I have an Intel P3 733 w/ 192MB, and it's ok for basic tasks, but it gets bogged down pretty quick and it won't run many recent games (though I'll admit much of the latter is my video card). For a general web/office machine, sub 1GHz is fine, but it won't do much more than that, especially running Win2k/XP.
Now this is funny! I did high-end, commercial 3D game development on a P3 866 running Win2K, and I had *zero* issues with performance. Yes, even with compile times. I'm not trying to be facetious at all; I'm just stating my experiences.
Took the damn thing back to their house and a whole bunch of the extended family was there, it being the holidays and all. They check out the computer and they are all, "Nice computer, only 2.6 GHZ though..."
Heh:) This is the angle that Dell takes. They have those silly charts that shows 2.6GHz is only good for email and web browsing, while 3.0GHz is what you need for serious applications and gaming. In reality, it's only a 15% difference in raw clockspeed! And the actual performance increase is less than that, of course, because the bus and memory speeds are still the same. Okay, and the 3GHz machine uses significantly more power (more than a 15% increase), but Dell doesn't advertise that.
There really isn't a high-end PC market any more. ALL PCs are high-end.
Yep, CPUs keep getting faster, byt high-end x86 processor speeds haven't anywhere near doubled in the last 18 months (and, yes, I know that Moore's law isn't really about speed). A year ago 2.4GHz was a common speed. And guess what...it still is. There was a jump to 2.8GHz--a 16% increase--but beyond that has been trouble. The few percent that got us up to 3GHz was more than balanced by a greater increase in power consumption. Ditto for 3.2GHz. And the 3.4GHz P4 has been delayed for just those reasons. So now we're going up a very steep slope, getting piddling gains for expensive tradeoffs.
Moore's law *will* continue, but the advances need to come from a different direction than the one we've been following. It's already hitting the point where you just don't *want* a high-end processor in your laptop, because you have to keep it running much slower anyway just to get some acceptable battery life. The 3.4GHz Prescott is arguably something you don't want in your *desktop* as it is.
Bottom line: Moore's law is no longer the most important concern in computing technology.
Re:It's not really all THAT odd...
on
NYT on Game Mods
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Heh. Go work for a newspaper and then come back again in six months.
Trust me, I know how this works. Sure, you have some companies trying to railroad stories through, but it's usually some editor who tells a peon "I keep hearing about game mods--write a story!" Then the peon pokes around, contacts people at what Google turns up, then leans hard on whoever is first to reply. I've been through this enough to know the drill.
Re:It's not really all THAT odd...
on
NYT on Game Mods
·
· Score: 1
The Unreal guys probably got proactive about getting this story out there.
No, that's not how you get articles in the press. The journalist wanting to write the article most likely contacted them, and used them as the primary source for the article.
That sums up open source in a nutshell, unfortunately. In reality, there's very little to say about it. Some open source software is great and everyone recognizes this (Apache, Python, Perl) and much more is crap. Ditto for commercial software. Lots of the so-called benefits of open source aren't really as amazing they seem. Ditto for commercial software. What it really comes down to is software that is truly better will stand out. This is why Perl and Python have become so entrenched. Other times it isn't at all clear why a commercial or open source product is better than its competition. This is the bottom line about Linux on the desktop. As much as many zealots want to push the superiority of Linux, it's hard to elucidate--even to other techies--why it's so much superior to alternatives (one side talks about security and the UNIX philosophy; the other side talks about fewer driver headaches and applications that work with much less fussing). When such arguments turn into "open vs. closed" then it comes across as a dodge, an empty way to win an argument.
High-end x86 processor speeds haven't anywhere near doubled in the last 18 months (and, yes, I know that Moore's law isn't really about speed). A year ago 2.4GHz was a common speed. And guess what...it still is. There was a jump to 2.8GHz--a 16% increase--but beyond that has been trouble. The few percent that got us up to 3GHz was more than balanced by a greater increase in power consumption. Ditto for 3.2GHz. And the 3.4GHz P4 has been delayed for just those reasons. So now we're going up a very steep slope, getting piddling gains for expensive tradeoffs.
