There aren't any 512-way Opteron systems in production yet, I'd expect a wait. I'm not even sure if any 8-way AMDs are commercially available. In case you haven't looked, Opteron 8xx CPUs are bloody expensive too. I don't think Itanium systems can be properly compared against Opteron 1xx and 2xx chips when discussing massive single-system-image computers.
Also, clusters != super computer. This has been discussed many times.
Not only that, they should have compared the EM64T Pentium against a similarly rated Athlon64, or compared the EM64T against a similarly rated Opteron. Comparing Xeon against Athlon64 is comparing products for two different markets - corporate vs. consumer, server/workstation vs. desktop.
Both cards render, share the output with each other, then both cards apply antialiasing based on the result, then output their respective lines. Maybe only one card need to output rather than having goofy cables.
There are already something like SIX memory card formats, and these guys want to start ANOTHER one!?
No thanks! I like to have an absolute minimum of formats. Smart Media is legacy. Sony's and Fuji's are kind of proprietary and uneccessary IMO. The only two relevant formats are CF and SD, in my opinion.
I stick with CF just so I have all my devices accept all my CF devices. Sure, it is the biggest, but it is also the most flexible, most affordable, and I really don't think the size is too bad. I'd accept SD for maybe watches and phones, but nothing larger.
If you said "transmuting lead into gold? That sounds kind of retarded!" The alchemist would say "oh you silly little man you don't have the same mathematical talents I do, now just go away!"
In a way, I wonder if it is possible, just not in the way they thought. I would have thought that somebody would have tried it. The only problem is that it is probably not worth doing from a financial perspective.
My thoughts are about smashing protons and neutrons into one material and it would eventually become other materials by virtue of having been force-fed nucleic particles. The problem is that if this works, you convert one object of one element into an object of a whole bunch of elements, some of them being radioactive or unsafe for other reasons, and melting the object down to get the objective element. Maybe I just don't know my physics to know if this can be done with the lower metals.
An article that simply accepts the manufacturer's ratings without testing them is worthless, IMO. I think they claimed that this thing was rated for 500 continuous watts, whereas saying others are rated only for bursts. Kind of like Car & Driver simply printing the manufacturer's performance claims when they have a chance to test it.
I think it is a good idea to do the math in terms of what your system draws, and then add a little safety margin. Sometimes I have problems finding those spec ratings though, not every device declares the power draw, fewer declare what they draw on different rails.
You do make an excellent point about inflated power ratings though. The last time I saw a true torture test (this wasn't one), there were a few PSU makers that flunked out with units that smoked out at 400-something on a 500-plus rated PSU.
At the moment, Apple isn't the ideal system to play games with anyway, for the simple fact that currently, much fewer games make it to the Apple platform.
And, yes, a good RAID controller is expensive and often not available for a PC chassis & mobo.
RAID controllers can fit. Even PCI-64 bit RAID cards will run in 32 bit slots, just hamstrung by the slower bus. The only problem is that the cheap-ass consumer motherboards don't have 64 bit PCI slots.
I could have sworn I had a non-empty drive when I put a "data" directory on my C drive, that data directory being a completely different drive altogether.
But now you scare me. I should check for myself.
I think Windows can do software RAID-5 but like Linux, I think they both have problems with dual processing.
That is true in a way, but that is true for everything. The difference is that hard drives generally fail the soonest of all computer components. They generally can last five years on average, but most other components last considerably longer.
I hardly consider Google a "one trick pony" given that they are hardly just a search engine.
As for branded graphics ads, every computer I touch gets a copy of Firefox, adblock (with my own block recipe), pop-up blocking and flashblock. Text ads still come through, which is fine with me, since they aren't annoying, gawdy or out of place.
Do you have a spare drive laying around? If you don't, then what do you have to restore to while waiting for that spare drive to come in the mail? With RAID-5, you already have that spare in the array, and you can keep the system going while waiting for a replacement drive.
Besides, computers should only be booted once per day. Once Photoshop is loaded, it is cached in memory for the rest of that day. So you save, what, ten seconds per day, while risking some day that you will have to wait for a restore to finish? That might be a net waste of time in the long run.
