Grumpy old man

[thegoonden]

Just looked back at my last ten or so posts, and they mainly seem to be.........


ATI are pants because of a b and c
and
Nvidia are pants because of x y and z


LOL


I think I might just be a bit frustrated at the slow progress in PC's these last 2-3 years......just a wee bit anyway.

When was Moore's law repealed?



I mean between gfx cards that only offer 150-170% the perf of 2 year old models, and CPU manufacturers going from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 (soon) cores while 99% of software still uses only one core......it's just not as much fun as it has been in previous years.


Old and grumpy of N.Ireland




PS: need some positivity pills....NURSE!

 

[thegoonden]

I'd say you pretty much have that one surrounded



But I AM miffed that there are no actual CPU upgrades (beyond speed-per-clock tweaks like those Nahalem brings) coming up......at least not for MOST uses....obviously 8,16,32 cores are great for hefty rendering or movie ripping, but for most apps and games you're just gonna be buying 1 CPU and 7,15,31 spare ones

As has been mentioned, proper multithreaded programming is far from easy, which means either Intel and AMD have to either figure out some method to make all the cores transparently act like one uberprocessor......or start seriously thinking about new tech to get past the current speed limitations. I sometimes wonder if the multicores are where they're gonna stay, marketing increasingly useless chips[1]....or whether they are just to distract us and satisfy the upgrade obsessives while they work on something genuinely new.


Anyway, defo going to wait for 1GB 4870 and try one, as you say, if it stinks, it can go home again and I can try a 280. Also tempted-ish by a 4870x2 if it's 2GB.....but don't trust this xfire stuff, and only have 780W to play with (currently peaks just over 400 with the GTX, so it should JUST be OK).

Still grumpy though



[1]Look, I know there are benefits when running loads of processes.....but apart from Bootup, when do most of us do that? (mate I just built the box for uses his 4 cores to run 3 copies of WOW, and still have some capacity for using other stuff). @2GHz, a C2D is not 2x a P4 and a C2Q is not 2x a C2D...that's what I'm driving at.

 

[thegoonden]

Contrary to popular opinion, Moore's law makes absolutely no statement on the real-world performance of any piece of silicon.

It simply states that the number of transistors which can be placed on a piece of silicon, for a given cost, will double every two years. That's it. CPUs have been keeping track with Moore's law (and GPUs have been exceeding it since their genesis), since it was introduced in 1965. How much longer it can be maintained is anyones's guess...

Was it not 18 months?

Surely a C2D and C2Q have the same component density? Hence a Quad is just 2 C2D's under one cover?

Anyway, in 10 years will we have 128 core chips @ 3GHz, with 127 cores doing a whole pile of sod all 99.9% of the time?

I see your point about GPU's but it doesn't seem to hold true (not that I know much about this). a 280 is 2 years younger than an 8800GTX, so it SHOULD have 2x transistor density, it also has a die which is considerably larger, yet it barely manages 150% the ultimate performance.

Time for quantum computing or something methinks



My CPU's......

8MHz,233MHz,533MHz,1200MHz,2000MHz,2800MHz(tortured to 3.2G),2400MHz(tortured up to 3.4G), and in another two years..... another 2400MHz....but with 8 or 16 of them....you see what's buggin me