The problem with dry ice is there are organised networks that specialise in stealing it. I've tried to dry ice several times (by leaving it out in the sun) and when I got back it was all gone.
HL started out using Quake's netcode, so if you used the same connection, the latency would be exactly the same. Later, with the upgrade to TF 1.5, HL's netcode was changed to incude latency compensation, so what you shoot is what you hit, regardless of your ping (as long as it's under 500). This also applies to the current version of CS.
So, don't look for much more success stories like Counterstrike, because the technological fickleness of gamers will cause mods based on old engines to become unpopular quickly.
On the contrary; as engines become more advanced, their lifespan will increase. And with more and more games supporting mods, chances are we'll see more and more user-created games like Counter-Strike (or Team Fortress, etc.).
One of the problems with this is that game developers prefer to release games that are complete crap "out of the box", hoping that someone will make a "killer mod" for free, and that they (the game's authors / publishers) will profit from it.
By contrast, HL is probably the most polished action game I've ever seen. Very few games released since then come even close to its balanced and addictive single-player gameplay. I hope Valve are dedicating the same amount of time to TF2's playtesting and refinement.
The judges have found that Valve can't sue Counter-strike because a) Counter-strike is a game, and b) it is developed by Valve.
When are you people going to learn that you can't trust someone called "Trusty"? And when are the moderators going to learn that before modding something as "informative", they should (at least) check that the information is true?
Yes, I'm sure that if the people living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro or starving to death in the middle of Africa worked hard enough, they would all become presidents of Microsoft. They just don't work, the lazy bastards.
So you really can't "waste" 2 hours of your life watching a movie without having to get drunk or stuffed?
If eating and drinking are your two main concerns when you go to a theatre, I have an advice for you: go to a restaurant instead. You have more choice of food, it's better lit, and you don't have that annoying movie in the backgrond.
Personally, I think that even popcorn should be banned from theatres. It's hard enough to enjoy a film surrounded by the sound of 100 people munching, but the smell makes it completely unbearable.
So I guess you and I agree on one point: food is one of the main reasons not to go to a theatre.
RMN ~~~
He's a wise man
on
Lego Segway
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I always have a mirror with me. People used to say I was vain, so I explained I just carry it in case I get slashdotted... now they say I'm insane.
RMN ~~~
This story is actually rather good...
on
Lego Segway
·
· Score: -1, Troll
...FOR ME TO POOP ON!
I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist.:-) I actually like Lego; I must have about five tons of it. I almost bought one of the robotics kits but I went through the specifications and found it rather limited (ex., when you connect the camera you lose a lot of the other features). I guess I'll have to use human soldiers to take over the world...
If you're a hardware engineer, I hope you don't design anything that people's lives depend on! Let me just quote a couple of sentences from your first post on this thread:
"its time Apple start calling anything based on the power PC architecture twice its clock speed, and anyhting thats both powerPC and 64 bits at 4 times its clock speed. After all, the processor does twice as much as a 32 bit processor in a given clock."
And:
"calling this new PowerPC that runs at "1.8GHz" a "7.4GHz PowerPC" is just as legitimate as Intel calling their pentiums 2.8GHz, etc. (Cause they don't really actually run at 2.8GHz. [...] These published clock rates are a marketing fiction."
I really don't think anything you say (including mixing memory bus speed with CPU core speed, or references to Spinal Tap) can possibly beat those two ideas (that bigger registers make the processors faster and that clock speeds are made-up numbers).
Do you know anything about hardware architecture? Don't bother to answer; it was a rethorical question.
Let me try to explain this slowly and in large, pretty letters.
Two ALUs do not equal twice the clock rate. The P4 has seven execution units. That does not mean it runs at 7x 2.8 GHz. Two of those seven execution units (the "simple ALUs") are double-pumped (they move data twice for each clock cycle, sort of like DDR memory transfers data at twice the clock speed). Therefore, these simple ALUs work (internally) at 5.6 GHz, on a 2.8 GHz chip. The CPU clock (the frequency with which data is moved between the main parts of the CPU) is 2.8 GHz.