People that spend $1000 to get another 8fps are stupid. Bad example.
I think one can get a 500W power supply with just one 12cm fan on the intake. Two 8cm fans just don't cut it, IMO, that's more and higher pitched motor whine to deal with.
Modular cabling is nice, but it can also be another point of failure. The substandard molex-knockoffs on most power supplies leave much to be desired.
They say aesthetics is important, but that's like saying a car's engine must look nice when going down the road. Chroming a power supply case is pointless unless you want one of those weirdo cases that let you see every ugly detail of everything that is inside the computer. A chromed power supply won't make the circuitboards look any prettier.
For a while now, gamer's PCs have been looking like the SUVs of the computing world. They don't necessarily need the power they have under the hood, they are incredibly energy inefficient and they are almost always gawdy looking.
The gaming "laptops" are almost as bad too, running 3.2GHz PIVs when they can't run for an hour on batteries.
Someone has to demonstrate security flaws. I don't like the black hacker mentality, but sometimes people have to prove it directly.
You can be sure that the government won't. They like having backdoors anyway, although they generally aren't smart enough to close their own backdoors.
I think it is stupid to make a yagi look like a sniper rifle-raygun anyway, the beam width is usually way too wide anyway. I'd like to see the range those things get with a parabolic. You won't be able to do the sniper look though, which is fine.
I call that a case of setting your brightness, contrast and gamma based on your lighting conditions. This is why some people suggest calibrating a display for the environment it is used in. No display is calibrated from the factory anyway, besides, if they don't know the light conditions, they can't tweak it to optimal without your direct input to the device.
Remember kids, you are better off bringing a gun to school than a copied music CD, even if you own the original and never intended to loan or give away the CD.
Japan allows much lighter cars than the US, some are somewhere between a Yugo and a scooter. Yet they have 60% of the car crash death rate per 10,000 cars as the US. Overall, Japan has much lighter cars too, because gas isn't cheap there.
Somehow, I'm not convinced that heavy trucks are the solution to accident deaths. John Stossel did a Myth Busters or something that showed that a mid-sized car is about as safe as an SUV. I've found some stats showing that minivans are safer than SUVs. A lot of it has to do with the fact that SUVs get into accidents more often because they have worse braking, worse handling and roll over much more often. Rollovers are also the most deadly kind of accidents too.
The goofy SXGA LCDs is a reason why I didn't bother with 17" or 19" LCDs. Between 15" and 21", there was no proper 4:3 LCD screen. I don't want to see black bars on 4:3 material just because the screen is too tall, and I didn't want to risk a video player distorting the image because it doesn't know better!
I have not confirmed it but I've read reports that Intel did supposedly ask around if anyone was interested in an x86 chip that could do 64 bit addressing when developing the P6.
The Itanium series does have a few high-availability features nonexistent in Xeon or Opteron, and is a heavy-iron type chip. Unfortunately, the market for those are slim at best compared to the desktop and small server market. It doesn't help that there is something of a backlash against high-watt computers, for example, a lot of blade systems have stuck to PIIIs then replaced by Pentium Ms.
As the #1 volume desktop operating system doesn't support it yet, why?
IIRC, nobody cared about 32 bit until Windows 95 came around, and even that was a hack. I don't rememer intel hawking 32 bit for 386s so much.
For a company whose main business is to businesses and retail, who in turn primarily use an OS with no x86-64 compatible variant, it is pointless. Thus why this is being promoted to the workstation and server market.
AMD's rare Athlon 64 ads seem to pay lip service to this missing OS issue. Given that few switch because of said OS's insecurities, not a lot of people are willing to switch to a 64 bit OS for bit-ness sake.
Slashdot Mirror
There aren't any 512-way Opteron systems in production yet, I'd expect a wait. I'm not even sure if any 8-way AMDs are commercially available. In case you haven't looked, Opteron 8xx CPUs are bloody expensive too. I don't think Itanium systems can be properly compared against Opteron 1xx and 2xx chips when discussing massive single-system-image computers.
