1. Didn't FSF/RMS start insisting that Linux must be called GNU/Linux sometime in the 1996-1997? Why didn't they say a word in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 or 1995? It seems to me that they waited 'till Linux started getting mainstream-attention, and THEN they started demanding a name-change!
2. The FAQ claims that Hurd is working. Is it? I fail to see it anywhere.
That Red Hat pours alot of money in to GNOME, while they give hardly any support to KDE (in fact, they seem to refer KDE as "Crapland" (according to the Red Hat bug-report where they talked about renaming apps and removing the "About" box)). And now they seem to be turning KDE in to GNOME-clone. It's understandable that KDE-developers and users are less than enthusiastic about it.
FWIW: I'm a KDE-user but I support competition between the desktops. In fact, I'm going to give GNOME2 a shot in the near-future.
"I think the old-timey notion of 'we got here first' applies to the moon, so far as the moon as a piece of real estate."
I assume you are an american. Do you pledge your allegiance to the descendants of the Vikings (that would propably mean Norway) or to Spain? Or maybe to the native americans. They did get there first, so by your logic, they own the land you have parked your arse on.
"Just recently they squeezed another 25% speed increase out of their drivers."
They claim "up to 25% increase in performance", but just about the only place where you see that is the Nature-test in 3DMark. In _games_ (you know, the things we actually use these vid-cards for?) there is exactly _zero_ improvement! And I heard that they changed the default-setting for filtering to one notch worse, so the image-quality suffers. Also, these new drivers have severe stability-problems.
"Overall, the Parhelia is slower than the 9700. However, the relative performance drop when 16xFSAA is enabled is less for the Parhelia than for the 9700, i.e. the 9700 may lose 50% of its framerates when 16xFSAA is enabled, while the Parhelia may lose only 20%."
I don't care even if enabling FAA on Parhelia increases FPS. I don't care if Parhelia takes 5% performance-hit and R300 takes 50% hit. All I care that is it playable. In case of Parhelia, it's (sadly) often not. Luckily, R300 has performance to spare, so in the end, it has better performance.
And Parhelia might have slightly better image-quality. Sadly, the performance is lacking, so that image-quality doesn't help much.
"The whole POINT of the new bill is to GIVE them 'lawful authority to do so' so how does this law apply?"
By your logic, some country could make it legal to kill americans. Then a citizen of that country comes to USA and kills dozens of people. As the cops try to arrest him, he'll just show them the law-books from his country and say "see, according to our laws, it's legal to kill americans. Therefore I haven't broken any laws. As I haven't broken any laws, I'll be going now. Ta-ta!"
What's that? It doesn't quite work like that? That guy has to obey US laws when he's in USA? So... Wouldn't that mean that the movie studio fat-cats must obey Australian laws if they operate in Australia? That's what I thought...
Where's the proof that textures eat more bandwidth? also, would the most used 12 megs of textures eat more bandwidth than the frame-buffer would (you never answered that).
But I'm sure that you know more about this than people with vast experience regarding 3D (both hardware and software). I mean, BB is using the eDRAM primarily for frame-buffer, not for textures. But like I said, I'm sure you know more about this than they do....
From BB website: As an example, how much memory bandwidth is required if the 3D-graphics chip renders 600 million pixels, 1.2 Gigatexels/sec using a dual texturing pipeline? Assume 32-bit color and 32-bit floating Z, as both are superior to their 16-bit counterparts.
For each rendered pixel (on average) we read the depth value and write the color and depth value back to the frame buffer. This means that for each pixel we must access 12 bytes of memory. 600M by 12 is 7.2 GB/s. But this is not all, we also have to count the bandwidth required by the video refresh unit, at 1024x768x85 Hz that's 64 MB/s. We also need to read textures and that's 500 MB/s to 2 Gigabytes/sec. In total, close to the 10 GB/s memory bandwidth and that's just for 600M pixels/ 1.2 Gigatexels
If I remember correctly, I said that "When talked about PC 3D-accelerators". Last time I checked, GameCube is no PC. And I also said in one of my other comments, that Sony uses similar design in PS2
And you still haven't answered my question: which needs more bandwidth: frame-buffer or textures? Generally speaking, frame-buffer requires more bandwidth.
