We already have done that. My old Celeron 600 notebook came with a 38 watthour battery. Most newer notebooks come with 50-65WHr batteries and I think you can order batteries as large as 80WHr with some notebooks.
And really power consumption, at least for the mobile CPUs right now, isn't all that much higher than it was back in the P3 days. Mobile P3s needed anywhere from about 10-20W, the Pentium M's use 7.5 (600mhz idel) to 24W (a few 533 FSB parts are 27W).
IDE/SATA drives only draw about 7-13W Idle/read&write, 15K SCSI drives a bit over 20W read&write.
Spin up might be a problem, but I'd assume you'd want to use cards that supported staggered sinpup on a setup that large.
So, yes 16 HDDs can pull quite a bit of power, about 300W for top end SCSI solutions. Though you wouldn't be thought of as particularly bright if you entrust a setup like that to a basic quality desktop PSU. And the quality of supplies you'd be using with a high end storage array like that (ie something in the N+1 redundant Zippy line) have been availible at well over 1000W for a while.
I think a 1000W PSU in a standard EAXT setup is massive overkill. I really have a hard time thinking of a workstation / stand alone server setup that would be too much for quality 500-600W PSUs to handle right now.
Anandtech reviewed a 4 CPU dual core Opteron setup from SUN while back, it only drew about 600W.
If the CPU wars of the last 5-7 years have taught us nothing; it's that you really can't judge a product on stats alone.
At some point you have to see it perform.
If we went strictly by the Rojak tables, the 5900 Ultra is a clearly superior card to the Radeon 9800 Pro.
Radeon 9800 Pro 128-bits 380 MHz 3040 MTexels/s 256-bits DDR 340MHz 21.76GB/s
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 450 MHz 3600 MTexels/s 256-bits DDR 425 MHz 27.20 GB/s
The 9800 Pro has 1 additional vertex shader pipe, but the raw pixel pushing of the 5900U should be a good 15-20% faster than the Radeon.
A modern graphics card has so many complex and intricate features and tradeoffs for performance and power and production, looking at a handful of stats isn't even a good comparison when we're dealing with GPUs of the same family, much less a wide ranging comparison.
If you want to know how something performs, there is no substitute for benchmarks.
Quite the opposite I would think. With the shear number of resources and amount of support availible on the internet, support forums to ask questions from people who have been there done that so to speak freely availible resouces, 2D, 3D art tools, scripting languages, entire game engines for free download. ease of distrobution, upload your project to sourceforge, or have your files hosted on a site like fileplanet for basically no cash, no effort. And let people all over the world download your game. not to mention graphics, intput, sound APIs/libraries have gotten substantially more user friendly. No more poking video memory to draw a pixel on the screen.
Now, you might have a point that it takes a bit more to get into a proffessional developement house than it did 20 years ago. People expect you to have formal degrees in CS/CE or art rather than just a disk full of your demos.
most chipsets now support floating dividers for PCI/AGP/PCIe/IDE ect that keep the derived clock frequency withing a mhz or two of spec. Intel tried to not do that with 915/(and I think)925, which did hinder overclocking early on, but most motherboard manufacturers, at least the ones concerned with the overclocking / tweaking market managed to hack their own locks on the PCI ect frequency.
There are still some early K8 chipsets (K8T800 and NF3 150) that don't support locks, but I think that's about it. Besides a 2mhz FSB overclock on a 200mhz bus results in a 1/3mhz increase on the PCI bus. I think you'll hard pressed to find a card (or chip) that can't take a +/-1% variance in the clock.
It may be a dishonest way of trying to score an extra few points in the benchmarks, but other than providing misleading perofrmance promises, I can't see how this is harmful to the consumer.
You state: The whole fact you're able to mug someone in-game makes this a non-crime.
Your argument is something like this. If I have the ability to do something I must have the right to do something.
That is not how reality works. Do you really want a system where ability does determines the right to do something.
Well, lets just forget for a second that half the point is this isn't the real world.
His argument (I think) was because Player vs. Player stealing is permitted by the rules of the game the theft of the items cannot be considered a crime.
Let's try and apply your 'real world' example to this more accurately. You're playing football (the American kind), lay out for a pass over the middle and get pancaked by the saftey covering over the top. Do you turn around have call the cops on him for assualt and battery?
