I agree with you for the most part, but there are some things you are missing. Because of the way the bus on the XBox is set up, the video performace is MUCH higher than on the Mini's separate graphics adapter. Since the processor and GPU share RAM, the bandwidth and latency between the two is MUCH MUCH lower than on the AGP Mini. Of course, the Mini allows much more flexability in terms of what you can do, and it is much easier to hook the Mini up to a high resolution monitor at native resolution. The Radeon 9200 scored lower on graphics benchmarks than the Radeon 9000 Pro. The Radeon 9000 Pro is a feature limited version of the Radeon 8500 (look it up). The Radeon 8500 scored lower on graphics benchmarks than the geForce 3. Therefore, the XBox GPU probably has more power than the 9200. I think I would rather have the Mini, but just to get the facts strait.
The powerbook, like most laptops, has the heatsync on the largest surface of the laptop, the bottom, where it touches your lap. Your lap takes the brunt of the heat from it. The Mac Mini's heatsync does not touch the case itself, since they have slightly more room to work with. As for the fans, the Mac Mini has a larger (but not large) fan than the powerbook. Therefore it spins slower than the powerbook's, generating less noise. Most laptop fans are horribly noisy, I would have though Apple would have sourced a quieter one. Evidently now.
Memory Sticks are not priced too badly. Of course they cannot be compaired to Compact Flash, but if you look at the price for SD cards, which are of a similar size to Memory Stick Duos, then the prices are definitely in the same ballpark. No comment on Sony's self destorying all propriatary technology trend, since Sony promised a couple of weeks ago to mend its ways.
The PSP continues the trend of gaming devices that the manufaturer looses money selling. Pretty soon, we will all have $5 PSP3s, Nintendo Gameboy FXs, and Xbox Minis, whilst the big three game hardware producers vie for the top spot of who lost the most money selling units.
RTFA. Right now they are only using a basic signal detector, but at the bottom of the page it states that they are hoping to add other features such as encryption detection and signal filtering that would require a CPU.
As they said, in the production model everything will be surface mounted, so the bulk of the small PCB board will not be there, and everything can be curved to fit into a largish ring, although not as large as it is now. With some tasteful decoration, it could almost pass for a high school ring. Sadly, geeks who design electronics AND their cases never have any sense of style, so I am sure this thing will end up being neon green and flashing with 18 blue LEDs.
Ok, the Nano-ITX is not off the shelf here yet, but if you live or travel to taiwan, you can get them, and it is a matter of time before they come here. My point is he was using a general purpose motherboard and parts, not custom built stuff.
I don't know if all you mac-heads remembered, but this guy used OFF THE SHELF components. The Mac Mini motherboard is custom made for the case. You could build a motherboard for a 2.2 GHz Pentium M, 8X DVD Burner, and 128 MB Radeon 9700 Mobile in the same case, if you were an all powerful Taiwanese MB manufaturer and you thought there was a market for Mac Mini to PC Mini converstion parts. With the stuff that is off the shelf, it is in no way shaped to fit in that little wierd case, so you have a lot of wasted space. The Mac Mini is basically an iBook without the battery, LCD, and keyboard. No one is claiming that the iBook is the most powerful 4 lb laptop.
That might be hard, as Memory Sticks and Memory Stick Pro cards are longer than CF cards any way you look at it, so the memory stick would stick 1/2" (about 1 cm) out of the card slot. Not to mention that everyone uses a different transfer protocol, so they would have to design, build, and power through CF a MS to PIO converter.
Basically, dual core processors and dual processor computers (at least x86 ones) works the same way. You have two completely seperate cores, which is a fancy word for the various circuts that do the actual math in the processor. In a dual core processor they share several things, such as some cache, but in a basic sense it is basically two processors on a single piece of silicon. One of the limiting things about both setups is that the processors cannot communicate that fast with eachother. In a dual processor system, the only way for the processors to communicate is for the master CPU to give the slave CPU something to do. This elimiates a lot of the potential performance boost from having 2x the processing power, the master CPU can only give tasks to the slave CPU that would not be faster for it to do itself. The same is true of dual core processors, although they communicate on a slightly lower level. On the OS side, things are also not so hot. Each task that the CPUs run, be it a program such as Firefox, or a driver for the OS, runs as a thread. A thread is used for multitasking purposes. Each thread is assigned a priority. The processor(s), which can only do one thing at a time, switch between threads millions of times a second, so that it seems that everything you do is running at the same time. However, you cannot split a thread into two pieces, to run on 2 CPUs. Since computers are not really intelligent, they cannot look at the tasks they are assigned and figure out how to split up the work, they rely on programmers to do it for them. For most things, this is not an issue, since the thread does not require much processor time to run. For things like new 3D games and video encoding, lots of processor time is required. Most of these programs are made so that they run entirely in one thread. The computer can not split this work between the two processors, so it ends up with one processor tying itself up completely with the time consuming thread, while the other one sits idle. For a program to take advantage of multiple processors, it has to be able to split the work it wants done into multiple threads, one for each CPU. Programs like Adobe Photoshop take advantage of this, but it is not an easy thing to do, and most programmers, under time and budget constraints, do not implement multiple threads into their software. Basically, 99% of all the software out there right now will not take advantage of the doubled processing power of these dual core chips.