Sure there are all kinds of tricks to reduce the bandwidth eaten by frame-buffer (compressed Z etc.), but you can do the same with textures (compressed textures, anyone?)
And still, even if textures as a whole required more bandwidth than frame-buffer, it doesn't still mean that the most used 12 megs of textures (that much would fit in to the eDRAM) required as much bandwidth as frame-buffer would. So putting frame-buffer in to the eDRAM is the smart thing to do IMO.
"All bitboys has done is made a wider memory bus. They try to make the case in the press release that memory is handicapping gfx performance no gpu. Historically gfx cards have used some of the fastest memory they can get, but the capability to widen the bus is nothing new and not an accomplishment"
You make it sound so simple. But it's not. What BB is doing is not "just widening the memory-bus". They actually move 12 megs of the ram ON THE DIE ITSELF. And that memory is on 1024bit memory-bus. For comparison, that four times as wide as on Radeon 9700 and Matrox Parhelia. That emdedded RAM is used for the things that require most bandwidth, namely the frame-buffer. Textures don't need alot of bandwidth, and they are located in the slower "traditional" RAM. Of course, if there's any eDRAM left, most used textures are stored there.
When it comes to PC 3D-accelerators, that IS pretty damn revolutionery!
"Who cares about this pathetic crap, NVIDIA and even ATI now will own them."
I remember when people talked about NVIDIA like that.... "Who cares about NVIDIA? 3Dfx will own them!"
"I guess they are using two 128-bit buses to maximize memory bandwidth. I don't see what is so revolutionary about this"
If you don't know what you are talking about, then don't talk, OK? The chip has 12 megs of on-die eDRAM on 1024bit memory-bus running at chip speed. That is pretty revolutionary when it comes to PC 3D-accelerator. PS2 has something similar in it's graphics-chip.
"Bitboys are famous for announcing graphics cards and then never delivering."
Because they did not announce any products. They held a seminar and in that seminar they had chips and video.cards on display. Now, in the past they have "pre-announced" products. But that was in the past. They haven't said a thing regadring their products in over 1.5 years! They have been running silent for a long time now!
Bitboys held a seminar in Assembly '02 regarding graphics hardware in handheld devices. In that seminar they had a hardware-accelerated demo of their technology. That demo was done using Altera FPGA-chip. It has hardware SVGA-acceleration, FSAA (of awesome quality I might add!) the works. Before the seminar I thought "Who needs 3D-acceleration in PDA/mobile phone?". After that demo I'm convinced that it's a must-have feature!
After the seminar I (and others) managed to talk with them. They had their PC 3D-accelerator on display, along with sample chips. They are pulling out of the PC-business for now in order to focus on the mobile stuff. The chops is called "Axe" and it is working. They are testing it in-house as we speak, and new revision of the chio is coming up. But it will not reach consumers because Infineon is killing the silicon-process at the end of the year. The chip had 12 megs of eDRA and it was somewhat bigger than other chips out there.
You can get the seminar from:
ftp://ftp.asmparty.net/pub/seminars/
It's the one called "Graphics hardware for handheld devices". I'm the guy with the laptop:)
Slashdot Mirror
1. Didn't FSF/RMS start insisting that Linux must be called GNU/Linux sometime in the 1996-1997? Why didn't they say a word in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 or 1995? It seems to me that they waited 'till Linux started getting mainstream-attention, and THEN they started demanding a name-change!
2. The FAQ claims that Hurd is working. Is it? I fail to see it anywhere.
"Or like their *friends* at Ericsson: Combining the two [ericsson.com]?"
l
You mean something like this:
http://www.nokia.com/phones/nokiad211/index.htm
True, it aint UMTS, but UMTS isn't available yet.
That Red Hat pours alot of money in to GNOME, while they give hardly any support to KDE (in fact, they seem to refer KDE as "Crapland" (according to the Red Hat bug-report where they talked about renaming apps and removing the "About" box)). And now they seem to be turning KDE in to GNOME-clone. It's understandable that KDE-developers and users are less than enthusiastic about it.