Obviously not, because you consented to that type of hit when you decided to play the game.
Very few 'on field' attacks go to the police, and those are the ones that go well beyond the normal infactions you see every game.
Ban his account, return items stolen using the bot and take steps towards stopping the use of bots in the future.
Games (all games, real and computer) have a seperate set of rules the players agree to play by. If stealing is ok under the rules of this game, you can't call the cops when it happens to you. Suck it up and play by the same rules everyone else in the game world is palying by. If something is stolen by unfair means (like this 'unbeatable' bot) those who develope and maintain the game world have a responsiblity to correct the problem and make ammends. Just like the powers that be in a 'real' game handing out pentalties, fines and suspensions when needed.
SSE1 was largely a floating point instruction set, integer work was passed off to MMX.
But SSE2 filled out 'Streaming SIMD extensions' to include most things you'd need.
And when running the chips in 64 bit mode now you have 8 additional 128 bit architectual registers for a total of 16. That's still well short of Alitvec's 32, but x86 chips have developed pretty effective register renaming tecniques over the years. The lack of architectual registers shouldn't be a major handicap.
actually that's not that hard to do with a PC with many fans. Start with low noise fans, put them on a controller at about 5V and you'll never hear them. I have 3 case fans and CPU fan, all at around 5-6V, the fans are not what you hear from the computer. Of course I have one of the early WD 7200 SE Caviar drives, that might still be the dominate noise source if the fans were at 12V....
But when running with just the Seagate 7200.7 drive it's hard to notice the computer is on unless there's total silence in the room. And I didn't need to spend the $1200 or so on the TNN-500 to get there.
Which is why Nocona core Xeons are selling with EM64T technology and not AMD64/x86-64... Even though aside from a few very minor changes AMD make to x86-64 after initial publication the two are identical. Intel can and will see an x86-64 chip without so much as acknowledging the existance of AMD64, in fact they've been doing it for more than a year.
Though I don't know what's more embarassing for Intel right now, that AMD with really no share in the server market 3 years ago got to dictate what instruction set is (probably) going to be the standard for x86 servers nor, or that Intel is still acting like that's not what's happening.
I'm thinking this might be more the preverbal straw that broke the camels back. There has always been outcry to the game play of GTA (at least in GTA3 and later), how horrific and violent and unseemly it is. And it is and that's what makes it fun, the ability to do and act as you want without worrying about consequences. This revelation that the developers hid sexually explicit content in the game just adds fuel to that fire. The backlash has as much to do with RockStar pushing the 'inappropriate' envelope with each new GTA game.
Now I don't actually believe any of that. I think this is just a knee-jerk reaction by everyone who wants to censor life "for the good of the children" and for whatever reason sexual content is more an attention grabber than violence. Maybe it's just that violence is so prevalent in entertainment today we really have a hard time stirring up public outrage over it anymore. Turn on any drama on TV (broadcast, cable, pay, whatever) and you've got corpses, shootouts, fights, ect. Show a boobie and the FCC comes down on you like a ton of bricks (on broadcast TV anyway, basic cable it's more the ad revenue dries up). Same for language, cop shows have guys getting shot and killed every week, but if you really want to be racy like "The Shield" you'll say 'shit' during the shootout. It's just the values our society (here in the US anyway) has placed on different types of content. And those looking to censor everything THEY find offensive know how to capitalize on it. That's all we're seeing.
As one of the many people who picked up an AthlonXP-Mobile, I can tell you it's pretty nice. An SI-97 and a Panflo ultra quiet fan, it's nice and cool, and the loudest thing on the computer is a pair of WD ATA hard drives.
The biggest drawback to intel right now for me is the 80-100+W TDP on most of their chips. I look forward to a dual core Yonah ~40-50W part.
Smithfield is two cores on one die. The difference is both cores access the system bus directly, there's no on chip core to core communications as there is with AMD's solution. That shouldn't surprise anyone though, SMP by deffinition is done in the same mannor, each chip sharing the system bus. Intel doesn't have the same abstraction between the core and the system AMD has.
Intel has shown plans for two seperate dies on a package (I forget the name, a version of Pressler maybe it was), but that should only help Intel, if one Smithfield core is bad, they throw both away (or more maybe sell them as single core prescotts, but we'll see), independant cores makes it easier to discard only the bad dies.
