>>The lower power consumption which improves battery life is persuasive for regular travelers, but for the average user there seems no need to make the change.
Better power consumption greatly benefits *everyone* who owns a laptop or any portable/embedded device. I'm not even a regular traveler, but I much prefer long battery life over short battery life even at the expense of speed. I've already decided that my next laptop must last at least 24 consecutive hours in the on state (With power management and all during idle time) without being plugged in. I simply don't want to carry a power brick or an extra battery with me.
This was the state of the cell phone industry back in the analog days. Even now, a popular modern phone such as the Samsung A650 only has about 1.5 hours of continuous analog talk time and 14 hours analog standby time versus 2.8 hours of continuous digital talk time and 7 days digital standby time. If the digital talk and standby times on that phone were as bad as the analog talk and standby times, Samsung would be out of the cell phone business. Even though cell phone chargers are small and lightweight, nobody wants to have to remember to carry one around. Why is this seen any differently for power bricks in laptops?
About a decade ago I think this was what people were thinking about 3D accelerators for the home PC. However, it didn't take long for people to realize that a slow CPU with a Voodoo or TNT card in it could smoke a much faster CPU that did not have the help of the 3D accelerator; A 300Mhz Celeron machine with a TNT would outperform a 500MHz Pentium 2 machine with a Tseng Labs ET4000 in pretty much any 3D app, especially games.
The GPU didn't even have to be that fast, either. As another poster already mentioned, ASICs tend to be a couple orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than general purpose processors for those tasks. The sort of calculations used in graphics and physics, typically involving large matrices, lend themselves very well to vectoring processors, eg the GeForce and Radeon chips. Heck, it was only recently that scaler architectures overtook vectoring architectures in supercomputing--that is thanks to the relatively low cost of using thousands of 'cheap' x86 blades in a cluster configuration.
Technology has an interesting way of trickling down. The ultimate gaming rig from three years ago is the standard desktop configuration now. The demand for better technology is perpetual.
I would consider a platform whose main attraction is easy integration with a store full of DRM'd crap (iTunes) to be inferior, if anything...
No offense to iPod owners, I think those little devices are actually pretty damn cool, if you're not using it for iTunes. However, there are much more versatile players out there. A co-worker showed me a DiamondMM Rio Karma player that played MP3s, Oggs, is easy to use in Linux, and was what I consider to be superior to the iPod at the time except perhaps for the interface. The iPod stole a lot of thunder from the Rio with little more than hip adverts and trendy style.
In any case, if I had the disposable income I would certainly opt for a player from a company that's not trying to shove DRM down my throat.
And according to this article (Consider the source carefully), nVidia, ATI, VIA, and SIS are pretty close, just barely past the double digits in percentage. Intel still sells more mainboard chipsets than all others combined. This is for Intel chipsets, and it's because of Intel's own shortcomings that the four main competitors have experienced any growth. I have no doubt that nVidia is strong in AMD chipset sales. However, the number of AMD systems out there, while growing, is still puny compared to Intel systems.
So again, I fail to see how nVidia is even close to becoming a monopoly.
And in response to your comment, I agree--ATI's southbridge sucks. In fact, I'm not too fond of any current ATI product on the market now.
Probably the most important reason of all is Opera for embedded devices. Google can screw with Ballmer's head quite fine simply by contributing to Firefox and other open source projects, and I don't think they care much about going into direct competition with MS a la Netscape.
So what's left? How about dominance in the ever-growing market of mobile and handheld devices? Integrate Opera's most excellent browsing innovations with a pinch of Google's search and advertising capabilities and you've got a serious net browsing appliance.
Doesn't Ford have a similar situation with Cummins, the makers of the diesel engines that go in Dodge trucks?
Heck, if nVidia can control and make a profit off many of the ATi products sold, then how can they lose by continuing to product ATi chips? If ATi switches manufacturers, then that will just be a large profile client nVidia has lost and one of ULi's competitors will be getting the money instead.
How on Earth did you reach this conclusion? They're still in fierce competition with ATi on the performance front and Intel in the embedded front. According to The Register, nVidia had the smallest market share of those three contenders in Q305 with Intel up by about 15% in graphics alone. And speaking of Intel, if virtually nothing has been done to them what makes you think that nVidia will catch anyone's attention?
Thanks for pointing that out. I checked out what Gentoo has to offer (Since that's my distro of choice) and they have an ebuild available for r350, r300, r250 and r200 chipsets; I had it backwards. However, they do not appear to support x800 and x18xx products. If you go the ATi route you are still behind by at least a generation.