The big wins will likely come outside of the x86 field, unless Intel scrambles and comes up with something brilliant (which they very well may).
So you're defending open source because one of its proponents is jokingly called a "benevolent dictactor," and a past leader of China was also a benevolent dictator? Please stop and reflect on your argument.
Re:Taking a moment for clarification.
on
On The Death Of Unix
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Linux is not Unix. Essentially, Unix is something that comes from the Unix codebase, which, essentially, Linux does not. Linux implements Posix, just like a Unix, but it does so many other things better.
Use Unix. Use Linux. Then just try to tell the difference. I've been there; there's essentially no different from a user's point of view.
Wow, nostalgia! I remember the blue screen of death. I used to see it back when I used the old pre-NT Windows kernels. I haven't seen it a single time in the three years since I upgraded to Windows 2000.
The article offers up this question: might there be other metrics that might be important to supercomputing, rather than relying solely on processing speed?
Not to sound flippant, but...duh. Okay, I know I sound flippant. But seriously, why has it taken so long to realize that processing speed is not of the utmost importance? It's like saying one car is better than another because has a top speed of 180MPH and the other 174MPH, ignore that the "slower" car gets 30% better mileage. There's such a thing as total cost of ownership.
Now if only Slashdotters would realize that this applies to home systems and not just supercomputers.
With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?
What about the programs running inside of jetliners and air traffic control systems? NASAs programs? The programs running heating and cooling systems where you work? Running the fuel injector in your car? In your PCs BIOS? On the server of any company that lets you buy things via internet? Inside credit card validation boxes? Odds are you never think about these things, but e-voting is a high profile thing to harp on at the moment.
This has nothing to do with open vs. closed source. It has everything to do with bad engineering practices on the part of the e-voting companies.
Look at the number of polygons that each deck is capable of rendering and you will think differently. I realize that alot of this has to do with memory/graphics/bus/etc but that is what counts. Compared to the other systems, the Gamecube is seriously lacking in HP.
Roughly in order of power, from highest to lowest:
Xbox GameCube PS2
And guess what? The PS2 is outselling the other two consoles COMBINED, and by a large margin. Tech is not everything. In the next round of consoles, tech will mean even less.
But seriously folks, what does this mean for GameCube 2's "air supply". With ATI and IBM tied up (legally,financially) with exclusive tech deals with M$
IBM is not "tied up" with Microsoft. Remember, IBM is also supplying processors for Sony (the "CELL"). The PowerPC is a commodity processor used in lots of devices. Maybe the modified PPC970 is just for Microsoft, but that doesn't apply to the PPC970 or PPC line in general.
Most embedded CPUs are not x86-based. They're not PowerPC or ARM based either. It's just that most people aren't familiar with what CPUs are out there, only what's available for PC boxes.
That said, consider that the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 use MIPS processors. The Sega Saturn used a Hitachi SH-2. The Dreamcast used an SH-4. The 3DO console was ARM based. The Nintendo 64 uses a MIPS. The GameCube uses a PowerPC. The Game Boy Color is Z80 based. The Game Boy Advance uses an ARM. The Nokia N-Gage also uses an ARM.
In short, non-x86 based game consoles are the norm, not the exception. You simply can't put a super hot P4 in an embedded environment. Intel knows this. That's not the market they're after with the P4. This is basic embedded systems design.
I peeked at one of the screenshots, and saw they format their C++ classes as "CClassname." I lost a little bit of respect for them.:) Legit or not, can we kill off Hungarian notation already?
Yes, let's all put down one of the most anticipated games in a long time, and the tremendous software engineering feat behind it, because Matt Green doesn't like their naming conventions! Half Life 2 sucks! Valve sucks!
Heck, if I can't find it on Google in a couple minutes, it doesn't exist.
Yeah, it's a joke, I know:)
Realistically, though, *lots* of information isn't freely available on the web. Even in tech fields, there are tens of thousands of papers that don't exist in digitized form. And it's pretty easy to buy a book--not something like "Learn Java 2 in 24 Hours"--filled with information that you can't find on the web.