This is not true dual core but two cores slapped into one chip package...
Care to elaborate on the difference?
Typically what they mean is that Intel's design is not functionally different than having two distinct processors as you would in a typical SMP setup. If you look at the diagrams on the second page of the article, you'll see there's no direct communications between the two cores on die. If the two cores want to check cache coherency or system resouces access it's arbitrated over the sytem bus. AMD uses a 'System Request Interface' that all cores on a die will connect to. There's actually local communcations between the two cores. You don't have to hop onto the system bus (or HTT link in this case) to request something that's sitting right next to you. This really only works well since Opteron is a NUMA architecture to begin with, you don't have to go snooping around to see who else is using the data because unless the local SRI has 'checked it out' you have exclusive access, and you don't need to verify that.
how well that work with the P54 Floating Point rounding error.
People may not notice the problem, but if they ever find out it's there, they'll want it fixed, better to throw out a chip in the fab, than replace the product in the market.
The casual gamer who plays the campaign on easy and occaionally skirmishes with the computer is going to want a review based more on 'is it fun to play' which is what you get from some one who is a journalist first and gamer second. Does it look and sound good, is it entertaining and are there any major techincal issues.
however a serious (die hard) gamer gets a very different experiance from a game. Often issues like linear missions, minor balancing issues, cut corners on AI and pathfinding do influence the 'fun' these guys have. When Empire Earth came out, it got solid reviews from most everyone. Great fun, epic scale, yadda yadda yadda. As a die hard RTS fan, I was dissapointed to find about 1/2 the campaign missions were made with painful linear design, most of the ages (epochs) were terribly unbalanced (in one gameplay mode or another) and the AI was worthless, it cheated on every difficulty and had no concept of strategy.
Needless to say what the reviews were looking for a what a 'gamer' was looking for were quite different.
but I'll say it again.
Agressive copy protection is often more a hinderance to legitimate users than it is to pirates.
Copy protection (especially for games it seems) stops only most amature pirates, and I'd venture to guess they would still be thwarted by the simplest measures. Certainly they should be as confused by cd checks for bad bits, as they are by hidden drivers and the like.
actually, we might see FMB 1.5 compatible chips (which newer S478 boards like the Abit IC7-Max3 should support), up to 3.8ghz by the end of the year. Older 865 and 875 boards will only support chips for FMB 1.0 (limited to 3.2ghz). Ace's Hardware has a nice layout.
I have extended HardOCP.com's pledge to correct any and all possible inconsistencies or errors in our editorial entitled "Behind the Phantom Console" personally to Timothy Roberts and Kevin Bachus of Infinium Labs and they have yet to inform HardOCP.com of any information we presented as being not correct. This courtesy was extended on September 17, 2003, the date the article was published and has been extended several times since then with no reply ever being received by HardOCP.com. It is my opinion that Infinium Labs' only interest is stifling HardOCP.com and our opinions. HardOCP.com still stands by our thoughts and opinions put forth in our editorial and no amount of legal badgering and frivolous lawsuits will change those opinions that we have shared with our readers.
_____________________________
Kyle Bennett
Editor-in-Chief @ HardOCP.com
Nice to see they have no intention of rolling over.
final and absolute control over what is in Java, or even what Java is, don't we degrade the idea of compile once, run anywhere?
I'm all for a more open Java, especially if it leads more developer control of what goes into Java, and wider acceptance. But in the end, it must be overseen by some one, right now it's SUN, and Java must be Java, regardless of where you're getting the JVM, or where you're writing the code. Without that central control we risk more J++'s. "mostly java, but 'better', so it doesn't work with SUN Java..."
The licesnse wouldn't restrict you from porting to linux. So long as you met the other guidlines, no profit, stays under MS' liscense ect.
However, it is a DirectX game. I haven't looked through it yet, but i would assume they used DirectInput, DirectSound ect in addition to Direct3D. So moving it over would not be a trivial task.
Slashdot Mirror
We already have done that.
My old Celeron 600 notebook came with a 38 watthour battery. Most newer notebooks come with 50-65WHr batteries and I think you can order batteries as large as 80WHr with some notebooks.
