Yes, broken record time, my third post on this subject:)
You can be pretty sure those cores are stripped-down units that aren't as good general purpose wise as the PowerPC 970. If you could get OS X on this thing I doubt it would run it as well as a real Mac, despite the core count and the higher clock speed.
Re:Massive processor, not much for graphics though
on
The Xbox 360 Unveiled
·
· Score: 1
See my longer comment further up:) I believe the three PowerPC cores are stripped-down ones, not "for real" like in the Macs (and not as good as "for real" ones either). The graphics chip is pretty much "for real" though, although expect a bit of slowdown because of contention for the main memory (nice to see GDDR used for that). I'd estimate the GPU to be somewhat better than current 6800s and somewhat less good than the forthcoming Nvidia G70, with the exception of the eDRAM which, AFAIK, basically just buys them multisampled FSAA for free (no room for much more than a full colour 720p framebuffer in there). (So for an entire machine that costs about as much as one high end GPU for a PC, it's a damn good deal...)
That would still be a lot of heat to dissipate from such a small box if the Xbox360's CPU really was equivalent to three G5s as seen in the high end Power Macs. Remember, liquid cooling isn't a "magic wand", connecting a radiator with an 80mm fan (say) to a liquid cooling circuit with the CPU on doesn't give you any benefit if you can attach the same size radiator directly to the CPU, the benefit comes from taking the heat away from the CPU and dissipating it through a much bigger radiator elsewhere (of which there is no sign on the Xbox360 enclosure).
I would go out on a limb and suggest these PowerPC cores are very different from -- and very stripped-down compared to -- the PowerPC 970 series used in the Mac G5s. They probably closely resemble the general purpose core within the Cell, and are probably in-order execution only. Otherwise the CPU would be too big to make it economical to manufacture: for instance, the dual core AMD64 chips recently announced have >200 million transistors and the cheapest ones are likely to cost about as much each as the launch price of the Xbox360 console, imagine the cost of a chip with three of those cores on it.
The Xbox360 CPU will probably be very fast performing well-defined number cruching tasks with little branching and logic (e.g. physics processing), but bad at game logic (e.g. AI), compared to current general purpose PPC or AMD64 hardware.
I expect the Xbox360 will look very nice as a gaming platform to begin with, but will be quickly outstripped by next generation gaming PCs with dual/multi core CPUs (the same game engines that take advantage of the multi core Xbox360 chip will take advantage of these) and dedicated physics processing units. Which, given the extra cost of the PC platform, is exactly as it should be.:)
Linus doesn't use OS X! He uses a Power Mac because they're well built (if expensive) workstations and he felt it was important to have a core developer running on non-x86 hardware...
See my other post. You don't need a PATA-bridged-through-SATA connector. Honestly. And with the current driver situation they're about the worst things to try to use. Connect the drive to one of the native PATA ports on your motherboard, or if you don't have any spare, pick up a native PATA interface card, e.g. a Promise TX2 Ultra ATA133 (with PDC2027x series chipset).
No, no, no. An "Ultra ATA" hard drive will connect to and work on any remotely recent IDE connector -- this *is* "PATA". The bridged PATA connectors on some motherboards and SATA cards that use chipsets like the Si3112 are, functionally, exactly the same as the native PATA connectors on motherboards, PATA cards, etc! The only difference is the way in which they are implemented in hardware, and the driver support (or lack thereof, typically, for those bridged PATA interfaces).
You're *better* off connecting a modern "Ultra ATA" hard drive with PATA interface to a native PATA connector (what you call a "legacy IDE connector") than to a PATA connector bridged through SATA, because (a) you won't have the overhead introduced by the bridging, which may decrease performance a little, and (b) the driver support is almost certainly better.
The general consensus on the Obsidian forums is that Obsidian was forced into rushing it out in time for Christmas, no matter what; they can't comment, but it's likely not their fault.
I lived in France for five years and I have to say the "brainwashed american" parent is generally right about the attitude of the French authorities...
(That doesn't make them as nasty as the US, though.)
In my experience the Tagan units are very high quality. My home server machine (which uses one of the 480W Tagan PSUs) runs 24/7 with an Opteron CPU and six hard drives and has been doing so for nearly a year now. The PSU is quite happy, virtually inaudible and only slightly warm.
The Antec 420W unit supplied with the case couldn't start the machine...
"Firstly: all your points are addressed in the article."
So the poster sounds reasonable so far, but...
"Secondly: anyone that buys a PC to play games on has more money than sense and is quickly parted from the latter."
