As I remember on the Slashdot post about 64 bit NT (It runs now!!!) GCC produces pretty unoptimized output for the Alpha. From that end I find it very hard to belive that Linxu outperforms Tru64. Besides, this guys a columnist, you think he knows what he is talking about? Get rid of Tru64 and you have basically killed the Alpha as a decent platform.
LaTex surly uses its own formatting codes in its ASCII text. The problem with ASCII is that you will have a nice big format if you want ASCII text to be able to hold pictures, and all the cool formatting stuff that people (especially WordPerfect users) have become accostomed to using.
Funny thing, when did AMD, CYRIX, or Intel open source their hardware. OpenSource has a place, but OpenSource hardware is just silly. OpenSpec, okay, but OpenSource hadrware is dumb.
Is it just me, or do all the sysadmins on/. seem to have a superiority complex? What do you call someon who is more happy with a computer would rather have 10X more stable, than 10X more powerful? A sysadmin.
There is usually nothing wrong with a workstation having security holes you can drive a truck through. If your firewall is doing its job, then the security threat should never reach IRIX. IRIX is great for what it was designed to do, graphics. Optimizations in IRIX to meet those ends kind of goes against the UNIX philosphoy for rock solid and air-tight. But worrying about security features, and 300 day uptimes, would not meet the needs of the OS. Having stability or speed comes at the price of the other. IE. You can make it really fast if you don't care if it crashes every few minutes.
Your are kidding right? ATI is and always has been crap. The Voodoo2 came out a month after the ATI, and the G4 came out long after the V3. The TNT beats the Rage 128 anyday (except in 32 bit), but nVidia ha better things to do then write drivers for Apple. The gamer market pushes technology foreword, so I don't see what your thing against gamers comes from. If it wasn't for Carmak, Apple would never even have put GL in MacOS. And yes, you can write drivers for an OS before the next chip comes out. My Riva 128 drivers were written long before the PIII came out yet, my 128 works fine on the P3. The driver interfaces with the OS, not the CPU. (Unless the wanted to add AltiVec.) Face it, the reason people don't make drivers for Apple is because until recently, Apple had no gaming community (Nanosaur yeah!!!!) gamers push the advancement of the low end hardware, thus no low-end 3D hardware on Apple. (no high end or midrange, because those people use Unix or NT)
Actually, if you are going to pay the extra money for a G4, doesn't a G400 make more sense? They have much better 3D speed (almost that of a TNT 2 Ultra plus the latest GL drivers make it faster than a TNT 2 Ultra in GL) , much better quality (3D and 2D on the Matrox are unmatched) and at only a slight price increase ($100 at most) The Rage 128 doesn't even outperform a TNT for most things, and the GL driver doesn't seem to support AGP.
1. BeOS kicks MacOS's ass, and they are just now gaining steam. Studio Pro is being ported to BeOS, and its only in its 2 or 3rd year on x86. In Linux's third year, I doubt they had a word Professional word processor. 2. BeOS kicks Linux's ass for speed. BeOS lightweight threads have 10 times less overhead that Linux threads. The API is a dream, there is a consistant programming interface, SMP is ingrained into the kernel from the beginning, ease of use is a fundemental part of the OS, etc etc. So what if there is no multi user support? It will be in R5. I can say the same thing about Linux and 3D. Where is the good OpenGL HW acceleration? Where is the USB and Firewire support? Where are the 3D sound APIs? Where is the OO Api? where is the consistant interface. Sure they are coming, but are they here NOW. BeOS many of those NOW, and is working on making the TCP stack better. Final point. When Intel wanted to show of it's PII and PIII, what did they use? NT, no, Linux, no, BeOS, yea.
The object doesn't have to be linux centric (like most of slashdot seems to be.) Could just be a swither object. If you want to switch between os's, what makes more sense, a switch object, with members for each OS, or OS objects, with one member for the switch? And you could always use some ASM code, to reboot into different OSs.
There is a differnece between plenty fast, and fast enough. Second, no I don't expect and add campaign aimed at 3D artist, but I was responding to your post that said Apple is targeting the G4 at creative professionals. They could have done that better by putting in a better graphics card.
