there was a day when you were all sitting around eating chips and talking about how kick-ass
I second that: when I was in highschool in 1986 the BBS scene was full of discussion on the 386 and upcoming 486 (and CGA porn). However, don't forget that anyone who has ever used the word 'l33t' probably wasn't born then... but I do find it interesting how the discussions went from really understanding the architecture (when masm was king), to just politics as usual. Since commodity programming has become so decoupled from the architecture, intellectual discourse on CPU architecture isn't in demand among the throngs. It's mostly a bipartisan thing these days. If everyone would stop shopping at Old Navy, we'd all be able to get along a little better. What the hell am I talking about.
I'm surprised the article doesn't reference the company SpaceDev. They are the world's first private asteroid mining company... well, they haven't really done it yet, so I guess they're the first to plan to do it. First launch should be some time next year.
enviornmental damage that is happening because of the wasteful way these machines use power...
Somebody moderate that post up.
You're totally on it. I live in California, and we are suffering serious power grid issues.
Why?
Hoards of server farms with 50-100W+ single CPUs! We now have to EXPECT mandatory rolling brownouts throughout the summer! What are we, Guatemala? (no offense to any Guatemalans, I just remember visiting the country there and only having power 3 hours a week)
I find it fascinating that this is as an example of 'every CPU counts'. Dotcoms and server farms are having a measurable impact on the environment due to power requirements: additional oil, additional dams, additional power plant capacity.
"...Light" sounds interesting, but not because of the critique ("..lyrical and sureal..."? oh please). I mean, kudos to the scifi authors for writing scifi, but writing a book with QM vs GR as a key plot point just seems kinda weak. I dug Cryptonomicon's portrayal of Turing and his buds, but that wasn't a main plot in the book, it was just food for thought.
C'mon, either pen some really esoteric SciFi, or let's hear a story about how Newton shafted Leibnitz on the differential calculus.
I'm a HUGE fan of Dr David Goodstein's "The Mechanical Universe" series, and the little skist they filmed about the individuals are fascinating. Like Galileo being persecuted (or Bruno, for that matter). Hell, Kepler's madness would make a great story too.
Instead, NBC makes miniseries after miniseries about the old testament instead of recounting the real and documented tragedies that occurred among the history of science.
Whoa, Timeline blew chunks. What a boner compared to the Andromeda Strain. That book was so obviously written for a movie, 80% of it was detailed descriptions of action and choreography. Big yawn.
Allow me to be a cynic also. Did you read the article? It wasn't at all an attempt to plug their CPUs. It was purely academic, and was gratuitous with it's references. It was a just a study in cloth deformation, in fact, there was no mention of intel-centric optimization--- take look at the code. sheesh, from the people that gave us VTune, it looks like they don't even use it!
I like the fact that Intel spends its vast resources taking on interesting stuff like this, AND OPENLY publishing its work. They actually pay someone to sit around and write 3D code that has virtually no impact on their profitability (at this point, anyway...) for the sake of research.
The only thing I know of that has more is an earthworm (5 hearts),
I remember when I was like 5 or 6, a blacksmith told me something about horses having "hearts" in their feet to help with circulation. Was that just drunken blacksmith babble, or is there some truth to it?
With respect to the debt, I think he doesn't realize (or the people
Let me add to that...
What Bush and GOP fail to grasp is that the tax cut money IS NOT THE PEOPLE'S!!!! Regan ran up huge debts in the 80's to feed the war machine, spending money that was not in the coffers on the expectation the the future taxes would pay off the debt. But the GOP is like a dumb college student with credit cards.
Bush's so called tax cut is just vote buying. The money he wants to give back is money that Regan already spent decades ago. How dense are his supports???
As a staunch agnostic, I find the phrase "In God We Trust" on all of our currency horribly offensive. Why does this still occur? I wish I had asked it earlier.
....so we take the reference rasterizer source code from the DirectX SDK/DDK and force the HAL call at the bottom of the T&L pipeline to deliver to this engine (forcing wireframe and pretending to handle all texture modes, etc...), than anything that uses D3D will render in mono wireframe on this badboy. I think the actual entry point is called MyRenderPrimitive and it takes a vertex buffer (gotta love MS and their My this and My that...)
Of course, I have no idea what the vector rendering rates are, but I think if someone published the command interface, it would be a few weekends worth of coding to get it up and running... but still, D3D would run on it...
--- Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
Yeah, I cringed at all the racial stereotypes (and perfect hair as well). It looked so much like Star Wars w/the empress and all. I think anyone a few years out of college will probably have the same reactions that you pointed out, especially anyone who enjoyed "Dead Ringers" or "Farewell to my Concubine".
However, regardless as to how much the trailer embarassed the grown up in me, and I know it's totally a teenaged geek movie, I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE IT! (Of course, I'm almost 30 and I was up until 2am last night rolling 3d6 for ability scores in Baldur's Gate II. I've been doing this since I was freaking 11!)
I expect this movie to fall in the category of moviews like:
If you haven't seen any of these, you really should. "Willow" and "Krull" were the best w.r.t monsters and NPCs. "Labyrinth" actually tried to pull a few Zork-like puzzles (a la the truth-teller/liar dilemma). Campy, D&D themed, but it's a tough genre to do well. "Excalibur" is, IMO, the best D&D movie to date, even though there weren't any cool monsters. "Time Bandits" and the "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" are also loads of fun and resemble D&D-like fantasy.
"All kids love 'Beholder'!"
--- Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
And if the Rambus Scam had gone as intended, Intel's
It wasn't a scam. The executives that made the dumb decision based on internal suggestions from analysis engineers realized there was no chipset vehicle to deliver higher performance processors based on SDRAM. The executive decision was rooted in fear that their latest CPU wouldn't look as fast b/c of memory bottlenecks.
Remember, executives were thinking of 2001 in 1996. The were thinking of the future in terms of: bazillions of polygons per sec for 3D T&L, endless streams of motion comp vectors for DVD/MPEG4 playback, and rapid searching of large phoneme databases to compute hidden markov models* in text-2-speech and speech-2-text --- that's a LOT of memory bandwidth, kids. They weren't thinking SpecFP. They weren't thinking Winbench.
Now you all considered it a scam b/c Intel made a partnership to supply high volume for Rambus, while Rambus would let them see their IP. Why is that a scam? People could by a VIA chipset with SDRAM and slap a PIII into it, can't they? It runs better than 820, doesn't it? How is that bad for consumers? Intel stumbled trying to make a high performance chipset. They weren't out to bone the masses. How would their partnership with Rambus stifle competition??? It hasn't and it wouldn't have if RDRAM panned out on all fronts.
So does this mean that any decision made by an executive is political? I'm challenging the perception in this thread that Intel is out to screw the masses. What is the problem with my position?
* buzzword alert
--- Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
Claims are cheap, evidence is scarce. The statements made here are all that count, and those statements demonstrate a profound ignorance of the technologies and issues involved. If you know more, use that knowledge in your posts.
Exactly. That's why I don't understand why you can call me 'ignorant'. What wasn't clear about my statements? I made observations about Intel's decision based on products and timeline. The person challenging me piped up and said I didn't know anything and then proceeded to talk about latency, and then slammed me personally again.
In my view I made the more intelligent posts. Should I have seeded my post with buzzwords? Ok: skew, timing, reflection, leadoff, page miss, row miss, page hit, column adress strobe. There, now you know I'm smart.
I supposed I could spout even more buzzwords about memory heirarchies -- which the previous poster said I know nothing about, and was fairly irrelevant to the discussion. Sure, most benchmarks run in the cache, blah blah blah, Spec, blah, Ziff-Davis, blah. (Maybe some genius will now explain to me what I cache is.)
Again, because you completely ignored my original point: Intel was extrapolating into the future in 1996. That's why they wrote the first version of ZD 3DWB'97 and did the 740 dance. Everything pointed toward 3D as the future and only RDRAM would support AGP 2/4X (NGP) and superfast FSB.
Someone made a claim that Intel was trying to corner the market by using RDRAM. Since it is obvious there is _no_ market for Intel to corner wrt memory, and based on the changes in intel's technology, I simply pointed out the obvious reason why intel tried to transition.
But apparently I forgot to slam intel in the process. So much for trying to raise awareness.
--- Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
and furthermore that you know little about memory hierarchies
How did you glean that nugget? I'm fairly certain I know 10x more than you on the subject.
Intel bet that going forward bandwidth would be a bigger issue than latency. Whoops. They also knew of the cost, and expect it to drop as volumes increased. Whoops. Heat was also an issue, but betting on bandwidth, this was ignored. Whoops.
in very specific situations, of which 3D graphics happens to be one, but
No shit. Intel was chomping at the bit to let loose with 3D as a way to sell more CPUs. That's why they did that horrible 740. They bet everything on 3D.
given that RDRAM was known at the time not to address those problems any better than DDR SDRAM,
current-generation DDR SDRAM is at least the equal of current-generation RDRAM for bandwidth, and offers
Don't you know that DDR wasn't on the table four years ago? Aparently not.
