I have never ONCE heard anyone talk about how they would like to impress their religion upon visiting aliens. Most people that consider what it'd be like to meet aliens would want to talk them about things like: "Do you guys really abduct people" and "How did you get all the way over here, and where are you from?" and stuff like that.
What kind of person wants to meet complete strangers and interrogate about his personal philosophy? Missionaries, and Socrates. I really thought Socrates was an wise-ass.
which can infect anyone's mind and not be able to pin the source.
It's been repeated by people, in articles, blogs, and other places as well. I think Carlin was the first to use the expression "invisible man up there" in that flippant context (maybe he wasn't the first, but he was probably the first that people remembered and attributed to him without becoming blocking such heresey from their minds)
But you're ignoring (and so is the great-grandparent) that God also wants to love the fish and see that love returned, the slashdot faithful earlier emphasized said claims. That relationship is NOT expected of the fish and the fish owner.
There was no reason to spend a paragraph and throw it out there, to just riddle it with clarifications. A relationship between dog and man would be more symbolic of how that mangod relationship _should_ work, but the "show me the evidence" types (such as myself) would have issue with that. (The dog is clearly aware of the man even though he is not his master, but I am not aware of God.... etc.)
1) See my other comment in this article about why I think routing data from one card back to the other is silly, and it is a huge bottleneck.
Also, they talk about using different cards. Last time I checked, an ATI card wouldn't work with an NVidia driver. Not likely. No, they'd have to be seperate address spaces for it to work in any sane fashion.
I can imagine if they were the SAME card the driver would create some overlapping maps for a special "joined" render mode. It have to be more at hoping there's a large correlation in the data both cards need pre-render, but you're not going to have perfect scaling.
2) Well, okay. But I was not assuming it'd be as simple as multidrop, that'd be kind of retarded. Ultimately it's whether or not the consumer has a way to take adventage of it...
3) I was explaining what was available in the past which filled the role that dual AGP might have... multiple expensive PCI-X cards in server mobo/chipsets. They did exist, they still exist. You can put 4 XVR-1200s in a Sun v880z if you want... gives you 8 1920x1200 3d-accelerated displays. There was an existing solution, so no market pressure existed.
4) No, it's not. Direct3d would have to do some heavy lifting to reinterpret what the games' graphic engine wants to display to what each card needs to know. A lot of it would be shared, but there'd be a need to modifying vertex programs, adjusting vertex/transformation data, syncronizing retrace, etc.
The easy solution would to be to add a feature to a card that lets it pretend the viewport is XY, then only render the subset XZ. Each card gets all the data required for XY, but knows which subset it's supposed to render independantly. But I don't think any chipsets out there support that yet. So it'd have to be added. Hence, dual AGP would not be useful for existing hardware. And again, it'd only work for matched cards.
But that's AGP, anyway. We're talking about PCI-express. And they are not multidrop. So clearly an extension to Direct3D is needed. I think that's what Alienware is going to do. Define the interface. Pressure Microsoft into updating DirectX to support it and create a software emulation layer to present the right data to each display. Then hope the driver authors can implement the subset rendering feature.
They'll solve combining multiple cards' output into one monitor by selling an Alienware monitor with two inputs that displays seamlessly side by side... taking a cue from Liebermann
ultimately EVERY device interaction in the system appears to be a memory access to the driver writer. But in order to support various modes of being to attach arbitrary devices and support unknown features, we adhere to some protocols standardized some time ago. Whether or not these protocols are conveyed over the same type of physical hardware that they originally did when it was introduced is up in the air.
The driver doesn't communicate through the PCI bus at all. Rather: 1) USB-mass storage takes the SCSI commands from the disk subsystem 2) mass storage converts them (trivially) into packets for injection into the USB bus. 3) mass storage informs the host controller subsystem to transfer data. 4) host controller talks using directly to the USB chipset through memory-mapped I/O (how it actually "gets" there, it doesn't care) and lets it know it's about to do DMA 5) host controller schedules DMA transfer with system (ultimately also using memory mapped I/O or maybe OOB I/O)
How the data actually gets moved from memory into the USB chipset is completely up to the motherboard manufacturer. Most likely the USB chipset is hooked up via a real PCI bus. And when you configure the devices, the system would be talking to a real PCI bridge when getting all the address ranges to do that I/O.