In fact, one of the key points is that people still make a living writing books. Putting those books on the web for free is the exception, not the rule.
It's also the case that when it rains it pours: there are certain topics that the web is flooded with (OpenGL, OOP fundamentals), and others that you find very, very little about. One of the drawbacks to only using the web is that you don't know what to think when not much is available about a topic; which is it: (a) not much information exists, or (b) the experts in that field aren't dumping what they know to a web site?
The 3.4GHz Pentium 4, due late this year, dissipates 103 watts. That's completely crazy. It's 200MHz faster than the 3.2GHz chip--roughly 5%--and yet power consumption has increased by significantly more than 5%. This is how the last several P4 speed bumps have gone, and why there was that big story about Intel not being able to keep Moore's "Law" in effect for much longer.
In all likelihood, the P5 is going to have some appalling numbers associated with it. Don't be surprised to see "150W" on the spec sheet. As such, the P5 will be a niche chip, even if the performance is impressive. It's out of the question for notebooks (and more than 50% of PC sales are notebooks). It's not something you'd want in a small form factor PC, which is a fast growing market. And at some point having a super hot, expensive to run PC at home is a losing battle.
If there's one thing that really hurts Linux, it's advocacy, especially when that advocacy is unfounded, uninformed, or overzealous. I really wish these so called "advocates" would just get on with their lives.
Realistically, a lot of people--even knowledgeable, technical people--either prefer Windows or MacOS to Linux, or they see advantages and drawbacks to each of them. To such people, trying to force "Photoshop is better than The GIMP," or "Yes, there is a version of that application for Linux, it's [fill in name of a half-baked Linux application written by a high school student here]," down their throats is downright annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
ut IBM only made the IBM PC because two guys called Steve had started raking in a fortune from the production of a computer put together in a garage.
Wow, you're not up on your computing history. Hint: IBM played a bit of a role in computing prior to the IBM PC.
I have an Intel P3 733 w/ 192MB, and it's ok for basic tasks, but it gets bogged down pretty quick and it won't run many recent games (though I'll admit much of the latter is my video card). For a general web/office machine, sub 1GHz is fine, but it won't do much more than that, especially running Win2k/XP.
Now this is funny! I did high-end, commercial 3D game development on a P3 866 running Win2K, and I had *zero* issues with performance. Yes, even with compile times. I'm not trying to be facetious at all; I'm just stating my experiences.
Took the damn thing back to their house and a whole bunch of the extended family was there, it being the holidays and all. They check out the computer and they are all, "Nice computer, only 2.6 GHZ though..."
:) This is the angle that Dell takes. They have those silly charts that shows 2.6GHz is only good for email and web browsing, while 3.0GHz is what you need for serious applications and gaming. In reality, it's only a 15% difference in raw clockspeed! And the actual performance increase is less than that, of course, because the bus and memory speeds are still the same. Okay, and the 3GHz machine uses significantly more power (more than a 15% increase), but Dell doesn't advertise that.
Heh
There really isn't a high-end PC market any more. ALL PCs are high-end.
The same type of people who built our digital past..
here's a hint, it wasn't megacorp!
No offense, but have you ever heard of IBM? Or DEC? Or Intel? Or Texas Instruments?
Yep, CPUs keep getting faster, byt high-end x86 processor speeds haven't anywhere near doubled in the last 18 months (and, yes, I know that Moore's law isn't really about speed). A year ago 2.4GHz was a common speed. And guess what...it still is. There was a jump to 2.8GHz--a 16% increase--but beyond that has been trouble. The few percent that got us up to 3GHz was more than balanced by a greater increase in power consumption. Ditto for 3.2GHz. And the 3.4GHz P4 has been delayed for just those reasons. So now we're going up a very steep slope, getting piddling gains for expensive tradeoffs.
Moore's law *will* continue, but the advances need to come from a different direction than the one we've been following. It's already hitting the point where you just don't *want* a high-end processor in your laptop, because you have to keep it running much slower anyway just to get some acceptable battery life. The 3.4GHz Prescott is arguably something you don't want in your *desktop* as it is.
