Because redirects and popups obliterate other browsers?
Look, I don't like sites that offer "anti-spyware" with misleading popups either, but just because you get redirected to one of those sites doesn't mean your machine is getting exploited.
And BTW, I'd recommend getting a new machine wit NX support (A64 is good). It prevents IE being exploited on this bug, it'll just crash like Firefox does on this exploit although you'll get a more informative error message than you would with Firefox (unless you had NX). Also, if you get a machine with NX, make sure to turn it on for Firefox, by default in Windows, it is only on for MS Apps (like Explorer and OE).
It integrates well with the (built-in) Perl debugger and provides a decent UI for it. And it's free. And I can use it anywhere. Which goes to your UI guideline thing, how can a program be "more compliant with UI guidelines" and be cross platform. Heck, what ARE the Linux UI guidelines?
One of the statements of the X (X Windows) project is "possibility, not policy".
Anyway, there you go. Maybe I should give Eclipse a try though.
I did get kicked a few times. But anyway that doesn't change a thing about how these things are run though.
As to breaking the rules, well, my post just got modded offtopic (which makes no sense). But did I get banned from slashdot? No. Because slashdot isn't like that. Pirate boards/channels are.
Those rules there are just there for the purpose of banning. I can't say how many times I got into a channel, the channel bot read me the riot act (normal thing upon entering), and I see a group of people gleefully ignoring the rules on the channel. But they all have admin priveliges. They don't have to follow no stinkin' rules.
And I also can't count how many times I saw someone banned just for saying something the admins didn't like. Even if it wasn't against the rules. They got it simply for disagreeing with someone who had admin.
To be even more direct to the topic, look at my example of g3torrent. It was rumored that g3torrent would spoof trackers (it didn't), and it was banned. It was even banned on sites that don't use ratios!
Canon is a good company. Their SLRs are fantastic. But I'm sorry, they lag in the point and shoot market. Canon has finally nearly completed rolling out the DIGIC II chip in their P&S line. What does this mean? Well, finally, their P&S cameras aren't slow as slugs.
Sony rolled their lines to modern processors starting two years ago, they had switched their line over a long time ago now. Canon just got started 1 year ago and still hasn't finished. Look at the Powershot G5, because it has an old chip, it has enormous shutter lag and slow shot-to-shot time.
I tried to buy the G5, I demoed it, I just couldn't buy it. The Sony DSC-V3, with its up to date processor was a million times faster a startup, preview, lag, etc. And the optics on the two are identical.
So, although I like some Canons (the SD### series), they have been slow to advance in the P&S market. Oh, and they buy their CCDs (in P&S cameras, not their CMOS sensors in dSLRs) from Sony.
Pirate scenes (and similar) are run by a bunch of 12-year olds (if they aren't 12, they act like it). They have absolutely no ability to tell anyone what to do in real life, so they boss around people online. They'll ban anyone and anything at the drop of a hat just as an excercise of the only power they have. Anyone who has been on an IRC channel can tell you this.
And the thing is, it's not "kids nowadays" either. It's always been like this.
I used to use g3torrent back before it was banned for supposedly lying to trackers (it didn't) to beat ratios (not like I even used any ratio servers anyway).
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" - Thomas Hesse, President of Sony BMG's global digital business division.
In the long-term, it'll make a big difference. Right now, established channels can create new channels by forcing operators to take them or else pay a high price for their high-line channels.
For example, you tell DirectTV that if they want to offer ESPN it is $20/customer/month. For ESPN and ESPN2 it is $10/customer/month (total). For ESPN,ESPN2, ESPNews and ESPN Classic, $5/customer/month (total). For ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNews, ESPN Classic and ESPN U, $2/customer/month (total). And thus they can force their new channesl to be carried.
So, since it is so easy to make new channels, they do it all the time, and in order to get people to watch the new channels, they pick up EXACTLY one show worth watching. They either create it, or buy it (see Bravo's experience with Law & Order years ago). So we have a zillion channels, and you say if we had a la Carte, it'd cost a mint.
But if we have a la Carte, people won't get Animal Planet, and Animal Planet won't get any money and they'll disappear (actually, bad example since Comcast owns Animal Planet, right?). And any decent shows will migrate to only a few channels. Then you can get those a la Carte and do just fine.
If we had a la carte all this time, we couldn't have 400 channels right now, we'd have 100. And then DTV wouldn't have to tell channels they can't be carried in HDTV since they don't have room for 400 channels of HDTV on their satellites.
See, ESPN created ESPN2-HD at a point when they had very little HD content on ESPN anyway (not even SportsCenter). They hoped to produced between ESPN and ESPN2, 200 HD events per year. That's one every other day between the two!
It's just a land grab. Get the channel out there, get it carried in the basic package, then create a single show so that you can then jack up the fees to the cable companies. The cable companies can't drop you since some of their customers watch that one show. Et voila! You now have a percentage of the revenue from every basic cable subscriber nationwide AND you can charge more for your ads because you have near-nationwide clearance. And thus, the cost of basic cable goes up for everyone to cover these fees from the operators. All because USA Networks or Viacom created a new channel, regardless of whether you watch it.
I probably wasn't clear enough about what I meant by multi-chip CPUs. And I probably interpreted your original description too rigidly to mean the thing that isn't viable anymore.
Let me explain.
It used to be that you might have multiple chips involved directly in the execution of the instruction stream. For example, the AMD 2900 series was bit-sliced. When an instruction was fetched and executed, multiple chips worked on it in parallel. I don't know the restrictions, but I believe each chip operated on 8 bits. If you had two chips in parallel you had a 16-bit processor, 4 of them, 32-bit.
A more common organization had some instructions go to different chips, very commonly FPUs. In the Intel 8086/8087, the 8087 watched the CPU fetches and when it saw a floating point instruction, it executed it itself. With the 80286/80287 and later, the main CPU would fetch the instruction and send it to the FPU for exeuction, then get the results back and put them were they were supposed to go. The Motorla 68020 and 68030 supported external FPUs also (68881/68882). The MIPS R2000 and R3000 also had external FPUs.
The original Motorola 88000 was actually two chips, the 88100 and the 88200. One chip did the operations, the other was the bus-interface (load/store and cache) chip.
This all ended at the end of the 80s, when new chips like the Motorola 68040 (except LC), the Intel 486 (except SX), Motorola 88110, and MIPS R4000 series came out. These chips were too fast to effectively use external FPUs, moving the data out to that other chip and back was too slow. Even though the on-chip 68040 FPU wasn't as capable as the external 68882 (or even 68881 in many ways), the lower latency made the performance much much higher.
So, what I meant was that off-chip processing of instructions in the stream just became unworkable at that point, and it still is.
But you're right, a processing system that includes multiple chips executing different instruction streams (the GPU) is quite viable and effective today.
HT is very effective on AMD's processors, but you have to remember that HT only comes into play for load/store instructions. So it has to be fast, but it has to be fast compared to the bus speeds in order to be effective. "calling out" to other chips for the execution of single-cycle math operations wouldn't work nearly as well.
For example, my understanding is that the HT links on current AMD processors run "only" at 1GHz. Since chips like mine run instructions at 2.2GHz or higher, using HT would mean no instruction could be executed in less than 2 clocks. This would be a big hit for simple register-register transfers or adds or such.
A lot of the other stuff you describe sounds remarkably like Intel's EPIC (Itanium). I am not convinced at this time of the value of EPIC in a processor family. I agree it sounds great on paper, but the results so far have been poor, and I know that Intel hasn't be completely successful in making compilers as effective as CPUs at scheduling instructions to run. And you can see why, right? Can you really statically schedule a loop perfectly which contains loads when some of those loads will come from cache (very fast) and some from SDRAM (very slow)? A CPU selecting instructions at runtime will be able to make the decisions on the fly, the compiler doesn't know what to do.
I do know that EPIC isn't incompatible with your idea of lots of threads though, so I know that rejection of one doesn't put a black mark against the other.
Even a 1GHz non-multithreaded chip can be much faster than a 4.0GHz Prescott today. It doesn't take threads to best it. All you have to do is jettison all the transistors that you absolutely can do without (16-bit mode, out of order execution) and then replace them with transistors you can use.
If you want to run code across a family of processors, you'll have some wastage of transistors. This isn't avoidable. But it is also critical. You can't just make one CPU and throw it away, you need a family to compete.
As to not replicating the parts 1,000 times, you're correct, you wouldn't have to replicate them all 1,000 times. But if you don't, you now have to arbitrate for those cells, and they are physically farther away (distance is latency) because they aren't co-located anymore. I would suggest that non-replicating thread support is a steeply falling slope. 2 threads is good. 4 not as much, 1000 isn't useful. All that you need to do is keep your transistors all working as much as possible. Having a 2nd thread to run when the first is stuck on memory adds a lot of performance, if you have some compute-bound threads to run. But do you have thousands eligibile to run at any time? No.
