I don't pretend to feel the difference between 2.0GHz and 2.1GHz.
Although these days I don't feel the difference between 1.0GHz and 2.0GHz, and I'm a software developer. I think that riles up some of the hardware fanboys, but it's true.
Turbo Pascal used to compile at thousands of lines per second on machines with a clock nearly two orders of magnitude slower that tool several cycles per instruction instead of running several instructions per cycle.
Object Pascal (Delphi) still compiles that fast, only now it does include optimization (maybe not as hardcore as some C compilers, but still pretty good). Borland used to advertise speeds of 800,000 lines per minute, back in the day when a 266MHz Pentium II was a hot machine. For most projects, the compilation speed is *zero*. For medium sized projects, it's in the "barely perceptible" range (as in maybe 1/30 second). Very, very impressive.
Why is it so fast? There are a variety of reasons, in rough order of importance:
1. There are no header files. All exported identifiers are in the "interface" section of the main source file. 2. Interface information is always precompiled into a lean format, so there's no need to #include giant files (kind of like having all headers always be precompiled). 3. There's no preprocessor. 4. "Object" files are stored in a lean "almost linked" intermediate format, rather than traditional, bulky object formats. This makes the linker a very simple and fast affair, but linking can be the slowest part of building a C++ project. 5. The compiler, linker, and build manager are all in one executable, so there's no loading programs during compilation (typically for C++, make is loaded first, the compiler is loaded for each source file, then the linker is loaded at the end; yes, disk caching helps here). 6. Object Pascal is generally a cleaner language than C and C++, so parsing and optimization are easier.
Middle of the Pack is not a step up for Apple... The G4 chips outperform Intel and there microinstruction intuperted to Risc instructions.... alot more goes into a processor than it's MHZ... Take a read of Hennessy and Patterson's book Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach
True, but there's still no denying that current Pentium 4's are faster. For the sake of argument, let's say that an 800MHz G4 is roughly equivalent to a 1.4GHz Pentium 4. Well, now a bottom-end $500 Dell is shipping with a 1.8GHz processor, the norm is 2-2.4GHz, and you can buy up to 2.8GHz, if you really want to throw your money way.
Bottom line: Yes, the G4 is faster than most people claim, but it is still measurably slower than what Intel is currently offering.
In these type of discussions, Linux is equated with the Linux kernel, some device drivers, and maybe a handful of utilities like sendmail and so on. After that you get into debates about scripting languages and window managers and desktop environments and all that--none of which could be considered part of "standard" Linux.
Standard Windows, however, includes graphics libraries and scripting systems and a GUI, and even tools like file browsers and Internet Explorer are considered part of Windows. Not surprisingly, most of the security problems are in those high-level tools, not the kernel itself. Now it could be argued that the kernel shouldn't allow tools to cause problems, but that's wishful thinking. Microsoft introduced a scripting language into Word, and that's been the cause of so-called "document viruses," for example.
To do a fair comparison, you need to put together a Linux machine running KDE, Star Office, a graphical email client, and so on. And then you have to consider all security exploits in KDE and all applications that come with it. But of course that's never how comparisons like this are done. If a KDE application is at fault, then we're quick to dismiss it as a KDE problem, not a Linux problem. And so we run in circles with this kind of meaningless argument.
68K architecture may have 16 registers, but they are 16-bit, while x86 are 32-bit.
it makes you wonder if this guy has ever touched a 68000 in his life, or if he's just spouting incorrectly remembered facts from a college survey course.
Re:why would anyone quit gaming?
on
The Aging Gamer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why would anyone quit gaming?
Because games get stale after a while, especially with most games pigeonholed into cliche-ridden genres: FPS, RTS, "character with attitude" platformer, racing, fighting, RPG. What eventually started bugging me is that most games are designed to take X hours to "beat." You buy the game, you plow through it, you see all the movies and all the levels and get the same experience out of it that everyone else does, and then you're done. So not only do you need a huge block of time to play, but you're just following a script. The cry for story-based games has made this much worse than it used to be.
