It was a very thin history, like you'd see on a gaming news site run by someone in high school. He took a simple, superficial look at a certain type of game, but ignored everything else, especially the flight simulators (which date back to 1980 or so on the Apple II, speaking simply in terms of home computer hardware).
I'm starting to get annoyed by the movement of academics into the game "field." Now they can state the obvious, but it carries more weight because they're professors.
I remember when I used to follow the demoscene back in 1992 or so. At the time it was becoming clear that there was a stifling lack of creativity. Some of the tech was nice, but there were endless, endless, painfully long shots of tunnels with plasma on the walls, and rotating geometric shapes. Earlier this year, when I was bored, I went and downloaded some of the most highly reccommended demos. Bleh. Except for using 3D hardware now, nothing has changed. It's like looking back on MAD magazine when you're 20 and realizing "Wow, was this magazine always this unfunny?"
The technology side of demos has gotten much less impressive because every game already includes flashy 3D coding. only they're more impressive because of the _game_ side of things. Goofy rendering tricks just don't cut it any more. But there doesn't seem to be anything to demos other than techology--and techno music:)
Go to any chat room and you will immediately and desperately hope that there's more to the net than 15 year old geeks. Collecting warez, MP3s, and whining that everything should be free--because you have no income--is not any kind of revolution.
Uh.... how incompatible.... in so mach as it runs any x86 code, back so far as the 8086 back in the 70's?
Really? So the Itanium isn't some new-fangled CPU that breaks with the past after all? It can run x86 code as is, natively, without emulation? I had no idea.
IA64 is definitely not intended for the personal computing market - at least not for a long time yet. This is a server processor
Ah, that brings back memories. Every new processor is always "initially targeted at the server market" going all the way back to the 386 at least. Makes me smile every time I see it!
...because there's not exactly going to be an immediate, huge demand for a greatly overpriced, unproven processor that's incompatible with just about everything that's been built up in the PC-clone era of the last 19 years. Similarly, you can't run Windows 98 on a PowerPC or Alpha. Does it matter?
It remains to be seen if the Itanium is really where personal computing is headed. After all, Intel has introduced other non-x86 processors in the past and had very high hopes for them. The RISC i860 processor, introduced in 1989, is a good example. The successor, the i960 is still available. But these chips are outside the x86 realm, and there's reason to think that the Itanium could be as well. Moving to an entirely new processor *family*, not just the next generation of what's currently available, is not to be taken lightly. This is doubly true when the benefits of such a change are not at all obvious.
I love it! Speak the truth, get tagged as flamebait! Slashdotters, congratulations! You've become the same misguided, wallowing community that swarmed around the Amiga in the early 1990s. That's not to say the Amiga wasn't some bang-up hardware; that's beside the point. The point is that being an armchair industry analyst and whiner does more harm than good. If you're a geek and want to make a difference, then do something. Don't just read about it and make pithy comments!
The truth of the matter is, 3Dfx was, for a goodly 2 years, one of the first big name companies to start the IP onslaught...
You're trying very hard to make this article fit your agenda, aren't you? How is 3dfx different than any of the hundreds or thousands of companies who are suing other other companies for similar reasons? The difference is that you *heard* about 3dfx, because you are game/PC-hardware geek. Just because you happen to know about a particular case doesn't make it extraordinary.
John F. gave thoughtful, intelligent answers. He's obviously both a talented musician and someone who isn't burying his head in the sands of misguided, ranting idealism. Most of the Slashdot questions, though not necessarily those passed on to TMBG, assumed that John and John run around being wacky, anti-authoritarian loons, and that everything they did had a "stick it to the man" angle. As it turns out, they didn't just release MP3s out of hatred for record companies or an inate beliefe that music needs to be free. John didn't whisper some bizarre underground phrase to the stage crasher (just "Can you please get off the stage?"). They aren't trying to isolate themselves from business and "evil" money. Bottom line: The Slashdot impression of TMBG was a projection of Slashdot ideals, and the image turned out to be completely false. I suspect this is happening on a regular basis, and headline stories have a much more unrealistic spin on them than people want to believe.