But that's not necessarily true. The USB host controller could just as easily be a directly attached member of the northbridge with no physical PCI bus presence at all. It'd still work, provided that the host controller was properly initialized and had the same register map.
It's a software issue, but so's all of it. It looks like that for simplicities sake, and for making the drivers more portable.
The USB hardware likes to talk in a dialect of SCSI, so you make it look like a SCSI device, naturally.
There'd be no reason to attempt to bit-bang the memory-mapped registers of the USB host controller, even though you could.
They're expecting you to layer your drivers and interfaces in that fashion, and the hardware has provisions to help make the end-result (the state of your flash disk) match up with what the software expects.
How the illusion is completed can be all software, all hardware, or a combination of both!
You don't make promises to the fish in terms the fish can comprehend that if it believes hard enough, it'll be able to live outside of the tank once it dies or you flush it down the toilet, do you?
The logical hardware layout that the operating system presents to the user is not congruent with the physical hardware layout.
That's just how it APPEARS to the operating system so the OS knows how to talk to and control all the parts. If you want to check the size and health of a piece of RAM, you send commands to an emulated ISA bus that the memory controller presents to you.
If you want to adjust the power settings (you know, like sleep mode or suspend) on an AGP card, you would use the virtual PCI bus location to specify the card you mean and send it standard power commands, even though it's not on a PCI bus at all.
You won't see a hypertransport bus in your sysfs tree even if you have an Opteron, but it doesn't mean it's not what the RAM, AGP, and other CPUs are connected to. It's all handled in the hardware, and you don't know the difference.
Now, I mean there may be this "hypertransport controller" that appears on the PCI bus, but that's just your operating systems window into doing stuff to it. But that doesn't mean the hypertransport links are on the PCI bus. It's actually the other way around.
Here's a good example: attach a USB-based flash drive to your system windows/linux system. SCSI system says it's a SCSI disk attached to a SCSI controller. A virtual SCSI controller. Check the USB bus. USB bus says it has a mass storage device. Huh! Well which is it? (Actually the SCSI subsystem would probably call the controller something like USB mass storage host controller or something)
That's the location of the PCI-bus-space accessible I/O space of the card (and a place to fall back to if the AGP GART is non-functional).
The AGP card itself is attached in some (chipset specific) way that is very close to the northbridge... it is essentially acting as non-cached physical RAM mapped into the memory space of the system routed through the chipset. The bus protocol (like whatever protocol the chipset has to your RAM) has nothing to do with PCI at all.
BTW, RAM tends to appear as I2C devices on the ISA bus. Does that mean RAM sticks are on the ISA bus?
There definitely isn't going to be any of that interleaved scanline bullshit of the days of the Voodoo.
Think about it, each card is going to have it's own dual display outputs, as every card that you'll plug into PCI Xpress should have.
Besides, a single graphics card is more than enough to play most games on the market at an acceptable frame rate. ANY PCI-Xpress card will be overkill for almost every game, and fine for the most demanding. What benefit would you get for having two "working together", when you consider the massive overhead?
So you plug in two, and so you have four monitors. Big deal, Windows already does this.
Maybe this "revolutionary technology" is getting Direct3D to use the whole virtual viewport of all four monitors instead of limiting it to a single card at at time. That'd take some trickery to fool both a generic game engine and the seperate graphic cards w.r.t. viewing frustrums and what's not visible, syncronization of vertex/texel programs, etc.
that's still one AGP slot per "motherboard", those systems can have a variable number of motherboards that are tied to a back plane, which is then partitioned.
Although it is impressive that an SSI can run across them. Very neat.
But I wonder if you can actually run a single X11 session using both screens.