Actually all modern x86 processors are radically different than 386s. I am not sure exactly what point (PII or PIII), but the internal workings of Intel and equivalent AMD processors switched from being x86s and over to being fast RISC processors with x86 command interpreters, since the CISC x86 design did not transition well into more modern processor design. As such, having an actual x86 processor in a modern computer could cause some problems. Not to mention that almost no applications are multithreaded. OSes vary in their compatibility, but in gerneral are quite pitiful. Windows, in its most expensive consumer version can handle 8 processors or processor cores. Linux can handle up to 128, but about 16 speed benifits and stability decrease greatly.
Yes, with USB, we can scale up to 127 Human Input Devices, or 63 keyboards and 63 mice, plus one USB christmas tree or coffee mug from japan. The multi-core processors only have 2 cores, so it will be several years before processors can handle the minesweeper/input demands of the modern slashdot reader.
I'm 18, and for the last 2 years one of the computers in my room has been a DEC Alphastation 500 with 8 SCSI hard drives. It is a great machine, sadly I need to sell it before I go to college, or else I fear that it will be trashed by my parents. Anyone interested?
I can't say that I am suprised that people don't know what DECs are, though. In this industry, if you don't release a new product every 6 months, you will be completely obsolete in a year and forgotten in 4. Anyone remember Voodoo or Number Nine?
In the follow up experement, most of the human subjects (with a few glaring exceptions) refused outright buy pictures of any of the monkeys. Scientists are currently puzzling out the implications of these unexpected results.
Re:Finally, on the same level as the PC, for now.
on
More On PS3 and Xbox 2
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· Score: 1
Every time a game console comes out, it beats the pants off PCs graphics quality wise. PCs have caught up to the current generation and even surpassed them. The PS3 and XBox 2 will again be amazing, as evidenced by recent articles about the Cell Processor, ect... I think a lot more than Half Life 2 will be possible, think better than Doom 3 on high resolution uncompressed settings.
Wasn't PS2 supposed to do movie quality graphics? We know the graphics are going to be better than what came before, why do we need to have these obviously false and untestable statements. Why not give us some real data like bandwidth, MHz, GFlops, and polygons?
Uhhhh...It is the Mac Mini. It has a Radeon 9200 (better than the gForce 3 in the XBox), a 1.25 GHz processor (Better than the 700 Mhz Celeron in the XBox), 256 MB of DDR RAM (better than the 64 MB of RDRAM in the XBox). For $29.99 US you can get a TV video adapter from Apple. Play flash games, shockwave games, emulate old systems, and play modern games ported to Mac (there are some). Plus, when you are done gaming, you can watch movies and listen to music. When you are done with entertainment in general, take it off the top of your TV and put a monitor and keyboard on it, and work.
The article repeatedly mentions the possible application of using this for intruder detection. What would one have to do, let it watch several intruders before it could spot one?
No, the Xbox 2 is only one IBM 970. Thats 85W. PS3 = 4x 970's, or 340 watts for the processors alone, never mind their 4 vector thingies each, and the rest of the hardware (with 250GFlops overkill on the processors, this thing has to have at least a 16 drive SCSI RAID array as a "memory card").
To answer some of the frequent raised points in the other comments here:
Induction transformers are not that efficient, in any form, including the common wall wart. They use sometimes up to 50% more current than they provide, and also suck power when there is no drain on them. To make an inductive transformer with a longer range, you have to remember that the inductive effect varies with the square of the distance. In other words, to get 2x the power, you need distance^2.
I was a little hasty to say "give you cancer in short order". There are many conflicting studies in this area. Anyway, living with a giant tesla coil would be like living next to several high tension wires. Many people have reported (although I make no guess as to whether these reports are true) various health problems associated with that.
I'm not talking about the dinky 2 watts from your cell phone and computer. I'm talking enough radiation to make tin foil spark and any spare light bulbs in your closet to spontainiously illuminate.
