Although it's been said before, it is truly the case with the K7 that compilers will have to be rewritten in order to take full advantage of the chip.
I'm not the most knowledgable on the way that the P2's x87 works, but I don't believe it's pipelined anywhere near to the level of the K7. Realize that pipelining does two things: it provides a massive speed boost to code that is properly optimized for the pipeline, and it provides a massive speed hit if the code completely violates the way the pipeline wants to work. Current compilers are not K7 pipeline-ready, and I doubt AMD has had a hell of a lot of time to spend writing compilers... they do have to make a chip, after all;).
Also, with these being unoptimized chipsets/processors, and the L2 cache not being anywhere near what the final L2 cache will be (it's probably far too expensive to experiment with 2MB full-speed on-die caches, especially for beta chips), I wouldn't be too worried about these chips. I may be jumping from Intel once AMD gets these beasts out and stable.
(1) clear laws (or court decisions) eliminating software patents and upholding emulation and reverse-engineering
This would be difficult to do (especially since IP laws can vary widely from country to country), but this would definitely be a very positive step forward. Perhaps not upholding emulation itself (commercial emulators of current system created by reverse engineering should not be protected, IMO), but protecting free emulators (developed for "educational" purposes), provided that they make their source freely available (the only reasonable "educational" purpose) should be a priority.
My personal favorite patented software algorithm is Sega's patent on the use of 3D cameras (i.e. any game or application making use of realtime 3D cameras. Basically this allows them to collect royalties for any game that uses a 3D camera (i.e. Final Fantasy VII, Quake, massive etc.). Thankfully, since Sega is an acceptable company, they haven't bothered to invoke this (just check out their support of emulation with the use of KGen98 in their recent "classics" release!). Even though Sega hasn't used this ridiculous patent, things like this should not be patentable in case certain other companies were to start invoking their rights.
1. Jedi's are so cool. There really aren't any cool Jedi's in 4,5 and 6. Yoda isn't exactly that tough and all he does is lift luke's space ship. Big fucking deal. Obi-wan gets his ass kicked really easily by Darth. He's 60+ years old, what do you expect. Epsiode 1 has great jedi and great fight scenes.
Well, duh! Notice that there are virtually *no* jedi in Episodes 4-6.
2. Why didn't the trade federation use storm troopers? It seems to me that droids would be much more difficult to maintain. Epsecially considering that they had thousands of them. And they never really killed anything. They just got their asses kicked. Remember the scene when obi wan is in the hanger and says "I'll take out the droids," and kills a dozen of them with no problem? You'd never see Luke or Han going after a dozen storm troopers. In fact, they ran like hell in Starwars when six or so came at them.
In short: once the empire exists Storm Troopers will exist.
Here's a little spoiler of episode 2 and 3, so if you want to avoid it, don't read any more!
You might have noticed the rather striking similarity between Padme and Amidala. That's because the "handmaiden" is a clone of Amidala (it is mentioned somewhere that clones look exactly the same, but there voice is slightly different - notice that the Queen's voice is shifted to be lower than Portman's actual voice). In Episode 2 we will see the Clone Wars that are mentioned quickly in A New Hope. Senator/Chancellor/(soon-to-be)Emperor Palpatine, after dissolving the senate realizes that droids are not an effective means of fighting a war, that he needs real people. But because there aren't enough people, he uses clones, which become the Storm Troopers that the Imperial Force uses. However, there is quite some speculation (and I imagine this could be true) that Darth Maul will return as a clone in Episode 2.
In Episode 3, what you will probably see is the slaughter of the Jedi (although this may start in 2) and Anakin's fall to the Dark Side. Boba Fett supposedly has a hand in the murder of the Jedi council, and his services were purchased by Emperor Palpatine (also "The Emperor" (Dark Lord of the Sith) in Episode 6). In a fight with Obi Wan, Anakin gets severely injured, and is forced to live his life in a biosuit as Darth Vader.
