then. That should tide you over for a while until the K7 has come down a bit in price.
BTW. You can now get Dual Alpha 21264 with 4 MB cache and 1 500 MHz processor for under 10K. Another processor is $3500 (about the same as a 450 Xeon with 2MB cache, but the Integer peformance is 75% higher and FP is 100% higher)
Intersting considering russian silicon technology wasn't very competitive. I guess necessity is the mother of invention. Put it togeather with a modern fab and you have something truly world class. Aint hybrid vigor wonderful.
Why are these questions of your "better"? I think the original question is quite interesting. It is difficult to answer accurately, but thoughtful attempts to answer it could be quite interesting.
Unfortunatley, no one seems inclined to even try to answer it. Rather than rising to the occasion, most of the posters to this topic are nitpicking.
So rather than nitpicking, I am going to try and start an attempt to answer the question. I don't have information readily available to me right now, so I will start by trying to better frame the question by defining some simplifying assumptions.
1. For the purpose of coming up with an aggregate value for the "total computing power" available in the world over a given time frame we should assume that the measurement for power scales linearly across a the number of systems we are measuring number of processors.
2. For the purpose of simplifying the "power" of any single system, we should assume that any two systems whose performance differs by no more than two fold have equivalent performance. This allows us to group microprocessor based systems of different architectures into similar performance categories based on processor generation. Unfortunatly, I don't know quite how to apply this to vector supercomputers and mainframe systems. Hopefully someone else can. This assumption introduces inaccuracy, but this inaacuracy only results in an error of less than two years or so.
I think the note that one FPU is for "behaviors" along with the phrase "emotion engine" is very interesting. It suggests that AI may be a serious focus for this console.
A lot of lipservice has been paid to improving game AI but when push comes to shove, R&D effort and CPU cycles go to the graphics engine. Dedicating a functional unit to this task may mean that someone is going to put their money where their mouth is.
By Intels own admission, the Merceds x86 performance will not match a dedicated implementation.
$150?
Horse shit. I am guessing the license is under $50
Whatever.
The PPro was kept alive far to long, primarily to protect various investments in the PPro server platform. Clock speeds stayed constant after the first few months and the costs of going over 2 processors were quite high. Increacing cache sizes did little to help.
The PII made a reasonable tradeoff. 1/2 speed cache + 2x the size let them ramp clock speeds at lower cost. The fact that Intel crippled the chip by limiting it to 2 way wasn't that big a deal for a lot of people since 4 Way PPro MBs carried a huge premium anyway.
Going further. The PPro was slower than offering by sun, MIPS, IBM & DEC when it was released, definitely at the end of the pack. Intel used to to build the ASCI red because a) they still wanted to be in the super computer business and b) they didn't have a faster chip to use. (The customer selected ASCI-RED despite that fact that it used a slower chip because the PPros low cost meant they could use more of them, which helped provide a competitive memory bandwidth)
As for your last point. At this late date the PPro makes a poor basis for an SMP system. Sure, you can go to 4-way, but it won't be any faster than the fastest 2-way PII (or PIII) for most code and it isn't likely to be any cheaper.
Intel sells lower priced chips too. The Celeron's will go into the low end, these will go into the higher end and in time I bet this core finds its way into the eleron.
The hardware is subsidized.
The have Celeron for the low end. The PII's days are numbered. We might see a PII 500 (though I doubt it), but after than the clock bumps will all go into the PIII
Bitch moan, bitch moan.
Animation master has a lot of features for a low price.
What AMD has is late, but it deserves a bit more respect than you give it.
1. They have Socket 7 chips that keep up with PIIs on cheaper motherboards, and have for some time.
2. They have a 3d api that actually has shipping code written for it. KNI may be better, but it has come later and it has no support.
3. The K6-3 is an incemental improvement, but given what they have done with an older bus-protocol and off-chip cache, I think it will be a competitive chip, when it finally comes out.