I think I will bow out of Slashdot completely for the new year. As sad as it may sound, I think there are doers and then there are those who read Slashdot. I'm horrified to be associated with the latter.
Rheingold notes the enormous damage done by hostile participants of virtual communities who seek attention through aggression and who take up an enormous, disproportionate amount of time and energy online, even when they comprise a distinct minority. In fact, this pattern has probably destroyed more virtual communities than any other single factor.
That's Katz quoting another author, but it's still a good quote. The general trouble with virtual communities is that they don't have any prequisites for participation. If I want to talk about, say, OS design, then I'd like to talk about it with people who have some kind of background in that field, even that background consists only of being widely read. I don't want blind advocates butting in all the time with cookie cutter opinions. I also don't want to talk with people who think they know a lot, but mostly have a lot of misconceptions and lack well-roundedness. For example, you can't talk about OSes with someone who only knows Windows and Linux, especially if that person seems to think that Linux is some entirely new concept in operating systems that came out of the blue to rock the 1990s.
I enjoy writing, and discussing writing with other authors can be interesting, even via email. But talking to people of the "I have a great idea! I just need to know how to sell it to someone who can write it for me!" mentality is draining and no fun. No contact with other writers would be better than that.
I guess overall I'm tiring of having to be my own editor. I much, much prefer to read a specialized magazine or newsletter than wade through web discussions.
A lot of people I know who use computers every day (though not power users like most/. readers) never use an application in anything but full screen mode and it makes me wonder when microsoft will stop allowing resizable windows because it "confuses users".
I'm a power user/programmer and I dislike resizable windows. I would much prefer each application to have its own screen and a way to hotkey between them. Seriously. The faux desktop interface adds more doodads and nonsense than it is worth.
Am I the only person tired of seeing "Over 500 different software packages included!" on the back of the box for various commercial distributions? The "500 packages" mean very little to most people, as they include Lisp and Scheme compilers, 10 different window managers, bizarre utilities, etc. And 90% of them are severely stale and need to be downloaded as it is.
No PC actually consumes that much power. You may have a 300 Watt or a 450 Watt Power supply but its just that... a supply. The computer probably uses about 50-100 Watts when in an Idle mode (no cdroms or harddrives spinning) and that isn't any more of a waste than leaving a standard light bulb on all the time.
It depends. Many PCs don't spin down their hard drives. Current processors can use 50W or more by themselves. PCs are shipping with huge power supplies for a reason. I think recent PCs are probably more in the 200W range when running a screen saver.
Agreed. If you're not using your PC for a while, just turn it off. With PCs sporting 450W power supplies these days, containing as many as five fans, and having video cards that get hot to the touch, turning the whole thing off is a good idea.
So when you say that its all about 'a few pimply-faced geeks' you are either a troll or off your rocker, because this market is huge. This means as much culturally to us as much as movies mean to us culturally.
I'd disagree with that. Over half of video game sales are during the Christmas season. I've heard figures as high as 80%. Video games as entertainment for kids 15 and under is a huge, huge market, just as Nickelodeon (a cable channel, for those outside the US), and Barbie dolls are. Outside of that market, I would hardly call video games larger than movies. They may make more money--as does the toy industry--but the cultural impact isn't there. Remembering "up, up, down, down" is similar to remembering a cartoon you used to watch when you came home from school in the fourth grade (for me it was Speed Racer), or a toy that it seemed all the other kids had, like Gobots.
Compared to movies and books, I can't help but find video games as shallow. I like them, sure, but even the games that are touted for their plots--like Half Life--just seem like so much bubblegum fluff from the fifties. "Bad aliens have invaded and you, the last hope of mankind, must exterminate them!" There's a funny backlash against kiddie games that's resulted in a plethora of Blade Runner-esque post-apocalyptic games set in dark futures. But the gaming experience hasn't advanced much. Sure, you can pay with action figures when you're 30, but is it really all that appealling?
The video game industry has expanded like crazy, but it hasn't shown any artistic growth.