Ideally AGP is specced to run at a rate which is as close to the same speed as the northbridge's bus to RAM (close because AGP is a multiple of the PCI bus rate while the FSB on many motherboards is independant of this). Once you've done that, adding another AGP doesn't help because you'd have to share that fast bus into the AGP-mapped memory space. It would have been nice to run 3D games on dual monitors, but by the time that became pratical, 3D cards had dual monitor outputs anyway. So there was no demand to have a dual AGP port board (while not being able to advertise AGP 8x on both, or whatever the fastest at the time was). Increased manufacturing costs without giving any additional benefit to the user.
And workstation/visualization boxes in the hi-end could use PCI-X on the chipsets with like 4 seperate PCI-X buses.
Ultimately no one even bothered to work out how dual AGP might be presented to the operating system.
VA/MD/DC is the center of the known universe, what Beltway did you think we wereh talking about?
And incidientally, I saw LLY 347 a few minutes later. On the side of the road, surrounded by state troopers. They were arresting him for the shitty carbon fiber hood and spoiler he tried to add to his civic.
BUT I CAN'T DO ANYTHING WITH IT. What the hell? it's intensionally obtuse, it tells me nothing about the person except he or she is a pretty good flash artist.
But pretty styleless, and an utter waste of bandwidth. It's not even remotely interesting.
And here's to hoping he just might be. Give it 10 years. Something will bubble up, some new emerging trend in competitve gaming. Here's to hoping it'll be Carmack who'll bring it into the mainstream and do it right, when the time comes.
I love queen Kottakkal.
on
The Confusion
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· Score: 1
I knew there was something about her name. And it wasn't in any encylopedias/historic references that I could find. Now I gotta dig up my paperback copy of Cryptonomicon for a once-over.
And elitest slashdotters will criticize in turn.
on
The Confusion
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· Score: 1
What's your point, and why is this modded up Insightful?
He doesn't really think it's confusing (more at con-fused, see review). It's his REVIEW that's definitely confusing, and it needs revision.
But you managed to make a witty observation/play on words. How cute. Here's a cookie.
His novels are more entertaining than essays.
on
The Confusion
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· Score: 1
The cheap Dells are cheap. You can't beat them in price/performance, especially in large quantities.
But you're looking at chipsets/mobos/power supplies that leave you little headroom, especially for gaming.
By the time you've picked a good starting point with a Precision or Dimension, you're looking at $1000 and up.
You're better off buying a bearbones system from Newegg, Polywell, Amax, whoever, which has a nice looking case/power supply/mobo ready to accept your choice of add-ons. You stretch your dollar to get a system which is trying to be expandable.
Only drawback -> you have to support it and install the OS.
Big deal. You'd probably end up doing that anyway with the Dell once you start adding new HDs and stuff.
I don't know how else to express it except that I think they over-engineer their rack-mount equipment.
I witnessed a buddy of mine assembling 20 or so of the 1Us, adding upgrades. And I've gotta tell you, I've never seen boards cut in the shapes or as many varieties of ribbon cables neatly tucked, etc. etc.
It's impressive! (but you pay for it) We usually go for the next cheapest option.;)
I am left to wonder if the only "real" big-name gaming PCs are born of Dells.
The only thing non-standard about their systems is the motherboards (and sometimes the power supplies, but I've never found them underspec, anyway). Cases are always nicely laid out to aid maintenance. Usually the latest and greatest connectivity internally.
As soon as they bite the bullet and put together an AMD-64 system, woah nelly.
I have zero problem with that notion. We use Fedora on desktops/laptops as appropriate, and use RHEL on servers that warrant it.
And let's not forget, the projects that Red Hat picks to include in Fedora are getting a lot of user-facetime that helps them improve, independant of how it helps Red Hat. (Minus changes Red Hat makes to that software to make it work in their environment if required)
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I have never ONCE heard anyone talk about how they would like to impress their religion upon visiting aliens. Most people that consider what it'd be like to meet aliens would want to talk them about things like: "Do you guys really abduct people" and "How did you get all the way over here, and where are you from?" and stuff like that.