4. The K7 looks very cool and it may well be the fastest x86 chip around for a while after it ships (provided it doesn't slip much further)
Your 4 yold P90 had a fraction of the bandwidth and much higher latency out of cache than a Celeron or a P III. There is more to cache performance than size.
Also, the Alpha's are a different animal. They have an on chip L2 cache. The 2 & 4 MB caches are on the motherboard (or chip carrier) and have higher latency and lower bandwidth than the cache on the celeron or the P3.
Yeah, except for putting a media coprocessor on the chip it brings nothing new to the table.
Like it or not, this chip will define Intel's high end desktop offerings. If you buy intel, this is where you are going to find your highest clockspeeds.
It isn't screen real estate. It is the text input area, just like the keyboard on my computer.
On the other hand, it does take up realestate on the device and on something this small, that can be a bit of a waste.
This particular omission doesn't really bother me, but it would be nice if the input area was also display area, then it could be used for something else.
How will a color screen contribute significantly to the utility of the platform?
The PalmIII added IR, which allows Palm owners to share information. This enables Palm owners to share information easily. This makes it easy to exchange notes, contact information, appointments, etc. Any environment with a large number of PalmIII users will see huge advantages from this feature.
The PalmIII also improved the formfactor, which, I have argued elsewhere, is an very important part of the Palms feature set. The easier the device is to carry the more likely you are to carry it and the more useful it will be to you. Similarly if it is easier to hold you will use it more and longer.
Granted, neither of these was enough reason for me to upgrade from a Pro.
The PalmV, on the other hand, may just do it. More compact than a PalmIII while including IR support and an improved screen. I have already explained the size advantage. The improved screen will make it easier to read the display which will make quick accesses even quicker and long accesses much less painful. I have read news & things on my Pro and while I find it treamendously useful to have such a compact, portable and up to date information source, it can cause horrible eyestrain under all but the best lighting conditions. (the rechargable battery should also be useful although its biggest benifit is in enabling a more compact form factor.)
I should also note that there is expected to be a Palm IV, or somesuch, which will improve upon the III with more memory and an expansion slot. This will enable larger custom applications on the platform which can be quite useful in verticle markets.
After that is the Wireless Palm, which I agree, will be a big step up, but it will also be expensive. However, having a vast network of information at your hip will be tremendously useful.
Color, on the other hand, just seems like a gee-whiz feature. I would like to see it in the future, and I think it will help expand the market for the platform, but it will add expense and decreace battery life which will, in turn, decrease the devices general utility. Until the tradeoff for color is less significant I would rather 3com focus their efforts elsewhere.
I think color brings little when compaired to the overall utility of having a pervasive personal information utility. Hell, even on my PC, there is little I do on my color display that I couldn't do just as well on a good B&W display.
Even with hard disks going for well under $100/GB, this PC week article is a waste of space.
The PIII may not offer much that people will use right now but it will be adopted because it is the future of the mid-range x86 line. To the extent that people want high end desktops, this chip will be bought simply because intel will offer no alternative.
More interesting, from my point of view, is a news.com article that observes that AMD systems are dominating in the retail channels.
Lots of good ideas here for avoiding A/D D/A conversion losses, but what about the issues with recompressing compressed audio? Is there anyone out there with a smart way to minimize these effects?
I think the 3500 hundred can drive CRTs as well.
One thing to keep in mind when pricing flat panels, the stated size represents the active image area, unlike CRTs. The 15" apple display we just bought has the same image area as a Sony Trinitron display and I must say, the image is fantastic. The viewing angles are quite broad, the image as bright and the subsampling is very well done so things look good even below screen resolution.
The price was just over $1000. A bit high, but not a totall killer. In a month or two they should have a 17" for about $1500 with the same active image area of a 19" display.
English borrows heavily from Latin. Does that mean that Latin isn't "out"
Beyond that. BeOS is not Mach based, though it does have a POSIX interface, as does NT. Same goes for MacOS 10. This doesn't make any of them "UNIX" or even UN*X.