This assumes you are writing code with gcc. If you are using one of the other myriad of compiled languages available, everything from Lisp to OCaml to Pascal to Eiffel, then you most certainly want to distribute binaries. Not everyone has the latest versions of those compilers sitting around. There are sound software engineering reasons to not use C and C++ for everything.
Reading this article I can't help but think of a grandfather sitting on his porch talking to all his grandchildren. You know, the types of stories that begin "Back in my day..." My responce to this article? "Yes grandpa... I know... 12 miles to school... uphill bothways..." These technologies all had flaws in them, hence the reason that they are seen in mainstream use. (note the use of mainstream here, search long enough and you will find anything being used) It time to just let go of the old technologies and embrace the new ones.
The point of the article is sometimes that good technologies disappear and are replaced with new ones of questionable value. Reel mowers are a good example. For a small lawn, reel mowers:
1. are quieter
2. are less expensive
3. require less maintenance
4. provide less opportunity for serious injury
5. don't need gasoline, oil or electricity
6. don't emit fumes
When I see a guy mowing his 1/8 acre with a riding mower, I can't help but laugh. Sure, he has the "technologically superior" solution, but he's also ridiculous:)
I am dumbfounded at how far some marketeers will apparently go to annoy their target audiences. If I bought a shirt, spilled coffee on it, then returned it the the store claiming "This shirt was stained when I bought it," then they'd happily take it back. I've seen stores take back some questionable items. The principle at work here is that it isn't worth pissing off future customers over what are effectively nickels and dimes to a large corporation.
But with spam and web advertising this doesn't apply. Spammers creatively alter subject lines to get past filters. Now really, does this make sense? People who get annoyed by spam are filtering it out, so are they really going to be receptive to you getting around filters by adding a comma after each letter? Much web advertising is the same way. Trickery like preventing use of the Back button and popups that appear when you leave a site is *annoying*. This is doubly true for people with modems--the majority of surfers. Having your connection grind to a halt because some stupid Java application is popping up windows and grabbing images is the worst negatively publicity you can imagine.
Okay, that's not true. Making modem users sit through animated ads before viewing a web page is even worse.
It is not that we need a faster computer to do the same things; we need a faster computer for the latest killer app. We needed to upgrade so that we could do desktop publishing, gaming, graphs, spell checking, the Internet, music sharing, or movie editing.
Good point. We've gotten into trouble by trying to have one machine for everything. That is, most people just want word processing and web browsing. The bulk of computers has come from needing to support high end applications, such as 3D modelling and magazine layout. Arguably it would have been better to have simple machines for most uses, then high-end specialized machines for those businesses that need it. This would be better than transferring unneeded R&D costs to the consumer every time something new comes along: MMX, Pentium III & 4, AGP, USB, SSE2, 3D-Now!, AMD 64-bit architecture, etc.
Gotta give 3dfx credit; it jumpstarted 3D hardware for the PC. They weren't the first, but they brought inexpensive workstation class 3D to home PCs with a bang. Even today, the Voodoo 1 is an impressive piece of hardware.
Just speculation here, but I can't help but wonder if the performance video card market is much smaller than assumed. I expect most people just use whatever video card came with their machine. I've read that 80% of all video cards out there are from ATI, because they dominate the OEM market. Having a bunch of big fish fighting over the last 20% would be pretty rough.
This has been said often enough for so many different processors that it has become trite. From experience, extra bits of compiler optimization rarely pay off in a big way. Quite often, it is impossible to tell the difference between minimal and full optimization settings. I suspect that contrived examples are being used for benchmarks, such as an image filter that takes 10 seconds to run and spends all its time inside of a 16 instruction loop. Sure, one tweak to the scheduler will make it run in 8 minutes instead, but how realistic is this? It isn't a win in the general case.
It seems that this story is being greatly misinterpreted. It is not a story of failure, it is a story of engineering.
Of course every geek would like a processor that has 500 integer units, 200 floating point units, and a gigabyte of on-chip RAM. But cost, development time, power consumption, heat, and reliability all come into the picture. The P4 team started with lofty goals and scaled them back to meet reality. That's how any hardware or software engineering project works. How often do you hear people say "We added tons of extra features, had better performance than projected, and finished six months early"?