What kind of person wants to meet complete strangers and interrogate about his personal philosophy? Missionaries, and Socrates. I really thought Socrates was an wise-ass.
They'd dismiss the question the first time it was asked...
"Do you believe in God?"
"?"
"You know, an omnipotent, omnipresent being that cares for all?"
"mu"
"Yes, or no?"
"No, mu. As in, there's no way to intelligently answer that. I didn't even think you were serious for a minute there."
which can infect anyone's mind and not be able to pin the source.
It's been repeated by people, in articles, blogs, and other places as well. I think Carlin was the first to use the expression "invisible man up there" in that flippant context (maybe he wasn't the first, but he was probably the first that people remembered and attributed to him without becoming blocking such heresey from their minds)
But you're ignoring (and so is the great-grandparent) that God also wants to love the fish and see that love returned, the slashdot faithful earlier emphasized said claims. That relationship is NOT expected of the fish and the fish owner.
There was no reason to spend a paragraph and throw it out there, to just riddle it with clarifications. A relationship between dog and man would be more symbolic of how that mangod relationship _should_ work, but the "show me the evidence" types (such as myself) would have issue with that. (The dog is clearly aware of the man even though he is not his master, but I am not aware of God.... etc.)
You just jealous, fool.
1) See my other comment in this article about why I think routing data from one card back to the other is silly, and it is a huge bottleneck.
Also, they talk about using different cards. Last time I checked, an ATI card wouldn't work with an NVidia driver. Not likely. No, they'd have to be seperate address spaces for it to work in any sane fashion.
I can imagine if they were the SAME card the driver would create some overlapping maps for a special "joined" render mode. It have to be more at hoping there's a large correlation in the data both cards need pre-render, but you're not going to have perfect scaling.
2) Well, okay. But I was not assuming it'd be as simple as multidrop, that'd be kind of retarded. Ultimately it's whether or not the consumer has a way to take adventage of it...
3) I was explaining what was available in the past which filled the role that dual AGP might have... multiple expensive PCI-X cards in server mobo/chipsets. They did exist, they still exist. You can put 4 XVR-1200s in a Sun v880z if you want... gives you 8 1920x1200 3d-accelerated displays. There was an existing solution, so no market pressure existed.
4) No, it's not. Direct3d would have to do some heavy lifting to reinterpret what the games' graphic engine wants to display to what each card needs to know. A lot of it would be shared, but there'd be a need to modifying vertex programs, adjusting vertex/transformation data, syncronizing retrace, etc.
The easy solution would to be to add a feature to a card that lets it pretend the viewport is XY, then only render the subset XZ. Each card gets all the data required for XY, but knows which subset it's supposed to render independantly. But I don't think any chipsets out there support that yet. So it'd have to be added. Hence, dual AGP would not be useful for existing hardware. And again, it'd only work for matched cards.
But that's AGP, anyway. We're talking about PCI-express. And they are not multidrop. So clearly an extension to Direct3D is needed. I think that's what Alienware is going to do. Define the interface. Pressure Microsoft into updating DirectX to support it and create a software emulation layer to present the right data to each display. Then hope the driver authors can implement the subset rendering feature.
They'll solve combining multiple cards' output into one monitor by selling an Alienware monitor with two inputs that displays seamlessly side by side... taking a cue from Liebermann
ultimately EVERY device interaction in the system appears to be a memory access to the driver writer. But in order to support various modes of being to attach arbitrary devices and support unknown features, we adhere to some protocols standardized some time ago. Whether or not these protocols are conveyed over the same type of physical hardware that they originally did when it was introduced is up in the air.
The driver doesn't communicate through the PCI bus at all. Rather:
1) USB-mass storage takes the SCSI commands from the disk subsystem
2) mass storage converts them (trivially) into packets for injection into the USB bus.
3) mass storage informs the host controller subsystem to transfer data.