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I agree with you for the most part, but there are some things you are missing. Because of the way the bus on the XBox is set up, the video performace is MUCH higher than on the Mini's separate graphics adapter. Since the processor and GPU share RAM, the bandwidth and latency between the two is MUCH MUCH lower than on the AGP Mini. Of course, the Mini allows much more flexability in terms of what you can do, and it is much easier to hook the Mini up to a high resolution monitor at native resolution. The Radeon 9200 scored lower on graphics benchmarks than the Radeon 9000 Pro. The Radeon 9000 Pro is a feature limited version of the Radeon 8500 (look it up). The Radeon 8500 scored lower on graphics benchmarks than the geForce 3. Therefore, the XBox GPU probably has more power than the 9200. I think I would rather have the Mini, but just to get the facts strait.
The powerbook, like most laptops, has the heatsync on the largest surface of the laptop, the bottom, where it touches your lap. Your lap takes the brunt of the heat from it. The Mac Mini's heatsync does not touch the case itself, since they have slightly more room to work with. As for the fans, the Mac Mini has a larger (but not large) fan than the powerbook. Therefore it spins slower than the powerbook's, generating less noise. Most laptop fans are horribly noisy, I would have though Apple would have sourced a quieter one. Evidently now.
Memory Sticks are not priced too badly. Of course they cannot be compaired to Compact Flash, but if you look at the price for SD cards, which are of a similar size to Memory Stick Duos, then the prices are definitely in the same ballpark. No comment on Sony's self destorying all propriatary technology trend, since Sony promised a couple of weeks ago to mend its ways.
The PSP continues the trend of gaming devices that the manufaturer looses money selling. Pretty soon, we will all have $5 PSP3s, Nintendo Gameboy FXs, and Xbox Minis, whilst the big three game hardware producers vie for the top spot of who lost the most money selling units.
RTFA. Right now they are only using a basic signal detector, but at the bottom of the page it states that they are hoping to add other features such as encryption detection and signal filtering that would require a CPU.
As they said, in the production model everything will be surface mounted, so the bulk of the small PCB board will not be there, and everything can be curved to fit into a largish ring, although not as large as it is now. With some tasteful decoration, it could almost pass for a high school ring. Sadly, geeks who design electronics AND their cases never have any sense of style, so I am sure this thing will end up being neon green and flashing with 18 blue LEDs.
Ok, the Nano-ITX is not off the shelf here yet, but if you live or travel to taiwan, you can get them, and it is a matter of time before they come here. My point is he was using a general purpose motherboard and parts, not custom built stuff.
I for one welcome our new horny robot masters.
I don't know if all you mac-heads remembered, but this guy used OFF THE SHELF components. The Mac Mini motherboard is custom made for the case. You could build a motherboard for a 2.2 GHz Pentium M, 8X DVD Burner, and 128 MB Radeon 9700 Mobile in the same case, if you were an all powerful Taiwanese MB manufaturer and you thought there was a market for Mac Mini to PC Mini converstion parts. With the stuff that is off the shelf, it is in no way shaped to fit in that little wierd case, so you have a lot of wasted space. The Mac Mini is basically an iBook without the battery, LCD, and keyboard. No one is claiming that the iBook is the most powerful 4 lb laptop.
That might be hard, as Memory Sticks and Memory Stick Pro cards are longer than CF cards any way you look at it, so the memory stick would stick 1/2" (about 1 cm) out of the card slot. Not to mention that everyone uses a different transfer protocol, so they would have to design, build, and power through CF a MS to PIO converter.
Basically, dual core processors and dual processor computers (at least x86 ones) works the same way. You have two completely seperate cores, which is a fancy word for the various circuts that do the actual math in the processor. In a dual core processor they share several things, such as some cache, but in a basic sense it is basically two processors on a single piece of silicon. One of the limiting things about both setups is that the processors cannot communicate that fast with eachother. In a dual processor system, the only way for the processors to communicate is for the master CPU to give the slave CPU something to do. This elimiates a lot of the potential performance boost from having 2x the processing power, the master CPU can only give tasks to the slave CPU that would not be faster for it to do itself. The same is true of dual core processors, although they communicate on a slightly lower level. On the OS side, things are also not so hot. Each task that the CPUs run, be it a program such as Firefox, or a driver for the OS, runs as a thread. A thread is used for multitasking purposes. Each thread is assigned a priority. The processor(s), which can only do one thing at a time, switch between threads millions of times a second, so that it seems that everything you do is running at the same time. However, you cannot split a thread into two pieces, to run on 2 CPUs. Since computers are not really intelligent, they cannot look at the tasks they are assigned and figure out how to split up the work, they rely on programmers to do it for them. For most things, this is not an issue, since the thread does not require much processor time to run. For things like new 3D games and video encoding, lots of processor time is required. Most of these programs are made so that they run entirely in one thread. The computer can not split this work between the two processors, so it ends up with one processor tying itself up completely with the time consuming thread, while the other one sits idle. For a program to take advantage of multiple processors, it has to be able to split the work it wants done into multiple threads, one for each CPU. Programs like Adobe Photoshop take advantage of this, but it is not an easy thing to do, and most programmers, under time and budget constraints, do not implement multiple threads into their software. Basically, 99% of all the software out there right now will not take advantage of the doubled processing power of these dual core chips.