A good many consumer hardware junkies don't understand that "faster, faster, more, more, more" is not a worthy goal. The goal is "good performance given real-world constraints." I know that people who would willingly pay $500 for a video card don't understand this, but this is how engineering of commodity items works. AMD has exactly the same set of constraints. It's not like AMD engineers can magically solve all of these problems. If anything, perhaps AMD is keeping their sights lower, so they don't have to scale back as much in the end.
When I saw the headline, I cringed and thought "Oh no, so many of the messages are going to include the acronym "AMD" in the first sentence. Ugh. And it turned out to be horribly true. I can barely wade through this stuff. Had I enough moderator points, I would tag them all as either "offtopic" or "troll."
AMD zealots, I mean this seriously: You have moved past the realm of simply enjoying a product to becoming annoying zealots, like Jehovah's Witnesses. Please, please, please, consider taking a lower key "live and let live" approach. As it is, I think many companies shy away from anything involving the term "Linux" because they know what kind of people come swarming around when they hear that word.
This is not a troll, nor a flame. It's a gentle suggestion that the rabid, juvenile AMD advocacy is doing harm in at least my particular case. I doubt I am alone.
Yeah, and remember how cars went to 8 cylinders, to 10 to 12, and even to 16 and higher in some cases. Then 8 seemed to be a reasonable upper limit in terms of size, performance, and reliability. Most cars have 4 cylinder engines these days.
The 640K comment was a bit premature, yes, that doesn't mean that memory sizes will increase for ever and ever. There's a point of diminishing returns. In terms of processor speed I think we're hitting it now.
And funnily enough, there are machines out there that don't even have 640K, like smaller PDAs and the biggest selling hand-held computer of all time: the Game Boy.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a very thin history, like you'd see on a gaming news site run by someone in high school. He took a simple, superficial look at a certain type of game, but ignored everything else, especially the flight simulators (which date back to 1980 or so on the Apple II, speaking simply in terms of home computer hardware).
I'm starting to get annoyed by the movement of academics into the game "field." Now they can state the obvious, but it carries more weight because they're professors.
I remember when I used to follow the demoscene back in 1992 or so. At the time it was becoming clear that there was a stifling lack of creativity. Some of the tech was nice, but there were endless, endless, painfully long shots of tunnels with plasma on the walls, and rotating geometric shapes. Earlier this year, when I was bored, I went and downloaded some of the most highly reccommended demos. Bleh. Except for using 3D hardware now, nothing has changed. It's like looking back on MAD magazine when you're 20 and realizing "Wow, was this magazine always this unfunny?"
:)
The technology side of demos has gotten much less impressive because every game already includes flashy 3D coding. only they're more impressive because of the _game_ side of things. Goofy rendering tricks just don't cut it any more. But there doesn't seem to be anything to demos other than techology--and techno music
Go to any chat room and you will immediately and desperately hope that there's more to the net than 15 year old geeks. Collecting warez, MP3s, and whining that everything should be free--because you have no income--is not any kind of revolution.
Uh.... how incompatible.... in so mach as it runs any x86 code, back so far as the 8086 back in the 70's?
Really? So the Itanium isn't some new-fangled CPU that breaks with the past after all? It can run x86 code as is, natively, without emulation? I had no idea.
IA64 is definitely not intended for the personal computing market - at least not for a long time yet. This is a server processor
Ah, that brings back memories. Every new processor is always "initially targeted at the server market" going all the way back to the 386 at least. Makes me smile every time I see it!
...because there's not exactly going to be an immediate, huge demand for a greatly overpriced, unproven processor that's incompatible with just about everything that's been built up in the PC-clone era of the last 19 years. Similarly, you can't run Windows 98 on a PowerPC or Alpha. Does it matter?
