Um, in the latest AMD CPUs, it's the CPU that has the memory controller. So, no, there won't be contention there.
That's not correct. In a multi-cpu AMD system, each CPU will have it's own memory controller, but will still need to access all of memory. So, it will boil down to the same scenario -- N clients on N channels. There will be contention every time 2 or more CPUs need to access the same channel.
I am not trying to flamebait, but this is an uninformed post trying to sound informed by throwing some keywords around.
re: unlimited simultaneous memory access - it's called a crossbar switch, and a lot of parallel supercomputers use them.
Crossbar switch lets N clients access N memories at the same time. That's hardly unlimited simultaneous access. And, even plain 2-channel desktop computers will let 2 requests onto each channel simultaneously, and 4-channel graphics cards have crossbar switches letting 4 requests come out simultaneously.
The HyperTransport that AMD uses is not a bad interconnect in the meantime, for people on smaller budgets..
The HT is not a memory interconnect, it's only used to connect the CPU to the northbridge, and, in some systems, northbridge to the southbridge. On an imaginary system with a large number of CPUs all firing off parallel requests on their own HT links to one northbridge with a memory controller, you'd still have memory contention problems at the northbridge, and most of your CPUs will be "busy" waiting to get some data back.
I am not trying to flamebait, but this is an uninformed post trying to sound informed by throwing some keywords around.
>> re: unlimited simultaneous memory access - it's called a crossbar switch, and a lot of parallel supercomputers use them. >The HyperTransport that AMD uses is not a bad interconnect in the meantime, for people on smaller budgets..
The HT is not a memory interconnect, it's only used to connect the CPU to the northbridge, and, in some systems, northbridge to the southbridge. On an imaginary system with a large number of CPUs all firing off parallel requests on their own HT links to one northbridge with a memory controller, you'd still have memory contention problems at the northbridge, and most of your CPUs will be "busy" waiting to get some data back.
My desktop is not for sale as advertising space. If it were, then the revenue generated from it should be MINE, not Googles.
That's a silly thing to say. That's like saying that your TV screen is yours, and the revenue from ads placed on it should be yours, and not TV station's.
If you took your monitor, put it on the window and let people who walk by your house read the ads, then you might have an argument.
Sony isn't doing everything by themselves. They were planning to, but once they realized that "cell" is not going to provide adequate graphics capabilities, they went with one of the two tried and true graphics chip companies -- the only one that wasn't already making chips for the competition.
I am quite surprised Intel is losing out. I recently acquired an old ThinkPad to do some development (porting from OS X to GNUstep) on, and to play the games that don't run on my Mac, and found the performance of the integrated graphics to be quite acceptable
Intel is probably losing out because the ATI integrated graphics in laptops runs as fast as current low-end 3d cards, vs. Intel's that run as fast as two year old low end cards. So, others are actually eating away at the integrated market share.
I've had a win on Deity level that started off with two cities in a corner peninsula when the opponents had a dozen cities each. I've built up a force, took a couple of cities by surprise, acquired some tech to make peace, moved my palace to one of the cities, and I was off an running.
The fact that you can create new "core" cities through moving palaces and creating the Forbidden Palace on the opposite side of the world really help out with this problem.
Becoming a communist will let you create a third center, as well.
Yeah, the fun of sitting in front of a large TV and playing with friends is a big plus for consoles. The ease of use, i.e. putting in a CD/DVD and turning the thing on lets you play it while sitting on the couch, it a big plus for me, too.
But, almost all decent PCs these days have TV out capabilities, and even PS2/XBOX controller -> USB converters available for very little $$$, so PCs can be set up to play just like the consoles -- in your living room, on a big TV, with a bunch of friends.
For all I know, the consoles are about having a jolly good time with your friends, while PC games seem to focus on just being good games.
That's an argument I've heard a lot, and it sounds reasonable. But, I'm not sure if it's a good one -- just look at the list of games you've made as the good PS2 games. Most of them are single-player games!
BTW, Civ has come a long way from the Amiga days, and Civ 3 : Conquests is only a year or so old, and they're still, arguably, making great improvements to the franchise. If you enjoyed the old Civ, you should really give the latest incarnation a shot.
My main reason for not playing games, or investing money in PC-gaming at all, is because I think all the PS2 games I've played have a higher entertainment value and especially replay value.
I'm not sure how you can say that PC games don't have as good of a replay value -- a lot of PC-only games (like Civ-type strategies, and RTS games) are famous for exactly that, the replay value. Other replay-value games like sports titles are all available on pretty much every console and PC.