For reference as far as performance goes, compare this ATi x300 benchmark to this nVidia GeForce 6600GT benchmark. Unfortunately I could not find a GeForce 6200TC comparison as that chip is much closer to the x300 in price. The ATi card is about $40 cheaper than the 6600GT on Pricewatch now, but the performance difference is in the range of 2x-5x in favor of the 6600GT across the board. In Enemy Territory, the 6600GT gets over a hundred FPS at 1280x1024 high quality (HQ) while the x300 gets a dismal 20 at the same settings. In Doom 3, the 6600GT manages to get 50 FPS at 1280x1024 in HQ while the x300 gets less than 10 at 640x480 in HQ. The 6600GT gets 53FPS in the Quake 4 1280x1024 low quality benchmark, while the x300 gets 21 in low quality. Unfortunately Phoronix didn't include a UT2004 benchmark for the 6600GT, but I think we can guess who wins there.
If performance isn't important, then you may as well get a Matrox G400 or something. Hell, XGI might even be a good choice since they might even go the open source route with drivers.
Considering how video cards have recently overtaken CPUs in complexity, I don't think they're charging too terribly much. Not only do you get more transistors in a modern GPU than a Pentium 4, but also 256-512MB of GDDR3 RAM. Granted, this sort of power isn't necessary for a lot of people. That's why both nVidia and ATi offer cheaper versions of their flagship cards with similar capabilities, only slower. For example, the GeForce 6200 and the Radeon x300 are both decent gfx cards that are available for around $50.
I wonder if ATi and nVidia even comes close in terms of profit margins on GPUs as Intel does on CPUs...
nVidia's driver may be closed source at the core, but they've done a commendable job in making their driver work on a wide variety of machines including Itanium, Solaris, FreeBSD, and 64-bit Linux. A couple years ago they changed the licensing terms of their driver package so that distros like SuSE, Gentoo, Debian, etc. could make their own packages and distribute them, package them with installers, etc. On top of that, the Linux performance is on par with the Windows drivers, they fully support *all* GeForce chips (Not just workstation, desktop, or mobile), and they even do SLI in Linux now.
Even to this day, I don't think ATi's gotten even close. Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK you still have to download the driver from ATi and *pray* that their installer works for your distro. ATi's support only goes up to their 8500 line (Like 2 years old), and even then performance is signifficantly lower than what you get in Windows. If you want performance, you're screwed since your $150 Radeon will perform like a $50 GeForce. I don't even want to get into trying to get 3D acceleration on a Radeon 7200 working...
Does anyone know if there's a way to completely disable anything with "Anime," "Manga," or "Hentai" in the title on the frontpage? These are getting really, really annoying...
>>You people need to figure out exactly what you want, Linux for the masses (read: grandma, mom, etc) or an O/S where you have to spend valuable time just getting it to work with regular hardware.
How about an OS where you have a choice? If you like binary drivers which may cause incompatibilities, instability, etc. then by all means, load 'em up! Otherwise, opt out of it and don't use them. Simple, huh? That's the great thing about using GNU/Linux--Relatively few things are crammed down the user's throat. Purists--Just don't use the damn drivers if you don't like them. Everyone else--Enjoy vendor support, but don't cry to the Linux developers when nVidia or ATi or Linksys or someone breaks your distro with a dud driver. Deal?
You have a good point, and the requirements of a open source kernels and operating systems are as diverse as the people using them. Just to paint a picture: People running a distro like Linspire, Ubuntu, etc. who might be new to Linux probably just want their computers to work as well as they do in Windows XP (Wireless, 3D acceleration, etc). People who run enterprise Linux probably want their shiny expensive SCSI RAID card and super deluxe network card to work so they can serve more customers. Do-it-yourselfers can go either way, but I think most would at least prefer (if not insist) upon an open source driver. And so on and so on.
Here's a bootstrapper that's written in over 99% C, boots Linux off several commercial mainboards, and isn't limited to just x86.
I guess TFA is a good technical resource, but it's also a good reminder as to why big wads of assembly suck.
Re:Don't forget to register your Linux version!
on
Quake 4 Linux
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I forget whether this was UT2004 or Quake 3, but one of the devs was saying in an interview that the best wya to show your support for Linux ports is to simply play the game on-line. This is because the master servers keep statistical information, including client version (Which has OS info in it). So the more Linux gamers show up to play on-line, the more the developers know we play their games too.
I don't think this is the case. Intel is a behemoth with enough money to fund hundreds of major projects concurrently. They can throw hundreds of man years on a project on a whim. This is not a resource limited start-up we're talking about.