Well, that's rich. Some of us don't like trying to "play" games on hardware that's barely up to the lowest common denominator. This is where the consoles always end up a year or so after their launch: with games running at 20fps average and dipping into single figures range, at pitiful resolutions. Have you *tried* playing Knights of the Old Republic on an Xbox?
Ewch. Give me a nice shiny PC for my interactive entertainment any day, for the same reason that I bought an expensive Arcam/B&W separates hi-fi rather than a nasty mini JVC thingy from Dixons... 8-)
Whether or not the PS3 hardware is sufficiently revolutionary to truly offer a PC-beating gaming experience remains to be seen. On paper it sounds up to it, but as another poster has said, so did the PS2 before launch...
To be pedantic, the upgrade to Windows 2000 Server Editions is Windows Server 2003. The upgrade to Windows 2000 Professional is Windows XP Professional.:)
The "0.9" and "0.10" there aren't single decimal numbers, they're major and minor version numbers -- separate numbers that are (as per tradition) separated by a dot. So minor version 10 is greater than minor version 9:)
We will? None of the other manufacturers appear to have. Intel have gotten very little extra clock speed so far (the fastest released Northwood -- 130nm process -- was 3.4GHz I believe) and whilst the PowerPC 970 series went from 2.0GHz to 2.5GHz, I suspect that the 130nm chip could run a lot faster than 2.0GHz if the 2.5GHz G5 Mac's water cooling system were to be used on it...
You can always run your own SMTP server, and have it route mail via your ISP's one for those receivers who automatically drop SMTP from random addresses assuming it's spam. That's what I do.:)
Rumour has it, however, that Intel's implementation of x86-64 isn't as good as AMD's. Expect the gap between Athlon64/Opteron and Pentium/Xeon to widen in 64-bit mode...
Aren't you confusing kernel and distribution? Microsoft Windows is like a distribution (it's a complete running system). How different are Slackware 1 and Slackware 9 for instance?
If you looked at what's happened to the NT kernel during those 10 years, I reckon it would also look like "10 years of incremental patches". Apart from the graphics renderer turning up in it, that is;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, broken record time, my third post on this subject :)
You can be pretty sure those cores are stripped-down units that aren't as good general purpose wise as the PowerPC 970. If you could get OS X on this thing I doubt it would run it as well as a real Mac, despite the core count and the higher clock speed.
See my longer comment further up :) I believe the three PowerPC cores are stripped-down ones, not "for real" like in the Macs (and not as good as "for real" ones either). The graphics chip is pretty much "for real" though, although expect a bit of slowdown because of contention for the main memory (nice to see GDDR used for that). I'd estimate the GPU to be somewhat better than current 6800s and somewhat less good than the forthcoming Nvidia G70, with the exception of the eDRAM which, AFAIK, basically just buys them multisampled FSAA for free (no room for much more than a full colour 720p framebuffer in there). (So for an entire machine that costs about as much as one high end GPU for a PC, it's a damn good deal...)
That would still be a lot of heat to dissipate from such a small box if the Xbox360's CPU really was equivalent to three G5s as seen in the high end Power Macs. Remember, liquid cooling isn't a "magic wand", connecting a radiator with an 80mm fan (say) to a liquid cooling circuit with the CPU on doesn't give you any benefit if you can attach the same size radiator directly to the CPU, the benefit comes from taking the heat away from the CPU and dissipating it through a much bigger radiator elsewhere (of which there is no sign on the Xbox360 enclosure).
No, these are stripped-down CPU cores.
I would go out on a limb and suggest these PowerPC cores are very different from -- and very stripped-down compared to -- the PowerPC 970 series used in the Mac G5s. They probably closely resemble the general purpose core within the Cell, and are probably in-order execution only. Otherwise the CPU would be too big to make it economical to manufacture: for instance, the dual core AMD64 chips recently announced have >200 million transistors and the cheapest ones are likely to cost about as much each as the launch price of the Xbox360 console, imagine the cost of a chip with three of those cores on it.
:)
The Xbox360 CPU will probably be very fast performing well-defined number cruching tasks with little branching and logic (e.g. physics processing), but bad at game logic (e.g. AI), compared to current general purpose PPC or AMD64 hardware.
I expect the Xbox360 will look very nice as a gaming platform to begin with, but will be quickly outstripped by next generation gaming PCs with dual/multi core CPUs (the same game engines that take advantage of the multi core Xbox360 chip will take advantage of these) and dedicated physics processing units. Which, given the extra cost of the PC platform, is exactly as it should be.
Offtopic! Irrelevant!