I play Q3Test on a P2-300 (not OCd) with an original TNT card (Graphics Blaster Riva TNT) and a Sound Blaster Live, and it's more than playable at 1024x768x32 under NT (I was extremely impressed, since Unreal is so poor). An TNT 2 Ultra with 2xCelery 450s should do considerably better than my "modest" configuration.
The emotion engine is actually quite a few "processors" thrown into one processor.
At the heart is a MIPS IV subset with full floating point, but (I believe) it handles 128 bits of data at a time.
In addition, there is an MPEG2 processing unit on the chip, two reprogrammable vector units (adding 14 parallel FP MACs and DIVs), and direct buses to both the graphics synthesizer and the I/O processor.
Everything can be used in parallel on the EE, so streaming DVD video for textures is entirely possible, as is the 6.4gflop figure.
Like mentioned before, the actual integer performance of the Emotion Engine (MIPS IV based) is equivalent to a Pentium II-300 (or 333), but it uses 128-bit integers (maybe 64... I forget exactly). It is the only *true* 128-bit console in existence (or on the horizon). The vector units (VU0 and VU1) are reprogrammable via microcode, so they can be used for considerably more than just vector processing. Total floating point performance would be equal to about a quad-Pentium III Xeon 500 (since SMP invariably penalizes each processor - actual FP is about 3.5x the speed of a P3-500).
it's 3.2gb/s system memory bandwidth. This isn't surprising (or impressive), given that all next-generation consoles (sans Dreamcast) and the next generation of PCs will all be using 800Mhz Direct Rambus DRAM, which, surprise! has a memory bandwidth of 3.2 gb/s.
The truly impressive thing is Sony's graphics memory bandwidth of 48gb/s.
A) The limitation for PCS is the PCI/AGP bus, CPU floating point, etc. A good average case for the PSX2 with all effects, etc will actually be closer to 20mil/sec, possibly 25. I have seen it in action and used it, and can testify to this. The Playstation 2's busses were all designed for peak performance, unlike the PC.
B) I've had my PSX for 2 years, and I still prefer gaming on it to gaming on a PC. Final Fantasy VIII, Tobal 2, Tekken 3, Gran Turismo 2, Omega Boost, etc. all still look extremely pretty compared to all PC games on the marketplace.
C) Consoles don't compete against 3D boards. When I want to play a FPS or RTS, I use my PC. However, when I want to play anything else, I use my consoles. Or, when I want to play multiplayer, I'd take a console anyday (far more fun to slug someone sitting next to you then to "T"alk over a network).
D) I have doubts about a $500 price point, as do virtually all of the online gaming sites. Expect $400 or less, probably closer to $300.
Sony and Toshiba's early comments was that the Emotion Engine will be a chip used in several multimedia pursuits. The PSY is just the first of them (and plans are to create add-ons at least in Japan to allow the PSY to double as a PC), but future uses could include routers or anything else that could benefit from a fast, fairly inexpensive processor.
I have used the Playstation 2 (no kidding), and I can tell you this : a celery 500 and Voodoo 3 doesn't even *approach* the PSX2. When they say 66 million triangles/second, they aren't lying - the PSX2's graphics are *amazing*, real-time bezier tesselation and modifications (used for such kick-ass effects as morphing) is incredible. Seeing as the Playstation 2 has over 3x the floating point performance of a Pentium III-500 (and the FP is well-optimized for vector and bezier calculations, unlike the P3), which is critical to 3D graphics performance, your combination won't even match.
However, the PSX2 has Firewire, PCMCIA, and USB connections. So, add a firewire hard disk, a USB keyboard and mouse, and a PCMCIA ethernet connection, and for under $1000 you have a machine with integer performance equal to a P2-300 and floating point performance equal to a quad Xeon-500. And the PSX2 has VESA, DTV, and NTSC output capability, to boot, so you wouldn't be limited to 60hz interlaced.