Now for the tin foil hat part: Their x86 products fell behind not because of lack of R&D funding, but because some idiot(s) up in management decided that they'd rather have everyone migrate to IA64 by buying a new PC rather than migrating to a backwards-compatible EM64T architecture.
Too bad they're moving to EFI which takes about 3 minutes to boot on current Itanium implementations as is. With the path they're taking, this really won't help.
The differences between workstation and desktop graphics cards have virtually diminished. For the past several years, Quadros have used the same GPUs as the desktop GeForce line and and FireGLs have used the same RXXX chips the desktop Radeon line. They're the same architecture, and usually the driver set for one is indicative of the driver set for the other. Heck, for a long time Radeon users who wanted 3D acceleration in Linux actually would actually go to ATi's site and download the FireGL driver. Why ATi doesn't seem to want to just offer a Linux driver for Radeons tweaked for desktop application performance like nVidia's been doing for about four and a half years now is really kind of baffling.
IMHO, it's always a good thing when artists decide to cut out the middle man and let the music sell itself over the web. However, as many have already noted, this is hardly unique to Harvy Danger. I suggest checking out http://bt.etree.org/ for a lot more great trade-friendly artists. They have a good variety with bands such as the Black Crowes, the Grateful Dead, Dave Matthews Band, Phish, and Gwar.
Again, this is a good thing that Harvy Danger is doing. It just makes me wonder why it took them so long (Maybe they had to wait for a contract to expire or something), other than the fact that they haven't had a hit in years and are probably desparate.
The sentence you quoted is an example of something that should never have made it on to the front page, even on Slashdot. I really wish the editors would keep such biased remarks in a blog or some place more appropriate.
I really do want to try this new distro out. If the graphical installer is compulsory, then yes, it will be very annoying. That's not how Gentoo has done things in the past, and I can't see a reason why they would do away with manual installs now. It's probably a simple option you can disable at the command prompt when you boot the same way you disable things like APM or DHCP discovery (noapm, nodhcp, etc).
The LinuxBIOS dude! What better nominee than someone who has helped so much in bringing free software to a traditionally proprietary area of the computer?
Slashdot Mirror
>>The lower power consumption which improves battery life is persuasive for regular travelers, but for the average user there seems no need to make the change.
Better power consumption greatly benefits *everyone* who owns a laptop or any portable/embedded device. I'm not even a regular traveler, but I much prefer long battery life over short battery life even at the expense of speed. I've already decided that my next laptop must last at least 24 consecutive hours in the on state (With power management and all during idle time) without being plugged in. I simply don't want to carry a power brick or an extra battery with me.
This was the state of the cell phone industry back in the analog days. Even now, a popular modern phone such as the Samsung A650 only has about 1.5 hours of continuous analog talk time and 14 hours analog standby time versus 2.8 hours of continuous digital talk time and 7 days digital standby time. If the digital talk and standby times on that phone were as bad as the analog talk and standby times, Samsung would be out of the cell phone business. Even though cell phone chargers are small and lightweight, nobody wants to have to remember to carry one around. Why is this seen any differently for power bricks in laptops?
About a decade ago I think this was what people were thinking about 3D accelerators for the home PC. However, it didn't take long for people to realize that a slow CPU with a Voodoo or TNT card in it could smoke a much faster CPU that did not have the help of the 3D accelerator; A 300Mhz Celeron machine with a TNT would outperform a 500MHz Pentium 2 machine with a Tseng Labs ET4000 in pretty much any 3D app, especially games.
The GPU didn't even have to be that fast, either. As another poster already mentioned, ASICs tend to be a couple orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than general purpose processors for those tasks. The sort of calculations used in graphics and physics, typically involving large matrices, lend themselves very well to vectoring processors, eg the GeForce and Radeon chips. Heck, it was only recently that scaler architectures overtook vectoring architectures in supercomputing--that is thanks to the relatively low cost of using thousands of 'cheap' x86 blades in a cluster configuration.
Technology has an interesting way of trickling down. The ultimate gaming rig from three years ago is the standard desktop configuration now. The demand for better technology is perpetual.
I would consider a platform whose main attraction is easy integration with a store full of DRM'd crap (iTunes) to be inferior, if anything...
No offense to iPod owners, I think those little devices are actually pretty damn cool, if you're not using it for iTunes. However, there are much more versatile players out there. A co-worker showed me a DiamondMM Rio Karma player that played MP3s, Oggs, is easy to use in Linux, and was what I consider to be superior to the iPod at the time except perhaps for the interface. The iPod stole a lot of thunder from the Rio with little more than hip adverts and trendy style.