The P4 has a long pipeline, which means it needs more cycles than, say, a PIII or and Athlon or a G4 to do some (resonably simple) operations. However, instructions can enter the pipeline before the previous instruction has finished executing. Think of it as a corridor: people go in at one end, and they come out at the other end. It may take 5 seconds for one person to walk across the corridor, but it won't take 10 seconds for two people to cross it, because the second person doesn't need to wait for the first one to reach the end.
This means there's a big penalty if the pipeline needs to be flushed, but as long as instructions are processed continuously (and the P4 has pretty good branch prediction / prefetch), it is quite fast indeed.
The actual time it takes to do something useful (such as multiply two numbers, compress a file, or render a 3D scene), depends on a lot of things. And it is important (a lot more important than the clock speed). But a P4 2.8 GHz does run at 2.8 GHz, contrary to what you said. If you want to discuss CPU architecture you need to understand the basic concepts, such as what clock speed means.
I am not talking out of my ass but even if I did, I suspect I'd still sound smarter than you.
I used to know the PII / PIII instruction times by heart, from the days I still programmed in assembly, but I never bothered to get a P4 reference. 4 cycles to do a shift... that's definitely a revolutionary design.
Well I've always hated P4s, now I have a new motive.:-)
Yes, after all, IBM has a lot more experience making chips than Intel, right? And they've never had any manufacturing problems with any of their products, right? And they've just opened a new plant.... well, if it's brand new I'm sure it'll work flawlessly, right?
Yes, and heatsinks also make it much harder to cool the chip. I mean, how is the air from the fan expected to cool the core if there's that big block of metal in the way...?
The double pumped ALU for easy instructions is running at twice clock-speed. The the complex integer instruction unit, which is infact also an ALU for mult/div/shift/etc. operations, doesn't
Actually, IIRC, there are two double-pumped ALUs in the P4. Are you sure they can't do shifts? I know they won't do muls or divs, but shifts look like a perfect operation to do in one "double-pumped" (ie, two) clock cycle(s).
IOW doing multiplies (or shifts), the P4 still isn't as fast as the P3.
If you mean per clock cycle, I'm sure you're right. From that point of view, there are very few CPUs that are as inefficient as the P4. But the point is, the P4 was designed to run at insanely high clock speeds to begin with. And I'm pretty sure a 3 GHz P4 can multiply integers as fast as any P3. I'm not so sure about FPU performance, though. The P4 really can't cut the mustard there (and eats Athlon dust).
Not to be pedantic, but with certain applications, certain 64-bit architecutres actually provide shorter execution. Superscalar performance is improved by using the larger registers to execute more instructions in parallel.
The registers and the execution units are two separate things. A CPU's ability to execute instructions in parallel has nothing to do with the size of the registers or the memory addressing (which is what "64-bit CPU" means). It has to do with its internal design.
To benefit from 64-bit registers (or from new registers), software needs to be rewritten, and even then, not all software would benefit from it. A lot of operations only need 8 or 16 bits of data, and don't benefit the least bit from 64-bit registers.
This is because larger registers let you feed more data into the various processor components at a faster rate.
More data, yes (of course, if you have 64-bit registers, you must have 64-bit ALUs). Faster, no. The speed at which the data is fed depends on the clock cycle.
With some applications this makes little difference, but with things like signal processing or matrix operations that benefit from SIMD; speed boosts would certainly occur. This assumes that you have more ALUs or FPUs to feed in your 64-bit chip.
There's no reason to add more execution units since it's hard enough keeping the current ones fed.
SIMD can only be used in very special cases; it's not an answer to every problem, and again software needs to be rewritten to use it (and compiler support isn't exactly brilliant).