And really power consumption, at least for the mobile CPUs right now, isn't all that much higher than it was back in the P3 days. Mobile P3s needed anywhere from about 10-20W, the Pentium M's use 7.5 (600mhz idel) to 24W (a few 533 FSB parts are 27W).
not as much as you might think.
HDD Power consumption
IDE/SATA drives only draw about 7-13W Idle/read&write, 15K SCSI drives a bit over 20W read&write.
Spin up might be a problem, but I'd assume you'd want to use cards that supported staggered sinpup on a setup that large.
So, yes 16 HDDs can pull quite a bit of power, about 300W for top end SCSI solutions. Though you wouldn't be thought of as particularly bright if you entrust a setup like that to a basic quality desktop PSU. And the quality of supplies you'd be using with a high end storage array like that (ie something in the N+1 redundant Zippy line) have been availible at well over 1000W for a while.
I think a 1000W PSU in a standard EAXT setup is massive overkill. I really have a hard time thinking of a workstation / stand alone server setup that would be too much for quality 500-600W PSUs to handle right now.
Anandtech reviewed a 4 CPU dual core Opteron setup from SUN while back, it only drew about 600W.
If the CPU wars of the last 5-7 years have taught us nothing; it's that you really can't judge a product on stats alone. At some point you have to see it perform. If we went strictly by the Rojak tables, the 5900 Ultra is a clearly superior card to the Radeon 9800 Pro.
Radeon 9800 Pro 128-bits 380 MHz 3040 MTexels/s 256-bits DDR 340MHz 21.76GB/s
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 450 MHz 3600 MTexels/s 256-bits DDR 425 MHz 27.20 GB/s
The 9800 Pro has 1 additional vertex shader pipe, but the raw pixel pushing of the 5900U should be a good 15-20% faster than the Radeon.
Clearly that is not the case in the real world
A modern graphics card has so many complex and intricate features and tradeoffs for performance and power and production, looking at a handful of stats isn't even a good comparison when we're dealing with GPUs of the same family, much less a wide ranging comparison.
If you want to know how something performs, there is no substitute for benchmarks.
Quite the opposite I would think.
With the shear number of resources and amount of support availible on the internet,
support forums to ask questions from people who have been there done that so to speak
freely availible resouces, 2D, 3D art tools, scripting languages, entire game engines for free download.
ease of distrobution, upload your project to sourceforge, or have your files hosted on a site like fileplanet for basically no cash, no effort. And let people all over the world download your game.
not to mention graphics, intput, sound APIs/libraries have gotten substantially more user friendly. No more poking video memory to draw a pixel on the screen.
Now, you might have a point that it takes a bit more to get into a proffessional developement house than it did 20 years ago. People expect you to have formal degrees in CS/CE or art rather than just a disk full of your demos.
most chipsets now support floating dividers for PCI/AGP/PCIe/IDE ect that keep the derived clock frequency withing a mhz or two of spec.
Intel tried to not do that with 915/(and I think)925, which did hinder overclocking early on, but most motherboard manufacturers, at least the ones concerned with the overclocking / tweaking market managed to hack their own locks on the PCI ect frequency.
There are still some early K8 chipsets (K8T800 and NF3 150) that don't support locks, but I think that's about it.
Besides a 2mhz FSB overclock on a 200mhz bus results in a 1/3mhz increase on the PCI bus. I think you'll hard pressed to find a card (or chip) that can't take a +/-1% variance in the clock.
It may be a dishonest way of trying to score an extra few points in the benchmarks, but other than providing misleading perofrmance promises, I can't see how this is harmful to the consumer.
You state: The whole fact you're able to mug someone in-game makes this a non-crime. Your argument is something like this. If I have the ability to do something I must have the right to do something. That is not how reality works. Do you really want a system where ability does determines the right to do something.
Well, lets just forget for a second that half the point is this isn't the real world.
His argument (I think) was because Player vs. Player stealing is permitted by the rules of the game the theft of the items cannot be considered a crime.
Let's try and apply your 'real world' example to this more accurately. You're playing football (the American kind), lay out for a pass over the middle and get pancaked by the saftey covering over the top. Do you turn around have call the cops on him for assualt and battery?
Obviously not, because you consented to that type of hit when you decided to play the game.
Very few 'on field' attacks go to the police, and those are the ones that go well beyond the normal infactions you see every game.
Ban his account, return items stolen using the bot and take steps towards stopping the use of bots in the future.