Also, clusters != super computer. This has been discussed many times.
Which is kind of funny when people claim that Anand favors AMDs. I guess it depends on which articles you read.
Not only that, they should have compared the EM64T Pentium against a similarly rated Athlon64, or compared the EM64T against a similarly rated Opteron. Comparing Xeon against Athlon64 is comparing products for two different markets - corporate vs. consumer, server/workstation vs. desktop.
I think AA is doable over PCIe.
Both cards render, share the output with each other, then both cards apply antialiasing based on the result, then output their respective lines. Maybe only one card need to output rather than having goofy cables.
There are already something like SIX memory card formats, and these guys want to start ANOTHER one!?
No thanks! I like to have an absolute minimum of formats. Smart Media is legacy. Sony's and Fuji's are kind of proprietary and uneccessary IMO. The only two relevant formats are CF and SD, in my opinion.
I stick with CF just so I have all my devices accept all my CF devices. Sure, it is the biggest, but it is also the most flexible, most affordable, and I really don't think the size is too bad. I'd accept SD for maybe watches and phones, but nothing larger.
If you said "transmuting lead into gold? That sounds kind of retarded!" The alchemist would say "oh you silly little man you don't have the same mathematical talents I do, now just go away!"
In a way, I wonder if it is possible, just not in the way they thought. I would have thought that somebody would have tried it. The only problem is that it is probably not worth doing from a financial perspective.
My thoughts are about smashing protons and neutrons into one material and it would eventually become other materials by virtue of having been force-fed nucleic particles. The problem is that if this works, you convert one object of one element into an object of a whole bunch of elements, some of them being radioactive or unsafe for other reasons, and melting the object down to get the objective element. Maybe I just don't know my physics to know if this can be done with the lower metals.
An article that simply accepts the manufacturer's ratings without testing them is worthless, IMO. I think they claimed that this thing was rated for 500 continuous watts, whereas saying others are rated only for bursts. Kind of like Car & Driver simply printing the manufacturer's performance claims when they have a chance to test it.
I think it is a good idea to do the math in terms of what your system draws, and then add a little safety margin. Sometimes I have problems finding those spec ratings though, not every device declares the power draw, fewer declare what they draw on different rails.
You do make an excellent point about inflated power ratings though. The last time I saw a true torture test (this wasn't one), there were a few PSU makers that flunked out with units that smoked out at 400-something on a 500-plus rated PSU.
At the moment, Apple isn't the ideal system to play games with anyway, for the simple fact that currently, much fewer games make it to the Apple platform.
And, yes, a good RAID controller is expensive and often not available for a PC chassis & mobo.
RAID controllers can fit. Even PCI-64 bit RAID cards will run in 32 bit slots, just hamstrung by the slower bus. The only problem is that the cheap-ass consumer motherboards don't have 64 bit PCI slots.
If you mean mounting a partition as a directory, sorry, Windows had had the same since Windows NT 4, maybe earlier.
Windows also had software RAID in NT, RAID-5, even, and they carry forward with the rest of the NT line, 2000, XP & 2003.
I could have sworn I had a non-empty drive when I put a "data" directory on my C drive, that data directory being a completely different drive altogether.
But now you scare me. I should check for myself.
I think Windows can do software RAID-5 but like Linux, I think they both have problems with dual processing.
That is true in a way, but that is true for everything. The difference is that hard drives generally fail the soonest of all computer components. They generally can last five years on average, but most other components last considerably longer.
I hardly consider Google a "one trick pony" given that they are hardly just a search engine.
As for branded graphics ads, every computer I touch gets a copy of Firefox, adblock (with my own block recipe), pop-up blocking and flashblock. Text ads still come through, which is fine with me, since they aren't annoying, gawdy or out of place.
Exactly what do you back up to?
Do you have a spare drive laying around? If you don't, then what do you have to restore to while waiting for that spare drive to come in the mail? With RAID-5, you already have that spare in the array, and you can keep the system going while waiting for a replacement drive.