FWIW: I'm a KDE-user but I support competition between the desktops. In fact, I'm going to give GNOME2 a shot in the near-future.
"I think the old-timey notion of 'we got here first' applies to the moon, so far as the moon as a piece of real estate."
I assume you are an american. Do you pledge your allegiance to the descendants of the Vikings (that would propably mean Norway) or to Spain? Or maybe to the native americans. They did get there first, so by your logic, they own the land you have parked your arse on.
"(I always wanted to try and fp my own story.)"
Keep trying, one day you might make it.
"Just recently they squeezed another 25% speed increase out of their drivers."
They claim "up to 25% increase in performance", but just about the only place where you see that is the Nature-test in 3DMark. In _games_ (you know, the things we actually use these vid-cards for?) there is exactly _zero_ improvement! And I heard that they changed the default-setting for filtering to one notch worse, so the image-quality suffers. Also, these new drivers have severe stability-problems.
"Do you get the feeling that people missed the point of why Rasterman and others (such as myself) say the Linux desktop has no future?"
Yeah, he said it because he doesn't work on Linux-desktops as much as before.
"Overall, the Parhelia is slower than the 9700. However, the relative performance drop when 16xFSAA is enabled is less for the Parhelia than for the 9700, i.e. the 9700 may lose 50% of its framerates when 16xFSAA is enabled, while the Parhelia may lose only 20%."
I don't care even if enabling FAA on Parhelia increases FPS. I don't care if Parhelia takes 5% performance-hit and R300 takes 50% hit. All I care that is it playable. In case of Parhelia, it's (sadly) often not. Luckily, R300 has performance to spare, so in the end, it has better performance.
And Parhelia might have slightly better image-quality. Sadly, the performance is lacking, so that image-quality doesn't help much.
"AFAIK, the Athlon XP already has the SSE2 instructions/registers"
Nope. Athlon XP has SSE instructions, but no SSE2 instructions. Hammer will have SSE2 as well.
"The whole POINT of the new bill is to GIVE them 'lawful authority to do so' so how does this law apply?"
By your logic, some country could make it legal to kill americans. Then a citizen of that country comes to USA and kills dozens of people. As the cops try to arrest him, he'll just show them the law-books from his country and say "see, according to our laws, it's legal to kill americans. Therefore I haven't broken any laws. As I haven't broken any laws, I'll be going now. Ta-ta!"
What's that? It doesn't quite work like that? That guy has to obey US laws when he's in USA? So... Wouldn't that mean that the movie studio fat-cats must obey Australian laws if they operate in Australia? That's what I thought...
Where's the proof that textures eat more bandwidth? also, would the most used 12 megs of textures eat more bandwidth than the frame-buffer would (you never answered that).
But I'm sure that you know more about this than people with vast experience regarding 3D (both hardware and software). I mean, BB is using the eDRAM primarily for frame-buffer, not for textures. But like I said, I'm sure you know more about this than they do....
From BB website:
As an example, how much memory bandwidth is required if the 3D-graphics chip renders 600 million pixels, 1.2 Gigatexels/sec using a dual texturing pipeline? Assume 32-bit color and 32-bit floating Z, as both are superior to their 16-bit counterparts.
For each rendered pixel (on average) we read the depth value and write the color and depth value back to the frame buffer. This means that for each pixel we must access 12 bytes of memory. 600M by 12 is 7.2 GB/s. But this is not all, we also have to count the bandwidth required by the video refresh unit, at 1024x768x85 Hz that's 64 MB/s. We also need to read textures and that's 500 MB/s to 2 Gigabytes/sec. In total, close to the 10 GB/s memory bandwidth and that's just for 600M pixels/ 1.2 Gigatexels
If I remember correctly, I said that "When talked about PC 3D-accelerators". Last time I checked, GameCube is no PC. And I also said in one of my other comments, that Sony uses similar design in PS2
And you still haven't answered my question: which needs more bandwidth: frame-buffer or textures? Generally speaking, frame-buffer requires more bandwidth.
Sure there are all kinds of tricks to reduce the bandwidth eaten by frame-buffer (compressed Z etc.), but you can do the same with textures (compressed textures, anyone?)