Whatever problem Intel was trying to solve, the engineers knew that they were trying to solve it the wrong way by using RDRAM.
Gee, that's a qualified statment. Oh, wait, you probably heard that from "a friend of mine's friend that works at intel, but wouldn't use his name."
--- Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
This was driven more by "how can we corner the market" than by "how can we deliver a better product at a better price".
Absolutely not true. Your statement demonstrates you haven't been following this issue at all. I know not everyone on/. can know everything about every issue, so read this and learn.
Intel went with RDRAM for 3 reasons, BANDWIDTH, BANDWIDTH, and BANDWIDTH. Intel was the only company trying to do something about the frontside bus bottleneck. They wanted faster frontside busses AND faster AGP being served by one memory channel. SDRAM honestly doesn't have the bandwidth, that is why there are 16, 32 and 64MB of graphics memory on all of your shiney Voodoo or GeForce cards: b/c SDRAM can't handle it.
Intel wanted faster FSBs and graphics performance, so they absolutely had no choice but to go with RDRAM.
Problems with latency and ridiculous electrical specifications, not to mention logical bugs coming from a first imlementation of new IP, and I doubt RAMBUS helped them... you see the point. Intel failed b/c they tried to put an untested technology in the mainstream from the get-go.
The memory bandwidth bottleneck still exists, at least Intel tried to do something about it.
AMD is sitting around waiting to see what floats to the top DDR or RDRAM, or maybe ADT. Why should AMD try to pioneer something when all they have to do is wait for Intel to demonstrate the best path???
Sheesh. Do some research.
--- Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
Intel HAS to support rambus in the P4. But they're unhappy about it.
Not true.
The chipset determines what type of memory the CPU needs. However, since the P4 frontside bus is twice as fast as EV6, the >3GB/s of bandwidth has to come from somewhere, and RDRAM is the only technology that can support it.
--- Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
Many of the classical puzzles are easily defined (like this one, the ol' can't trisect and angle with a straight-edge and compass, etc.), which makes them exciting for non-geniuses like myself to study. They deceptively appear as low-hanging fruit because many came from planar geometry and mechanics. At the time, these were advanced subjects, and it took centuries for the baseline standard of intelligence to achieve a level where even the common person knows F=ma. Once we reach that level, then the creme de la creme will be within reach of the real brainbenders.
Think how long it will take for the baseline knowledge to contain quantum theory (assuming quantum theory survives another century).
I think we've had a glimpse of what the future provides. Fermat's Last Theorem (a^x+b^x=c^x has no solution for x > 2, er.. something) took forever to solve and the solution is simply insane. I'm sure there are bucketloads of similar postulates/conjectures/etc... in the math world alone that will sit idle for centuries. Turing 'n von Neumann had all their P/NP conjectures. And gawk knows what kind of weirdness is stirring in the minds of the QM peoples.
Personally, I feel fortunate to be in a time when the problems being solved are easily explained in laymans terms (e.g. carpenter's ruler). Even though I could never solve it, it's fun to grasp the complexity and then skip ahead to the solution.
Now if they could only solve the map-folding problem... oh wait, maps are becoming extinct...
--- Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
One of the big challenges in making rotational devices is: how to supply power to the rotating portion without tangling up the wires after one rotation.
I've always tried to build a system of brushes on the back of disks, but it looks like this project solves it via the motor, yes? Does the motor actually have wires that come out of the spinning part (armature)?
What other ways have people found to solve this problem w/o a special motor? IMHO it sounds like the kind of problem that engineers resolved 50 years ago...
Thx,
S
--- Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
Slashdot Mirror
there was a day when you were all sitting around eating chips and talking about how kick-ass
I second that: when I was in highschool in 1986 the BBS scene was full of discussion on the 386 and upcoming 486 (and CGA porn). However, don't forget that anyone who has ever used the word 'l33t' probably wasn't born then... but I do find it interesting how the discussions went from really understanding the architecture (when masm was king), to just politics as usual. Since commodity programming has become so decoupled from the architecture, intellectual discourse on CPU architecture isn't in demand among the throngs. It's mostly a bipartisan thing these days. If everyone would stop shopping at Old Navy, we'd all be able to get along a little better. What the hell am I talking about.
---
Could be issue latency to account for the frequency domain changes. They may have to throw in an extra clock every N clocks to keep the PLLs happy.