I do hope you are kidding. 800 MB/sec is as fast as SDRAM gets (Okay, it goes up to 143 mhz, but not standard) 100MHz SDRAM on a 100MHz bus. Alpha does not have faster memory bandwidth than that (single processor, the EV6 runs at 200 mhz bus, but 100 mhz ram)
Sorry, no cigar. The G4 has FPU performance the G3 has nothing. I'll elaborate. The G3 is based on the PPC 603. It was a cheap, consumer processor used in early PowerMacs. The G4 is based on the 604e, a powerhouse of a CPU used in some high end PowerMacs. The 604e makes the fpu of the 603 eat dirt. (Some versions of the 603 don't even have FPUs.) The G4 inherits the awesome FPU of the 604e, instead of the crappy FPU of the 603.
1. You are perfectly right, I had not heard of that, my fault. 2. Your kidding about the ATI being fast right? First, the D3D performance of the Rage 128 is under that of a Riva TNT. Only slightly mind you, but still under. Riva TNT is a year old. That is D3D, OpenGL is another story. Most test seem to show that the Ati doesn't support AGP under OpenGL. It is significantly slower than the TNT under OpenGL. And the TNT is still a year old. 3. Since when are 3D modlers not considered creative professionals? 4. I know Be pulled away, I can hope can't I? Looks like I am 3 for 4
The prevailing thought is that Macs suck. However, the G4 is being dragged into unfairly. The G4 is not married to the mac architecture. In any other case you guys would be drooling over the specs. AltiVec kicks SSE's ass all over the place. The PIII can issue 4 but only process 2 FPs per sucond using SSE. But it looks as if the G4 should be able to process the 4 floats granted by its 128 bit vector unit, in one cycle. (128/32=4) Add to this a RISC architecture, that is good at spliting ops between multiple pipes (great for matrix math AKA 3D) and a good FPU (descendant of the 604e instead of the 603 that the G3 was based on.) The 604e was and still is an FP powerhouse. The 603 was a cheap consumer chip while the 604 was used in the high end. In any case, these chips look to kick ass, and remember MacOS X is just around the corner. Besides, this time they actuall used real programs. Go to Motorola's website, G4 with AltiVec blows x86 away. My last comment is that I am not a mac users, in fact I can't stand apple. But if I had the jingle, I would buy a G4 right away. (And load what? this great chip has a choice of LinuxPPC (no media support), MacOS (buggy as hell and half emulated), and MacOS X beta (a server OS and still in beta).
If anybody EXCEPT apple were managing this thing I would worry for Intel, but even though the G4 (yes it IS that fast) is fast as hell, apple shoves a half emulated piece of crap OS on it, make braindead graphics choices, the mismarkets it. Wonderful. But all I can think about is a dual G4 BeBox. ohhhh.
The TNT has very decent OpenGL drivers from my experiance. (under windows anyway, don't know about the NT drivers) in any case the reason that the Gloria Xl (Permedia 2 I think) is so fast in OpenGL is becuase it has a Delta geometry coprocessor onboard the Permedia 2 chip. Besides, people who use Maya ($10,000) can afford a high end OGL card. (under 2000 these days) Plus unlike 3Dfx, nVidia has a full ICD so it IS theoretically compatible with Softimage, etc.
Now what modern hardware gets 30 fps on modern games. I am talking about cutting edge games on cutting edgre hardware. Turok gets 65+fps in D3D, and 75-80 fps in Glide. (On Voodoo 2s no less) the 15 fps there is not a big thing. DirectX is not the pathetic thing we used to make fun of anymore. As I pointed out in my post, it has only a 20% performace hit on average. And I would think that Open obsessed Linux users and Glide just wouldn't go together. 3Dfx is infamous for propriatory stuff, in consumer and arcade markets. In the beginning people wanted to liscence glide but 3Dfx wouldn't let them. And remember the Glide Required fiasco where 3Dfx put Glide Required stickers on D3D and OGL games?
middle-endian/adj./ Not big-endian or little-endian. Used of perverse byte orders such as 3-4-1-2 or 2-1-4-3, occasionally found in the packed-decimal formats of minicomputer manufacturers who shall remain nameless. See NUXI problem. Non-US hackers use this term to describe the American mm/dd/yy style of writing dates (Europeans write dd/mm/yy).