What type of games are you referring to when you say that PS2 has replay value that PC doesn't?
I can't find the "IE Theme" on the update site -- can you point me to it? I'd like to set that up for my dad who's complaining about things not looking the same.
As for swarming making it tougher, have you ever actually used BitTorrent? I have never seen any sort of evidence of that.
I pretty much have something going through torrent at all times. I see wildly varying download rates during a download of a same item. It can go anywhere from 100KB/s to 30KB/s and back up in one hour. And, this is with very active torrents with 100+ clients.
The inactive torrents are actually a lot more stable, because there are only a few seeds and they are not being leetched to death.
I find this to be the norm in the circles that I go in, but I understand that the experiences vary with regions and ISPs. I can't say what the overall "world" average is.
Most movie releases these days are Xvid-encoded to fit on a single CD. Assume 93 minutes of movie and 700 megabyte file size, and it works out to just about exactly 1Mbps.
Do you often achieve the maximum download rate, and then sustain it for an hour and a half? If you do, you have a much better connection than most average ADSL users.
Also, if we're talking about swarming, it'll be even tougher to sustain the max download rate while upload clients are dropping in and out of the swarm.
The technology to eliminate lag already exists and has been implemented. I have used it myself.
Can you provide any details? I don't understand how you can see something without a lag if you can't download it in real time?
What nonsense. Have you ever downloaded a trailer from here?
Those trailers are reduced to very small resolutions, so that you can watch them right away. They are hardly good enough to replace regular TV or way off from DVD or HD content.
Get the hardware out quickly; if you wait too long, it will be obsolete before you ship.
It's already obsolete. It's on par with cards from about 6-7 years ago, if they achieve everything in their spec. It's only good enough as a teaching tool.
You can charge a little more than a comparable regular graphics card, but not a lot more. If this becomes a premium custom hardware product, it's dead on arrival.
A comparable graphics card costs $10 if you can even find it these days.
I don't see how this is worth the effort when you can buy the cheapest ATI card, and use the generic open-source VGA driver and achieve better 2D performance. This is somewhat like somebody trying to get people to work on an open-source version of DOS. Sure, you get your freedom of the free software, but who would want to use DOS? I'm all for open-source, but it has it be at least remotely competitive to get somebody to look at it.
Yes, I agree, but when you gamble you always lose. The odds are always against you.
Not true with poker. You're playing against other players, not against the house. Your odds to win are you make of it. The house can make it tougher to win by increasing the rake, but generally if you play better than other players, you will win money.
Putting aside whether my example is good or not, your answers proves the point that it's really hard to make a program that will judge well what the other player has.
Short answer to all this is that if I had KK down and AK5 on the flop, damn right I'm going for it.
Going back to this... If this is a NL game, I'd definitely push all my chips in at the flop. If it were a limit game, and we're heads up with no limit to the number of raises, I'd probably call after the second reraise.
Sorry about the shot at you, but represented the tools as something that's "easy" (your word) to do. Taking into account betting patterns of somebody and giving you information that's correct more often than not is a really really hard thing to do.
A tool could easily tell you that you have 8 outs to a straight, and that your chance on the flop is about 32%, but to be able to tell you that, based on any information, the other guy is most likely not also drawing to a flush at the same time is something I haven't seen before. Certainly not an easy thing to come up with.
it's easy to find software that is designed to follow along with the current game, giving you the statistically best move based on what is known, such as the face-up cards, who is on the button, and what your cards are.
That's a very misinformed statement, coming from somebody who probably doesn't play much poker himself.
A large part of figuring out the "statistically" best move is having a good idea of what the opponent might be holding in his hand. That's the very difficult part.
Here's a quick example. Say you're holding KK, the you raise preflop and get reraised. Flop comes AK5. You bet, and you get raised again. Stats will tell you that you can beat 99% of the hands out there, so raise away, right? Most good players will consider that the opponent might have AA since he reraised you preflop and would adjust their strategy accordingly. A simple stat bot would raise until he's out of money.
Visit the UofA's poker research pages for more details on where the trouble spots in poker AI research are.
The fact of the matter is, the odds aren't in your (the proverbial your) favor. Odds are, you (proverbial) play like crap, or in a game where there is a human element (poker), the dealer plays better than you do.