Multi-chip CPUs don't really work anymore (your idea of high-speed interconnects to other chips). CPUs are too fast. It takes too long to drive that signal out to the other chip, it's not worth the trouble.
Anyway, I would suggest that to make 1,000 threads run well, most modules would have to be replicated at least 250 times. And if you're gonna do that, don't bother redesigning, just make a 2 or 4 thread chip and buy more of them (or replicate the area of the die).
BTW, you're right, Intel doesn't have SOI. But honestly it appears it is so because they don't need it. And don't use P4 as an example, everyone knows it sucks including Intel. Look at the new (non-SOI) 2-core Yonah that is roughly AMD A64 X2 3800+ speed and uses half the power.
Honestly, Intel are incredible at process technology. They have a lot of secrets and are way ahead of most of the industry. When the stories about the idea of using "strained silicon" came into the news, Intel had already SHIPPED chips using it. I had one in my PC it turned out!
If Intel switches tracks and gets as good at chip design as AMD is (and it appears they are at least trying now), we're going to see some spectacular stuff.
Finally, note that not nearly all tasks cannot be parallelized effectively. CPU speed will still have its place because of this. Don't write off higher clock speeds. When I started with computers, chips ran at 500KHz or 1MHz. Now even decent chips (say, AMD or Intel P-M) run at 2400x that. There's no reason it won't go up 10x again over the next couple years. And given that even a slow PC right now is very fast for all nearly all normal tasks (Excel, anyone), what percentage of the market going to need a gaggle of cores then?
BTW, I find this discussion interesting. Too often things on slashdot turn into name calling and hate-fests. I may not agree with you on this topic, but it's pretty clear that we both at least recognize there are two legitimate sides to discuss.
Yes, power dissipated is V*V/R or VI And yeah, smaller transistors have lower resistance. But smaller gates mean less power, not more. You need less current to move the charge in and out of a smaller transistor (since the charge is smaller). So the "I" in the "VI" can go down. Well, that "I" is really a "V/R" (current across a resistance), so lowering that I really means you can reduce the "V". And since the total power is V*V/R, that means the total power used drops drastically.
Let me explain it a little better because I think I even confused myself.
Power is V*I. The I is V/R. Lowering this R means the V/R value does get bigger (current goes up). But also, since the I only needs to be sufficient to fill or drain a gate in a given amount of time (one cycle), you can reduce the V until V/R is a more reasonable value. And when you lower that V you're also reducing the other V in the power formula (V*V/R), so in fact instead of power going up, it goes down greatly.
For a much easier corollary, look at AMD's 130nm CPUs against their directly equivalent 90nm versions. The 90nm versions take half as much power.
Today's nuclear CPUs are mainly because there are so many transistors switching so fast in such a small space. If you built an old-type CPU using 90nm technology (like an Z80 or something) it would take far far less power than the old ones, which ran off of +5V (plug that into V*V/R!). Additionally, current CPUs have a lot of leakage current, something that CMOS didn't have a problem with until we got to sub 180nm processes. Compare a current CPU to an old NMOS or even ECL processor. You'll see how leakage was a problem before and how much of a savior CMOS was.
Additionally, the megahertz race is not over. It may not be the current concentration of vendors, but as chips go to smaller and smaller feature sizes, they naturally get faster. So even with little concentration on speed, we'll still see a rise in individual core speed.
A 1000-thread (simultaneous) chip is a ridiculous idea. That means you have to duplicate every transistor in the chip (like registers) 1000 times. That makes no sense. You will never reach the same speed as current single processor chips with a 1000-thread CPU (at least not right now). A small number of cores is a better idea at the moment.
No wait, reading TFA, that projector is actually higher quality than this one. This one just a homemade system like an "opaque projector", a system that has been sold on eBay for like 4 years. Wow, the slashvertisements never end, do they? slashdot sucks.
Note to anyone who wants to make this, the image will be really really dim since it works on reflected light.
Look, your view of an improved console is not the same as MS' or Sony's. I totally respect that. But that doesn't mean that MS made a bad or faulty design. And it doesn't mean other people agree with you. I highly recommend you not buy a 360, it doesn't seem appropriate for you. But your arguments on this are good for those in your position only. Since HDTV resolution is 3-4X times that of regular TV, I personally am looking for more than "several times" faster equipment. It would take that just to tread water, graphics-wise at HDTV resolutions, and I (and MS) think improved graphics are a better idea than that.
As to you not being clear about cooling, you again, for the 3rd time just don't know what you are talking about in this area. If you put the unit in a box it will heat up far above normal temperatures. You can't ensure you have headroom if you can't control the cooling solution, and if the user puts the unit in a box, you can't control the cooling solution. Okay. Do you get it now? I also explained why you cannot always warn the user. I explained a few practical reasons why not and a legal/liability one. I finally took the time to explain that you have NO IDEA what the incidence of the problem is. If it happens 5 times out of a million, then MS shouldn't spend a single dime fixing it. If it happens 5,000, it's quite important. Until you know which it is, you should refrain from explaining how MS did a crappy job and you'd do better.
At room temperatures, heat doesn't produce significant changes in electrical resistance in copper, tin, etc. We're not talking about superconductors here. Also note that there is no evidence that more heat makes chips wear out quicker, at least not until you get to the catastrophic failure mode. Additionally, as a 360 owner, I can say that your comments about "robust operation" are pretty presumptive. You just have no idea if they are unreliable. Mine is reliable at at least 116F-140F. Frankly, that seems pretty good to me. So step off about your comments as to Xbox 360 would be more reliable if it ran cooler.
Finally, all those comments are AGAIN tangential. MS felt they needed a certain level of performance. That level of performance generates a certain amount of heat. Putting that much heat in a stereo cabinet doesn't work. So no matter how much you complain, you're not going to change the situation. It seems likely to me MS did about as well as reasonably could be done given the cost and design constraints.
And making it "a few percent" slower would only reduce the power consumption by a few percent. For example, look at an AMD A64. http://www.amdcompare.com/us-en/desktop/ Select 90nm from CMOS and A64 (regular) from processor. Also look at http://techreport.com/cpu/ for the voltage ratings.
A 90nm 4000+ runs at 2.4GHz and 1.4V and has a design power of 89W. A 3700+ runs at 2.2GHz and runs at 1.4V and has a design power of 89W. A 3200+ runs at 2.0GHz and 1.4V and has a design power of 67W (make sure to use socket 754 version, other suffers from reduced performance due to bad FSB).
Power is proportional to frequency and with the square of voltage. So, let's calculate. Performance is proportional to frequency.
So, a 3700+ is 91% as fast as a 4000+, and uses 91% as much power. A 3200+ is 83% as fast and uses 83% as much power.
If a 3200 could run at 1.3V (not impossible, it would than take (1.3/1.4)^2*(2.0/2.4) as much power. That'd be 71% as much power.
In that case, I'd save as much as 20W (30%), but lose about 20% of my power. If you go by TDP ratings on AMD's site, it comes out to about the same (62W TDP versus 89W, for about 70% as much power, although these are rough numbers, AMD seems to class TDP ratings by what heatsink they use, not actual TDP). Anyway, how does this jive with your statement that it would use MUCH LESS than 80% of the power?
It just happens to be that personally, you don't find the tradeoffs
I understand if you think Xbox 1 is powerful enough. I also agree games aren't about graphics. But your idea of a not-improved console doesn't fit MS' business plan. MS wanted to produce a console with graphics head and shoulders above the rest. As I said, your suggestions make the console unsaleable, or at least not in the space MS aimed for.
Xbox 1 was hot, but it wasn't 110W (well, not typical). I'll put the Kill-A-Watt on my Xbox 1 tonight and tell you how much it takes. I do agree Xbox 1 was a bad design, from a hardware and cooling standpoint, for what that's worth.
As to PS3 having more connectors, and being hardware superior in general, I agree, I expect will be technically superior. It also will get hot too.
As to your comment about making sure if a part crashes at 80, make sure it doesn't reach 70: this shows AGAIN you have no idea what is going on. Let me explain again, if you put the 360 in an unvented stereo cabinet, it will hit 116F ambient (this was with the front cracked open). That means that there is no spot inside (since there is no compressor-based cooling system) in that box that is less than 116F ambient. And you talk of trying to keep spots below 70? Again, I'm sure MS did all they can to cool it, it really cools itself well. But if you put it in a box, it defeats the cooling system.