It remains to be seen if the Itanium is really where personal computing is headed. After all, Intel has introduced other non-x86 processors in the past and had very high hopes for them. The RISC i860 processor, introduced in 1989, is a good example. The successor, the i960 is still available. But these chips are outside the x86 realm, and there's reason to think that the Itanium could be as well. Moving to an entirely new processor *family*, not just the next generation of what's currently available, is not to be taken lightly. This is doubly true when the benefits of such a change are not at all obvious.
I love it! Speak the truth, get tagged as flamebait! Slashdotters, congratulations! You've become the same misguided, wallowing community that swarmed around the Amiga in the early 1990s. That's not to say the Amiga wasn't some bang-up hardware; that's beside the point. The point is that being an armchair industry analyst and whiner does more harm than good. If you're a geek and want to make a difference, then do something. Don't just read about it and make pithy comments!
Moderate me down, that's fine with me. I give up.
The truth of the matter is, 3Dfx was, for a goodly 2 years, one of the first big name companies to start the IP onslaught...
You're trying very hard to make this article fit your agenda, aren't you? How is 3dfx different than any of the hundreds or thousands of companies who are suing other other companies for similar reasons? The difference is that you *heard* about 3dfx, because you are game/PC-hardware geek. Just because you happen to know about a particular case doesn't make it extraordinary.
John F. gave thoughtful, intelligent answers. He's obviously both a talented musician and someone who isn't burying his head in the sands of misguided, ranting idealism. Most of the Slashdot questions, though not necessarily those passed on to TMBG, assumed that John and John run around being wacky, anti-authoritarian loons, and that everything they did had a "stick it to the man" angle. As it turns out, they didn't just release MP3s out of hatred for record companies or an inate beliefe that music needs to be free. John didn't whisper some bizarre underground phrase to the stage crasher (just "Can you please get off the stage?"). They aren't trying to isolate themselves from business and "evil" money. Bottom line: The Slashdot impression of TMBG was a projection of Slashdot ideals, and the image turned out to be completely false. I suspect this is happening on a regular basis, and headline stories have a much more unrealistic spin on them than people want to believe.
I think I will bow out of Slashdot completely for the new year. As sad as it may sound, I think there are doers and then there are those who read Slashdot. I'm horrified to be associated with the latter.
Rheingold notes the enormous damage done by hostile participants of virtual communities who seek attention through aggression and who take up an enormous, disproportionate amount of time and energy online, even when they comprise a distinct minority. In fact, this pattern has probably destroyed more virtual communities than any other single factor.
That's Katz quoting another author, but it's still a good quote. The general trouble with virtual communities is that they don't have any prequisites for participation. If I want to talk about, say, OS design, then I'd like to talk about it with people who have some kind of background in that field, even that background consists only of being widely read. I don't want blind advocates butting in all the time with cookie cutter opinions. I also don't want to talk with people who think they know a lot, but mostly have a lot of misconceptions and lack well-roundedness. For example, you can't talk about OSes with someone who only knows Windows and Linux, especially if that person seems to think that Linux is some entirely new concept in operating systems that came out of the blue to rock the 1990s.
I enjoy writing, and discussing writing with other authors can be interesting, even via email. But talking to people of the "I have a great idea! I just need to know how to sell it to someone who can write it for me!" mentality is draining and no fun. No contact with other writers would be better than that.
I guess overall I'm tiring of having to be my own editor. I much, much prefer to read a specialized magazine or newsletter than wade through web discussions.
A lot of people I know who use computers every day (though not power users like most /. readers) never use an application in anything but full screen mode and it makes me wonder when microsoft will stop allowing resizable windows because it "confuses users".
I'm a power user/programmer and I dislike resizable windows. I would much prefer each application to have its own screen and a way to hotkey between them. Seriously. The faux desktop interface adds more doodads and nonsense than it is worth.
A few years ago everyone was trying to make OSes and commercial 3D engines. Now everyone is trying to make 3D GUIs.
Name five 3D GUI projects.
Am I the only person tired of seeing "Over 500 different software packages included!" on the back of the box for various commercial distributions? The "500 packages" mean very little to most people, as they include Lisp and Scheme compilers, 10 different window managers, bizarre utilities, etc. And 90% of them are severely stale and need to be downloaded as it is.