In any case, if I had the disposable income I would certainly opt for a player from a company that's not trying to shove DRM down my throat.
And according to this article (Consider the source carefully), nVidia, ATI, VIA, and SIS are pretty close, just barely past the double digits in percentage. Intel still sells more mainboard chipsets than all others combined. This is for Intel chipsets, and it's because of Intel's own shortcomings that the four main competitors have experienced any growth. I have no doubt that nVidia is strong in AMD chipset sales. However, the number of AMD systems out there, while growing, is still puny compared to Intel systems.
So again, I fail to see how nVidia is even close to becoming a monopoly.
And in response to your comment, I agree--ATI's southbridge sucks. In fact, I'm not too fond of any current ATI product on the market now.
Probably the most important reason of all is Opera for embedded devices. Google can screw with Ballmer's head quite fine simply by contributing to Firefox and other open source projects, and I don't think they care much about going into direct competition with MS a la Netscape.
So what's left? How about dominance in the ever-growing market of mobile and handheld devices? Integrate Opera's most excellent browsing innovations with a pinch of Google's search and advertising capabilities and you've got a serious net browsing appliance.
It's speculative. However, based on Opera's history of creating fast, fully-integrated browsers of very high quality, it's a logical conclusion.
Doesn't Ford have a similar situation with Cummins, the makers of the diesel engines that go in Dodge trucks?
Heck, if nVidia can control and make a profit off many of the ATi products sold, then how can they lose by continuing to product ATi chips? If ATi switches manufacturers, then that will just be a large profile client nVidia has lost and one of ULi's competitors will be getting the money instead.
How on Earth did you reach this conclusion? They're still in fierce competition with ATi on the performance front and Intel in the embedded front. According to The Register, nVidia had the smallest market share of those three contenders in Q305 with Intel up by about 15% in graphics alone. And speaking of Intel, if virtually nothing has been done to them what makes you think that nVidia will catch anyone's attention?
Thanks for pointing that out. I checked out what Gentoo has to offer (Since that's my distro of choice) and they have an ebuild available for r350, r300, r250 and r200 chipsets; I had it backwards. However, they do not appear to support x800 and x18xx products. If you go the ATi route you are still behind by at least a generation.
For reference as far as performance goes, compare this ATi x300 benchmark to this nVidia GeForce 6600GT benchmark. Unfortunately I could not find a GeForce 6200TC comparison as that chip is much closer to the x300 in price. The ATi card is about $40 cheaper than the 6600GT on Pricewatch now, but the performance difference is in the range of 2x-5x in favor of the 6600GT across the board. In Enemy Territory, the 6600GT gets over a hundred FPS at 1280x1024 high quality (HQ) while the x300 gets a dismal 20 at the same settings. In Doom 3, the 6600GT manages to get 50 FPS at 1280x1024 in HQ while the x300 gets less than 10 at 640x480 in HQ. The 6600GT gets 53FPS in the Quake 4 1280x1024 low quality benchmark, while the x300 gets 21 in low quality. Unfortunately Phoronix didn't include a UT2004 benchmark for the 6600GT, but I think we can guess who wins there.
If performance isn't important, then you may as well get a Matrox G400 or something. Hell, XGI might even be a good choice since they might even go the open source route with drivers.
Considering how video cards have recently overtaken CPUs in complexity, I don't think they're charging too terribly much. Not only do you get more transistors in a modern GPU than a Pentium 4, but also 256-512MB of GDDR3 RAM. Granted, this sort of power isn't necessary for a lot of people. That's why both nVidia and ATi offer cheaper versions of their flagship cards with similar capabilities, only slower. For example, the GeForce 6200 and the Radeon x300 are both decent gfx cards that are available for around $50.
I wonder if ATi and nVidia even comes close in terms of profit margins on GPUs as Intel does on CPUs...
>>I just love the way that the guys at nvidia refer to this ATI technology. It's not CrossFire, It's MissFire.
:-P
Their drivers seem to miss Linux almost entirely
nVidia's driver may be closed source at the core, but they've done a commendable job in making their driver work on a wide variety of machines including Itanium, Solaris, FreeBSD, and 64-bit Linux. A couple years ago they changed the licensing terms of their driver package so that distros like SuSE, Gentoo, Debian, etc. could make their own packages and distribute them, package them with installers, etc. On top of that, the Linux performance is on par with the Windows drivers, they fully support *all* GeForce chips (Not just workstation, desktop, or mobile), and they even do SLI in Linux now.