What I really want is to sit down for short bursts and play something unique. But instead it's like going to a video store that only rents movies like Collateral Damage and The Phantom Menace (ugh!), except that they're each 15 hours long.
Ridiculous. You're saying that architectures with lots of regs are inferior because they make you save lots of registers at certain times, but reg-starved architectures make you save them all the time, all over the place, in any code that feels the slightest register pressure.
No. What I'm saying is that leaving things in memory, rather than pulling them into registers and potentially having to spill registers as a result, can often be more efficient. It's been shown that passing parameters in registers can be a bad things sometimes, because you often immediately have to move those registers to non-transient registers, so there's no win.
So what he's suggestion is yet *another* band-aid on an already patched together architecture. This is no different than tacking 32-bit mode on top of a segmented 16-bit architecture, or the bizarre MMX/fp register sharing nonsense.
With more registers, you would need less clock speed.
Have you ever looked at the function entry and exit for for processors like MIPS or PowerPC? There can easily be 20-40 instructions (at 4 bytes per instruction) to save and restore registers. Sometimes fewer registers is a win.
Unless you were lucky enough to be involved in a web-type startup in 1996, this has no effect on you. So we're talking, what, like 0.0002% of this supposed Generation X?
And you know what, we're still here witnessing the rise of the web. You can get cheap web space. You can put up whatever you want. You can use Google. And that's all pretty amazing, and it offers some big possibilities for future business opportunity. Just because you were in some company without a product or business plan that managed to get $100 million in venture capital, then blow it all in four years, doesn't mean that the rest of your life will be a train wreck.
No, that is completely wrong. With consoles now, you have bland games with boring graphics so that the game can be pushed to as many consoles as possible.
Most major console titles of recent years have all been for a single platform:
Halo (Xbox) Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2) Mario Sunshine (GC) Final Fantasy X (PS2) GTA 3 (PS2, later ported to PC) Devil May Cry (PS2) Super Monkey Ball (GC) Kingdom Hearts (PS2) Zelda (GC, not released yet) Jet Grind Radio (Dreamcast)
I can speak from personal experience on this one here. This mobo isn't for your hardcore gamer, its for your average computer user who still wants to play video games at a reasonable price.
You're right. The hardcore gamer these days doesn't mess with PC video cards, but owns a PS2, Xbox, and/or Game Cube. If you don't, then you're missing out on lots and lots of really great games. Compare the number of incredible console games released in the last two years with the number of PC games that actually make good use out of high-end video card features like vertex and pixel shaders. It's almost as if the PC 3D card market exists entirely to support first person shooters.
Before modding me down, realize I'm a game developer. I love the hardware in cards like the GeForce 4. But I see those cards are being great for development platforms, not for commercial software. Heck, half of the machines that Dell sells ship with the Intel integrated 3D chipset, and we're talking 2+ GHz machines. The 3D game market on the PC, to a great, great extent, has become an marginally profitable niche.
Re:ID are mentoined but not Commander Keen ?
on
High Score
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It's a pity, really : Commander Keen was one of the biggest step PC gamer ever made in terms of playability. This was the first time a game was so feature-rich
But it was only a milestone if you were a PC owner who never had any exposure to the NES, SMS, Genesis, TurboGrafx, etc. It was one of the first times a PC game managed to equal the playability of an 8-bit console game from 5 or 6 years earlier. If you think about it, when Commander Keen was a big deal on the PC, Sonic the Hedgehog was the hot console game. And, _man_ did Sonic make Keen look lame. But in comparison with the relative handful of good PC arcade games prior to Keen, yes, it was a milestone.
Good, free, online classic gaming book
on
High Score
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Halcyon Days. This used to be commercial a few years back.
No, they have not done that. They simply haven't come forward to say much of anything on DRM. That doesn't mean that they won't. Be careful what you read into silence.