No PC actually consumes that much power. You may have a 300 Watt or a 450 Watt Power supply but its just that ... a supply. The computer probably uses about 50-100 Watts when in an Idle mode (no cdroms or harddrives spinning) and that isn't any more of a waste than leaving a standard light bulb on all the time.
It depends. Many PCs don't spin down their hard drives. Current processors can use 50W or more by themselves. PCs are shipping with huge power supplies for a reason. I think recent PCs are probably more in the 200W range when running a screen saver.
Agreed. If you're not using your PC for a while, just turn it off. With PCs sporting 450W power supplies these days, containing as many as five fans, and having video cards that get hot to the touch, turning the whole thing off is a good idea.
As best I remember, my school library didn't stock Penthouse, Hustler, or porn videos other.
So when you say that its all about 'a few pimply-faced geeks' you are either a troll or off your rocker, because this market is huge. This means as much culturally to us as much as movies mean to us culturally.
I'd disagree with that. Over half of video game sales are during the Christmas season. I've heard figures as high as 80%. Video games as entertainment for kids 15 and under is a huge, huge market, just as Nickelodeon (a cable channel, for those outside the US), and Barbie dolls are. Outside of that market, I would hardly call video games larger than movies. They may make more money--as does the toy industry--but the cultural impact isn't there. Remembering "up, up, down, down" is similar to remembering a cartoon you used to watch when you came home from school in the fourth grade (for me it was Speed Racer), or a toy that it seemed all the other kids had, like Gobots.
Compared to movies and books, I can't help but find video games as shallow. I like them, sure, but even the games that are touted for their plots--like Half Life--just seem like so much bubblegum fluff from the fifties. "Bad aliens have invaded and you, the last hope of mankind, must exterminate them!" There's a funny backlash against kiddie games that's resulted in a plethora of Blade Runner-esque post-apocalyptic games set in dark futures. But the gaming experience hasn't advanced much. Sure, you can pay with action figures when you're 30, but is it really all that appealling?
The video game industry has expanded like crazy, but it hasn't shown any artistic growth.
This assumes you are writing code with gcc. If you are using one of the other myriad of compiled languages available, everything from Lisp to OCaml to Pascal to Eiffel, then you most certainly want to distribute binaries. Not everyone has the latest versions of those compilers sitting around. There are sound software engineering reasons to not use C and C++ for everything.
Reading this article I can't help but think of a grandfather sitting on his porch talking to all his grandchildren. You know, the types of stories that begin "Back in my day..." My responce to this article? "Yes grandpa... I know... 12 miles to school... uphill bothways..." These technologies all had flaws in them, hence the reason that they are seen in mainstream use. (note the use of mainstream here, search long enough and you will find anything being used) It time to just let go of the old technologies and embrace the new ones.
:)
The point of the article is sometimes that good technologies disappear and are replaced with new ones of questionable value. Reel mowers are a good example. For a small lawn, reel mowers:
1. are quieter
2. are less expensive
3. require less maintenance
4. provide less opportunity for serious injury
5. don't need gasoline, oil or electricity
6. don't emit fumes
When I see a guy mowing his 1/8 acre with a riding mower, I can't help but laugh. Sure, he has the "technologically superior" solution, but he's also ridiculous
I am dumbfounded at how far some marketeers will apparently go to annoy their target audiences. If I bought a shirt, spilled coffee on it, then returned it the the store claiming "This shirt was stained when I bought it," then they'd happily take it back. I've seen stores take back some questionable items. The principle at work here is that it isn't worth pissing off future customers over what are effectively nickels and dimes to a large corporation.
But with spam and web advertising this doesn't apply. Spammers creatively alter subject lines to get past filters. Now really, does this make sense? People who get annoyed by spam are filtering it out, so are they really going to be receptive to you getting around filters by adding a comma after each letter? Much web advertising is the same way. Trickery like preventing use of the Back button and popups that appear when you leave a site is *annoying*. This is doubly true for people with modems--the majority of surfers. Having your connection grind to a halt because some stupid Java application is popping up windows and grabbing images is the worst negatively publicity you can imagine.