For those of you who doubt NV10's performance improvement, take a look at the workstation front. Even with Dual PII 400s, a card with a gamma geometry processor, is much faster (in medium textured scenes) than the Evens and Sutherland chipsets, which, although they have higher fill-rate, don't have geometry acceleration. A playstation kicks a P100s ass even though the main CPU is 1/3 the speed. Its becuase the playstation has HW geometry acceleration. In any case, HW acceleration will also benifit OpenGL, now truespace will run faster than ever!!! BTW- You guys have managed to/. blue's news and the link in the article.
For those of you who doubt NV10's performance improvement, take a look at the workstation front. Even with Dual PII 400s, a card with a gamma geometry processor, is much faster (in medium textured scenes) than the Evens and Sutherland chipsets, which, although they have higher fill-rate, don't have geometry acceleration. A playstation kicks a P100s ass even though the main CPU is 1/3 the speed. Its becuase the playstation has HW geometry acceleration. In any case, HW acceleration will also benifit OpenGL, now truespace will run faster than ever!!!
I feel sorry to tell you that Glide no longer has the massive performance increase compared to D3D. Yes D3D is still pretty hard to program for, and yes it is still slightly slower (20-30% in fact) but it is not like the old days when D3D would run at 30 fps and glide would do 70 fps. Even Turok which is only DX6 only gets 15 fps in Glide over D3D. The proof is in the games. Unreal is just as playable with D3D as it is under Glide.
Slashdot Mirror
As I remember on the Slashdot post about 64 bit NT (It runs now!!!) GCC produces pretty unoptimized output for the Alpha. From that end I find it very hard to belive that Linxu outperforms Tru64. Besides, this guys a columnist, you think he knows what he is talking about? Get rid of Tru64 and you have basically killed the Alpha as a decent platform.
LaTex surly uses its own formatting codes in its ASCII text. The problem with ASCII is that you will have a nice big format if you want ASCII text to be able to hold pictures, and all the cool formatting stuff that people (especially WordPerfect users) have become accostomed to using.
Acutally WinModems themselves are not lame, where else can you get a $10 56K modem. Them not porting drivers to BeOS, BSD and other OS is lame.
Funny thing, when did AMD, CYRIX, or Intel open source their hardware. OpenSource has a place, but OpenSource hardware is just silly. OpenSpec, okay, but OpenSource hadrware is dumb.
Is it just me, or do all the sysadmins on /. seem to have a superiority complex? What do you call someon who is more happy with a computer would rather have 10X more stable, than 10X more powerful? A sysadmin.
There is usually nothing wrong with a workstation having security holes you can drive a truck through. If your firewall is doing its job, then the security threat should never reach IRIX. IRIX is great for what it was designed to do, graphics. Optimizations in IRIX to meet those ends kind of goes against the UNIX philosphoy for rock solid and air-tight. But worrying about security features, and 300 day uptimes, would not meet the needs of the OS. Having stability or speed comes at the price of the other. IE. You can make it really fast if you don't care if it crashes every few minutes.