Besides, SIMD (Altivec / SSE2 / etc.) use separate registers, which are already 128-bit long in most architectures (ex., G4, P4). 64-bit CPUs are not going to change this; they're simply increasing the main register size (including memory addressing) and, in some cases (ex., x86-64), adding new general-purpose registers.
If the system is completely idle for a long time, and configured to slow down, that's possible. Most desktop systems are not. There's always some part of the chip that's idle (hyperthreading tries to minimise that).
Either way, it's irrelevant if a chip slows down its clock when it's not doing anything. When it does do something, a P4 2.8 GHz does it at 2.8 GHz (with some parts operating at twice that speed, as was pointed out).
I think AMD "launched" the 2400+ (and 2600+, and 2700+, and 2800+) basically to have an excuse to lower the price of other models.
Most people I know are buying Athlon XPs between 1600+ and 2000+, and this includes a lot of geeks. They're starting to realise it won't make any real difference.
Personally, I work in animation and post-production, so I need fast chips, but I won't pay 40% extra for a chip that's 10% faster. It's simply cheaper to build a render farm with ten MP 1800+s than with eight 2200+s.
Same goes for the Pentiums and Xeons. I don't know anyone with a 2.8 GHz P4. And looking at Intel's prices (and FPU performance), I'd say it's even less likely I'll buy one.
I think AMD's decision to make a 64-bit chip is a good one, from a business point of view. The only way they're going to sell is if they come up with something new, something that makes people want to upgrade. If you have a 1.5 GHz you're not going to spend money on a 1.7 GHz chip. But if a new version of Windows comes out that only runs on a 64-bit chip, you may consider upgrading. After all, you don't want to be running boring old Win32 when your friends are running Win64...;-)
Currently I'm waiting for the Barton MP. The extra cache should make a significant difference in 3D rendering, and when the Hammer is released, the Barton should come down to an acceptable price. I just hope AMD releases a 333 MHz version of the MPX chipset.
No real reason why they shouldn't; 2 GHz is actually rather conservative. The new chip is very similar to the current Thoroughbred, and those can run at 2.2 GHz even without an IHS and with a regular (bad) cooler. They can be taken up to about 2.4 GHz with good air cooling. Add an integrated heat spreader and I suspect even an Athlon XP could be pushed to 2.7 GHz or so. The problem is, there's virtually no market for it; even the 2400+ (2 GHz) models are selling poorly.
AMD has been having some problems with SOI manufacturing but those will probably be solved by the end of the year.
Yes, they did that to be able to do the operations in 1 clock cycle.
I've heard some people speculate that the Hammer will use a similar trick on the instruction decoder: run it at twice the clock speed so that it keeps the execution units fed. Don't know if there's any truth in it, though. Basically that's what Intel is trying to do with hyperthreading (although the approaches are different).
One thing AMD has already confirmed they've improved is the prefetch, which is much better on the XP than on the old Athlons, but is still not quite as good as the P4's. They can probably get a good 10-15% of performance there. Add the integrated memory controller, increase the FSB and cache, and you have something that'll probably be about 25% faster than current Athlons for the same clock speed (on 32-bit code). That would mean a 2 GHz Hammer would probably have a "rating" around 3200+.
By the time the Hammer is released, the P4 will probably be hitting 3.2 GHz, so I suspect AMD will not get a big lead over Intel (at least in the mainstream market, where 64-bit code won't be very important). But since neither AMD nor Intel are selling their top chips anyway, I don't think that will be very relevant. What AMD really wants is big corporate clients (like Intel has) for their low- and mid-range chips.
Slashdot Mirror
I loved the Atari ST error messages. Compared to some things Windows sometimes spits out, they were actually quite clear and helpful.
RMN
~~~
And personally I prefer the ones that said "Keyboard not found; press F1 to continue"
RMN
~~~
The problem with dry ice is there are organised networks that specialise in stealing it. I've tried to dry ice several times (by leaving it out in the sun) and when I got back it was all gone.