4) host controller talks using directly to the USB chipset through memory-mapped I/O (how it actually "gets" there, it doesn't care) and lets it know it's about to do DMA
5) host controller schedules DMA transfer with system (ultimately also using memory mapped I/O or maybe OOB I/O)
How the data actually gets moved from memory into the USB chipset is completely up to the motherboard manufacturer. Most likely the USB chipset is hooked up via a real PCI bus. And when you configure the devices, the system would be talking to a real PCI bridge when getting all the address ranges to do that I/O.
But that's not necessarily true. The USB host controller could just as easily be a directly attached member of the northbridge with no physical PCI bus presence at all. It'd still work, provided that the host controller was properly initialized and had the same register map.
It's a software issue, but so's all of it. It looks like that for simplicities sake, and for making the drivers more portable.
The USB hardware likes to talk in a dialect of SCSI, so you make it look like a SCSI device, naturally.
There'd be no reason to attempt to bit-bang the memory-mapped registers of the USB host controller, even though you could.
They're expecting you to layer your drivers and interfaces in that fashion, and the hardware has provisions to help make the end-result (the state of your flash disk) match up with what the software expects.
How the illusion is completed can be all software, all hardware, or a combination of both!
You don't make promises to the fish in terms the fish can comprehend that if it believes hard enough, it'll be able to live outside of the tank once it dies or you flush it down the toilet, do you?
I swear...
that was the point I was trying to make.
The logical hardware layout that the operating system presents to the user is not congruent with the physical hardware layout.
That's just how it APPEARS to the operating system so the OS knows how to talk to and control all the parts. If you want to check the size and health of a piece of RAM, you send commands to an emulated ISA bus that the memory controller presents to you.
If you want to adjust the power settings (you know, like sleep mode or suspend) on an AGP card, you would use the virtual PCI bus location to specify the card you mean and send it standard power commands, even though it's not on a PCI bus at all.
You won't see a hypertransport bus in your sysfs tree even if you have an Opteron, but it doesn't mean it's not what the RAM, AGP, and other CPUs are connected to. It's all handled in the hardware, and you don't know the difference.
Now, I mean there may be this "hypertransport controller" that appears on the PCI bus, but that's just your operating systems window into doing stuff to it. But that doesn't mean the hypertransport links are on the PCI bus. It's actually the other way around.
Here's a good example: attach a USB-based flash drive to your system windows/linux system. SCSI system says it's a SCSI disk attached to a SCSI controller. A virtual SCSI controller. Check the USB bus. USB bus says it has a mass storage device. Huh! Well which is it? (Actually the SCSI subsystem would probably call the controller something like USB mass storage host controller or something)
That's the location of the PCI-bus-space accessible I/O space of the card (and a place to fall back to if the AGP GART is non-functional).
The AGP card itself is attached in some (chipset specific) way that is very close to the northbridge... it is essentially acting as non-cached physical RAM mapped into the memory space of the system routed through the chipset. The bus protocol (like whatever protocol the chipset has to your RAM) has nothing to do with PCI at all.
BTW, RAM tends to appear as I2C devices on the ISA bus. Does that mean RAM sticks are on the ISA bus?
There definitely isn't going to be any of that interleaved scanline bullshit of the days of the Voodoo.
Think about it, each card is going to have it's own dual display outputs, as every card that you'll plug into PCI Xpress should have.
Besides, a single graphics card is more than enough to play most games on the market at an acceptable frame rate. ANY PCI-Xpress card will be overkill for almost every game, and fine for the most demanding.
What benefit would you get for having two "working together", when you consider the massive overhead?
So you plug in two, and so you have four monitors. Big deal, Windows already does this.
Maybe this "revolutionary technology" is getting Direct3D to use the whole virtual viewport of all four monitors instead of limiting it to a single card at at time. That'd take some trickery to fool both a generic game engine and the seperate graphic cards w.r.t. viewing frustrums and what's not visible, syncronization of vertex/texel programs, etc.
that's still one AGP slot per "motherboard", those systems can have a variable number of motherboards that are tied to a back plane, which is then partitioned.
Although it is impressive that an SSI can run across them. Very neat.
But I wonder if you can actually run a single X11 session using both screens.
