Warp wrote:
>   On the other hand, we are talking about 1976 here. With regular desktop
> computers we were talking about KMIPS and KFLOPS and a few kB of RAM at
> most.

On the gripping hand, one "mainframe" I programmed on (that was running 
the entire K-12 school district, scheduling and grades and report cards 
and payroll and such) could have been outrun by an Apple ][, if you 
could get a 600 line-per-minute line printer hooked up to it. The same 
kind of computer was running the local bank at the time. (Yeah, around 
1976-1981 or so.)  32Kbytes of real live core memory, punched card 
input, all that good stuff.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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scott wrote:
> Saw a demo a while back where some dude had hooked up 3 PS3's to 
> raytrace in realtime at full HD resolution. 

I saw somewhere that someone took a stack of 8 PS3's to do <mumble> 
(weather prediction? Nuclear simulations?) because that cost less *and* 
was more powerful than a couple hour's time on the supercomputer he'd 
been renting.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:24:11 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> state machine

I think that's what we call the government here in Utah.  It churns and 
churns, but nothing ever seems to happen. ;)

Jim

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Stephen wrote:
> Was it the drink or going into work and travelling during the rush hour?
> But then you are a man and listen to no one. :)
> 

How could it possibly be the drink? Evry fule kno that beer is
medicinal! Must have been the travelling in rush hour. Almost back to
normal now and humbly listening to the Kat's advice ;-)

John

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John VanSickle wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> John VanSickle wrote:
>>
>>> There were games on the Apple (6502-based) which had seven versions 
>>> of any given sprite graphic so that they wouldn't have to be shifted 
>>> in order to display them on the screen.  8-bit game programmers 
>>> learned much about squeezing every last drop of performance out of 
>>> limited speed and memory.
>>
>> Wouldn't having 7 copies of the same data eat more memory?
> 
> This is what programmers call a trade-off; the only way to get 
> acceptable speed was to use up seven times as much memory (not eight, 
> because only the lower seven bits of each video byte represented screen 
> pixels; the MSB selected the colors).
> 
>> Did it actually store 7 copies, or just precompute them?
> 
> The computer did not precompute them; the programmer did.

Now that I think about it more, there was a bit more involved than 
shifting the bits.  On the Apple ][, if a raster bit was set, but its 
neighbors were not, it was one of four colors, depending on the MSB of 
the byte and whether the bit fell in an even or odd column on the screen.

The upshot of this is that if the programmer simply shifted the bits 
over, then the colors of three of the sprites would be radically 
different from the other four, and if the sprite began in an 
odd-numbered byte (horizontally) rather than an even-numbered one, the 
colors would again be swapped.  Programmers wound up making fourteen 
versions of every sprite, and aside from preserving the MSB, each group 
of seven were shifted versions of the same graphic, shifted across two 
bytes, and not one.

Regards,
John

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> As I understand it, technologies like CUDA allow you to run arbitrary 
> code on a GPU. So no need for convoluted trickery to convince the GPU 
> that your proplem is just like texture mapping, just feed it the actual 
> calculations you want it to do. (Of course, it runs arbitrary code, that 
> doesn't necessarily mean it runs it *fast*.)

Every so often some noob posts in the programming group how POV-Ray is 
out of date, and we should just port to CUDA or the equivalent AMD tech 
(Close-to-the-metal, or something, isn't it?).

There are still significant limitations, even on the very newest NVidia 
cards, that would prevent POV-Ray from working well on them.

...Chambers

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Well let's examine that one.
> 
> I've only ever seen a PS3 in action once. I was using it to play a game 
> called "Call of Duty 4". Never heard of the game,

You don't play many video games, then.  CoD4 has been one of the top 
selling games for the past several months (it came out last November, 
didn't it?)

> On the other hand, Word just makes text appear on a screen, and lets you 
> edit it. (And change fonts and styles.) That was possible 20 years ago. 

No, you're describing WordPad.  Word does significantly more.

> So why does it suddenly require so much hardware to achieve the same 
> thing as before? It's not like Word has any significant new features or 
> anything...

Because your computer is doing a *lot* more than just running Word.

...Chambers

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Chambers wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> As I understand it, technologies like CUDA allow you to run arbitrary 
>> code on a GPU. So no need for convoluted trickery to convince the GPU 
>> that your proplem is just like texture mapping, just feed it the 
>> actual calculations you want it to do. (Of course, it runs arbitrary 
>> code, that doesn't necessarily mean it runs it *fast*.)
> 
> Every so often some noob posts in the programming group how POV-Ray is 
> out of date, and we should just port to CUDA or the equivalent AMD tech 
> (Close-to-the-metal, or something, isn't it?).
> 
> There are still significant limitations, even on the very newest NVidia 
> cards, that would prevent POV-Ray from working well on them.
> 
> ...Chambers

But, as soon as it is reasonable, there are some who will be all over it.

The newest chips are capable of double precision floating point 
operations. It's a step, at least.

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>> I've only ever seen a PS3 in action once. I was using it to play a 
>> game called "Call of Duty 4". Never heard of the game,
> 
> You don't play many video games, then.

Yeah - and? ;-)

>> On the other hand, Word just makes text appear on a screen, and lets 
>> you edit it. (And change fonts and styles.) That was possible 20 years 
>> ago. 
> 
> No, you're describing WordPad.  Word does significantly more.

Yes - you can insert pictures and there are different text alignments 
and you can fiddle with the margins and insert headers and footers and a 
few other bits that nobody uses. But basically, it's WordPad with bells on.

>> So why does it suddenly require so much hardware to achieve the same 
>> thing as before? It's not like Word has any significant new features 
>> or anything...
> 
> Because your computer is doing a *lot* more than just running Word.

But what if you only actually want to run Word?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> I've only ever seen a PS3 in action once. I was using it to play a 
>>> game called "Call of Duty 4". Never heard of the game,
>>
>> You don't play many video games, then.
> 
> Yeah - and? ;-)

Nothing :)  As long as you realize that the limits of your experiences 
are not the same as the limits of others'.

> few other bits that nobody uses.

You know that saying, "80% of the users use 20% of the features"?  It 
turns out that you can't just put out a product with 20% of the 
features, because everybody uses a *different* 20%.

In other words, *all* the features that are in Word are there because 
there are a significant number of people who use them.  Very few people 
use *all* of them, but all of the features get used a lot.

> But what if you only actually want to run Word?

Then you should run Linux on an EeePC, or an embedded system.  You could 
even buy a 15 or 20 year old Word Processor - basically a laptop that 
only runs Notepad :)

...Chambers

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