RMN
~~~
HL started out using Quake's netcode, so if you used the same connection, the latency would be exactly the same. Later, with the upgrade to TF 1.5, HL's netcode was changed to incude latency compensation, so what you shoot is what you hit, regardless of your ping (as long as it's under 500). This also applies to the current version of CS.
It's even more interesting when you notice that Valve was founded by ex-Microsoft managers.
RMN
~~~
So, don't look for much more success stories like Counterstrike, because the technological fickleness of gamers will cause mods based on old engines to become unpopular quickly.
On the contrary; as engines become more advanced, their lifespan will increase. And with more and more games supporting mods, chances are we'll see more and more user-created games like Counter-Strike (or Team Fortress, etc.).
One of the problems with this is that game developers prefer to release games that are complete crap "out of the box", hoping that someone will make a "killer mod" for free, and that they (the game's authors / publishers) will profit from it.
By contrast, HL is probably the most polished action game I've ever seen. Very few games released since then come even close to its balanced and addictive single-player gameplay. I hope Valve are dedicating the same amount of time to TF2's playtesting and refinement.
RMN
~~~
The judges have found that Valve can't sue Counter-strike because a) Counter-strike is a game, and b) it is developed by Valve.
When are you people going to learn that you can't trust someone called "Trusty"? And when are the moderators going to learn that before modding something as "informative", they should (at least) check that the information is true?
RMN
~~~
Yes, I'm sure that if the people living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro or starving to death in the middle of Africa worked hard enough, they would all become presidents of Microsoft. They just don't work, the lazy bastards.
It's called irony.
RMN
~~~
They're doing it so that people can die at home, surrounded by their family, instead of at internet cafes.
RMN
~~~
So you really can't "waste" 2 hours of your life watching a movie without having to get drunk or stuffed?
If eating and drinking are your two main concerns when you go to a theatre, I have an advice for you: go to a restaurant instead. You have more choice of food, it's better lit, and you don't have that annoying movie in the backgrond.
Personally, I think that even popcorn should be banned from theatres. It's hard enough to enjoy a film surrounded by the sound of 100 people munching, but the smell makes it completely unbearable.
So I guess you and I agree on one point: food is one of the main reasons not to go to a theatre.
RMN
~~~
I always have a mirror with me. People used to say I was vain, so I explained I just carry it in case I get slashdotted... now they say I'm insane.
RMN
~~~
...FOR ME TO POOP ON!
:-) I actually like Lego; I must have about five tons of it. I almost bought one of the robotics kits but I went through the specifications and found it rather limited (ex., when you connect the camera you lose a lot of the other features). I guess I'll have to use human soldiers to take over the world...
I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist.
RMN
~~~
Since when do black holes occupy so much space (I thought they were points)?
They're big points.
RMN
~~~
If you're a hardware engineer, I hope you don't design anything that people's lives depend on! Let me just quote a couple of sentences from your first post on this thread:
"its time Apple start calling anything based on the power PC architecture twice its clock speed, and anyhting thats both powerPC and 64 bits at 4 times its clock speed. After all, the processor does twice as much as a 32 bit processor in a given clock."
And:
"calling this new PowerPC that runs at "1.8GHz" a "7.4GHz PowerPC" is just as legitimate as Intel calling their pentiums 2.8GHz, etc. (Cause they don't really actually run at 2.8GHz. [...] These published clock rates are a marketing fiction."
I really don't think anything you say (including mixing memory bus speed with CPU core speed, or references to Spinal Tap) can possibly beat those two ideas (that bigger registers make the processors faster and that clock speeds are made-up numbers).
Feel free to keep trying, though.
RMN
~~~
Do you know anything about hardware architecture? Don't bother to answer; it was a rethorical question.
Let me try to explain this slowly and in large, pretty letters.