Yes, all my information came straight from Phil Harrison - I'm not pulling this out of my butt.
Ummm.. DVD is considerably better off 2 1/2 years into its life than VHS was after the same amount of time. DVD *is* catching on very quickly (10s, if not 100s of thousands of players sold monthly). However, for most people, one DVD player is "good enough." I had a DVD-ROM on my computer, and I thought it was quite awesome... then my parents got a low-end (Toshiba 2008) stand-alone, and I was blown away by the improvement in quality. I quickly got the Toshiba A110 to replace my PC's player, and the quality is outstanding. Forget 19-21" hi-res monitors, DVD looks much better on large TVs (DVD on a 32" Wega XBR is incredible).
The moral of all this is that if Sony adds DVD to the PS-Y, they will cannibalize their entry-level DVD player sales, which is currently the bulk of the market (there are far more A110s, 2109s, and 530s on the market than Theta DaViDs), and royally hurt profits. A future add-on might make sense; however, with DVD doing very well on its own, Sony would be foolish to make it a DVD player.
This may very well be true, but there is some very nice hardware available that Linux doesn't support right now, such as DVD players, the Sound Blaster Live, or 3D support in virtually any video card. If Linux had support for the Riva TNT, and all other nice hardware, how many more users would consider changing? I put myself in this catergory (as I own a TNT, an SB Live, and a DVD decoder)... if the support for my hardware (some very nice hardware) were in Linux, I wouldn't be typing this from Windows NT.
I don't think it's safe to say that games and other violent scenes make us more violent. They *do* increase adrenaline, which (in some) may have the unfortunate side-effect of causing more violent tendencies, *but*, if you weren't playing Quake or watching NYPD Blue, what would you be doing? Reading up on the bombings in Kosovo, hearing about the newest frivolous lawsuit, or playing football? In virtually everyone I know, the last three activities have a far, far larger impact on violent tendencies than playing a computer game (I've nearly started fuming while doing "safe" things like reading the newspaper or filing taxes).
People need to realize that we *are* a violent species by nature (for the religious out there, all you have to do is read the first 3 chapters of Genesis), and need outlets for our emotions - video games are the safest method of relieving stress and violent emotions - noone gets hurt (unless you have the tendency to bang your head against the wall), and there is a sense of reward as you pick off that annoying bastard's head in Unreal. Sure, there may be those with problems so bad initially that they may become socially violent after being electronically violent... but there are far more (like me) that would be far more socially violent if it weren't for electronic violence. Of course, those with the problems shouldn't be playing those games, anyway.
Not necessarily. DVD-Video can have PCM audio tracks, unencoded 24-bit, 96Khz (over 3x CD-quality). DVD-Audio will probably be based entirely on DVD's 24/96. However, on my equipment (Panasonic A110 connected with an Interlink Lightspeed 100 optical audio cable to an Onkyo TXDS656, connected to Atlantic Technology's Compact Theater 1 with Monster XP), the difference between a Linear stereo PCM sound track and a Dolby Digital 5.1 sound track is undistinguishable. What we really need is a Dolby Digital 2.0 based music format... Excellent sound quality *and* excellent compression.
Denying the importance of the U.S. government to the world would be like denying the importance of Linux to Open Source. The fact is, no matter who (or what) you are, the U.S. government *has* affected you to some degree... those living in the US or its territores feel its influence much more directly than those in China, Russia, or Germany, but I guarantee you that in some way, be it covert (financial aid to Mexico), overt (bombing of Yugoslavia), or whatever, the US government has affected you, and your beliefs. How much it will continue to affect you is of critical importance to you, especially with Congress' belief that it has the manifest destiny to govern the internet. I wasn't old enough to vote in the last election, but I have no fear of being one of the 5% of 19 year-olds that vote in 2000, because I'm not a fucking dolt - I realize the US government likes to stick it in me, and I'm screaming at them (for what my voice is worth) to take it out.