Games (all games, real and computer) have a seperate set of rules the players agree to play by. If stealing is ok under the rules of this game, you can't call the cops when it happens to you. Suck it up and play by the same rules everyone else in the game world is palying by. If something is stolen by unfair means (like this 'unbeatable' bot) those who develope and maintain the game world have a responsiblity to correct the problem and make ammends. Just like the powers that be in a 'real' game handing out pentalties, fines and suspensions when needed.
In the beginning, I'd say that was pretty true.
SSE1 was largely a floating point instruction set, integer work was passed off to MMX.
But SSE2 filled out 'Streaming SIMD extensions' to include most things you'd need.
And when running the chips in 64 bit mode now you have 8 additional 128 bit architectual registers for a total of 16. That's still well short of Alitvec's 32, but x86 chips have developed pretty effective register renaming tecniques over the years. The lack of architectual registers shouldn't be a major handicap.
actually that's not that hard to do with a PC with many fans.
Start with low noise fans, put them on a controller at about 5V and you'll never hear them.
I have 3 case fans and CPU fan, all at around 5-6V, the fans are not what you hear from the computer.
Of course I have one of the early WD 7200 SE Caviar drives, that might still be the dominate noise source if the fans were at 12V....
But when running with just the Seagate 7200.7 drive it's hard to notice the computer is on unless there's total silence in the room.
And I didn't need to spend the $1200 or so on the TNN-500 to get there.
Which is why Nocona core Xeons are selling with EM64T technology and not AMD64/x86-64... Even though aside from a few very minor changes AMD make to x86-64 after initial publication the two are identical.
Intel can and will see an x86-64 chip without so much as acknowledging the existance of AMD64, in fact they've been doing it for more than a year.
Though I don't know what's more embarassing for Intel right now, that AMD with really no share in the server market 3 years ago got to dictate what instruction set is (probably) going to be the standard for x86 servers nor,
or that Intel is still acting like that's not what's happening.
I'm thinking this might be more the preverbal straw that broke the camels back. There has always been outcry to the game play of GTA (at least in GTA3 and later), how horrific and violent and unseemly it is. And it is and that's what makes it fun, the ability to do and act as you want without worrying about consequences.
This revelation that the developers hid sexually explicit content in the game just adds fuel to that fire. The backlash has as much to do with RockStar pushing the 'inappropriate' envelope with each new GTA game.
Now I don't actually believe any of that. I think this is just a knee-jerk reaction by everyone who wants to censor life "for the good of the children" and for whatever reason sexual content is more an attention grabber than violence. Maybe it's just that violence is so prevalent in entertainment today we really have a hard time stirring up public outrage over it anymore. Turn on any drama on TV (broadcast, cable, pay, whatever) and you've got corpses, shootouts, fights, ect. Show a boobie and the FCC comes down on you like a ton of bricks (on broadcast TV anyway, basic cable it's more the ad revenue dries up).
Same for language, cop shows have guys getting shot and killed every week, but if you really want to be racy like "The Shield" you'll say 'shit' during the shootout.
It's just the values our society (here in the US anyway) has placed on different types of content. And those looking to censor everything THEY find offensive know how to capitalize on it. That's all we're seeing.
As one of the many people who picked up an AthlonXP-Mobile, I can tell you it's pretty nice.
An SI-97 and a Panflo ultra quiet fan, it's nice and cool, and the loudest thing on the computer is a pair of WD ATA hard drives.
The biggest drawback to intel right now for me is the 80-100+W TDP on most of their chips.
I look forward to a dual core Yonah ~40-50W part.
Smithfield is two cores on one die.
The difference is both cores access the system bus directly, there's no on chip core to core communications as there is with AMD's solution. That shouldn't surprise anyone though, SMP by deffinition is done in the same mannor, each chip sharing the system bus. Intel doesn't have the same abstraction between the core and the system AMD has.
Intel has shown plans for two seperate dies on a package (I forget the name, a version of Pressler maybe it was), but that should only help Intel, if one Smithfield core is bad, they throw both away (or more maybe sell them as single core prescotts, but we'll see), independant cores makes it easier to discard only the bad dies.
just take them down to any local bank where you can exchange them for real dollars.
This is not true dual core but two cores slapped into one chip package...