The PS2 does have good power usage. But note that the PS2 currently on sale (slimline) has an external power supply. And PS2s before that with the possible exception of the PS2+ (full-size, but no i.Link port on the front) used a lot more than 50W. I'll put my original PS2 on the Kill-A-Watt tonight too and see how it does, and I'll put my PS2+ on there (which I bought because it was quieter) on there too.
An internal power supply is convenient, but it actually is bad for cooling. It concentrates more heat in a smaller area. It however is more efficient, since running 20A at 12V across 3 foot of wire (like 360 does) is expensive and inefficient.
I still think you're mistaken about the PS3 power usage (and heat production). They may run the video chip slower whenever possible to keep heat and power useage down. That'd be great. But I don't think they'll limit the top speed, and the cooling system has to work at top speed. No one wants a console that can play only some games without crashing/overheating (if placed in a stereo cabinet).
As to your comments about the launch games sucking on 360. Launch games always suck, especially if the console makes its worldwide debut in your country (like PSP did, and the games SUCK). Note that PS1 and PS2 debuted in Japan months before the US, and so by the time it came to the US the games were better (although the PS2 games still largely stunk).
Just because the launch titles suck doens't mean made a bad design.
If the Xbox ran at 80% clockrate, it would only save about 30W (assuming video chip takes 80W, and you can reduce clock rate 20% and the voltage 20% and there is zero leakage current). I assure you 130W isnt much better than 160W. It will likely still overheat if placed in a closed space.
Anyway, most of your comments come to "I think older consoles are fast enough, so 360 doesn't need to be so fast." That's fine for you, stick with the current consoles, there's tons of great games on there. I don't think that one person's opinion that "we don't need that much performance" is necessarily means that the whole marketplace feels that way, and it doesn't mean that strategy would work in the face of fierce competition from PS3.
In summary, if your argument is "to me, the increase of heat isn't worth it for the additional power", you are expressing a personal opinion, one that you should act upon by not buying a 360. But leave other people to make that decision for themselves, okay?
Go ahead and search it. It requires better labelling, but no RFID chips. There doesn't even seem to be anything in there to even let you identify a particular tire, just perhaps model and manufacture date or something.
Conspiracy theorists (and trolls) never check their sources too carefully, it just dampenens the ranting.
Interesting, you assert that MS could reduce the power consumption by smartening up the design. Could you perhaps explain how it is that you arrived at this conclusion? Could you please describe the research you did to determine the MS design is suboptimal and perhaps the steps you'd take to improve it?
As to reducing the polygon count, I don't happen to agree that is a viable option. It is an option, but MS needs to beat PS3 in the marketplace, and surely they don't feel that having a lower-performing console will do that for them.
As to it not crashing when overheating, I agree that would be ideal. Note that the console itself has a signal for overheating (it's very cryptic, two red lights on the front, but you can find it in the MS knowledge base). However, there are technical issues to detecting overheating. Basically, you need a temperature sensor in the place that the overheating happens. You cannot just have temperature sensors in every chip, it would mean having custom versions of every chip in the unit, which wouldn't be cost effective, for example you couldn't even use commodity RAM.
One place we seem to know they don't have a sensor that can report and let it put up an error message is in the power supply. I say this because some people (apparently) had the power supply (PS) overheat and the PS just turns off, turning off the 360 with it. That means you get no error message, which is puzzling. To have the PS indicate to the unit that it is overheating would have added additional cost to the unit, it's also mildly dangerous, if the PS is overheating, it is going to stay on so an error message can be displayed for 30 seconds? I'm not sure that's safe, I mean what if the PS is smouldering, and it says on for 30 more seconds and catches fire? Additionally, I'm not sure you can pass UL or other safety regs if it works that way. But perhaps this is possible, I think that neither you or I can say though that we have all the info to say that MS made the incorrect decision there. Heck, neither you nor I even know what percentage of the time this problem is occuring? You'd be able more able to justify a better temperature reporting system if 5,000 out of 1 million systems are reporting heat problems than if 5 out of 1 million are.
Also, having done electrical design myself, I can tell you it is likely not possible for MS to switch off the GPU completely. Removing power from the GPU means it will be backpowered by any signal lines to it that are not grounded. That will make the chip latch up and it won't fix itself until all the lines are lowered for a second or so and back up (generally that means turning the unit off). Adding the ability to ground all lines to the GPU takes extra design, and can be problematic in very high speed designs (which the 360 is). MS could probably halt the GPU to a low power state, which would reduce power consumption to less than 1% of peak.
Additionally to this, I think that it is likely that people are reporting just plain "busted unit" problems as heat problems, simply because the unit runs hot. Just because it crashes and it is hot doesn't mean it crashed due to heat. MS would know better here, and I'm sure the unit in question ended up in their hands for investigation. I note http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169465&cid=141 24290 that my unit was running in a 116F box with exhaust temps of 140F and not even glitching, so there's plenty of temperature headroom on these things, if yours isn't defective.
Well, I have to say I have no way to be sure that PS3 will use as much power. But I would bet significant amounts of money on it. By "as much", I mean within 25%, for a rated of 160W, 120W typical. This would also be too hot to run in a typical unvented stereo enclosure. With an NVidia graphics chip in there, plus the Power PC, plus 8 coprocessors it's not going to be a cool device either. I mean, check the power usage ratings on current NVidia graphic
What if MS had put a fridge in the Xbox 360? Surely, that'd be a good enough cooling system, wouldn't it? It'd have to be the best they could possibly do at any price, right? And it'd get down to below 32F in there! Surely, we're set up!
But what happens if you put this fridge-designed Xbox 360 in an entertainment console which doesn't vent any air? Since the "hot side" and "cool side" are now in the same box, it does nothing. And since the system is taking in energy, both to be a game machine, and also to (uselessly) move freon around, it will heat up in that box. The temperature in the box, even the cool side will rise until the box it is in can radiate heat well enough to maintain a stable temperature.
I will say it again, for the millionth time, you don't understand thermodynamics. No matter how good or poor MS' cooling system is, you completely defeat it (actually make it work against you) if you put it in a stereo cabinet that has no ventilation. Your fridge would not work if put in an enclosed space either. You simply don't have an enclosed space large enough to put it in. It will work in a corner, it won't work in a box. And also to note, it doesn't have anything inside it that is generating 160W of heat. It has stuff inside it that is generating exactly 0W of heat. It simply has to fight entropy, not fight actual heat generation.
As to this fridge you speak of using less power than an Xbox 360, a typical fridge in 2002 uses 440KWh of power per year http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/equipment/english/page16.cf m?PrintView=N&Text=N. That's 1200Wh per day. That's 1/3rd what an Xbox 360 would use if it were turned on all day (160W*24h/day = 3840Wh/day). And the Xbox 360 takes up only about 1/3 of a cubic foot, a standard fridge probably is about 20 cubic feet (on the outside), thus it has many times the surface area with which to radiate/convect heat away, oh, and unlike an Xbox in a sealed container, it can blow exhaust air to eliminate heat. So I mention again, are you really understanding what is going on here?
Again, the laws of thermodynamics don't give you the choice of making a completely enclosed cooling system work. It gives you a couple options:
1. Vent the enclosed space. This is the best option, but it isn't under MS' control. 2. Make the 360 work at the temperatures it could possibly reach if fully enclosed. If this were possible, then the Xbox 360 wouldn't even have a fan in the first place, because radiative/convective cooling would be enough to keep it running in all conditions. Note that since the exhaust temps on my 360 can reach 140F, that means making the 360 work when the entire system is significantly hotter than that. 3. Make the 360 use less power, and thus heat up less. This is definitely possible, but if done, it would make the system not a better performer than current generation systems. 4. Make the 360 large enough that it won't fit in any enclosure people are likely to have around (stereo cabinets). This would suck since the DVD drive on it is so damn loud. Plus it would cost too much to ship from where it is made.
So, 1 can't be done by MS. 2 can't be done by anyone. 3 & 4 make the unit unsellable.
Xbox 360 doesn't overheat unless you restrict its good cooling system from working (by putting it in a box or possibly the power supply on deep shag). It's in the same place as your fridge, despite being at a significant handicap as to power dissipation and surface area.
I do think it's a shame that video games now use so much power and em
It cools itself VERY well. It has far better cooling than the original Xbox.
Do you understand how cooling works? You can't "make cold". You just move heat out to somewhere else. Now, where do you move it to? Well, outside the Xbox 360 itself. The problem is, if you put the 360 in another box (a stereo cabinet), that stereo cabinet now contains all the heat generated by the 360. Unless this cabinet is designed to move the heat outside itself, the cabinet will overheat. The cabinet has completely defeated the cooling system of the 360.