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Although it's been said before, it is truly the case with the K7 that compilers will have to be rewritten in order to take full advantage of the chip.
;).
I'm not the most knowledgable on the way that the P2's x87 works, but I don't believe it's pipelined anywhere near to the level of the K7. Realize that pipelining does two things: it provides a massive speed boost to code that is properly optimized for the pipeline, and it provides a massive speed hit if the code completely violates the way the pipeline wants to work. Current compilers are not K7 pipeline-ready, and I doubt AMD has had a hell of a lot of time to spend writing compilers... they do have to make a chip, after all
Also, with these being unoptimized chipsets/processors, and the L2 cache not being anywhere near what the final L2 cache will be (it's probably far too expensive to experiment with 2MB full-speed on-die caches, especially for beta chips), I wouldn't be too worried about these chips. I may be jumping from Intel once AMD gets these beasts out and stable.
(1) clear laws (or court decisions) eliminating software patents and upholding emulation and reverse-engineering
This would be difficult to do (especially since IP laws can vary widely from country to country), but this would definitely be a very positive step forward. Perhaps not upholding emulation itself (commercial emulators of current system created by reverse engineering should not be protected, IMO), but protecting free emulators (developed for "educational" purposes), provided that they make their source freely available (the only reasonable "educational" purpose) should be a priority.
My personal favorite patented software algorithm is Sega's patent on the use of 3D cameras (i.e. any game or application making use of realtime 3D cameras. Basically this allows them to collect royalties for any game that uses a 3D camera (i.e. Final Fantasy VII, Quake, massive etc.). Thankfully, since Sega is an acceptable company, they haven't bothered to invoke this (just check out their support of emulation with the use of KGen98 in their recent "classics" release!). Even though Sega hasn't used this ridiculous patent, things like this should not be patentable in case certain other companies were to start invoking their rights.
1. Jedi's are so cool. There really aren't any cool Jedi's in 4,5 and 6. Yoda isn't exactly that tough and all he does is lift luke's space ship. Big fucking deal. Obi-wan gets his ass kicked really easily by Darth. He's 60+ years old, what do you expect. Epsiode 1 has great jedi and great fight scenes.
Well, duh! Notice that there are virtually *no* jedi in Episodes 4-6.
2. Why didn't the trade federation use storm troopers? It seems to me that droids would be much more difficult to maintain. Epsecially considering that they had thousands of them. And they never really killed anything. They just got their asses kicked. Remember the scene when obi wan is in the hanger and says "I'll take out the droids," and kills a dozen of them with no problem? You'd never see Luke or Han going after a dozen storm troopers. In fact, they ran like hell in Starwars when six or so came at them.
In short: once the empire exists Storm Troopers will exist.
Here's a little spoiler of episode 2 and 3, so if you want to avoid it, don't read any more!
You might have noticed the rather striking similarity between Padme and Amidala. That's because the "handmaiden" is a clone of Amidala (it is mentioned somewhere that clones look exactly the same, but there voice is slightly different - notice that the Queen's voice is shifted to be lower than Portman's actual voice). In Episode 2 we will see the Clone Wars that are mentioned quickly in A New Hope. Senator/Chancellor/(soon-to-be)Emperor Palpatine, after dissolving the senate realizes that droids are not an effective means of fighting a war, that he needs real people. But because there aren't enough people, he uses clones, which become the Storm Troopers that the Imperial Force uses. However, there is quite some speculation (and I imagine this could be true) that Darth Maul will return as a clone in Episode 2.
In Episode 3, what you will probably see is the slaughter of the Jedi (although this may start in 2) and Anakin's fall to the Dark Side. Boba Fett supposedly has a hand in the murder of the Jedi council, and his services were purchased by Emperor Palpatine (also "The Emperor" (Dark Lord of the Sith) in Episode 6). In a fight with Obi Wan, Anakin gets severely injured, and is forced to live his life in a biosuit as Darth Vader.