Bottom line: Moore's law is no longer the most important concern in computing technology.
Heh. Go work for a newspaper and then come back again in six months.
Trust me, I know how this works. Sure, you have some companies trying to railroad stories through, but it's usually some editor who tells a peon "I keep hearing about game mods--write a story!" Then the peon pokes around, contacts people at what Google turns up, then leans hard on whoever is first to reply. I've been through this enough to know the drill.
The Unreal guys probably got proactive about getting this story out there.
No, that's not how you get articles in the press. The journalist wanting to write the article most likely contacted them, and used them as the primary source for the article.
That sums up open source in a nutshell, unfortunately. In reality, there's very little to say about it. Some open source software is great and everyone recognizes this (Apache, Python, Perl) and much more is crap. Ditto for commercial software. Lots of the so-called benefits of open source aren't really as amazing they seem. Ditto for commercial software. What it really comes down to is software that is truly better will stand out. This is why Perl and Python have become so entrenched. Other times it isn't at all clear why a commercial or open source product is better than its competition. This is the bottom line about Linux on the desktop. As much as many zealots want to push the superiority of Linux, it's hard to elucidate--even to other techies--why it's so much superior to alternatives (one side talks about security and the UNIX philosophy; the other side talks about fewer driver headaches and applications that work with much less fussing). When such arguments turn into "open vs. closed" then it comes across as a dodge, an empty way to win an argument.
High-end x86 processor speeds haven't anywhere near doubled in the last 18 months (and, yes, I know that Moore's law isn't really about speed). A year ago 2.4GHz was a common speed. And guess what...it still is. There was a jump to 2.8GHz--a 16% increase--but beyond that has been trouble. The few percent that got us up to 3GHz was more than balanced by a greater increase in power consumption. Ditto for 3.2GHz. And the 3.4GHz P4 has been delayed for just those reasons. So now we're going up a very steep slope, getting piddling gains for expensive tradeoffs.
The big wins will likely come outside of the x86 field, unless Intel scrambles and comes up with something brilliant (which they very well may).
So you're defending open source because one of its proponents is jokingly called a "benevolent dictactor," and a past leader of China was also a benevolent dictator? Please stop and reflect on your argument.
Linux is not Unix. Essentially, Unix is something that comes from the Unix codebase, which, essentially, Linux does not. Linux implements Posix, just like a Unix, but it does so many other things better.
Use Unix. Use Linux. Then just try to tell the difference. I've been there; there's essentially no different from a user's point of view.
satisfying to see some of those fortunes being spent to help create good software for a change
Classic (unnecessary!) Slashdot editorializing in a news report.
Hint: News has an impact of its own. Ending every story with an inflammatory spin, one that's often misinformed, is not needed.
Wow, nostalgia! I remember the blue screen of death. I used to see it back when I used the old pre-NT Windows kernels. I haven't seen it a single time in the three years since I upgraded to Windows 2000.
The article offers up this question: might there be other metrics that might be important to supercomputing, rather than relying solely on processing speed?
Not to sound flippant, but...duh. Okay, I know I sound flippant. But seriously, why has it taken so long to realize that processing speed is not of the utmost importance? It's like saying one car is better than another because has a top speed of 180MPH and the other 174MPH, ignore that the "slower" car gets 30% better mileage. There's such a thing as total cost of ownership.
Now if only Slashdotters would realize that this applies to home systems and not just supercomputers.
With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?
What about the programs running inside of jetliners and air traffic control systems? NASAs programs? The programs running heating and cooling systems where you work? Running the fuel injector in your car? In your PCs BIOS? On the server of any company that lets you buy things via internet? Inside credit card validation boxes? Odds are you never think about these things, but e-voting is a high profile thing to harp on at the moment.
This has nothing to do with open vs. closed source. It has everything to do with bad engineering practices on the part of the e-voting companies.
Look at the number of polygons that each deck is capable of rendering and you will think differently. I realize that alot of this has to do with memory/graphics/bus/etc but that is what counts. Compared to the other systems, the Gamecube is seriously lacking in HP.