---
I'm surprised the article doesn't reference the company SpaceDev. They are the world's first private asteroid mining company... well, they haven't really done it yet, so I guess they're the first to plan to do it. First launch should be some time next year.
---
enviornmental damage that is happening because of the wasteful way these machines use power...
Somebody moderate that post up.
You're totally on it. I live in California, and we are suffering serious power grid issues.
Why?
Hoards of server farms with 50-100W+ single CPUs! We now have to EXPECT mandatory rolling brownouts throughout the summer! What are we, Guatemala? (no offense to any Guatemalans, I just remember visiting the country there and only having power 3 hours a week)
I find it fascinating that this is as an example of 'every CPU counts'. Dotcoms and server farms are having a measurable impact on the environment due to power requirements: additional oil, additional dams, additional power plant capacity.
---
"...Light" sounds interesting, but not because of the critique ("..lyrical and sureal..."? oh please). I mean, kudos to the scifi authors for writing scifi, but writing a book with QM vs GR as a key plot point just seems kinda weak. I dug Cryptonomicon's portrayal of Turing and his buds, but that wasn't a main plot in the book, it was just food for thought.
C'mon, either pen some really esoteric SciFi, or let's hear a story about how Newton shafted Leibnitz on the differential calculus.
I'm a HUGE fan of Dr David Goodstein's "The Mechanical Universe" series, and the little skist they filmed about the individuals are fascinating. Like Galileo being persecuted (or Bruno, for that matter). Hell, Kepler's madness would make a great story too.
Instead, NBC makes miniseries after miniseries about the old testament instead of recounting the real and documented tragedies that occurred among the history of science.
---
Whoa, Timeline blew chunks. What a boner compared to the Andromeda Strain. That book was so obviously written for a movie, 80% of it was detailed descriptions of action and choreography. Big yawn.
---
any ideas why the world's morality filter delimmas weren't solved with a simple suffix? it would have been so easy.
---
Allow me to be a cynic also. Did you read the article? It wasn't at all an attempt to plug their CPUs. It was purely academic, and was gratuitous with it's references. It was a just a study in cloth deformation, in fact, there was no mention of intel-centric optimization--- take look at the code. sheesh, from the people that gave us VTune, it looks like they don't even use it!
I like the fact that Intel spends its vast resources taking on interesting stuff like this, AND OPENLY publishing its work. They actually pay someone to sit around and write 3D code that has virtually no impact on their profitability (at this point, anyway...) for the sake of research.
---
The only thing I know of that has more is an earthworm (5 hearts),
I remember when I was like 5 or 6, a blacksmith told me something about horses having "hearts" in their feet to help with circulation. Was that just drunken blacksmith babble, or is there some truth to it?
---
With respect to the debt, I think he doesn't realize (or the people
Let me add to that...
What Bush and GOP fail to grasp is that the tax cut money IS NOT THE PEOPLE'S!!!! Regan ran up huge debts in the 80's to feed the war machine, spending money that was not in the coffers on the expectation the the future taxes would pay off the debt. But the GOP is like a dumb college student with credit cards.
Bush's so called tax cut is just vote buying. The money he wants to give back is money that Regan already spent decades ago. How dense are his supports???
---
there is no actual "right" that women possess to do
[...the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...]
now where did i hear that before??? i think it qualifies for the woman, but not for the early fetus.
---
In the same line of thought...
As a staunch agnostic, I find the phrase "In God We Trust" on all of our currency horribly offensive. Why does this still occur? I wish I had asked it earlier.
No gods, no masters.
---
D'oh. I meant 'where do i get an encrypted filesystem', not a program that writes 0/1s...
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
an unusually high altitude (20000' or thereabouts)
Why did he pull at 20k? That's a long time to be beneath a canopy, unless you've got beaucoup acreage underneath you and there's no wind...
---
the one that wipes the filesystem by writing random data over it a few times, then 0's
Does this really exist? If so, where do I get it.
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
If I recall correctly, the address extensions of the P6 generation were actually removed before the introduction of the Pentium Pro, and finally
Nope. Nothing was removed, just never used. There are 36 address bits ON the original PPro package itself. Selector math is done in 36 bits too.