Care to elaborate on the difference?
Typically what they mean is that Intel's design is not functionally different than having two distinct processors as you would in a typical SMP setup.
If you look at the diagrams on the second page of the article, you'll see there's no direct communications between the two cores on die. If the two cores want to check cache coherency or system resouces access it's arbitrated over the sytem bus.
AMD uses a 'System Request Interface' that all cores on a die will connect to. There's actually local communcations between the two cores. You don't have to hop onto the system bus (or HTT link in this case) to request something that's sitting right next to you. This really only works well since Opteron is a NUMA architecture to begin with, you don't have to go snooping around to see who else is using the data because unless the local SRI has 'checked it out' you have exclusive access, and you don't need to verify that.
how well that work with the P54 Floating Point rounding error.
People may not notice the problem, but if they ever find out it's there, they'll want it fixed, better to throw out a chip in the fab, than replace the product in the market.
The casual gamer who plays the campaign on easy and occaionally skirmishes with the computer is going to want a review based more on 'is it fun to play' which is what you get from some one who is a journalist first and gamer second. Does it look and sound good, is it entertaining and are there any major techincal issues.
however a serious (die hard) gamer gets a very different experiance from a game.
Often issues like linear missions, minor balancing issues, cut corners on AI and pathfinding do influence the 'fun' these guys have.
When Empire Earth came out, it got solid reviews from most everyone. Great fun, epic scale, yadda yadda yadda.
As a die hard RTS fan, I was dissapointed to find about 1/2 the campaign missions were made with painful linear design, most of the ages (epochs) were terribly unbalanced (in one gameplay mode or another) and the AI was worthless, it cheated on every difficulty and had no concept of strategy.
Needless to say what the reviews were looking for a what a 'gamer' was looking for were quite different.
Well it ships with the PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 510 (which they naturally list as a 650W supply),
and considering a nice high end Prescott system can pull on the high side of 300W under full load at stock speeds,
I'm guessing it isn't pretty. Maybe in the neighborhood of 400W full load; probably a bit less than half of that idle.
That's never stopped them before
but I'll say it again.
Agressive copy protection is often more a hinderance to legitimate users than it is to pirates.
Copy protection (especially for games it seems) stops only most amature pirates, and I'd venture to guess they would still be thwarted by the simplest measures. Certainly they should be as confused by cd checks for bad bits, as they are by hidden drivers and the like.
it's a good thing, older Nvidia drivers are so easily found.
After 'St. Anger' i say we keep them there....
actually, we might see FMB 1.5 compatible chips (which newer S478 boards like the Abit IC7-Max3 should support), up to 3.8ghz by the end of the year.
Older 865 and 875 boards will only support chips for FMB 1.0 (limited to 3.2ghz).
Ace's Hardware has a nice layout.
I have extended HardOCP.com's pledge to correct any and all possible inconsistencies or errors in our editorial entitled "Behind the Phantom Console" personally to Timothy Roberts and Kevin Bachus of Infinium Labs and they have yet to inform HardOCP.com of any information we presented as being not correct. This courtesy was extended on September 17, 2003, the date the article was published and has been extended several times since then with no reply ever being received by HardOCP.com. It is my opinion that Infinium Labs' only interest is stifling HardOCP.com and our opinions. HardOCP.com still stands by our thoughts and opinions put forth in our editorial and no amount of legal badgering and frivolous lawsuits will change those opinions that we have shared with our readers.
_____________________________
Kyle Bennett
Editor-in-Chief @ HardOCP.com
Nice to see they have no intention of rolling over.
final and absolute control over what is in Java, or even what Java is, don't we degrade the idea of compile once, run anywhere?
I'm all for a more open Java, especially if it leads more developer control of what goes into Java, and wider acceptance.
But in the end, it must be overseen by some one, right now it's SUN, and Java must be Java, regardless of where you're getting the JVM, or where you're writing the code. Without that central control we risk more J++'s. "mostly java, but 'better', so it doesn't work with SUN Java..."
The licesnse wouldn't restrict you from porting to linux. So long as you met the other guidlines, no profit, stays under MS' liscense ect.
However, it is a DirectX game. I haven't looked through it yet, but i would assume they used DirectInput, DirectSound ect in addition to Direct3D. So moving it over would not be a trivial task.