We're talking about poker where you play against other people, not against the dealer. This is not "let is ride", "carribean stud", or some other bastardization of poker in which there's an optimal strategy which gives you just under 50% of the odds to win. You play against other players, and if you're better than they are, you take their money.
The casino only takes a percentage of every pot, and the dealer is there to deal the cards and nothing else.
I don't think you understand the original point. If the bots become so good that the humans can't beat them, the humans will stop playing. Then, you'll have less players, less hands played, and less rake. The online casino starts making a lot less money.
You can count on them trying to do as much as possible to prevent this from happening.
Is online poker set up in such a way that card counting can actually work? Card counting works because casinos use multiple decks to eliminate the need for time-wasting shuffling.
You might be thinking about blackjack. Poker can only be played with one deck, which is always shuffled in a b&m casino.
In stud games, though, one needs to remember which cards have been shown and mucked, and a computer bot would be able to gain an advantage by having a perfect memory. Most good players, though, don't have much trouble remembering the important cards, though.
Actually, there is knowledge that at least xbox2 will be based on a CPU and nVidia GPU combination, basically a PC lite for gaming just like xbox1.
Well, first, it's an ATI GPU, not an nVidia GPU that will be in xbox2. But, really, how can you compare "a cpu and a gpu" with "a grid". Both of those are so vague that they yield no information on their processing power.
The current top of the line GPU is so far ahead of what was available 2 years ago, so it's not inconcievable that the xbox2 GPU will be far ahead of the current versions.
The "grid technology" offers great scaling potential -- but that doesn't mean that Sony is going to plop a grid of 100 cores into a PS3, it just wouldn't make any sense price-wise.
In fact, whatever they decide to put in the PS3 will probably be availble in either a CPU or a GPU available for PCs within a year, if it really turns out to be that successful. The technology is far from secret, when even you and I know about it!:)
That's just the status quo. Currently, more PS2's than XBox + GC, so let's assume the same for the next generation. Not too big a leap. Whether it's right or not is another question.
It's a bit of weak argument to base one's "analysis" on -- saying that PS3 will sell more than Xbox2+GC2 just because PS2 is selling more than Xbox and GC is a bit of stretch. It's not like we've gone through many generations of consoles, seeing a pattern like emerging..
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Um, in the latest AMD CPUs, it's the CPU that has the memory controller. So, no, there won't be contention there.
That's not correct. In a multi-cpu AMD system, each CPU will have it's own memory controller, but will still need to access all of memory. So, it will boil down to the same scenario -- N clients on N channels. There will be contention every time 2 or more CPUs need to access the same channel.
Sorry about that, I guess I should look at the preview after clicking on the button.
Corrected post is here.
I am not trying to flamebait, but this is an uninformed post trying to sound informed by throwing some keywords around.
re: unlimited simultaneous memory access - it's called a crossbar switch, and a lot of parallel supercomputers use them.
Crossbar switch lets N clients access N memories at the same time. That's hardly unlimited simultaneous access. And, even plain 2-channel desktop computers will let 2 requests onto each channel simultaneously, and 4-channel graphics cards have crossbar switches letting 4 requests come out simultaneously.
The HyperTransport that AMD uses is not a bad interconnect in the meantime, for people on smaller budgets..
The HT is not a memory interconnect, it's only used to connect the CPU to the northbridge, and, in some systems, northbridge to the southbridge. On an imaginary system with a large number of CPUs all firing off parallel requests on their own HT links to one northbridge with a memory controller, you'd still have memory contention problems at the northbridge, and most of your CPUs will be "busy" waiting to get some data back.
I am not trying to flamebait, but this is an uninformed post trying to sound informed by throwing some keywords around.
>> re: unlimited simultaneous memory access - it's called a crossbar switch, and a lot of parallel supercomputers use them. >The HyperTransport that AMD uses is not a bad interconnect in the meantime, for people on smaller budgets..
The HT is not a memory interconnect, it's only used to connect the CPU to the northbridge, and, in some systems, northbridge to the southbridge. On an imaginary system with a large number of CPUs all firing off parallel requests on their own HT links to one northbridge with a memory controller, you'd still have memory contention problems at the northbridge, and most of your CPUs will be "busy" waiting to get some data back.
My desktop is not for sale as advertising space. If it were, then the revenue generated from it should be MINE, not Googles.
That's a silly thing to say. That's like saying that your TV screen is yours, and the revenue from ads placed on it should be yours, and not TV station's.
If you took your monitor, put it on the window and let people who walk by your house read the ads, then you might have an argument.