Let's do another check. How is the cooling in your refrigerator? Pretty good, eh? It can get down to 10F in there! But the trick is, it is moving the heat to the back of the fridge, to the coils. So, now lets put that entire fridge in a box. The box contains not only the cold part (the actual fridge inside part) but also the coils too. The only thing breaching this box is the power cord, which supplies plently of power to inside the box. Where does that power go? It turns into heat, which is now all inside the box. So the box heats up. As the box heats up, unless the box can get rid of all its heat by radiation, it will eventually heat up inside until although the inside of the fridge is cooler than the outside, the inside is warmer than ambient outside the box.
I say again, are you sure you aren't asking MS to violate the laws of thermodynamics? Are you sure you even understand them?
The only solution to this problem would be for MS to reduce the power useage of the Xbox 360 until it is lower than the amount that a typical unvented stereo cabinet can radiate. They could surely do that, but can it be done with next-generation performance?
As to the power supply, if it truly overheats on regular carpet, then that's a shame. But honestly, I just don't buy it. Maybe on shag or something. But its vents are on the top, and not likely blocked by carpet. It even has fans in it (I hear). If it overheats when placed right behind the unit, or in an overwarm unvented stereo cabinet, then the solution is simply to move it out. The cable is long enough. Do it. MS really should state this in the manual, I'll grant you that.
But otherwise, the problem is not with the console, it's with you. If you don't feel that a box this hot is appropriate for your living room (and I do understand that), then don't buy it. You'll have to stick with PS2/Xbox 1/Gamecube type performance for now, because PS3 will have similar power dissapation, count on it. Later the PS3 and Xbox 360 will probably be put on a smaller geometry (65nm?) and thus use less power.
However, stating that MS messed up and that this should be cooler and MS is interesting but shows a complete lack of the technical issues.
So, again, either learn to live with it, or wait it out. But either way, it, is like it is because that's how power and thermodynamics works, and no amount of bitching at MS is going to change it.
Like I said, lawsuit aside. Does the power brick not work on carped?
My unit can at times exhaust 140F air. If you put the brick behind the unit, it will shut down. Does MS mention this specifically in the manual? No, and they should.
But it has a 3-foot cable. If you put it in your entertainment center, you're crazy. It's even difficult to do, since the cable is so thick and so long, it's like coiling up a cobra in your entertainment center.
Put the behind the entertainment center (I did), even on carpet, it will work. You do not have to put it on strings. Just because you read that on the internet doesn't mean it's true.
As to people always putting their console "under the TV or on the floor", well, yeah, I understand that. But things will be different now, and it isn't MS' fault. This thing uses more power than my PC does. It's simply not going to work like the video games you're used to, no matter how much you wish it were so.
MS has two choices. Don't make a next-gen machine, or print in the manual the warnings. And they did the latter (at least mostly). So why is it MS' fault again?
If you reasonably expect to put your video game under your TV in an enclosed space, then you need to get a PS2. If you want a video game that doesn't run hot, get a PS2. That's the only real answer. You cannot wave a wand and make the unit produce less heat or consume less power, not and do what it is capable of doing. I completely understand if someone wants to "opt out" of the current generation of video games, at least until they get smaller process chips to reduce the power consumption. But I cannot understand that people want to have their cake and eat it too.
Now, I know some are just plain defective. That'll happen when you ship hundreds of thousands. There might even be more defective units than would normally be expected. That could happen to, due to manufacturing difficulties.
But a design defect? I just don't know if we're there.
But it gets hot because it does so much. Its regular level of consumption is 160W. That's a lot, and it all turns into heat. Despite this, the Xbox 360 has a great cooling system. It really keeps itself cool.
But, like all devices, a cooling system just moves the heat somewhere else, in this case ouside the case. So if you put it in a confied area or block the vents, it will be unable to cool itself. There is NOTHING MS can do about this.
Perhaps you'd like Xbox to take less power (PS2 uses 50W). I can understand that. But it's not going to happen. PS3 will be the same. These super-capable game machines are pushing the limits of technology and so they use a lot of power and generate a lot of heat.
So, lawsuit aside, when you evaluate your problems with 360, make sure you're not expecting MS to defy the laws of thermodynamics.
BTW, I got together an EXECELLENT cooling system for my 360 in my stereo/video game cabinet now. I'm considering writing it up. Costs a fair bit, but instead of 116F inside there with the front panel cracked an inch, now it gets to 78F (67F ambient in the room) in there with the front panel completely closed. It's so much quieter now.
yes, Linux comes with thousands of packages...
on
Antispyware Shootout
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None of these are any more trustworthy than the ones you get with your PC, or that you buy from Target.
You've left the realm of info and fact and gone to opinion. You don't like IE. You don't like Notepad. Fine.
But that doesn't mean you don't get a lot of software with Windows that is as trustworthy as Linux apps, it just means YOU don't trust them. And hell, most of these Linux apps aren't trustworthy either. That's why you don't run them as root.
So the answer is again in all 3 places. Don't run as root, on Windows, Mac or Linux.
As to someone putting holes into Linux. Actually, yes, they have. I forget what it was, but there were major holes put into the kernel of a distro, and on purpose. They did it by checking in code into the distro site, then they hacked into machines running the distro. It was on slashdot about two years ago, maybe 3.
As to IE having security holes, even as limited user, well, that's true. It has some. It has a lot fewer than the reports you see around, because some of these holes aren't real holes, or aren't fixable, or are trumped up (see "hyperthreading security hole"). But there are some legitimate ones. There's only one big one right now that is known of, and Firefox also suffers from it! Note that on my machine, which has data execution prevention, even that isn't an issue on IE, it catches it. Probably catches the Firefox one too.
But hey, is using IE holes to crap on Windows even fair? Do you crap on Linux for Firefox holes? If you crap on Windows for IIS holes, do you crap on Linux for Apache (or tinyhttpd) holes?
Anyway, Windows and Linux both have patched a lot of security holes in the last 3 years, and there's still more to go, on both sides. But I still think the battle is moving to the user front now. Social engineering will always exist, and whichever platform inherits the most novice users will have the biggest problem. It doesn't matter who makes the platform or whether it is open source or not.
If you set up your Windows machine for limited users, it works fine too. No, you can't do everything, but then again neither can Mac OS X. Mac OS X asks for your admin password quite a bit. Too much, frankly.
I have no idea how to even understand your trusted distro comments. On Windows, you get much of that software on the Windows CD. Surely that's trusted, if some random internet site is trusted. Many other thinks (fixes, mostly) come from MS' own site. Is that not trusted? Other software (those missing apps you speak of) you buy on a CD (perhaps at Target). Is that not trusted?
Yes, you can install bogus software on a PC. Or a Mac. Or linux. And that compromises security. The answer is the same on all 3 platforms. Don't do it.
The Register is entertaining. It's also a rag, and they carry numerous stories that just plain aren't true. Citing them means nothing.
I'll say this clearly and plainly. If Linux or Mac inherited the huge base of completely clueless users that Windows currently shoulders, either would have a serious issue with perception of lack of inherent security. Any one of them could at any moment click "accept" to install Gator, insert a Sony DRM CD, or be convinced to install a "web accelerator" that makes their machine insecure or even puposely a home for bad code.
They do soak heat from the block. But the constant inflow of cool air takes most of the heat away. As to burning my hand on one, I couldn't say, it depends on the engine. But do note that the intake manifolds on nearly all recent cars is now made of plastic. High-density-polypropelene often. That's literally the same as garbage bags, and I'm sure you know that polyproplene doesn't tolerate much heat at all, I'd be surprised if you could burn your hand on it before it became soft to the touch.
As to your plastic spacer, it will do virtually nothing. Your intake manifold cannot remain completely cold in a closed space that is hot. Some heat from nearby parts is emited as infrared radiation, and it will hit your intake manifold and heat it up some. Furthermore take a little class in thermodynamics and see how much insulating power a thin gasket which is under compression (and thus has no insulating airspaces in it) is worth in insulation.
I think you'll find in good testing that the reduction in heat soak into the intake manifold under normal conditions is insignificant. If it weren't, the manufacturer would have put in a spacer themselves, gained HP or MPG and reaped the rewards from CAFE regulations or in the free market.
Slashdot Mirror
Because redirects and popups obliterate other browsers?
Look, I don't like sites that offer "anti-spyware" with misleading popups either, but just because you get redirected to one of those sites doesn't mean your machine is getting exploited.
And BTW, I'd recommend getting a new machine wit NX support (A64 is good). It prevents IE being exploited on this bug, it'll just crash like Firefox does on this exploit although you'll get a more informative error message than you would with Firefox (unless you had NX). Also, if you get a machine with NX, make sure to turn it on for Firefox, by default in Windows, it is only on for MS Apps (like Explorer and OE).