Linus doesn't use OS X! He uses a Power Mac because they're well built (if expensive) workstations and he felt it was important to have a core developer running on non-x86 hardware...
See my other post. You don't need a PATA-bridged-through-SATA connector. Honestly. And with the current driver situation they're about the worst things to try to use. Connect the drive to one of the native PATA ports on your motherboard, or if you don't have any spare, pick up a native PATA interface card, e.g. a Promise TX2 Ultra ATA133 (with PDC2027x series chipset).
No, no, no. An "Ultra ATA" hard drive will connect to and work on any remotely recent IDE connector -- this *is* "PATA". The bridged PATA connectors on some motherboards and SATA cards that use chipsets like the Si3112 are, functionally, exactly the same as the native PATA connectors on motherboards, PATA cards, etc! The only difference is the way in which they are implemented in hardware, and the driver support (or lack thereof, typically, for those bridged PATA interfaces).
You're *better* off connecting a modern "Ultra ATA" hard drive with PATA interface to a native PATA connector (what you call a "legacy IDE connector") than to a PATA connector bridged through SATA, because (a) you won't have the overhead introduced by the bridging, which may decrease performance a little, and (b) the driver support is almost certainly better.
Yes, it is, according to LucasArts.
The general consensus on the Obsidian forums is that Obsidian was forced into rushing it out in time for Christmas, no matter what; they can't comment, but it's likely not their fault.
The story was largely excellent, parent just obviously didn't understand it...
I lived in France for five years and I have to say the "brainwashed american" parent is generally right about the attitude of the French authorities...
(That doesn't make them as nasty as the US, though.)
In my experience the Tagan units are very high quality. My home server machine (which uses one of the 480W Tagan PSUs) runs 24/7 with an Opteron CPU and six hard drives and has been doing so for nearly a year now. The PSU is quite happy, virtually inaudible and only slightly warm.
The Antec 420W unit supplied with the case couldn't start the machine...
"Firstly: all your points are addressed in the article."
So the poster sounds reasonable so far, but...
"Secondly: anyone that buys a PC to play games on has more money than sense and is quickly parted from the latter."
Well, that's rich. Some of us don't like trying to "play" games on hardware that's barely up to the lowest common denominator. This is where the consoles always end up a year or so after their launch: with games running at 20fps average and dipping into single figures range, at pitiful resolutions. Have you *tried* playing Knights of the Old Republic on an Xbox?
Ewch. Give me a nice shiny PC for my interactive entertainment any day, for the same reason that I bought an expensive Arcam/B&W separates hi-fi rather than a nasty mini JVC thingy from Dixons... 8-)
Whether or not the PS3 hardware is sufficiently revolutionary to truly offer a PC-beating gaming experience remains to be seen. On paper it sounds up to it, but as another poster has said, so did the PS2 before launch...
To be pedantic, the upgrade to Windows 2000 Server Editions is Windows Server 2003. The upgrade to Windows 2000 Professional is Windows XP Professional. :)
Just in case you're not joking... ;-)
:)
The "0.9" and "0.10" there aren't single decimal numbers, they're major and minor version numbers -- separate numbers that are (as per tradition) separated by a dot. So minor version 10 is greater than minor version 9
We will? None of the other manufacturers appear to have. Intel have gotten very little extra clock speed so far (the fastest released Northwood -- 130nm process -- was 3.4GHz I believe) and whilst the PowerPC 970 series went from 2.0GHz to 2.5GHz, I suspect that the 130nm chip could run a lot faster than 2.0GHz if the 2.5GHz G5 Mac's water cooling system were to be used on it...
(Quick erratum)
The Athlon 64 doesn't have hyperthreading, that's a P4 feature.
You can always run your own SMTP server, and have it route mail via your ISP's one for those receivers who automatically drop SMTP from random addresses assuming it's spam. That's what I do. :)
Rumour has it, however, that Intel's implementation of x86-64 isn't as good as AMD's. Expect the gap between Athlon64/Opteron and Pentium/Xeon to widen in 64-bit mode...
Who dare mod that offtopic? That's really funny :)
Ahem
Aren't you confusing kernel and distribution? Microsoft Windows is like a distribution (it's a complete running system). How different are Slackware 1 and Slackware 9 for instance?
;-)
If you looked at what's happened to the NT kernel during those 10 years, I reckon it would also look like "10 years of incremental patches". Apart from the graphics renderer turning up in it, that is
"It works perfectly for me [...] under Linux" :) Are you talking about the Live!, or the Audigy?
Dumb sounding but necessary question