I play Q3Test on a P2-300 (not OCd) with an original TNT card (Graphics Blaster Riva TNT) and a Sound Blaster Live, and it's more than playable at 1024x768x32 under NT (I was extremely impressed, since Unreal is so poor). An TNT 2 Ultra with 2xCelery 450s should do considerably better than my "modest" configuration.
The emotion engine is actually quite a few "processors" thrown into one processor.
At the heart is a MIPS IV subset with full floating point, but (I believe) it handles 128 bits of data at a time.
In addition, there is an MPEG2 processing unit on the chip, two reprogrammable vector units (adding 14 parallel FP MACs and DIVs), and direct buses to both the graphics synthesizer and the I/O processor.
Everything can be used in parallel on the EE, so streaming DVD video for textures is entirely possible, as is the 6.4gflop figure.
Like mentioned before, the actual integer performance of the Emotion Engine (MIPS IV based) is equivalent to a Pentium II-300 (or 333), but it uses 128-bit integers (maybe 64... I forget exactly). It is the only *true* 128-bit console in existence (or on the horizon). The vector units (VU0 and VU1) are reprogrammable via microcode, so they can be used for considerably more than just vector processing. Total floating point performance would be equal to about a quad-Pentium III Xeon 500 (since SMP invariably penalizes each processor - actual FP is about 3.5x the speed of a P3-500).
it's 3.2gb/s system memory bandwidth. This isn't surprising (or impressive), given that all next-generation consoles (sans Dreamcast) and the next generation of PCs will all be using 800Mhz Direct Rambus DRAM, which, surprise! has a memory bandwidth of 3.2 gb/s.
The truly impressive thing is Sony's graphics memory bandwidth of 48gb/s.
A) The limitation for PCS is the PCI/AGP bus, CPU floating point, etc. A good average case for the PSX2 with all effects, etc will actually be closer to 20mil/sec, possibly 25. I have seen it in action and used it, and can testify to this. The Playstation 2's busses were all designed for peak performance, unlike the PC.
B) I've had my PSX for 2 years, and I still prefer gaming on it to gaming on a PC. Final Fantasy VIII, Tobal 2, Tekken 3, Gran Turismo 2, Omega Boost, etc. all still look extremely pretty compared to all PC games on the marketplace.
C) Consoles don't compete against 3D boards. When I want to play a FPS or RTS, I use my PC. However, when I want to play anything else, I use my consoles. Or, when I want to play multiplayer, I'd take a console anyday (far more fun to slug someone sitting next to you then to "T"alk over a network).
D) I have doubts about a $500 price point, as do virtually all of the online gaming sites. Expect $400 or less, probably closer to $300.
Sony and Toshiba's early comments was that the Emotion Engine will be a chip used in several multimedia pursuits. The PSY is just the first of them (and plans are to create add-ons at least in Japan to allow the PSY to double as a PC), but future uses could include routers or anything else that could benefit from a fast, fairly inexpensive processor.
I have used the Playstation 2 (no kidding), and I can tell you this : a celery 500 and Voodoo 3 doesn't even *approach* the PSX2. When they say 66 million triangles/second, they aren't lying - the PSX2's graphics are *amazing*, real-time bezier tesselation and modifications (used for such kick-ass effects as morphing) is incredible. Seeing as the Playstation 2 has over 3x the floating point performance of a Pentium III-500 (and the FP is well-optimized for vector and bezier calculations, unlike the P3), which is critical to 3D graphics performance, your combination won't even match.
However, the PSX2 has Firewire, PCMCIA, and USB connections. So, add a firewire hard disk, a USB keyboard and mouse, and a PCMCIA ethernet connection, and for under $1000 you have a machine with integer performance equal to a P2-300 and floating point performance equal to a quad Xeon-500. And the PSX2 has VESA, DTV, and NTSC output capability, to boot, so you wouldn't be limited to 60hz interlaced.