It integrates well with the (built-in) Perl debugger and provides a decent UI for it. And it's free. And I can use it anywhere. Which goes to your UI guideline thing, how can a program be "more compliant with UI guidelines" and be cross platform. Heck, what ARE the Linux UI guidelines?
One of the statements of the X (X Windows) project is "possibility, not policy".
Anyway, there you go. Maybe I should give Eclipse a try though.
I did get kicked a few times. But anyway that doesn't change a thing about how these things are run though.
As to breaking the rules, well, my post just got modded offtopic (which makes no sense). But did I get banned from slashdot? No. Because slashdot isn't like that. Pirate boards/channels are.
Those rules there are just there for the purpose of banning. I can't say how many times I got into a channel, the channel bot read me the riot act (normal thing upon entering), and I see a group of people gleefully ignoring the rules on the channel. But they all have admin priveliges. They don't have to follow no stinkin' rules.
And I also can't count how many times I saw someone banned just for saying something the admins didn't like. Even if it wasn't against the rules. They got it simply for disagreeing with someone who had admin.
To be even more direct to the topic, look at my example of g3torrent. It was rumored that g3torrent would spoof trackers (it didn't), and it was banned. It was even banned on sites that don't use ratios!
It's just so dumb. It's lively, but dumb.
Canon is a good company. Their SLRs are fantastic. But I'm sorry, they lag in the point and shoot market. Canon has finally nearly completed rolling out the DIGIC II chip in their P&S line. What does this mean? Well, finally, their P&S cameras aren't slow as slugs.
Sony rolled their lines to modern processors starting two years ago, they had switched their line over a long time ago now. Canon just got started 1 year ago and still hasn't finished. Look at the Powershot G5, because it has an old chip, it has enormous shutter lag and slow shot-to-shot time.
I tried to buy the G5, I demoed it, I just couldn't buy it. The Sony DSC-V3, with its up to date processor was a million times faster a startup, preview, lag, etc. And the optics on the two are identical.
So, although I like some Canons (the SD### series), they have been slow to advance in the P&S market. Oh, and they buy their CCDs (in P&S cameras, not their CMOS sensors in dSLRs) from Sony.
Pirate scenes (and similar) are run by a bunch of 12-year olds (if they aren't 12, they act like it). They have absolutely no ability to tell anyone what to do in real life, so they boss around people online. They'll ban anyone and anything at the drop of a hat just as an excercise of the only power they have. Anyone who has been on an IRC channel can tell you this.
And the thing is, it's not "kids nowadays" either. It's always been like this.
I used to use g3torrent back before it was banned for supposedly lying to trackers (it didn't) to beat ratios (not like I even used any ratio servers anyway).
But look at those bottles.
Ingredients: sugar and/or HFCS.
I was disappointed to see this (at my local taqueria).
I guess there's still a chance they're using sugar, but given how much cheaper HFCS is (even without tariffs), I doubt it.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" - Thomas Hesse, President of Sony BMG's global digital business division.
This is the quote of my year in my book.
In the long-term, it'll make a big difference. Right now, established channels can create new channels by forcing operators to take them or else pay a high price for their high-line channels.
For example, you tell DirectTV that if they want to offer ESPN it is $20/customer/month. For ESPN and ESPN2 it is $10/customer/month (total). For ESPN,ESPN2, ESPNews and ESPN Classic, $5/customer/month (total). For ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNews, ESPN Classic and ESPN U, $2/customer/month (total). And thus they can force their new channesl to be carried.
So, since it is so easy to make new channels, they do it all the time, and in order to get people to watch the new channels, they pick up EXACTLY one show worth watching. They either create it, or buy it (see Bravo's experience with Law & Order years ago). So we have a zillion channels, and you say if we had a la Carte, it'd cost a mint.
But if we have a la Carte, people won't get Animal Planet, and Animal Planet won't get any money and they'll disappear (actually, bad example since Comcast owns Animal Planet, right?). And any decent shows will migrate to only a few channels. Then you can get those a la Carte and do just fine.
If we had a la carte all this time, we couldn't have 400 channels right now, we'd have 100. And then DTV wouldn't have to tell channels they can't be carried in HDTV since they don't have room for 400 channels of HDTV on their satellites.
See, ESPN created ESPN2-HD at a point when they had very little HD content on ESPN anyway (not even SportsCenter). They hoped to produced between ESPN and ESPN2, 200 HD events per year. That's one every other day between the two!
It's just a land grab. Get the channel out there, get it carried in the basic package, then create a single show so that you can then jack up the fees to the cable companies. The cable companies can't drop you since some of their customers watch that one show. Et voila! You now have a percentage of the revenue from every basic cable subscriber nationwide AND you can charge more for your ads because you have near-nationwide clearance. And thus, the cost of basic cable goes up for everyone to cover these fees from the operators. All because USA Networks or Viacom created a new channel, regardless of whether you watch it.
When it was virtualearth.msn.com, it worked on Safari. Now virtualearth.msn.com redirects to this and this doesn't work.
I was using virtualearth exclusively. Now I'm using Google maps. Way to go MS!
I probably wasn't clear enough about what I meant by multi-chip CPUs. And I probably interpreted your original description too rigidly to mean the thing that isn't viable anymore.
Let me explain.
It used to be that you might have multiple chips involved directly in the execution of the instruction stream. For example, the AMD 2900 series was bit-sliced. When an instruction was fetched and executed, multiple chips worked on it in parallel. I don't know the restrictions, but I believe each chip operated on 8 bits. If you had two chips in parallel you had a 16-bit processor, 4 of them, 32-bit.
A more common organization had some instructions go to different chips, very commonly FPUs. In the Intel 8086/8087, the 8087 watched the CPU fetches and when it saw a floating point instruction, it executed it itself. With the 80286/80287 and later, the main CPU would fetch the instruction and send it to the FPU for exeuction, then get the results back and put them were they were supposed to go. The Motorla 68020 and 68030 supported external FPUs also (68881/68882). The MIPS R2000 and R3000 also had external FPUs.
The original Motorola 88000 was actually two chips, the 88100 and the 88200. One chip did the operations, the other was the bus-interface (load/store and cache) chip.
This all ended at the end of the 80s, when new chips like the Motorola 68040 (except LC), the Intel 486 (except SX), Motorola 88110, and MIPS R4000 series came out. These chips were too fast to effectively use external FPUs, moving the data out to that other chip and back was too slow. Even though the on-chip 68040 FPU wasn't as capable as the external 68882 (or even 68881 in many ways), the lower latency made the performance much much higher.
So, what I meant was that off-chip processing of instructions in the stream just became unworkable at that point, and it still is.
But you're right, a processing system that includes multiple chips executing different instruction streams (the GPU) is quite viable and effective today.
HT is very effective on AMD's processors, but you have to remember that HT only comes into play for load/store instructions. So it has to be fast, but it has to be fast compared to the bus speeds in order to be effective. "calling out" to other chips for the execution of single-cycle math operations wouldn't work nearly as well.
For example, my understanding is that the HT links on current AMD processors run "only" at 1GHz. Since chips like mine run instructions at 2.2GHz or higher, using HT would mean no instruction could be executed in less than 2 clocks. This would be a big hit for simple register-register transfers or adds or such.
A lot of the other stuff you describe sounds remarkably like Intel's EPIC (Itanium). I am not convinced at this time of the value of EPIC in a processor family. I agree it sounds great on paper, but the results so far have been poor, and I know that Intel hasn't be completely successful in making compilers as effective as CPUs at scheduling instructions to run. And you can see why, right? Can you really statically schedule a loop perfectly which contains loads when some of those loads will come from cache (very fast) and some from SDRAM (very slow)? A CPU selecting instructions at runtime will be able to make the decisions on the fly, the compiler doesn't know what to do.
I do know that EPIC isn't incompatible with your idea of lots of threads though, so I know that rejection of one doesn't put a black mark against the other.
Even a 1GHz non-multithreaded chip can be much faster than a 4.0GHz Prescott today. It doesn't take threads to best it. All you have to do is jettison all the transistors that you absolutely can do without (16-bit mode, out of order execution) and then replace them with transistors you can use.
If you want to run code across a family of processors, you'll have some wastage of transistors. This isn't avoidable. But it is also critical. You can't just make one CPU and throw it away, you need a family to compete.
As to not replicating the parts 1,000 times, you're correct, you wouldn't have to replicate them all 1,000 times. But if you don't, you now have to arbitrate for those cells, and they are physically farther away (distance is latency) because they aren't co-located anymore. I would suggest that non-replicating thread support is a steeply falling slope. 2 threads is good. 4 not as much, 1000 isn't useful. All that you need to do is keep your transistors all working as much as possible. Having a 2nd thread to run when the first is stuck on memory adds a lot of performance, if you have some compute-bound threads to run. But do you have thousands eligibile to run at any time? No.