It looks like China is starting to tell both Microsoft and Intel to take a hike. Interesting times are ahead
There have been numerous alternatives to the x86 architecture outside of China, but most of them have flopped:
* National Semiconductor's 32-bit processors. * Intel's i860 and i960. * Motorola's 88000 (not the 68000!). * The DEC Alpha. * Stack-based processors from Harris. * Sun's UltraSparc. * PowerPC (popular, but is not displacing the x86).
Another failed break from existing architectures
on
Itanium Problems
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· Score: 2
The Itanium isn't Intel's first attempt at a much more powerful non-x86 architecture. In the late 1980s, Intel was pushing the i860--eventually succeeded by the i960--which really were amazing compared to the x86 line, but they flopped.
And who can forget Motorla's 88000 line, which was meant to be the follow-on the the 68K?
* First high performance consumer level 3D card for PCs. * First multitexturing in a PC card. * First trilinear filtering in a PC card. * Glide API, back when Direct3D and OpenGL were poorly supported on the PC. * Higher precision color blending with 16 bits per pixel. Operations occurred internally at 22-bits, I think. * Able to connect multiple Voodoo 2's together for--what was then--unheard of performance.
Let's not rewrite history to fit your own ideas, okay?
In terms of hardware site fanboy numbers, sure. But we're hitting the point where few people [*] can tell the difference between 1GHz and 2.8GHz and even hardware engineers are starting to realize this, so maybe it Just Doesn't Matter.
One thing I respect about the PowerPC chips is that the power consumption is drastically lower than for x86 chips. Drastically. It would be a shame to lose that and have everyone using 100 watt processors a couple of years down the road.
It isn't that consoles are beating PCs, it's that PCs continually get more and more fragmented and stressful to work with. I *hate* having to play 1975 system administrator at home, yet that's exactly what I feel like when I buy high-end 3D games. And I'm a game programmer, not some clueless newbie grandma.
We've known ever since the Halloween Documents that they have been running scared
I think it's pretty clear that Microsoft is unconcerned with Linux and rightly so. When you run Linux, you have to be very paranoid about what scanner or digital camera or video card you buy. We've all been there. There have been slashdot stories about it. The bottom line is that the fundamental differences between Linux and Windows and MacOS are very few, when it comes right down to it. But switching from Windows to Linux, assuming you do more than just download MP3s and browse the web, is a big pain in the arse. The restrictiveness that comes from not being able to walk into Best Buy and get whatever it is you want--application, game, new video card--is frustrating. It isn't worth dealing with unless the alternative gives you something that's way, way, beyond what Windows gives you in a tangible way. And speaking as someone who runs both Linux and Windows, that isn't the case.
"Who the fuck are you?" I have never heard of Janis Ian.
Oh for crying out loud, all you had to do was follow the link in the article (ahem: janisian.com). And please don't put her down by claiming she's old or you never heard her music. Fame is very fleeting in music. Bands that are on top of the world now will be have people saying "Who? I never heard of them!" in fifteen years.
And anyone who is pro-music should realize that the best music isn't always from people who get coverage on Entertainment Tonight. One of Janis's big points is that there's a difference between mega-bands like Radiohead and the 99.9% of other bands that don't sell 10 million copies of each CD they release.
...are gleaned from other news sites 95% of the time (the exceptions being book reviews, interviews, and Ask Slashdot). It's not like Slashdot is a source of original content. (Somehow this reminds me of people using pop culture names for their web handles, then complaining when someone else uses the same handle.)
Where is a new FPS with original goal that doesn't use the Ray Tracing BSP method
I agree with your post, and I hate to nit-pick it, but the "ray tracing BSP method" pretty much died with Quake 2, though fanboys and amateur game developers are a bit slow to realize this.
I think your factor of two from Quake 2 to Quake 3 is way high. More like 0.25, or 0.5 at most. It was a complete yawner in so many ways.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't pretend to feel the difference between 2.0GHz and 2.1GHz.