Check out the specsheet (refer to the alphabetical listing of pin names in the appendix, addresses go from A0-A35):
http://developer.intel.co m/d esign/pro/datashts/24357001.pdf
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
....so we take the reference rasterizer source code from the DirectX SDK/DDK and force the HAL call at the bottom of the T&L pipeline to deliver to this engine (forcing wireframe and pretending to handle all texture modes, etc...), than anything that uses D3D will render in mono wireframe on this badboy. I think the actual entry point is called MyRenderPrimitive and it takes a vertex buffer (gotta love MS and their My this and My that...)
Of course, I have no idea what the vector rendering rates are, but I think if someone published the command interface, it would be a few weekends worth of coding to get it up and running... but still, D3D would run on it...
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
Yeah, I cringed at all the racial stereotypes (and perfect hair as well). It looked so much like Star Wars w/the empress and all. I think anyone a few years out of college will probably have the same reactions that you pointed out, especially anyone who enjoyed "Dead Ringers" or "Farewell to my Concubine".
However, regardless as to how much the trailer embarassed the grown up in me, and I know it's totally a teenaged geek movie, I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE IT! (Of course, I'm almost 30 and I was up until 2am last night rolling 3d6 for ability scores in Baldur's Gate II. I've been doing this since I was freaking 11!)
I expect this movie to fall in the category of moviews like:
"Dragonslayer"
"Willow"
"Legend" (w/Tom Cruise)
"Labyrinth" (w/David Bowie)
"Conan" Series
"Krull"
If you haven't seen any of these, you really should. "Willow" and "Krull" were the best w.r.t monsters and NPCs. "Labyrinth" actually tried to pull a few Zork-like puzzles (a la the truth-teller/liar dilemma). Campy, D&D themed, but it's a tough genre to do well. "Excalibur" is, IMO, the best D&D movie to date, even though there weren't any cool monsters. "Time Bandits" and the "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" are also loads of fun and resemble D&D-like fantasy.
"All kids love 'Beholder'!"
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
And if the Rambus Scam had gone as intended, Intel's
It wasn't a scam. The executives that made the dumb decision based on internal suggestions from analysis engineers realized there was no chipset vehicle to deliver higher performance processors based on SDRAM. The executive decision was rooted in fear that their latest CPU wouldn't look as fast b/c of memory bottlenecks.
Remember, executives were thinking of 2001 in 1996. The were thinking of the future in terms of: bazillions of polygons per sec for 3D T&L, endless streams of motion comp vectors for DVD/MPEG4 playback, and rapid searching of large phoneme databases to compute hidden markov models* in text-2-speech and speech-2-text --- that's a LOT of memory bandwidth, kids. They weren't thinking SpecFP. They weren't thinking Winbench.
Now you all considered it a scam b/c Intel made a partnership to supply high volume for Rambus, while Rambus would let them see their IP. Why is that a scam? People could by a VIA chipset with SDRAM and slap a PIII into it, can't they? It runs better than 820, doesn't it? How is that bad for consumers? Intel stumbled trying to make a high performance chipset. They weren't out to bone the masses. How would their partnership with Rambus stifle competition??? It hasn't and it wouldn't have if RDRAM panned out on all fronts.
So does this mean that any decision made by an executive is political? I'm challenging the perception in this thread that Intel is out to screw the masses. What is the problem with my position?
* buzzword alert
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
Claims are cheap, evidence is scarce. The statements made here are all that count, and those statements demonstrate a profound ignorance of the technologies and issues involved. If you know more, use that knowledge in your posts.
Exactly. That's why I don't understand why you can call me 'ignorant'. What wasn't clear about my statements? I made observations about Intel's decision based on products and timeline. The person challenging me piped up and said I didn't know anything and then proceeded to talk about latency, and then slammed me personally again.
In my view I made the more intelligent posts. Should I have seeded my post with buzzwords? Ok: skew, timing, reflection, leadoff, page miss, row miss, page hit, column adress strobe. There, now you know I'm smart.
I supposed I could spout even more buzzwords about memory heirarchies -- which the previous poster said I know nothing about, and was fairly irrelevant to the discussion. Sure, most benchmarks run in the cache, blah blah blah, Spec, blah, Ziff-Davis, blah. (Maybe some genius will now explain to me what I cache is.)
Again, because you completely ignored my original point: Intel was extrapolating into the future in 1996. That's why they wrote the first version of ZD 3DWB'97 and did the 740 dance. Everything pointed toward 3D as the future and only RDRAM would support AGP 2/4X (NGP) and superfast FSB.
Someone made a claim that Intel was trying to corner the market by using RDRAM. Since it is obvious there is _no_ market for Intel to corner wrt memory, and based on the changes in intel's technology, I simply pointed out the obvious reason why intel tried to transition.