Multi-chip CPUs don't really work anymore (your idea of high-speed interconnects to other chips). CPUs are too fast. It takes too long to drive that signal out to the other chip, it's not worth the trouble.
Anyway, I would suggest that to make 1,000 threads run well, most modules would have to be replicated at least 250 times. And if you're gonna do that, don't bother redesigning, just make a 2 or 4 thread chip and buy more of them (or replicate the area of the die).
BTW, you're right, Intel doesn't have SOI. But honestly it appears it is so because they don't need it. And don't use P4 as an example, everyone knows it sucks including Intel. Look at the new (non-SOI) 2-core Yonah that is roughly AMD A64 X2 3800+ speed and uses half the power.
Honestly, Intel are incredible at process technology. They have a lot of secrets and are way ahead of most of the industry. When the stories about the idea of using "strained silicon" came into the news, Intel had already SHIPPED chips using it. I had one in my PC it turned out!
If Intel switches tracks and gets as good at chip design as AMD is (and it appears they are at least trying now), we're going to see some spectacular stuff.
Finally, note that not nearly all tasks cannot be parallelized effectively. CPU speed will still have its place because of this. Don't write off higher clock speeds. When I started with computers, chips ran at 500KHz or 1MHz. Now even decent chips (say, AMD or Intel P-M) run at 2400x that. There's no reason it won't go up 10x again over the next couple years. And given that even a slow PC right now is very fast for all nearly all normal tasks (Excel, anyone), what percentage of the market going to need a gaggle of cores then?
BTW, I find this discussion interesting. Too often things on slashdot turn into name calling and hate-fests. I may not agree with you on this topic, but it's pretty clear that we both at least recognize there are two legitimate sides to discuss.
Yes, power dissipated is V*V/R or VI And yeah, smaller transistors have lower resistance. But smaller gates mean less power, not more. You need less current to move the charge in and out of a smaller transistor (since the charge is smaller). So the "I" in the "VI" can go down. Well, that "I" is really a "V/R" (current across a resistance), so lowering that I really means you can reduce the "V". And since the total power is V*V/R, that means the total power used drops drastically.
Let me explain it a little better because I think I even confused myself.
Power is V*I. The I is V/R. Lowering this R means the V/R value does get bigger (current goes up). But also, since the I only needs to be sufficient to fill or drain a gate in a given amount of time (one cycle), you can reduce the V until V/R is a more reasonable value. And when you lower that V you're also reducing the other V in the power formula (V*V/R), so in fact instead of power going up, it goes down greatly.
For a much easier corollary, look at AMD's 130nm CPUs against their directly equivalent 90nm versions. The 90nm versions take half as much power.
Today's nuclear CPUs are mainly because there are so many transistors switching so fast in such a small space. If you built an old-type CPU using 90nm technology (like an Z80 or something) it would take far far less power than the old ones, which ran off of +5V (plug that into V*V/R!). Additionally, current CPUs have a lot of leakage current, something that CMOS didn't have a problem with until we got to sub 180nm processes. Compare a current CPU to an old NMOS or even ECL processor. You'll see how leakage was a problem before and how much of a savior CMOS was.
Additionally, the megahertz race is not over. It may not be the current concentration of vendors, but as chips go to smaller and smaller feature sizes, they naturally get faster. So even with little concentration on speed, we'll still see a rise in individual core speed.
A 1000-thread (simultaneous) chip is a ridiculous idea. That means you have to duplicate every transistor in the chip (like registers) 1000 times. That makes no sense. You will never reach the same speed as current single processor chips with a 1000-thread CPU (at least not right now). A small number of cores is a better idea at the moment.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/ 14/1751205&tid=222&tid=196
Looks like slashdot got scooped by... slashdot.
No wait, reading TFA, that projector is actually higher quality than this one. This one just a homemade system like an "opaque projector", a system that has been sold on eBay for like 4 years. Wow, the slashvertisements never end, do they? slashdot sucks.
Note to anyone who wants to make this, the image will be really really dim since it works on reflected light.
Look, your view of an improved console is not the same as MS' or Sony's. I totally respect that. But that doesn't mean that MS made a bad or faulty design. And it doesn't mean other people agree with you. I highly recommend you not buy a 360, it doesn't seem appropriate for you. But your arguments on this are good for those in your position only. Since HDTV resolution is 3-4X times that of regular TV, I personally am looking for more than "several times" faster equipment. It would take that just to tread water, graphics-wise at HDTV resolutions, and I (and MS) think improved graphics are a better idea than that.
As to you not being clear about cooling, you again, for the 3rd time just don't know what you are talking about in this area. If you put the unit in a box it will heat up far above normal temperatures. You can't ensure you have headroom if you can't control the cooling solution, and if the user puts the unit in a box, you can't control the cooling solution. Okay. Do you get it now? I also explained why you cannot always warn the user. I explained a few practical reasons why not and a legal/liability one. I finally took the time to explain that you have NO IDEA what the incidence of the problem is. If it happens 5 times out of a million, then MS shouldn't spend a single dime fixing it. If it happens 5,000, it's quite important. Until you know which it is, you should refrain from explaining how MS did a crappy job and you'd do better.
At room temperatures, heat doesn't produce significant changes in electrical resistance in copper, tin, etc. We're not talking about superconductors here. Also note that there is no evidence that more heat makes chips wear out quicker, at least not until you get to the catastrophic failure mode. Additionally, as a 360 owner, I can say that your comments about "robust operation" are pretty presumptive. You just have no idea if they are unreliable. Mine is reliable at at least 116F-140F. Frankly, that seems pretty good to me. So step off about your comments as to Xbox 360 would be more reliable if it ran cooler.
Finally, all those comments are AGAIN tangential. MS felt they needed a certain level of performance. That level of performance generates a certain amount of heat. Putting that much heat in a stereo cabinet doesn't work. So no matter how much you complain, you're not going to change the situation. It seems likely to me MS did about as well as reasonably could be done given the cost and design constraints.
And making it "a few percent" slower would only reduce the power consumption by a few percent. For example, look at an AMD A64. http://www.amdcompare.com/us-en/desktop/ Select 90nm from CMOS and A64 (regular) from processor. Also look at http://techreport.com/cpu/ for the voltage ratings.
A 90nm 4000+ runs at 2.4GHz and 1.4V and has a design power of 89W. A 3700+ runs at 2.2GHz and runs at 1.4V and has a design power of 89W. A 3200+ runs at 2.0GHz and 1.4V and has a design power of 67W (make sure to use socket 754 version, other suffers from reduced performance due to bad FSB).
Power is proportional to frequency and with the square of voltage. So, let's calculate. Performance is proportional to frequency.
So, a 3700+ is 91% as fast as a 4000+, and uses 91% as much power.
A 3200+ is 83% as fast and uses 83% as much power.
If a 3200 could run at 1.3V (not impossible, it would than take (1.3/1.4)^2*(2.0/2.4) as much power. That'd be 71% as much power.
In that case, I'd save as much as 20W (30%), but lose about 20% of my power. If you go by TDP ratings on AMD's site, it comes out to about the same (62W TDP versus 89W, for about 70% as much power, although these are rough numbers, AMD seems to class TDP ratings by what heatsink they use, not actual TDP). Anyway, how does this jive with your statement that it would use MUCH LESS than 80% of the power?
It just happens to be that personally, you don't find the tradeoffs
I understand if you think Xbox 1 is powerful enough. I also agree games aren't about graphics. But your idea of a not-improved console doesn't fit MS' business plan. MS wanted to produce a console with graphics head and shoulders above the rest. As I said, your suggestions make the console unsaleable, or at least not in the space MS aimed for.
Xbox 1 was hot, but it wasn't 110W (well, not typical). I'll put the Kill-A-Watt on my Xbox 1 tonight and tell you how much it takes. I do agree Xbox 1 was a bad design, from a hardware and cooling standpoint, for what that's worth.
As to PS3 having more connectors, and being hardware superior in general, I agree, I expect will be technically superior. It also will get hot too.
As to your comment about making sure if a part crashes at 80, make sure it doesn't reach 70: this shows AGAIN you have no idea what is going on. Let me explain again, if you put the 360 in an unvented stereo cabinet, it will hit 116F ambient (this was with the front cracked open). That means that there is no spot inside (since there is no compressor-based cooling system) in that box that is less than 116F ambient. And you talk of trying to keep spots below 70? Again, I'm sure MS did all they can to cool it, it really cools itself well. But if you put it in a box, it defeats the cooling system.