Although these days I don't feel the difference between 1.0GHz and 2.0GHz, and I'm a software developer. I think that riles up some of the hardware fanboys, but it's true.
Turbo Pascal used to compile at thousands of lines per second on machines with a clock nearly two orders of magnitude slower that tool several cycles per instruction instead of running several instructions per cycle.
Object Pascal (Delphi) still compiles that fast, only now it does include optimization (maybe not as hardcore as some C compilers, but still pretty good). Borland used to advertise speeds of 800,000 lines per minute, back in the day when a 266MHz Pentium II was a hot machine. For most projects, the compilation speed is *zero*. For medium sized projects, it's in the "barely perceptible" range (as in maybe 1/30 second). Very, very impressive.
Why is it so fast? There are a variety of reasons, in rough order of importance:
1. There are no header files. All exported identifiers are in the "interface" section of the main source file.
2. Interface information is always precompiled into a lean format, so there's no need to #include giant files (kind of like having all headers always be precompiled).
3. There's no preprocessor.
4. "Object" files are stored in a lean "almost linked" intermediate format, rather than traditional, bulky object formats. This makes the linker a very simple and fast affair, but linking can be the slowest part of building a C++ project.
5. The compiler, linker, and build manager are all in one executable, so there's no loading programs during compilation (typically for C++, make is loaded first, the compiler is loaded for each source file, then the linker is loaded at the end; yes, disk caching helps here).
6. Object Pascal is generally a cleaner language than C and C++, so parsing and optimization are easier.
Middle of the Pack is not a step up for Apple... The G4 chips outperform Intel and there microinstruction intuperted to Risc instructions.... alot more goes into a processor than it's MHZ... Take a read of Hennessy and Patterson's book Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach
True, but there's still no denying that current Pentium 4's are faster. For the sake of argument, let's say that an 800MHz G4 is roughly equivalent to a 1.4GHz Pentium 4. Well, now a bottom-end $500 Dell is shipping with a 1.8GHz processor, the norm is 2-2.4GHz, and you can buy up to 2.8GHz, if you really want to throw your money way.
Bottom line: Yes, the G4 is faster than most people claim, but it is still measurably slower than what Intel is currently offering.
In these type of discussions, Linux is equated with the Linux kernel, some device drivers, and maybe a handful of utilities like sendmail and so on. After that you get into debates about scripting languages and window managers and desktop environments and all that--none of which could be considered part of "standard" Linux.
Standard Windows, however, includes graphics libraries and scripting systems and a GUI, and even tools like file browsers and Internet Explorer are considered part of Windows. Not surprisingly, most of the security problems are in those high-level tools, not the kernel itself. Now it could be argued that the kernel shouldn't allow tools to cause problems, but that's wishful thinking. Microsoft introduced a scripting language into Word, and that's been the cause of so-called "document viruses," for example.
To do a fair comparison, you need to put together a Linux machine running KDE, Star Office, a graphical email client, and so on. And then you have to consider all security exploits in KDE and all applications that come with it. But of course that's never how comparisons like this are done. If a KDE application is at fault, then we're quick to dismiss it as a KDE problem, not a Linux problem. And so we run in circles with this kind of meaningless argument.
With such flagrantly wrong statements as:
68K architecture may have 16 registers, but they are 16-bit, while x86 are 32-bit.
it makes you wonder if this guy has ever touched a 68000 in his life, or if he's just spouting incorrectly remembered facts from a college survey course.
Why would anyone quit gaming?
Because games get stale after a while, especially with most games pigeonholed into cliche-ridden genres: FPS, RTS, "character with attitude" platformer, racing, fighting, RPG. What eventually started bugging me is that most games are designed to take X hours to "beat." You buy the game, you plow through it, you see all the movies and all the levels and get the same experience out of it that everyone else does, and then you're done. So not only do you need a huge block of time to play, but you're just following a script. The cry for story-based games has made this much worse than it used to be.