Okay, that's not true. Making modem users sit through animated ads before viewing a web page is even worse.
It is not that we need a faster computer to do the same things; we need a faster computer for the latest killer app. We needed to upgrade so that we could do desktop publishing, gaming, graphs, spell checking, the Internet, music sharing, or movie editing.
Good point. We've gotten into trouble by trying to have one machine for everything. That is, most people just want word processing and web browsing. The bulk of computers has come from needing to support high end applications, such as 3D modelling and magazine layout. Arguably it would have been better to have simple machines for most uses, then high-end specialized machines for those businesses that need it. This would be better than transferring unneeded R&D costs to the consumer every time something new comes along: MMX, Pentium III & 4, AGP, USB, SSE2, 3D-Now!, AMD 64-bit architecture, etc.
Gotta give 3dfx credit; it jumpstarted 3D hardware for the PC. They weren't the first, but they brought inexpensive workstation class 3D to home PCs with a bang. Even today, the Voodoo 1 is an impressive piece of hardware.
Just speculation here, but I can't help but wonder if the performance video card market is much smaller than assumed. I expect most people just use whatever video card came with their machine. I've read that 80% of all video cards out there are from ATI, because they dominate the OEM market. Having a bunch of big fish fighting over the last 20% would be pretty rough.
It merely needs recompiled code to perform well.
This has been said often enough for so many different processors that it has become trite. From experience, extra bits of compiler optimization rarely pay off in a big way. Quite often, it is impossible to tell the difference between minimal and full optimization settings. I suspect that contrived examples are being used for benchmarks, such as an image filter that takes 10 seconds to run and spends all its time inside of a 16 instruction loop. Sure, one tweak to the scheduler will make it run in 8 minutes instead, but how realistic is this? It isn't a win in the general case.
It seems that this story is being greatly misinterpreted. It is not a story of failure, it is a story of engineering.
Of course every geek would like a processor that has 500 integer units, 200 floating point units, and a gigabyte of on-chip RAM. But cost, development time, power consumption, heat, and reliability all come into the picture. The P4 team started with lofty goals and scaled them back to meet reality. That's how any hardware or software engineering project works. How often do you hear people say "We added tons of extra features, had better performance than projected, and finished six months early"?
A good many consumer hardware junkies don't understand that "faster, faster, more, more, more" is not a worthy goal. The goal is "good performance given real-world constraints." I know that people who would willingly pay $500 for a video card don't understand this, but this is how engineering of commodity items works. AMD has exactly the same set of constraints. It's not like AMD engineers can magically solve all of these problems. If anything, perhaps AMD is keeping their sights lower, so they don't have to scale back as much in the end.
When I saw the headline, I cringed and thought "Oh no, so many of the messages are going to include the acronym "AMD" in the first sentence. Ugh. And it turned out to be horribly true. I can barely wade through this stuff. Had I enough moderator points, I would tag them all as either "offtopic" or "troll."
AMD zealots, I mean this seriously: You have moved past the realm of simply enjoying a product to becoming annoying zealots, like Jehovah's Witnesses. Please, please, please, consider taking a lower key "live and let live" approach. As it is, I think many companies shy away from anything involving the term "Linux" because they know what kind of people come swarming around when they hear that word.
This is not a troll, nor a flame. It's a gentle suggestion that the rabid, juvenile AMD advocacy is doing harm in at least my particular case. I doubt I am alone.
Yep! Remember when DRAM peaked at 640K?
Yeah, and remember how cars went to 8 cylinders, to 10 to 12, and even to 16 and higher in some cases. Then 8 seemed to be a reasonable upper limit in terms of size, performance, and reliability. Most cars have 4 cylinder engines these days.
The 640K comment was a bit premature, yes, that doesn't mean that memory sizes will increase for ever and ever. There's a point of diminishing returns. In terms of processor speed I think we're hitting it now.
And funnily enough, there are machines out there that don't even have 640K, like smaller PDAs and the biggest selling hand-held computer of all time: the Game Boy.