Two ALUs do not equal twice the clock rate. The P4 has seven execution units. That does not mean it runs at 7x 2.8 GHz. Two of those seven execution units (the "simple ALUs") are double-pumped (they move data twice for each clock cycle, sort of like DDR memory transfers data at twice the clock speed). Therefore, these simple ALUs work (internally) at 5.6 GHz, on a 2.8 GHz chip. The CPU clock (the frequency with which data is moved between the main parts of the CPU) is 2.8 GHz.
The P4 has a long pipeline, which means it needs more cycles than, say, a PIII or and Athlon or a G4 to do some (resonably simple) operations. However, instructions can enter the pipeline before the previous instruction has finished executing. Think of it as a corridor: people go in at one end, and they come out at the other end. It may take 5 seconds for one person to walk across the corridor, but it won't take 10 seconds for two people to cross it, because the second person doesn't need to wait for the first one to reach the end.
This means there's a big penalty if the pipeline needs to be flushed, but as long as instructions are processed continuously (and the P4 has pretty good branch prediction / prefetch), it is quite fast indeed.
The actual time it takes to do something useful (such as multiply two numbers, compress a file, or render a 3D scene), depends on a lot of things. And it is important (a lot more important than the clock speed). But a P4 2.8 GHz does run at 2.8 GHz, contrary to what you said. If you want to discuss CPU architecture you need to understand the basic concepts, such as what clock speed means.
I am not talking out of my ass but even if I did, I suspect I'd still sound smarter than you.
RMN
~~~
I used to know the PII / PIII instruction times by heart, from the days I still programmed in assembly, but I never bothered to get a P4 reference. 4 cycles to do a shift... that's definitely a revolutionary design.
:-)
Well I've always hated P4s, now I have a new motive.
RMN
~~~
Yes, after all, IBM has a lot more experience making chips than Intel, right? And they've never had any manufacturing problems with any of their products, right? And they've just opened a new plant.... well, if it's brand new I'm sure it'll work flawlessly, right?
No worries, mate.
RMN
~~~
Yes, and heatsinks also make it much harder to cool the chip. I mean, how is the air from the fan expected to cool the core if there's that big block of metal in the way...?
RMN
~~~
The double pumped ALU for easy instructions is running at twice clock-speed. The the complex integer instruction unit, which is infact also an ALU for mult/div/shift/etc. operations, doesn't
Actually, IIRC, there are two double-pumped ALUs in the P4. Are you sure they can't do shifts? I know they won't do muls or divs, but shifts look like a perfect operation to do in one "double-pumped" (ie, two) clock cycle(s).
IOW doing multiplies (or shifts), the P4 still isn't as fast as the P3.
If you mean per clock cycle, I'm sure you're right. From that point of view, there are very few CPUs that are as inefficient as the P4. But the point is, the P4 was designed to run at insanely high clock speeds to begin with. And I'm pretty sure a 3 GHz P4 can multiply integers as fast as any P3. I'm not so sure about FPU performance, though. The P4 really can't cut the mustard there (and eats Athlon dust).
RMN
~~~
Not to be pedantic, but with certain applications, certain 64-bit architecutres actually provide shorter execution. Superscalar performance is improved by using the larger registers to execute more instructions in parallel.
The registers and the execution units are two separate things. A CPU's ability to execute instructions in parallel has nothing to do with the size of the registers or the memory addressing (which is what "64-bit CPU" means). It has to do with its internal design.
To benefit from 64-bit registers (or from new registers), software needs to be rewritten, and even then, not all software would benefit from it. A lot of operations only need 8 or 16 bits of data, and don't benefit the least bit from 64-bit registers.
This is because larger registers let you feed more data into the various processor components at a faster rate.
More data, yes (of course, if you have 64-bit registers, you must have 64-bit ALUs). Faster, no. The speed at which the data is fed depends on the clock cycle.
With some applications this makes little difference, but with things like signal processing or matrix operations that benefit from SIMD; speed boosts would certainly occur. This assumes that you have more ALUs or FPUs to feed in your 64-bit chip.