Your are kidding right? ATI is and always has been crap. The Voodoo2 came out a month after the ATI, and the G4 came out long after the V3. The TNT beats the Rage 128 anyday (except in 32 bit), but nVidia ha better things to do then write drivers for Apple. The gamer market pushes technology foreword, so I don't see what your thing against gamers comes from. If it wasn't for Carmak, Apple would never even have put GL in MacOS. And yes, you can write drivers for an OS before the next chip comes out. My Riva 128 drivers were written long before the PIII came out yet, my 128 works fine on the P3. The driver interfaces with the OS, not the CPU. (Unless the wanted to add AltiVec.) Face it, the reason people don't make drivers for Apple is because until recently, Apple had no gaming community (Nanosaur yeah!!!!) gamers push the advancement of the low end hardware, thus no low-end 3D hardware on Apple. (no high end or midrange, because those people use Unix or NT)
Actually, if you are going to pay the extra money for a G4, doesn't a G400 make more sense? They have much better 3D speed (almost that of a TNT 2 Ultra plus the latest GL drivers make it faster than a TNT 2 Ultra in GL) , much better quality (3D and 2D on the Matrox are unmatched) and at only a slight price increase ($100 at most) The Rage 128 doesn't even outperform a TNT for most things, and the GL driver doesn't seem to support AGP.
1. BeOS kicks MacOS's ass, and they are just now gaining steam. Studio Pro is being ported to BeOS, and its only in its 2 or 3rd year on x86. In Linux's third year, I doubt they had a word Professional word processor.
2. BeOS kicks Linux's ass for speed. BeOS lightweight threads have 10 times less overhead that Linux threads. The API is a dream, there is a consistant programming interface, SMP is ingrained into the kernel from the beginning, ease of use is a fundemental part of the OS, etc etc. So what if there is no multi user support? It will be in R5. I can say the same thing about Linux and 3D. Where is the good OpenGL HW acceleration? Where is the USB and Firewire support? Where are the 3D sound APIs? Where is the OO Api? where is the consistant interface.
Sure they are coming, but are they here NOW. BeOS many of those NOW, and is working on making the TCP stack better. Final point. When Intel wanted to show of it's PII and PIII, what did they use? NT, no, Linux, no, BeOS, yea.
The object doesn't have to be linux centric (like most of slashdot seems to be.) Could just be a swither object. If you want to switch between os's, what makes more sense, a switch object, with members for each OS, or OS objects, with one member for the switch? And you could always use some ASM code, to reboot into different OSs.
There is a differnece between plenty fast, and fast enough. Second, no I don't expect and add campaign aimed at 3D artist, but I was responding to your post that said Apple is targeting the G4 at creative professionals. They could have done that better by putting in a better graphics card.
I do hope you are kidding. 800 MB/sec is as fast as SDRAM gets (Okay, it goes up to 143 mhz, but not standard) 100MHz SDRAM on a 100MHz bus. Alpha does not have faster memory bandwidth than that (single processor, the EV6 runs at 200 mhz bus, but 100 mhz ram)
Sorry, no cigar. The G4 has FPU performance the G3 has nothing. I'll elaborate. The G3 is based on the PPC 603. It was a cheap, consumer processor used in early PowerMacs. The G4 is based on the 604e, a powerhouse of a CPU used in some high end PowerMacs. The 604e makes the fpu of the 603 eat dirt. (Some versions of the 603 don't even have FPUs.) The G4 inherits the awesome FPU of the 604e, instead of the crappy FPU of the 603.
1. You are perfectly right, I had not heard of that, my fault.
2. Your kidding about the ATI being fast right?
First, the D3D performance of the Rage 128 is under that of a Riva TNT. Only slightly mind you, but still under. Riva TNT is a year old. That is D3D, OpenGL is another story. Most test seem to show that the Ati doesn't support AGP under OpenGL. It is significantly slower than the TNT under OpenGL. And the TNT is still a year old. 3. Since when are 3D modlers not considered creative professionals? 4. I know Be pulled away, I can hope can't I?
Looks like I am 3 for 4
The prevailing thought is that Macs suck. However, the G4 is being dragged into unfairly. The G4 is not married to the mac architecture. In any other case you guys would be drooling over the specs. AltiVec kicks SSE's ass all over the place. The PIII can issue 4 but only process 2 FPs per sucond using SSE. But it looks as if the G4 should be able to process the 4 floats granted by its 128 bit vector unit, in one cycle. (128/32=4) Add to this a RISC architecture, that is good at spliting ops between multiple pipes (great for matrix math AKA 3D) and a good FPU (descendant of the 604e instead of the 603 that the G3 was based on.) The 604e was and still is an FP powerhouse. The 603 was a cheap consumer chip while the 604 was used in the high end. In any case, these chips look to kick ass, and remember MacOS X is just around the corner. Besides, this time they actuall used real programs. Go to Motorola's website, G4 with AltiVec blows x86 away. My last comment is that I am not a mac users, in fact I can't stand apple. But if I had the jingle, I would buy a G4 right away. (And load what? this great chip has a choice of LinuxPPC (no media support), MacOS (buggy as hell and half emulated), and MacOS X beta (a server OS and still in beta).