Ideally AGP is specced to run at a rate which is as close to the same speed as the northbridge's bus to RAM (close because AGP is a multiple of the PCI bus rate while the FSB on many motherboards is independant of this). Once you've done that, adding another AGP doesn't help because you'd have to share that fast bus into the AGP-mapped memory space. It would have been nice to run 3D games on dual monitors, but by the time that became pratical, 3D cards had dual monitor outputs anyway. So there was no demand to have a dual AGP port board (while not being able to advertise AGP 8x on both, or whatever the fastest at the time was). Increased manufacturing costs without giving any additional benefit to the user.
And workstation/visualization boxes in the hi-end could use PCI-X on the chipsets with like 4 seperate PCI-X buses.
Ultimately no one even bothered to work out how dual AGP might be presented to the operating system.
VA/MD/DC is the center of the known universe, what Beltway did you think we wereh talking about?
And incidientally, I saw LLY 347 a few minutes later. On the side of the road, surrounded by state troopers. They were arresting him for the shitty carbon fiber hood and spoiler he tried to add to his civic.
Also, note that while this was not a demonstration of directional mics, it was a good demonstration of similar technology in RF (directional radio).
Yes, I know there's a technical/industry term for it, I just took finals and my brain is fried. Beamforming? No. Arrrghhh...
Raku-something or other.
Sure it's flash. It loaded pretty quick.
BUT I CAN'T DO ANYTHING WITH IT. What the hell? it's intensionally obtuse, it tells me nothing about the person except he or she is a pretty good flash artist.
But pretty styleless, and an utter waste of bandwidth. It's not even remotely interesting.
Whatever.
And here's to hoping he just might be. Give it 10 years. Something will bubble up, some new emerging trend in competitve gaming. Here's to hoping it'll be Carmack who'll bring it into the mainstream and do it right, when the time comes.
I knew there was something about her name. And it wasn't in any encylopedias/historic references that I could find. Now I gotta dig up my paperback copy of Cryptonomicon for a once-over.
What's your point, and why is this modded up Insightful?
He doesn't really think it's confusing (more at con-fused, see review).
It's his REVIEW that's definitely confusing, and it needs revision.
But you managed to make a witty observation/play on words. How cute. Here's a cookie.
The cheap Dells are cheap. You can't beat them in price/performance, especially in large quantities.
But you're looking at chipsets/mobos/power supplies that leave you little headroom, especially for gaming.
By the time you've picked a good starting point with a Precision or Dimension, you're looking at $1000 and up.
You're better off buying a bearbones system from Newegg, Polywell, Amax, whoever, which has a nice looking case/power supply/mobo ready to accept your choice of add-ons. You stretch your dollar to get a system which is trying to be expandable.
Only drawback -> you have to support it and install the OS.
Big deal. You'd probably end up doing that anyway with the Dell once you start adding new HDs and stuff.
I don't know how else to express it except that I think they over-engineer their rack-mount equipment.
;)
I witnessed a buddy of mine assembling 20 or so of the 1Us, adding upgrades. And I've gotta tell you, I've never seen boards cut in the shapes or as many varieties of ribbon cables neatly tucked, etc. etc.
It's impressive! (but you pay for it) We usually go for the next cheapest option.
I am left to wonder if the only "real" big-name gaming PCs are born of Dells.
The only thing non-standard about their systems is the motherboards (and sometimes the power supplies, but I've never found them underspec, anyway). Cases are always nicely laid out to aid maintenance. Usually the latest and greatest connectivity internally.
As soon as they bite the bullet and put together an AMD-64 system, woah nelly.
I have zero problem with that notion. We use Fedora on desktops/laptops as appropriate, and use RHEL on servers that warrant it.
And let's not forget, the projects that Red Hat picks to include in Fedora are getting a lot of user-facetime that helps them improve, independant of how it helps Red Hat. (Minus changes Red Hat makes to that software to make it work in their environment if required)
if you link to this site and/or reply and/or mod me up.
Also, no, I have not actually applied to win. I'm going to see what damage I can cause.