Yes, all my information came straight from Phil Harrison - I'm not pulling this out of my butt.
Ummm.. DVD is considerably better off 2 1/2 years into its life than VHS was after the same amount of time. DVD *is* catching on very quickly (10s, if not 100s of thousands of players sold monthly). However, for most people, one DVD player is "good enough." I had a DVD-ROM on my computer, and I thought it was quite awesome... then my parents got a low-end (Toshiba 2008) stand-alone, and I was blown away by the improvement in quality. I quickly got the Toshiba A110 to replace my PC's player, and the quality is outstanding. Forget 19-21" hi-res monitors, DVD looks much better on large TVs (DVD on a 32" Wega XBR is incredible).
The moral of all this is that if Sony adds DVD to the PS-Y, they will cannibalize their entry-level DVD player sales, which is currently the bulk of the market (there are far more A110s, 2109s, and 530s on the market than Theta DaViDs), and royally hurt profits. A future add-on might make sense; however, with DVD doing very well on its own, Sony would be foolish to make it a DVD player.
This may very well be true, but there is some very nice hardware available that Linux doesn't support right now, such as DVD players, the Sound Blaster Live, or 3D support in virtually any video card. If Linux had support for the Riva TNT, and all other nice hardware, how many more users would consider changing? I put myself in this catergory (as I own a TNT, an SB Live, and a DVD decoder)... if the support for my hardware (some very nice hardware) were in Linux, I wouldn't be typing this from Windows NT.
I don't think it's safe to say that games and other violent scenes make us more violent. They *do* increase adrenaline, which (in some) may have the unfortunate side-effect of causing more violent tendencies, *but*, if you weren't playing Quake or watching NYPD Blue, what would you be doing? Reading up on the bombings in Kosovo, hearing about the newest frivolous lawsuit, or playing football? In virtually everyone I know, the last three activities have a far, far larger impact on violent tendencies than playing a computer game (I've nearly started fuming while doing "safe" things like reading the newspaper or filing taxes).
People need to realize that we *are* a violent species by nature (for the religious out there, all you have to do is read the first 3 chapters of Genesis), and need outlets for our emotions - video games are the safest method of relieving stress and violent emotions - noone gets hurt (unless you have the tendency to bang your head against the wall), and there is a sense of reward as you pick off that annoying bastard's head in Unreal. Sure, there may be those with problems so bad initially that they may become socially violent after being electronically violent... but there are far more (like me) that would be far more socially violent if it weren't for electronic violence. Of course, those with the problems shouldn't be playing those games, anyway.
Not necessarily. DVD-Video can have PCM audio tracks, unencoded 24-bit, 96Khz (over 3x CD-quality). DVD-Audio will probably be based entirely on DVD's 24/96. However, on my equipment (Panasonic A110 connected with an Interlink Lightspeed 100 optical audio cable to an Onkyo TXDS656, connected to Atlantic Technology's Compact Theater 1 with Monster XP), the difference between a Linear stereo PCM sound track and a Dolby Digital 5.1 sound track is undistinguishable. What we really need is a Dolby Digital 2.0 based music format... Excellent sound quality *and* excellent compression.
Denying the importance of the U.S. government to the world would be like denying the importance of Linux to Open Source. The fact is, no matter who (or what) you are, the U.S. government *has* affected you to some degree... those living in the US or its territores feel its influence much more directly than those in China, Russia, or Germany, but I guarantee you that in some way, be it covert (financial aid to Mexico), overt (bombing of Yugoslavia), or whatever, the US government has affected you, and your beliefs. How much it will continue to affect you is of critical importance to you, especially with Congress' belief that it has the manifest destiny to govern the internet. I wasn't old enough to vote in the last election, but I have no fear of being one of the 5% of 19 year-olds that vote in 2000, because I'm not a fucking dolt - I realize the US government likes to stick it in me, and I'm screaming at them (for what my voice is worth) to take it out.