Sony isn't doing everything by themselves. They were planning to, but once they realized that "cell" is not going to provide adequate graphics capabilities, they went with one of the two tried and true graphics chip companies -- the only one that wasn't already making chips for the competition.
I am quite surprised Intel is losing out. I recently acquired an old ThinkPad to do some development (porting from OS X to GNUstep) on, and to play the games that don't run on my Mac, and found the performance of the integrated graphics to be quite acceptable
Intel is probably losing out because the ATI integrated graphics in laptops runs as fast as current low-end 3d cards, vs. Intel's that run as fast as two year old low end cards. So, others are actually eating away at the integrated market share.
I've had a win on Deity level that started off with two cities in a corner peninsula when the opponents had a dozen cities each. I've built up a force, took a couple of cities by surprise, acquired some tech to make peace, moved my palace to one of the cities, and I was off an running.
The fact that you can create new "core" cities through moving palaces and creating the Forbidden Palace on the opposite side of the world really help out with this problem.
Becoming a communist will let you create a third center, as well.
Yeah, the fun of sitting in front of a large TV and playing with friends is a big plus for consoles. The ease of use, i.e. putting in a CD/DVD and turning the thing on lets you play it while sitting on the couch, it a big plus for me, too.
But, almost all decent PCs these days have TV out capabilities, and even PS2/XBOX controller -> USB converters available for very little $$$, so PCs can be set up to play just like the consoles -- in your living room, on a big TV, with a bunch of friends.
For all I know, the consoles are about having a jolly good time with your friends, while PC games seem to focus on just being good games.
That's an argument I've heard a lot, and it sounds reasonable. But, I'm not sure if it's a good one -- just look at the list of games you've made as the good PS2 games. Most of them are single-player games!
BTW, Civ has come a long way from the Amiga days, and Civ 3 : Conquests is only a year or so old, and they're still, arguably, making great improvements to the franchise. If you enjoyed the old Civ, you should really give the latest incarnation a shot.
My main reason for not playing games, or investing money in PC-gaming at all, is because I think all the PS2 games I've played have a higher entertainment value and especially replay value.
I'm not sure how you can say that PC games don't have as good of a replay value -- a lot of PC-only games (like Civ-type strategies, and RTS games) are famous for exactly that, the replay value. Other replay-value games like sports titles are all available on pretty much every console and PC.
What type of games are you referring to when you say that PS2 has replay value that PC doesn't?
I can't find the "IE Theme" on the update site -- can you point me to it? I'd like to set that up for my dad who's complaining about things not looking the same.
What games do you play on that system?
As for swarming making it tougher, have you ever actually used BitTorrent? I have never seen any sort of evidence of that.
I pretty much have something going through torrent at all times. I see wildly varying download rates during a download of a same item. It can go anywhere from 100KB/s to 30KB/s and back up in one hour. And, this is with very active torrents with 100+ clients.
The inactive torrents are actually a lot more stable, because there are only a few seeds and they are not being leetched to death.
I find this to be the norm in the circles that I go in, but I understand that the experiences vary with regions and ISPs. I can't say what the overall "world" average is.
Most movie releases these days are Xvid-encoded to fit on a single CD. Assume 93 minutes of movie and 700 megabyte file size, and it works out to just about exactly 1Mbps.
Do you often achieve the maximum download rate, and then sustain it for an hour and a half? If you do, you have a much better connection than most average ADSL users.
Also, if we're talking about swarming, it'll be even tougher to sustain the max download rate while upload clients are dropping in and out of the swarm.
The technology to eliminate lag already exists and has been implemented. I have used it myself.
Can you provide any details? I don't understand how you can see something without a lag if you can't download it in real time?
What nonsense. Have you ever downloaded a trailer from here?
Those trailers are reduced to very small resolutions, so that you can watch them right away. They are hardly good enough to replace regular TV or way off from DVD or HD content.
Get the hardware out quickly; if you wait too long, it will be obsolete before you ship.
It's already obsolete. It's on par with cards from about 6-7 years ago, if they achieve everything in their spec. It's only good enough as a teaching tool.
You can charge a little more than a comparable regular graphics card, but not a lot more. If this becomes a premium custom hardware product, it's dead on arrival.
A comparable graphics card costs $10 if you can even find it these days.