The PS2 does have good power usage. But note that the PS2 currently on sale (slimline) has an external power supply. And PS2s before that with the possible exception of the PS2+ (full-size, but no i.Link port on the front) used a lot more than 50W. I'll put my original PS2 on the Kill-A-Watt tonight too and see how it does, and I'll put my PS2+ on there (which I bought because it was quieter) on there too.
An internal power supply is convenient, but it actually is bad for cooling. It concentrates more heat in a smaller area. It however is more efficient, since running 20A at 12V across 3 foot of wire (like 360 does) is expensive and inefficient.
I still think you're mistaken about the PS3 power usage (and heat production). They may run the video chip slower whenever possible to keep heat and power useage down. That'd be great. But I don't think they'll limit the top speed, and the cooling system has to work at top speed. No one wants a console that can play only some games without crashing/overheating (if placed in a stereo cabinet).
As to your comments about the launch games sucking on 360. Launch games always suck, especially if the console makes its worldwide debut in your country (like PSP did, and the games SUCK). Note that PS1 and PS2 debuted in Japan months before the US, and so by the time it came to the US the games were better (although the PS2 games still largely stunk).
Just because the launch titles suck doens't mean made a bad design.
If the Xbox ran at 80% clockrate, it would only save about 30W (assuming video chip takes 80W, and you can reduce clock rate 20% and the voltage 20% and there is zero leakage current). I assure you 130W isnt much better than 160W. It will likely still overheat if placed in a closed space.
Anyway, most of your comments come to "I think older consoles are fast enough, so 360 doesn't need to be so fast." That's fine for you, stick with the current consoles, there's tons of great games on there. I don't think that one person's opinion that "we don't need that much performance" is necessarily means that the whole marketplace feels that way, and it doesn't mean that strategy would work in the face of fierce competition from PS3.
In summary, if your argument is "to me, the increase of heat isn't worth it for the additional power", you are expressing a personal opinion, one that you should act upon by not buying a 360. But leave other people to make that decision for themselves, okay?
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/nhtsa/Cfc_title49/publ414 .106.pdf
Go ahead and search it. It requires better labelling, but no RFID chips. There doesn't even seem to be anything in there to even let you identify a particular tire, just perhaps model and manufacture date or something.
Conspiracy theorists (and trolls) never check their sources too carefully, it just dampenens the ranting.
Interesting, you assert that MS could reduce the power consumption by smartening up the design. Could you perhaps explain how it is that you arrived at this conclusion? Could you please describe the research you did to determine the MS design is suboptimal and perhaps the steps you'd take to improve it?
As to reducing the polygon count, I don't happen to agree that is a viable option. It is an option, but MS needs to beat PS3 in the marketplace, and surely they don't feel that having a lower-performing console will do that for them.
As to it not crashing when overheating, I agree that would be ideal. Note that the console itself has a signal for overheating (it's very cryptic, two red lights on the front, but you can find it in the MS knowledge base). However, there are technical issues to detecting overheating. Basically, you need a temperature sensor in the place that the overheating happens. You cannot just have temperature sensors in every chip, it would mean having custom versions of every chip in the unit, which wouldn't be cost effective, for example you couldn't even use commodity RAM.
One place we seem to know they don't have a sensor that can report and let it put up an error message is in the power supply. I say this because some people (apparently) had the power supply (PS) overheat and the PS just turns off, turning off the 360 with it. That means you get no error message, which is puzzling. To have the PS indicate to the unit that it is overheating would have added additional cost to the unit, it's also mildly dangerous, if the PS is overheating, it is going to stay on so an error message can be displayed for 30 seconds? I'm not sure that's safe, I mean what if the PS is smouldering, and it says on for 30 more seconds and catches fire? Additionally, I'm not sure you can pass UL or other safety regs if it works that way. But perhaps this is possible, I think that neither you or I can say though that we have all the info to say that MS made the incorrect decision there. Heck, neither you nor I even know what percentage of the time this problem is occuring? You'd be able more able to justify a better temperature reporting system if 5,000 out of 1 million systems are reporting heat problems than if 5 out of 1 million are.
Also, having done electrical design myself, I can tell you it is likely not possible for MS to switch off the GPU completely. Removing power from the GPU means it will be backpowered by any signal lines to it that are not grounded. That will make the chip latch up and it won't fix itself until all the lines are lowered for a second or so and back up (generally that means turning the unit off). Adding the ability to ground all lines to the GPU takes extra design, and can be problematic in very high speed designs (which the 360 is). MS could probably halt the GPU to a low power state, which would reduce power consumption to less than 1% of peak.
Additionally to this, I think that it is likely that people are reporting just plain "busted unit" problems as heat problems, simply because the unit runs hot. Just because it crashes and it is hot doesn't mean it crashed due to heat. MS would know better here, and I'm sure the unit in question ended up in their hands for investigation. I note http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169465&cid=141 24290 that my unit was running in a 116F box with exhaust temps of 140F and not even glitching, so there's plenty of temperature headroom on these things, if yours isn't defective.
Well, I have to say I have no way to be sure that PS3 will use as much power. But I would bet significant amounts of money on it. By "as much", I mean within 25%, for a rated of 160W, 120W typical. This would also be too hot to run in a typical unvented stereo enclosure. With an NVidia graphics chip in there, plus the Power PC, plus 8 coprocessors it's not going to be a cool device either. I mean, check the power usage ratings on current NVidia graphic
What if MS had put a fridge in the Xbox 360? Surely, that'd be a good enough cooling system, wouldn't it? It'd have to be the best they could possibly do at any price, right? And it'd get down to below 32F in there! Surely, we're set up!
But what happens if you put this fridge-designed Xbox 360 in an entertainment console which doesn't vent any air? Since the "hot side" and "cool side" are now in the same box, it does nothing. And since the system is taking in energy, both to be a game machine, and also to (uselessly) move freon around, it will heat up in that box. The temperature in the box, even the cool side will rise until the box it is in can radiate heat well enough to maintain a stable temperature.
I will say it again, for the millionth time, you don't understand thermodynamics. No matter how good or poor MS' cooling system is, you completely defeat it (actually make it work against you) if you put it in a stereo cabinet that has no ventilation. Your fridge would not work if put in an enclosed space either. You simply don't have an enclosed space large enough to put it in. It will work in a corner, it won't work in a box. And also to note, it doesn't have anything inside it that is generating 160W of heat. It has stuff inside it that is generating exactly 0W of heat. It simply has to fight entropy, not fight actual heat generation.
As to this fridge you speak of using less power than an Xbox 360, a typical fridge in 2002 uses 440KWh of power per year http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/equipment/english/page16.cf m?PrintView=N&Text=N. That's 1200Wh per day. That's 1/3rd what an Xbox 360 would use if it were turned on all day (160W*24h/day = 3840Wh/day). And the Xbox 360 takes up only about 1/3 of a cubic foot, a standard fridge probably is about 20 cubic feet (on the outside), thus it has many times the surface area with which to radiate/convect heat away, oh, and unlike an Xbox in a sealed container, it can blow exhaust air to eliminate heat. So I mention again, are you really understanding what is going on here?
Again, the laws of thermodynamics don't give you the choice of making a completely enclosed cooling system work. It gives you a couple options:
1. Vent the enclosed space. This is the best option, but it isn't under MS' control.
2. Make the 360 work at the temperatures it could possibly reach if fully enclosed. If this were possible, then the Xbox 360 wouldn't even have a fan in the first place, because radiative/convective cooling would be enough to keep it running in all conditions. Note that since the exhaust temps on my 360 can reach 140F, that means making the 360 work when the entire system is significantly hotter than that.
3. Make the 360 use less power, and thus heat up less. This is definitely possible, but if done, it would make the system not a better performer than current generation systems.
4. Make the 360 large enough that it won't fit in any enclosure people are likely to have around (stereo cabinets). This would suck since the DVD drive on it is so damn loud. Plus it would cost too much to ship from where it is made.
So, 1 can't be done by MS. 2 can't be done by anyone. 3 & 4 make the unit unsellable.
What is your suggestion again? Oh, that MS should mention that you can't put it in an enclosed space. Did you perhaps check page 2 of the manual? http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/prod/oet/forms/blobs/re trieve.cgi?attachment_id=581228&native_or_pdf=pdf
Xbox 360 doesn't overheat unless you restrict its good cooling system from working (by putting it in a box or possibly the power supply on deep shag). It's in the same place as your fridge, despite being at a significant handicap as to power dissipation and surface area.
I do think it's a shame that video games now use so much power and em
It cools itself VERY well. It has far better cooling than the original Xbox.
Do you understand how cooling works? You can't "make cold". You just move heat out to somewhere else. Now, where do you move it to? Well, outside the Xbox 360 itself. The problem is, if you put the 360 in another box (a stereo cabinet), that stereo cabinet now contains all the heat generated by the 360. Unless this cabinet is designed to move the heat outside itself, the cabinet will overheat. The cabinet has completely defeated the cooling system of the 360.