Besides, computers should only be booted once per day. Once Photoshop is loaded, it is cached in memory for the rest of that day. So you save, what, ten seconds per day, while risking some day that you will have to wait for a restore to finish? That might be a net waste of time in the long run.
People that spend $1000 to get another 8fps are stupid. Bad example.
I think one can get a 500W power supply with just one 12cm fan on the intake. Two 8cm fans just don't cut it, IMO, that's more and higher pitched motor whine to deal with.
Modular cabling is nice, but it can also be another point of failure. The substandard molex-knockoffs on most power supplies leave much to be desired.
They say aesthetics is important, but that's like saying a car's engine must look nice when going down the road. Chroming a power supply case is pointless unless you want one of those weirdo cases that let you see every ugly detail of everything that is inside the computer. A chromed power supply won't make the circuitboards look any prettier.
For a while now, gamer's PCs have been looking like the SUVs of the computing world. They don't necessarily need the power they have under the hood, they are incredibly energy inefficient and they are almost always gawdy looking.
The gaming "laptops" are almost as bad too, running 3.2GHz PIVs when they can't run for an hour on batteries.
Someone has to demonstrate security flaws. I don't like the black hacker mentality, but sometimes people have to prove it directly.
You can be sure that the government won't. They like having backdoors anyway, although they generally aren't smart enough to close their own backdoors.
I think it is stupid to make a yagi look like a sniper rifle-raygun anyway, the beam width is usually way too wide anyway. I'd like to see the range those things get with a parabolic. You won't be able to do the sniper look though, which is fine.
I call that a case of setting your brightness, contrast and gamma based on your lighting conditions. This is why some people suggest calibrating a display for the environment it is used in. No display is calibrated from the factory anyway, besides, if they don't know the light conditions, they can't tweak it to optimal without your direct input to the device.
Remember kids, you are better off bringing a gun to school than a copied music CD, even if you own the original and never intended to loan or give away the CD.
Japan allows much lighter cars than the US, some are somewhere between a Yugo and a scooter. Yet they have 60% of the car crash death rate per 10,000 cars as the US. Overall, Japan has much lighter cars too, because gas isn't cheap there.
Somehow, I'm not convinced that heavy trucks are the solution to accident deaths. John Stossel did a Myth Busters or something that showed that a mid-sized car is about as safe as an SUV. I've found some stats showing that minivans are safer than SUVs. A lot of it has to do with the fact that SUVs get into accidents more often because they have worse braking, worse handling and roll over much more often. Rollovers are also the most deadly kind of accidents too.
Regional Crash Analyses
The goofy SXGA LCDs is a reason why I didn't bother with 17" or 19" LCDs. Between 15" and 21", there was no proper 4:3 LCD screen. I don't want to see black bars on 4:3 material just because the screen is too tall, and I didn't want to risk a video player distorting the image because it doesn't know better!
I have not confirmed it but I've read reports that Intel did supposedly ask around if anyone was interested in an x86 chip that could do 64 bit addressing when developing the P6.
The Itanium series does have a few high-availability features nonexistent in Xeon or Opteron, and is a heavy-iron type chip. Unfortunately, the market for those are slim at best compared to the desktop and small server market. It doesn't help that there is something of a backlash against high-watt computers, for example, a lot of blade systems have stuck to PIIIs then replaced by Pentium Ms.
As the #1 volume desktop operating system doesn't support it yet, why?
IIRC, nobody cared about 32 bit until Windows 95 came around, and even that was a hack. I don't rememer intel hawking 32 bit for 386s so much.
For a company whose main business is to businesses and retail, who in turn primarily use an OS with no x86-64 compatible variant, it is pointless. Thus why this is being promoted to the workstation and server market.
AMD's rare Athlon 64 ads seem to pay lip service to this missing OS issue. Given that few switch because of said OS's insecurities, not a lot of people are willing to switch to a 64 bit OS for bit-ness sake.
...had a post with a link to the Dell site which was selling the Pentium 4 and Xeons, both with available x86-64 compatibility and ready to order now.
Supposedly Intel released the chips in June too.