What I really want is to sit down for short bursts and play something unique. But instead it's like going to a video store that only rents movies like Collateral Damage and The Phantom Menace (ugh!), except that they're each 15 hours long.
Ridiculous. You're saying that architectures with lots of regs are inferior because they make you save lots of registers at certain times, but reg-starved architectures make you save them all the time, all over the place, in any code that feels the slightest register pressure.
No. What I'm saying is that leaving things in memory, rather than pulling them into registers and potentially having to spill registers as a result, can often be more efficient. It's been shown that passing parameters in registers can be a bad things sometimes, because you often immediately have to move those registers to non-transient registers, so there's no win.
So what he's suggestion is yet *another* band-aid on an already patched together architecture. This is no different than tacking 32-bit mode on top of a segmented 16-bit architecture, or the bizarre MMX/fp register sharing nonsense.
With more registers, you would need less clock speed.
Have you ever looked at the function entry and exit for for processors like MIPS or PowerPC? There can easily be 20-40 instructions (at 4 bytes per instruction) to save and restore registers. Sometimes fewer registers is a win.
Unless you were lucky enough to be involved in a web-type startup in 1996, this has no effect on you. So we're talking, what, like 0.0002% of this supposed Generation X?
And you know what, we're still here witnessing the rise of the web. You can get cheap web space. You can put up whatever you want. You can use Google. And that's all pretty amazing, and it offers some big possibilities for future business opportunity. Just because you were in some company without a product or business plan that managed to get $100 million in venture capital, then blow it all in four years, doesn't mean that the rest of your life will be a train wreck.
No, that is completely wrong. With consoles now, you have bland games with boring graphics so that the game can be pushed to as many consoles as possible.
Most major console titles of recent years have all been for a single platform:
Halo (Xbox)
Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2)
Mario Sunshine (GC)
Final Fantasy X (PS2)
GTA 3 (PS2, later ported to PC)
Devil May Cry (PS2)
Super Monkey Ball (GC)
Kingdom Hearts (PS2)
Zelda (GC, not released yet)
Jet Grind Radio (Dreamcast)
Need I go on?
I can speak from personal experience on this one here. This mobo isn't for your hardcore gamer, its for your average computer user who still wants to play video games at a reasonable price.
You're right. The hardcore gamer these days doesn't mess with PC video cards, but owns a PS2, Xbox, and/or Game Cube. If you don't, then you're missing out on lots and lots of really great games. Compare the number of incredible console games released in the last two years with the number of PC games that actually make good use out of high-end video card features like vertex and pixel shaders. It's almost as if the PC 3D card market exists entirely to support first person shooters.
Before modding me down, realize I'm a game developer. I love the hardware in cards like the GeForce 4. But I see those cards are being great for development platforms, not for commercial software. Heck, half of the machines that Dell sells ship with the Intel integrated 3D chipset, and we're talking 2+ GHz machines. The 3D game market on the PC, to a great, great extent, has become an marginally profitable niche.
It's a pity, really : Commander Keen was one of the biggest step PC gamer ever made in terms of playability.
This was the first time a game was so feature-rich
But it was only a milestone if you were a PC owner who never had any exposure to the NES, SMS, Genesis, TurboGrafx, etc. It was one of the first times a PC game managed to equal the playability of an 8-bit console game from 5 or 6 years earlier. If you think about it, when Commander Keen was a big deal on the PC, Sonic the Hedgehog was the hot console game. And, _man_ did Sonic make Keen look lame. But in comparison with the relative handful of good PC arcade games prior to Keen, yes, it was a milestone.
Halcyon Days. This used to be commercial a few years back.
Now, they are telling the DRM to shove it!
No, they have not done that. They simply haven't come forward to say much of anything on DRM. That doesn't mean that they won't. Be careful what you read into silence.
Well, they did a few years back anyway.
Thank you for generalizing an experience you had in an amusement park in the mid 1990s to todays story about LCD monitors.