I don't see how this is worth the effort when you can buy the cheapest ATI card, and use the generic open-source VGA driver and achieve better 2D performance. This is somewhat like somebody trying to get people to work on an open-source version of DOS. Sure, you get your freedom of the free software, but who would want to use DOS? I'm all for open-source, but it has it be at least remotely competitive to get somebody to look at it.
Yes, I agree, but when you gamble you always lose. The odds are always against you.
Not true with poker. You're playing against other players, not against the house. Your odds to win are you make of it. The house can make it tougher to win by increasing the rake, but generally if you play better than other players, you will win money.
Putting aside whether my example is good or not, your answers proves the point that it's really hard to make a program that will judge well what the other player has.
Short answer to all this is that if I had KK down and AK5 on the flop, damn right I'm going for it.
Going back to this... If this is a NL game, I'd definitely push all my chips in at the flop. If it were a limit game, and we're heads up with no limit to the number of raises, I'd probably call after the second reraise.
Sorry about the shot at you, but represented the tools as something that's "easy" (your word) to do. Taking into account betting patterns of somebody and giving you information that's correct more often than not is a really really hard thing to do.
A tool could easily tell you that you have 8 outs to a straight, and that your chance on the flop is about 32%, but to be able to tell you that, based on any information, the other guy is most likely not also drawing to a flush at the same time is something I haven't seen before. Certainly not an easy thing to come up with.
it's easy to find software that is designed to follow along with the current game, giving you the statistically best move based on what is known, such as the face-up cards, who is on the button, and what your cards are.
That's a very misinformed statement, coming from somebody who probably doesn't play much poker himself.
A large part of figuring out the "statistically" best move is having a good idea of what the opponent might be holding in his hand. That's the very difficult part.
Here's a quick example. Say you're holding KK, the you raise preflop and get reraised. Flop comes AK5. You bet, and you get raised again. Stats will tell you that you can beat 99% of the hands out there, so raise away, right? Most good players will consider that the opponent might have AA since he reraised you preflop and would adjust their strategy accordingly. A simple stat bot would raise until he's out of money.
Visit the UofA's poker research pages for more details on where the trouble spots in poker AI research are.
The fact of the matter is, the odds aren't in your (the proverbial your) favor. Odds are, you (proverbial) play like crap, or in a game where there is a human element (poker), the dealer plays better than you do.
We're talking about poker where you play against other people, not against the dealer. This is not "let is ride", "carribean stud", or some other bastardization of poker in which there's an optimal strategy which gives you just under 50% of the odds to win. You play against other players, and if you're better than they are, you take their money.
The casino only takes a percentage of every pot, and the dealer is there to deal the cards and nothing else.
I don't think you understand the original point. If the bots become so good that the humans can't beat them, the humans will stop playing. Then, you'll have less players, less hands played, and less rake. The online casino starts making a lot less money.
You can count on them trying to do as much as possible to prevent this from happening.
Is online poker set up in such a way that card counting can actually work? Card counting works because casinos use multiple decks to eliminate the need for time-wasting shuffling.
You might be thinking about blackjack. Poker can only be played with one deck, which is always shuffled in a b&m casino.
In stud games, though, one needs to remember which cards have been shown and mucked, and a computer bot would be able to gain an advantage by having a perfect memory. Most good players, though, don't have much trouble remembering the important cards, though.
Actually, there is knowledge that at least xbox2 will be based on a CPU and nVidia GPU combination, basically a PC lite for gaming just like xbox1.
:)
Well, first, it's an ATI GPU, not an nVidia GPU that will be in xbox2. But, really, how can you compare "a cpu and a gpu" with "a grid". Both of those are so vague that they yield no information on their processing power.
The current top of the line GPU is so far ahead of what was available 2 years ago, so it's not inconcievable that the xbox2 GPU will be far ahead of the current versions.
The "grid technology" offers great scaling potential -- but that doesn't mean that Sony is going to plop a grid of 100 cores into a PS3, it just wouldn't make any sense price-wise.
In fact, whatever they decide to put in the PS3 will probably be availble in either a CPU or a GPU available for PCs within a year, if it really turns out to be that successful. The technology is far from secret, when even you and I know about it!
That's just the status quo. Currently, more PS2's than XBox + GC, so let's assume the same for the next generation. Not too big a leap. Whether it's right or not is another question.
It's a bit of weak argument to base one's "analysis" on -- saying that PS3 will sell more than Xbox2+GC2 just because PS2 is selling more than Xbox and GC is a bit of stretch. It's not like we've gone through many generations of consoles, seeing a pattern like emerging..