Let's do another check. How is the cooling in your refrigerator? Pretty good, eh? It can get down to 10F in there! But the trick is, it is moving the heat to the back of the fridge, to the coils. So, now lets put that entire fridge in a box. The box contains not only the cold part (the actual fridge inside part) but also the coils too. The only thing breaching this box is the power cord, which supplies plently of power to inside the box. Where does that power go? It turns into heat, which is now all inside the box. So the box heats up. As the box heats up, unless the box can get rid of all its heat by radiation, it will eventually heat up inside until although the inside of the fridge is cooler than the outside, the inside is warmer than ambient outside the box.
I say again, are you sure you aren't asking MS to violate the laws of thermodynamics? Are you sure you even understand them?
The only solution to this problem would be for MS to reduce the power useage of the Xbox 360 until it is lower than the amount that a typical unvented stereo cabinet can radiate. They could surely do that, but can it be done with next-generation performance?
As to the power supply, if it truly overheats on regular carpet, then that's a shame. But honestly, I just don't buy it. Maybe on shag or something. But its vents are on the top, and not likely blocked by carpet. It even has fans in it (I hear). If it overheats when placed right behind the unit, or in an overwarm unvented stereo cabinet, then the solution is simply to move it out. The cable is long enough. Do it. MS really should state this in the manual, I'll grant you that.
But otherwise, the problem is not with the console, it's with you. If you don't feel that a box this hot is appropriate for your living room (and I do understand that), then don't buy it. You'll have to stick with PS2/Xbox 1/Gamecube type performance for now, because PS3 will have similar power dissapation, count on it. Later the PS3 and Xbox 360 will probably be put on a smaller geometry (65nm?) and thus use less power.
However, stating that MS messed up and that this should be cooler and MS is interesting but shows a complete lack of the technical issues.
So, again, either learn to live with it, or wait it out. But either way, it, is like it is because that's how power and thermodynamics works, and no amount of bitching at MS is going to change it.
Like I said, lawsuit aside. Does the power brick not work on carped?
My unit can at times exhaust 140F air. If you put the brick behind the unit, it will shut down. Does MS mention this specifically in the manual? No, and they should.
But it has a 3-foot cable. If you put it in your entertainment center, you're crazy. It's even difficult to do, since the cable is so thick and so long, it's like coiling up a cobra in your entertainment center.
Put the behind the entertainment center (I did), even on carpet, it will work. You do not have to put it on strings. Just because you read that on the internet doesn't mean it's true.
As to people always putting their console "under the TV or on the floor", well, yeah, I understand that. But things will be different now, and it isn't MS' fault. This thing uses more power than my PC does. It's simply not going to work like the video games you're used to, no matter how much you wish it were so.
MS has two choices. Don't make a next-gen machine, or print in the manual the warnings. And they did the latter (at least mostly). So why is it MS' fault again?
If you reasonably expect to put your video game under your TV in an enclosed space, then you need to get a PS2. If you want a video game that doesn't run hot, get a PS2. That's the only real answer. You cannot wave a wand and make the unit produce less heat or consume less power, not and do what it is capable of doing. I completely understand if someone wants to "opt out" of the current generation of video games, at least until they get smaller process chips to reduce the power consumption. But I cannot understand that people want to have their cake and eat it too.
I know it's a legimate keyword. There's also absolutely no reason to use it. It's the default in the only place where it is even valid.
It'd be like typing "unsigned long int" instead of "unsigned long".
I call BS on this. No reasonable code uses "auto" nearly as many times as typedef.
Now, I know some are just plain defective. That'll happen when you ship hundreds of thousands. There might even be more defective units than would normally be expected. That could happen to, due to manufacturing difficulties.
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But a design defect? I just don't know if we're there.
I know it gets hot http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169465&cid=14
But it gets hot because it does so much. Its regular level of consumption is 160W. That's a lot, and it all turns into heat. Despite this, the Xbox 360 has a great cooling system. It really keeps itself cool.
But, like all devices, a cooling system just moves the heat somewhere else, in this case ouside the case. So if you put it in a confied area or block the vents, it will be unable to cool itself. There is NOTHING MS can do about this.
Perhaps you'd like Xbox to take less power (PS2 uses 50W). I can understand that. But it's not going to happen. PS3 will be the same. These super-capable game machines are pushing the limits of technology and so they use a lot of power and generate a lot of heat.
So, lawsuit aside, when you evaluate your problems with 360, make sure you're not expecting MS to defy the laws of thermodynamics.
BTW, I got together an EXECELLENT cooling system for my 360 in my stereo/video game cabinet now. I'm considering writing it up. Costs a fair bit, but instead of 116F inside there with the front panel cracked an inch, now it gets to 78F (67F ambient in the room) in there with the front panel completely closed. It's so much quieter now.
None of these are any more trustworthy than the ones you get with your PC, or that you buy from Target.
You've left the realm of info and fact and gone to opinion. You don't like IE. You don't like Notepad. Fine.
But that doesn't mean you don't get a lot of software with Windows that is as trustworthy as Linux apps, it just means YOU don't trust them. And hell, most of these Linux apps aren't trustworthy either. That's why you don't run them as root.
So the answer is again in all 3 places. Don't run as root, on Windows, Mac or Linux.
As to someone putting holes into Linux. Actually, yes, they have. I forget what it was, but there were major holes put into the kernel of a distro, and on purpose. They did it by checking in code into the distro site, then they hacked into machines running the distro. It was on slashdot about two years ago, maybe 3.
As to IE having security holes, even as limited user, well, that's true. It has some. It has a lot fewer than the reports you see around, because some of these holes aren't real holes, or aren't fixable, or are trumped up (see "hyperthreading security hole"). But there are some legitimate ones. There's only one big one right now that is known of, and Firefox also suffers from it! Note that on my machine, which has data execution prevention, even that isn't an issue on IE, it catches it. Probably catches the Firefox one too.
But hey, is using IE holes to crap on Windows even fair? Do you crap on Linux for Firefox holes? If you crap on Windows for IIS holes, do you crap on Linux for Apache (or tinyhttpd) holes?
Anyway, Windows and Linux both have patched a lot of security holes in the last 3 years, and there's still more to go, on both sides. But I still think the battle is moving to the user front now. Social engineering will always exist, and whichever platform inherits the most novice users will have the biggest problem. It doesn't matter who makes the platform or whether it is open source or not.
If you set up your Windows machine for limited users, it works fine too. No, you can't do everything, but then again neither can Mac OS X. Mac OS X asks for your admin password quite a bit. Too much, frankly.
I have no idea how to even understand your trusted distro comments. On Windows, you get much of that software on the Windows CD. Surely that's trusted, if some random internet site is trusted. Many other thinks (fixes, mostly) come from MS' own site. Is that not trusted? Other software (those missing apps you speak of) you buy on a CD (perhaps at Target). Is that not trusted?
Yes, you can install bogus software on a PC. Or a Mac. Or linux. And that compromises security. The answer is the same on all 3 platforms. Don't do it.
The Register is entertaining. It's also a rag, and they carry numerous stories that just plain aren't true. Citing them means nothing.
I'll say this clearly and plainly. If Linux or Mac inherited the huge base of completely clueless users that Windows currently shoulders, either would have a serious issue with perception of lack of inherent security. Any one of them could at any moment click "accept" to install Gator, insert a Sony DRM CD, or be convinced to install a "web accelerator" that makes their machine insecure or even puposely a home for bad code.
They do soak heat from the block. But the constant inflow of cool air takes most of the heat away. As to burning my hand on one, I couldn't say, it depends on the engine. But do note that the intake manifolds on nearly all recent cars is now made of plastic. High-density-polypropelene often. That's literally the same as garbage bags, and I'm sure you know that polyproplene doesn't tolerate much heat at all, I'd be surprised if you could burn your hand on it before it became soft to the touch.
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As to your plastic spacer, it will do virtually nothing. Your intake manifold cannot remain completely cold in a closed space that is hot. Some heat from nearby parts is emited as infrared radiation, and it will hit your intake manifold and heat it up some. Furthermore take a little class in thermodynamics and see how much insulating power a thin gasket which is under compression (and thus has no insulating airspaces in it) is worth in insulation.
I challenge you to do some actual tests on your intake manifold. Like I did with my Xbox 360 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169465&cid=14
I think you'll find in good testing that the reduction in heat soak into the intake manifold under normal conditions is insignificant. If it weren't, the manufacturer would have put in a spacer themselves, gained HP or MPG and reaped the rewards from CAFE regulations or in the free market.