Roughly in order of power, from highest to lowest:
Xbox
GameCube
PS2
And guess what? The PS2 is outselling the other two consoles COMBINED, and by a large margin. Tech is not everything. In the next round of consoles, tech will mean even less.
But seriously folks, what does this mean for GameCube 2's "air supply". With ATI and IBM tied up (legally,financially) with exclusive tech deals with M$
IBM is not "tied up" with Microsoft. Remember, IBM is also supplying processors for Sony (the "CELL"). The PowerPC is a commodity processor used in lots of devices. Maybe the modified PPC970 is just for Microsoft, but that doesn't apply to the PPC970 or PPC line in general.
Most embedded CPUs are not x86-based. They're not PowerPC or ARM based either. It's just that most people aren't familiar with what CPUs are out there, only what's available for PC boxes.
That said, consider that the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 use MIPS processors. The Sega Saturn used a Hitachi SH-2. The Dreamcast used an SH-4. The 3DO console was ARM based. The Nintendo 64 uses a MIPS. The GameCube uses a PowerPC. The Game Boy Color is Z80 based. The Game Boy Advance uses an ARM. The Nokia N-Gage also uses an ARM.
In short, non-x86 based game consoles are the norm, not the exception. You simply can't put a super hot P4 in an embedded environment. Intel knows this. That's not the market they're after with the P4. This is basic embedded systems design.
We are already hitting the limits of how much code can work together without being riddled by bugs. I think we need a advance in programming first.
We've already made such advances in programming, and related programming languages, but most programmers eschew them for C++ and Visual Basic.
Or maybe it does now. The two terms are used interchangeably.
I peeked at one of the screenshots, and saw they format their C++ classes as "CClassname." I lost a little bit of respect for them. :) Legit or not, can we kill off Hungarian notation already?
Yes, let's all put down one of the most anticipated games in a long time, and the tremendous software engineering feat behind it, because Matt Green doesn't like their naming conventions! Half Life 2 sucks! Valve sucks!
Heck, if I can't find it on Google in a couple minutes, it doesn't exist.
:)
Yeah, it's a joke, I know
Realistically, though, *lots* of information isn't freely available on the web. Even in tech fields, there are tens of thousands of papers that don't exist in digitized form. And it's pretty easy to buy a book--not something like "Learn Java 2 in 24 Hours"--filled with information that you can't find on the web.
In fact, one of the key points is that people still make a living writing books. Putting those books on the web for free is the exception, not the rule.
It's also the case that when it rains it pours: there are certain topics that the web is flooded with (OpenGL, OOP fundamentals), and others that you find very, very little about. One of the drawbacks to only using the web is that you don't know what to think when not much is available about a topic; which is it: (a) not much information exists, or (b) the experts in that field aren't dumping what they know to a web site?
"Cool" as in "agreeable to"?
Or "cool" as in "less interested?"
Yeah, RTFA. But what a lousy headline.
The 3.4GHz Pentium 4, due late this year, dissipates 103 watts. That's completely crazy. It's 200MHz faster than the 3.2GHz chip--roughly 5%--and yet power consumption has increased by significantly more than 5%. This is how the last several P4 speed bumps have gone, and why there was that big story about Intel not being able to keep Moore's "Law" in effect for much longer.
In all likelihood, the P5 is going to have some appalling numbers associated with it. Don't be surprised to see "150W" on the spec sheet. As such, the P5 will be a niche chip, even if the performance is impressive. It's out of the question for notebooks (and more than 50% of PC sales are notebooks). It's not something you'd want in a small form factor PC, which is a fast growing market. And at some point having a super hot, expensive to run PC at home is a losing battle.
If there's one thing that really hurts Linux, it's advocacy, especially when that advocacy is unfounded, uninformed, or overzealous. I really wish these so called "advocates" would just get on with their lives.
Realistically, a lot of people--even knowledgeable, technical people--either prefer Windows or MacOS to Linux, or they see advantages and drawbacks to each of them. To such people, trying to force "Photoshop is better than The GIMP," or "Yes, there is a version of that application for Linux, it's [fill in name of a half-baked Linux application written by a high school student here]," down their throats is downright annoying.