And still, even if textures as a whole required more bandwidth than frame-buffer, it doesn't still mean that the most used 12 megs of textures (that much would fit in to the eDRAM) required as much bandwidth as frame-buffer would. So putting frame-buffer in to the eDRAM is the smart thing to do IMO.
Which needs more bandwidth: Textures or double (triple?) buffered frame-buffer with 32bit Z and 32bit colors?
Answer: The frame-buffer.
"All bitboys has done is made a wider memory bus. They try to make the case in the press release that memory is handicapping gfx performance no gpu. Historically gfx cards have used some of the fastest memory they can get, but the capability to widen the bus is nothing new and not an accomplishment"
You make it sound so simple. But it's not. What BB is doing is not "just widening the memory-bus". They actually move 12 megs of the ram ON THE DIE ITSELF. And that memory is on 1024bit memory-bus. For comparison, that four times as wide as on Radeon 9700 and Matrox Parhelia. That emdedded RAM is used for the things that require most bandwidth, namely the frame-buffer. Textures don't need alot of bandwidth, and they are located in the slower "traditional" RAM. Of course, if there's any eDRAM left, most used textures are stored there.
When it comes to PC 3D-accelerators, that IS pretty damn revolutionery!
"It has hardware SVGA-acceleration..."
Obviously, that should be SVG (as in Scalable Vector Graphics)-acceleration.
"Who cares about this pathetic crap, NVIDIA and even ATI now will own them."
I remember when people talked about NVIDIA like that.... "Who cares about NVIDIA? 3Dfx will own them!"
"I guess they are using two 128-bit buses to maximize memory bandwidth. I don't see what is so revolutionary about this"
If you don't know what you are talking about, then don't talk, OK? The chip has 12 megs of on-die eDRAM on 1024bit memory-bus running at chip speed. That is pretty revolutionary when it comes to PC 3D-accelerator. PS2 has something similar in it's graphics-chip.
"Bitboys are famous for announcing graphics cards and then never delivering."
Because they did not announce any products. They held a seminar and in that seminar they had chips and video.cards on display. Now, in the past they have "pre-announced" products. But that was in the past. They haven't said a thing regadring their products in over 1.5 years! They have been running silent for a long time now!
Bitboys held a seminar in Assembly '02 regarding graphics hardware in handheld devices. In that seminar they had a hardware-accelerated demo of their technology. That demo was done using Altera FPGA-chip. It has hardware SVGA-acceleration, FSAA (of awesome quality I might add!) the works. Before the seminar I thought "Who needs 3D-acceleration in PDA/mobile phone?". After that demo I'm convinced that it's a must-have feature! :)
After the seminar I (and others) managed to talk with them. They had their PC 3D-accelerator on display, along with sample chips. They are pulling out of the PC-business for now in order to focus on the mobile stuff. The chops is called "Axe" and it is working. They are testing it in-house as we speak, and new revision of the chio is coming up. But it will not reach consumers because Infineon is killing the silicon-process at the end of the year. The chip had 12 megs of eDRA and it was somewhat bigger than other chips out there.
You can get the seminar from:
ftp://ftp.asmparty.net/pub/seminars/
It's the one called "Graphics hardware for handheld devices". I'm the guy with the laptop
...For me to poop on!
0wn3d!
Wait 12 hours for KDE and X? How about waiting 3 months with Debian.
Touche!
I myself am planning to move to Gentoo from Debian soon. Propably when they release the GCC3.1 using version.
Didn't that start from a post by a KDE-developer where he complained Israels policy regarding palestinians? So disagreeing with Israel = Nazi?
And weren't there some anti-black comments found in Debian? They were put there by one of the devels. Does that mean that Debian is racist?
And what about socialism? It's just a political/economic system, just like capitalism is. It's not evil, just like capitalism is not evil.
Last time I checked, we still have freedom of speech
"You may even try Sid the Unstable version if you want the latest and the greatest software"
Yeah, like KDE3 and Xfree 4.2. No, wait...
It's been over 2 months since KDE3 was released. How about having it FINALLY in Debian as well?