There's no reason to add more execution units since it's hard enough keeping the current ones fed.
SIMD can only be used in very special cases; it's not an answer to every problem, and again software needs to be rewritten to use it (and compiler support isn't exactly brilliant).
Besides, SIMD (Altivec / SSE2 / etc.) use separate registers, which are already 128-bit long in most architectures (ex., G4, P4). 64-bit CPUs are not going to change this; they're simply increasing the main register size (including memory addressing) and, in some cases (ex., x86-64), adding new general-purpose registers.
RMN
~~~
If the system is completely idle for a long time, and configured to slow down, that's possible. Most desktop systems are not. There's always some part of the chip that's idle (hyperthreading tries to minimise that).
Either way, it's irrelevant if a chip slows down its clock when it's not doing anything. When it does do something, a P4 2.8 GHz does it at 2.8 GHz (with some parts operating at twice that speed, as was pointed out).
RMN
~~~
I think AMD "launched" the 2400+ (and 2600+, and 2700+, and 2800+) basically to have an excuse to lower the price of other models.
;-)
Most people I know are buying Athlon XPs between 1600+ and 2000+, and this includes a lot of geeks. They're starting to realise it won't make any real difference.
Personally, I work in animation and post-production, so I need fast chips, but I won't pay 40% extra for a chip that's 10% faster. It's simply cheaper to build a render farm with ten MP 1800+s than with eight 2200+s.
Same goes for the Pentiums and Xeons. I don't know anyone with a 2.8 GHz P4. And looking at Intel's prices (and FPU performance), I'd say it's even less likely I'll buy one.
I think AMD's decision to make a 64-bit chip is a good one, from a business point of view. The only way they're going to sell is if they come up with something new, something that makes people want to upgrade. If you have a 1.5 GHz you're not going to spend money on a 1.7 GHz chip. But if a new version of Windows comes out that only runs on a 64-bit chip, you may consider upgrading. After all, you don't want to be running boring old Win32 when your friends are running Win64...
Currently I'm waiting for the Barton MP. The extra cache should make a significant difference in 3D rendering, and when the Hammer is released, the Barton should come down to an acceptable price. I just hope AMD releases a 333 MHz version of the MPX chipset.
RMN
~~~
No real reason why they shouldn't; 2 GHz is actually rather conservative. The new chip is very similar to the current Thoroughbred, and those can run at 2.2 GHz even without an IHS and with a regular (bad) cooler. They can be taken up to about 2.4 GHz with good air cooling. Add an integrated heat spreader and I suspect even an Athlon XP could be pushed to 2.7 GHz or so. The problem is, there's virtually no market for it; even the 2400+ (2 GHz) models are selling poorly.
AMD has been having some problems with SOI manufacturing but those will probably be solved by the end of the year.
RMN
~~~
So as you see, Microsoft did innovate!
RMN
~~~
Yes, they did that to be able to do the operations in 1 clock cycle.
I've heard some people speculate that the Hammer will use a similar trick on the instruction decoder: run it at twice the clock speed so that it keeps the execution units fed. Don't know if there's any truth in it, though. Basically that's what Intel is trying to do with hyperthreading (although the approaches are different).
One thing AMD has already confirmed they've improved is the prefetch, which is much better on the XP than on the old Athlons, but is still not quite as good as the P4's. They can probably get a good 10-15% of performance there. Add the integrated memory controller, increase the FSB and cache, and you have something that'll probably be about 25% faster than current Athlons for the same clock speed (on 32-bit code). That would mean a 2 GHz Hammer would probably have a "rating" around 3200+.
By the time the Hammer is released, the P4 will probably be hitting 3.2 GHz, so I suspect AMD will not get a big lead over Intel (at least in the mainstream market, where 64-bit code won't be very important). But since neither AMD nor Intel are selling their top chips anyway, I don't think that will be very relevant. What AMD really wants is big corporate clients (like Intel has) for their low- and mid-range chips.
RMN
~~~