If anybody EXCEPT apple were managing this thing I would worry for Intel, but even though the G4 (yes it IS that fast) is fast as hell, apple shoves a half emulated piece of crap OS on it, make braindead graphics choices, the mismarkets it. Wonderful. But all I can think about is a dual G4 BeBox. ohhhh.
The TNT has very decent OpenGL drivers from my experiance. (under windows anyway, don't know about the NT drivers) in any case the reason that the Gloria Xl (Permedia 2 I think) is so fast in OpenGL is becuase it has a Delta geometry coprocessor onboard the Permedia 2 chip. Besides, people who use Maya ($10,000) can afford a high end OGL card. (under 2000 these days) Plus unlike 3Dfx, nVidia has a full ICD so it IS theoretically compatible with Softimage, etc.
Now what modern hardware gets 30 fps on modern games. I am talking about cutting edge games on cutting edgre hardware. Turok gets 65+fps in D3D, and 75-80 fps in Glide. (On Voodoo 2s no less) the 15 fps there is not a big thing. DirectX is not the pathetic thing we used to make fun of anymore. As I pointed out in my post, it has only a 20% performace hit on average. And I would think that Open obsessed Linux users and Glide just wouldn't go together. 3Dfx is infamous for propriatory stuff, in consumer and arcade markets. In the beginning people wanted to liscence glide but 3Dfx wouldn't let them. And remember the Glide Required fiasco where 3Dfx put Glide Required stickers on D3D and OGL games?
Funny
/adj./
middle-endian
Not big-endian or little-endian. Used of perverse byte orders such as 3-4-1-2 or 2-1-4-3, occasionally found in the packed-decimal formats of minicomputer manufacturers who shall remain nameless. See NUXI problem. Non-US hackers use this term to describe the American mm/dd/yy style of writing dates (Europeans write dd/mm/yy).
For those of you who doubt NV10's performance improvement, take a look at the workstation front. Even with Dual PII 400s, a card with a gamma geometry processor, is much faster (in medium textured scenes) than the Evens and Sutherland chipsets, which, although they have higher fill-rate, don't have geometry acceleration. A playstation kicks a P100s ass even though the main CPU is 1/3 the speed. Its becuase the playstation has HW geometry acceleration. In any case, HW acceleration will also benifit OpenGL, now truespace will run faster than ever!!! BTW- You guys have managed to /. blue's news and the link in the article.
For those of you who doubt NV10's performance improvement, take a look at the workstation front. Even with Dual PII 400s, a card with a gamma geometry processor, is much faster (in medium textured scenes) than the Evens and Sutherland chipsets, which, although they have higher fill-rate, don't have geometry acceleration. A playstation kicks a P100s ass even though the main CPU is 1/3 the speed. Its becuase the playstation has HW geometry acceleration. In any case, HW acceleration will also benifit OpenGL, now truespace will run faster than ever!!!
I feel sorry to tell you that Glide no longer has the massive performance increase compared to D3D. Yes D3D is still pretty hard to program for, and yes it is still slightly slower (20-30% in fact) but it is not like the old days when D3D would run at 30 fps and glide would do 70 fps. Even Turok which is only DX6 only gets 15 fps in Glide over D3D. The proof is in the games. Unreal is just as playable with D3D as it is under Glide.
And if you aren't then ever think that maybe Linux is not so pure itself. As I remember, a lot of stuff in Linux if very BSDish.
If even half his comments are true, he has a decent point.
Interseting how all the rats have crawled out of their holes on this board.