It looks like China is starting to tell both Microsoft and Intel to take a hike. Interesting times are ahead
There have been numerous alternatives to the x86 architecture outside of China, but most of them have flopped:
* National Semiconductor's 32-bit processors.
* Intel's i860 and i960.
* Motorola's 88000 (not the 68000!).
* The DEC Alpha.
* Stack-based processors from Harris.
* Sun's UltraSparc.
* PowerPC (popular, but is not displacing the x86).
The Itanium isn't Intel's first attempt at a much more powerful non-x86 architecture. In the late 1980s, Intel was pushing the i860--eventually succeeded by the i960--which really were amazing compared to the x86 line, but they flopped.
And who can forget Motorla's 88000 line, which was meant to be the follow-on the the 68K?
3DFX failed because they didn't innovate
That's silly. 3dfx innovated like crazy:
* First high performance consumer level 3D card for PCs.
* First multitexturing in a PC card.
* First trilinear filtering in a PC card.
* Glide API, back when Direct3D and OpenGL were poorly supported on the PC.
* Higher precision color blending with 16 bits per pixel. Operations occurred internally at 22-bits, I think.
* Able to connect multiple Voodoo 2's together for--what was then--unheard of performance.
Let's not rewrite history to fit your own ideas, okay?
In terms of hardware site fanboy numbers, sure. But we're hitting the point where few people [*] can tell the difference between 1GHz and 2.8GHz and even hardware engineers are starting to realize this, so maybe it Just Doesn't Matter.
One thing I respect about the PowerPC chips is that the power consumption is drastically lower than for x86 chips. Drastically. It would be a shame to lose that and have everyone using 100 watt processors a couple of years down the road.
[*] Those few people are disproportionately loud.
It isn't that consoles are beating PCs, it's that PCs continually get more and more fragmented and stressful to work with. I *hate* having to play 1975 system administrator at home, yet that's exactly what I feel like when I buy high-end 3D games. And I'm a game programmer, not some clueless newbie grandma.
We've known ever since the Halloween Documents that they have been running scared
I think it's pretty clear that Microsoft is unconcerned with Linux and rightly so. When you run Linux, you have to be very paranoid about what scanner or digital camera or video card you buy. We've all been there. There have been slashdot stories about it. The bottom line is that the fundamental differences between Linux and Windows and MacOS are very few, when it comes right down to it. But switching from Windows to Linux, assuming you do more than just download MP3s and browse the web, is a big pain in the arse. The restrictiveness that comes from not being able to walk into Best Buy and get whatever it is you want--application, game, new video card--is frustrating. It isn't worth dealing with unless the alternative gives you something that's way, way, beyond what Windows gives you in a tangible way. And speaking as someone who runs both Linux and Windows, that isn't the case.
"Who the fuck are you?" I have never heard of Janis Ian.
Oh for crying out loud, all you had to do was follow the link in the article (ahem: janisian.com). And please don't put her down by claiming she's old or you never heard her music. Fame is very fleeting in music. Bands that are on top of the world now will be have people saying "Who? I never heard of them!" in fifteen years.
And anyone who is pro-music should realize that the best music isn't always from people who get coverage on Entertainment Tonight. One of Janis's big points is that there's a difference between mega-bands like Radiohead and the 99.9% of other bands that don't sell 10 million copies of each CD they release.
...are gleaned from other news sites 95% of the time (the exceptions being book reviews, interviews, and Ask Slashdot). It's not like Slashdot is a source of original content. (Somehow this reminds me of people using pop culture names for their web handles, then complaining when someone else uses the same handle.)
Where is a new FPS with original goal that doesn't use the Ray Tracing BSP method
I agree with your post, and I hate to nit-pick it, but the "ray tracing BSP method" pretty much died with Quake 2, though fanboys and amateur game developers are a bit slow to realize this.
I think your factor of two from Quake 2 to Quake 3 is way high. More like 0.25, or 0.5 at most. It was a complete yawner in so many ways.