Actually all modern x86 processors are radically different than 386s. I am not sure exactly what point (PII or PIII), but the internal workings of Intel and equivalent AMD processors switched from being x86s and over to being fast RISC processors with x86 command interpreters, since the CISC x86 design did not transition well into more modern processor design. As such, having an actual x86 processor in a modern computer could cause some problems. Not to mention that almost no applications are multithreaded. OSes vary in their compatibility, but in gerneral are quite pitiful. Windows, in its most expensive consumer version can handle 8 processors or processor cores. Linux can handle up to 128, but about 16 speed benifits and stability decrease greatly.
Yes, with USB, we can scale up to 127 Human Input Devices, or 63 keyboards and 63 mice, plus one USB christmas tree or coffee mug from japan. The multi-core processors only have 2 cores, so it will be several years before processors can handle the minesweeper/input demands of the modern slashdot reader.
I for one welcome our killer-robotic-unicycle rulers!
I'm 18, and for the last 2 years one of the computers in my room has been a DEC Alphastation 500 with 8 SCSI hard drives. It is a great machine, sadly I need to sell it before I go to college, or else I fear that it will be trashed by my parents. Anyone interested? I can't say that I am suprised that people don't know what DECs are, though. In this industry, if you don't release a new product every 6 months, you will be completely obsolete in a year and forgotten in 4. Anyone remember Voodoo or Number Nine?
In the follow up experement, most of the human subjects (with a few glaring exceptions) refused outright buy pictures of any of the monkeys. Scientists are currently puzzling out the implications of these unexpected results.
Sorry, I was uniformed of the exact specifications. Anyway, they are of compairable specs, if not exactly the same.
Why the DEC logo?
Every time a game console comes out, it beats the pants off PCs graphics quality wise. PCs have caught up to the current generation and even surpassed them. The PS3 and XBox 2 will again be amazing, as evidenced by recent articles about the Cell Processor, ect... I think a lot more than Half Life 2 will be possible, think better than Doom 3 on high resolution uncompressed settings.
Wasn't PS2 supposed to do movie quality graphics? We know the graphics are going to be better than what came before, why do we need to have these obviously false and untestable statements. Why not give us some real data like bandwidth, MHz, GFlops, and polygons?
Uhhhh...It is the Mac Mini. It has a Radeon 9200 (better than the gForce 3 in the XBox), a 1.25 GHz processor (Better than the 700 Mhz Celeron in the XBox), 256 MB of DDR RAM (better than the 64 MB of RDRAM in the XBox). For $29.99 US you can get a TV video adapter from Apple. Play flash games, shockwave games, emulate old systems, and play modern games ported to Mac (there are some). Plus, when you are done gaming, you can watch movies and listen to music. When you are done with entertainment in general, take it off the top of your TV and put a monitor and keyboard on it, and work.
The article repeatedly mentions the possible application of using this for intruder detection. What would one have to do, let it watch several intruders before it could spot one?
No, the Xbox 2 is only one IBM 970. Thats 85W. PS3 = 4x 970's, or 340 watts for the processors alone, never mind their 4 vector thingies each, and the rest of the hardware (with 250GFlops overkill on the processors, this thing has to have at least a 16 drive SCSI RAID array as a "memory card").
To answer some of the frequent raised points in the other comments here: Induction transformers are not that efficient, in any form, including the common wall wart. They use sometimes up to 50% more current than they provide, and also suck power when there is no drain on them. To make an inductive transformer with a longer range, you have to remember that the inductive effect varies with the square of the distance. In other words, to get 2x the power, you need distance^2. I was a little hasty to say "give you cancer in short order". There are many conflicting studies in this area. Anyway, living with a giant tesla coil would be like living next to several high tension wires. Many people have reported (although I make no guess as to whether these reports are true) various health problems associated with that.
I'm not talking about the dinky 2 watts from your cell phone and computer. I'm talking enough radiation to make tin foil spark and any spare light bulbs in your closet to spontainiously illuminate.