I often have to work in silence if I am in a hurry, and I know I have the hardware sitting here that would solve the problem. all in all, a bummer.
Well, even back with my 400mhz k6-2, mp3 playback only took 4-5%. Now it isn't even noticeable, (task man reports between 0 and 4 percent)
If you're running Winamp, you might want to increase the 'buffer' or whatever (where Winamp puts the music after it decodes it but before it comes out of the speakers. I can't remember the term they used, and I'm to lazy to check... but not to lazy to write all this. Anyway)
You might have decreased the buffer to make the Graphic EQ more responsive, but by increasing it Winamp actually needs to work a bit less. Just a thought.
it's all in the controller. Perhaps abandoning the other busses and rigging up the interrupts for a single bus would be best? Also, it seems that having several memory busses would solve the problems of speed dependencies. multiplexing the south bridge to 2 or 4 seriate channels should do it.
I don't know if you realize this or not, but that's exactly the way PCs currently work, except the busses are different for different things. PCI bus, memory bus, CPU/Cache bus, ISA bus, IDE bus, etc, etc, etc. Making all of the busses use the same interface would be insane, what's the point of having a 4.8gb/sec modem port? And with the huge memory caches on video cards these days (32-64megs) You don't need all that much bandwidth(but AGP4x provides plenty).
Modern PCs use different busses for different reasons, there's a lot more to consider then pure speed.
Speaking of the 'speed of light', you could use actual fiber optic network cables much nearer their capacity with a bus that fast dumping straight into the RAM, cutting out several steps (which is where the latency comes from in the first place) along the way. This would make clustered systems fly, and open up altogether new techniques as well.
Fiber optic memory?? Ai-ya! First of all, wire is about 66% as fast as the speed of light, and secondly, even then you won't overcome the lag. Current ram technology has lag measured in nanoseconds. And, that lag needs to be absolutely constant.
I remember reading about star bridge a while ago, the general consensus on slashdot was that it was probably a scam, or at lest an operation with a dim chance of success. The benchmarks they touted did things like compare 4-bit integer adds (on their machine) to full blown 64bit operations on IBM iron.
Like I said, most people didn't buy into it, but the company is still around a year or so later, so who knows. Maybe they are selling some systems. Either way, they certainly aren't making much of an impact on anything in the computing world. Let's not forget that $15 million would get you a fuck of a lot of conventional CPU as well. It's enough to buy 10,000 high-end PCs and network 'em together (resulting in about the biggest Beowulf cluster in existence). And that wouldn't require any new programming technology.
I think these guys also claimed that they'd sell these things for $3-4k...
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I often have to work in silence if I am in a hurry, and I know I have the hardware sitting here that would solve the problem. all in all, a bummer.
Well, even back with my 400mhz k6-2, mp3 playback only took 4-5%. Now it isn't even noticeable, (task man reports between 0 and 4 percent)
If you're running Winamp, you might want to increase the 'buffer' or whatever (where Winamp puts the music after it decodes it but before it comes out of the speakers. I can't remember the term they used, and I'm to lazy to check... but not to lazy to write all this. Anyway)
You might have decreased the buffer to make the Graphic EQ more responsive, but by increasing it Winamp actually needs to work a bit less. Just a thought.
it's all in the controller. Perhaps abandoning the other busses and rigging up the interrupts for a single bus would be best? Also, it seems that having several memory busses would solve the problems of speed dependencies. multiplexing the south bridge to 2 or 4 seriate channels should do it.
I don't know if you realize this or not, but that's exactly the way PCs currently work, except the busses are different for different things. PCI bus, memory bus, CPU/Cache bus, ISA bus, IDE bus, etc, etc, etc. Making all of the busses use the same interface would be insane, what's the point of having a 4.8gb/sec modem port? And with the huge memory caches on video cards these days (32-64megs) You don't need all that much bandwidth(but AGP4x provides plenty).
Modern PCs use different busses for different reasons, there's a lot more to consider then pure speed.
Speaking of the 'speed of light', you could use actual fiber optic network cables much nearer their capacity with a bus that fast dumping straight into the RAM, cutting out several steps (which is where the latency comes from in the first place) along the way. This would make clustered systems fly, and open up altogether new techniques as well.
Fiber optic memory?? Ai-ya! First of all, wire is about 66% as fast as the speed of light, and secondly, even then you won't overcome the lag. Current ram technology has lag measured in nanoseconds. And, that lag needs to be absolutely constant.
A simpler design isn't always the best design.
For instance, the VGA adaptor would greatly benefit from that interface (3d work, video games),
Um... just what do you think AGP is?
I remember reading about star bridge a while ago, the general consensus on slashdot was that it was probably a scam, or at lest an operation with a dim chance of success. The benchmarks they touted did things like compare 4-bit integer adds (on their machine) to full blown 64bit operations on IBM iron.
Like I said, most people didn't buy into it, but the company is still around a year or so later, so who knows. Maybe they are selling some systems. Either way, they certainly aren't making much of an impact on anything in the computing world. Let's not forget that $15 million would get you a fuck of a lot of conventional CPU as well. It's enough to buy 10,000 high-end PCs and network 'em together (resulting in about the biggest Beowulf cluster in existence). And that wouldn't require any new programming technology.
I think these guys also claimed that they'd sell these things for $3-4k...