But apparently I forgot to slam intel in the process. So much for trying to raise awareness.
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
and furthermore that you know little about memory hierarchies
How did you glean that nugget? I'm fairly certain I know 10x more than you on the subject.
Intel bet that going forward bandwidth would be a bigger issue than latency. Whoops. They also knew of the cost, and expect it to drop as volumes increased. Whoops. Heat was also an issue, but betting on bandwidth, this was ignored. Whoops.
in very specific situations, of which 3D graphics happens to be one, but
No shit. Intel was chomping at the bit to let loose with 3D as a way to sell more CPUs. That's why they did that horrible 740. They bet everything on 3D.
given that RDRAM was known at the time not to address those problems any better than DDR SDRAM,
current-generation DDR SDRAM is at least the equal of current-generation RDRAM for bandwidth, and offers
Don't you know that DDR wasn't on the table four years ago? Aparently not.
Whatever problem Intel was trying to solve, the engineers knew that they were trying to solve it the wrong way by using RDRAM.
Gee, that's a qualified statment. Oh, wait, you probably heard that from "a friend of mine's friend that works at intel, but wouldn't use his name."
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
This was driven more by "how can we corner the market" than by "how can we deliver a better product at a better price".
/. can know everything about every issue, so read this and learn.
Absolutely not true. Your statement demonstrates you haven't been following this issue at all. I know not everyone on
Intel went with RDRAM for 3 reasons, BANDWIDTH, BANDWIDTH, and BANDWIDTH. Intel was the only company trying to do something about the frontside bus bottleneck. They wanted faster frontside busses AND faster AGP being served by one memory channel. SDRAM honestly doesn't have the bandwidth, that is why there are 16, 32 and 64MB of graphics memory on all of your shiney Voodoo or GeForce cards: b/c SDRAM can't handle it.
Intel wanted faster FSBs and graphics performance, so they absolutely had no choice but to go with RDRAM.
Problems with latency and ridiculous electrical specifications, not to mention logical bugs coming from a first imlementation of new IP, and I doubt RAMBUS helped them... you see the point. Intel failed b/c they tried to put an untested technology in the mainstream from the get-go.
The memory bandwidth bottleneck still exists, at least Intel tried to do something about it.
AMD is sitting around waiting to see what floats to the top DDR or RDRAM, or maybe ADT. Why should AMD try to pioneer something when all they have to do is wait for Intel to demonstrate the best path???
Sheesh. Do some research.
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
Intel HAS to support rambus in the P4. But they're unhappy about it. Not true. The chipset determines what type of memory the CPU needs. However, since the P4 frontside bus is twice as fast as EV6, the >3GB/s of bandwidth has to come from somewhere, and RDRAM is the only technology that can support it.
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
Many of the classical puzzles are easily defined (like this one, the ol' can't trisect and angle with a straight-edge and compass, etc.), which makes them exciting for non-geniuses like myself to study. They deceptively appear as low-hanging fruit because many came from planar geometry and mechanics. At the time, these were advanced subjects, and it took centuries for the baseline standard of intelligence to achieve a level where even the common person knows F=ma. Once we reach that level, then the creme de la creme will be within reach of the real brainbenders.
Think how long it will take for the baseline knowledge to contain quantum theory (assuming quantum theory survives another century).
I think we've had a glimpse of what the future provides. Fermat's Last Theorem (a^x+b^x=c^x has no solution for x > 2, er.. something) took forever to solve and the solution is simply insane. I'm sure there are bucketloads of similar postulates/conjectures/etc... in the math world alone that will sit idle for centuries. Turing 'n von Neumann had all their P/NP conjectures. And gawk knows what kind of weirdness is stirring in the minds of the QM peoples.
Personally, I feel fortunate to be in a time when the problems being solved are easily explained in laymans terms (e.g. carpenter's ruler). Even though I could never solve it, it's fun to grasp the complexity and then skip ahead to the solution.
Now if they could only solve the map-folding problem... oh wait, maps are becoming extinct...
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.
One of the big challenges in making rotational devices is: how to supply power to the rotating portion without tangling up the wires after one rotation.
I've always tried to build a system of brushes on the back of disks, but it looks like this project solves it via the motor, yes? Does the motor actually have wires that come out of the spinning part (armature)?
What other ways have people found to solve this problem w/o a special motor? IMHO it sounds like the kind of problem that engineers resolved 50 years ago...
Thx,
S
---
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.