Even to this day, I don't think ATi's gotten even close. Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK you still have to download the driver from ATi and *pray* that their installer works for your distro. ATi's support only goes up to their 8500 line (Like 2 years old), and even then performance is signifficantly lower than what you get in Windows. If you want performance, you're screwed since your $150 Radeon will perform like a $50 GeForce. I don't even want to get into trying to get 3D acceleration on a Radeon 7200 working...
Does anyone know if there's a way to completely disable anything with "Anime," "Manga," or "Hentai" in the title on the frontpage? These are getting really, really annoying...
>>You people need to figure out exactly what you want, Linux for the masses (read: grandma, mom, etc) or an O/S where you have to spend valuable time just getting it to work with regular hardware.
How about an OS where you have a choice? If you like binary drivers which may cause incompatibilities, instability, etc. then by all means, load 'em up! Otherwise, opt out of it and don't use them. Simple, huh? That's the great thing about using GNU/Linux--Relatively few things are crammed down the user's throat. Purists--Just don't use the damn drivers if you don't like them. Everyone else--Enjoy vendor support, but don't cry to the Linux developers when nVidia or ATi or Linksys or someone breaks your distro with a dud driver. Deal?
You have a good point, and the requirements of a open source kernels and operating systems are as diverse as the people using them. Just to paint a picture: People running a distro like Linspire, Ubuntu, etc. who might be new to Linux probably just want their computers to work as well as they do in Windows XP (Wireless, 3D acceleration, etc). People who run enterprise Linux probably want their shiny expensive SCSI RAID card and super deluxe network card to work so they can serve more customers. Do-it-yourselfers can go either way, but I think most would at least prefer (if not insist) upon an open source driver. And so on and so on.
Here's a bootstrapper that's written in over 99% C, boots Linux off several commercial mainboards, and isn't limited to just x86.
I guess TFA is a good technical resource, but it's also a good reminder as to why big wads of assembly suck.
I forget whether this was UT2004 or Quake 3, but one of the devs was saying in an interview that the best wya to show your support for Linux ports is to simply play the game on-line. This is because the master servers keep statistical information, including client version (Which has OS info in it). So the more Linux gamers show up to play on-line, the more the developers know we play their games too.
You have your homework, now get to it!
I don't think this is the case. Intel is a behemoth with enough money to fund hundreds of major projects concurrently. They can throw hundreds of man years on a project on a whim. This is not a resource limited start-up we're talking about.
Now for the tin foil hat part: Their x86 products fell behind not because of lack of R&D funding, but because some idiot(s) up in management decided that they'd rather have everyone migrate to IA64 by buying a new PC rather than migrating to a backwards-compatible EM64T architecture.
Too bad they're moving to EFI which takes about 3 minutes to boot on current Itanium implementations as is. With the path they're taking, this really won't help.
The differences between workstation and desktop graphics cards have virtually diminished. For the past several years, Quadros have used the same GPUs as the desktop GeForce line and and FireGLs have used the same RXXX chips the desktop Radeon line. They're the same architecture, and usually the driver set for one is indicative of the driver set for the other. Heck, for a long time Radeon users who wanted 3D acceleration in Linux actually would actually go to ATi's site and download the FireGL driver. Why ATi doesn't seem to want to just offer a Linux driver for Radeons tweaked for desktop application performance like nVidia's been doing for about four and a half years now is really kind of baffling.
IMHO, it's always a good thing when artists decide to cut out the middle man and let the music sell itself over the web. However, as many have already noted, this is hardly unique to Harvy Danger. I suggest checking out http://bt.etree.org/ for a lot more great trade-friendly artists. They have a good variety with bands such as the Black Crowes, the Grateful Dead, Dave Matthews Band, Phish, and Gwar.
Again, this is a good thing that Harvy Danger is doing. It just makes me wonder why it took them so long (Maybe they had to wait for a contract to expire or something), other than the fact that they haven't had a hit in years and are probably desparate.
The sentence you quoted is an example of something that should never have made it on to the front page, even on Slashdot. I really wish the editors would keep such biased remarks in a blog or some place more appropriate.
I really do want to try this new distro out. If the graphical installer is compulsory, then yes, it will be very annoying. That's not how Gentoo has done things in the past, and I can't see a reason why they would do away with manual installs now. It's probably a simple option you can disable at the command prompt when you boot the same way you disable things like APM or DHCP discovery (noapm, nodhcp, etc).
The LinuxBIOS dude! What better nominee than someone who has helped so much in bringing free software to a traditionally proprietary area of the computer?
Too bad they don't have Nmap support. Ha!
They're not talking about the number of amperes being used by electrical demand in the world, they're talking about the current of the earth itself.
You don't by chance work for Microsoft, do you?