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Does anybody here remember the Industrial Revolution?
It was a time of massive change. The natural order of things, which had
stood of test of time for many centuries, was suddenly swept away.
Bizarre, futuristic new machines made become possible to mass produce
goods in hitherto-unimaginable quantities. Steam locomotives made and
broke the fortunes of entire communities. Suddenly distant towns were
just a few minutes away. Engineering feat such as massive bridges and
towering buildings became a common sight. Impassible ravines could now
be tamed by them. The sky itself seemed almost within human reach.
Even today, people still romanticise about the steam engines. The
locomotives, the massive winding engines, even steam-powered computers.
But, you know, we actually *have* locomotives today! And in a sense,
they're much *better* than what we had before. They're faster, quieter,
more reliable, and require far fewer people to operate. And yet, nobody
really gets excited about electric trains. It's just "too easy".
Likewise, we have electric motors that output far more torque or have a
much higher top-speed than any steam engine, and take up a fraction of
the space. Some of them are remotely operated, so you don't need
technicians at all. And yet... nobody finds this impressive. I guess for
shock and awe, bigger really *is* better...
I think I myself may have lived through a different revolution. When I
was a kid, computers were small plastic boxy things that you hook up to
your TV and play computer games on. Graphics were blurry, blocky and
garishly colourful. The 8-bit era of computer graphics is well documented.
Most people spent the next ten years looking at 8- or 16-colour
graphics. But I had access to an Amiga; my mind was blown by
4,096-colour images and stereophonic digital audio. With enough
simplification, trickery and down-right hacking-the-metal, you could
find games that generate those "oh my god, it looks like a real
photograph!" moments.
Today, my *actual photographs* are digital images!
Flashback may have been limited to 32 colours, but the fluidity of the
main character's motion was astonishingly life-like.
We had had little digital music disks for years, of course. But
everybody dreamed dizzily of the day when a digital *video* disk might
exist, allowing perfect pausing, instant chapter access, and all the
other trippy stuff that CDs already do. But the technology of the time
just couldn't quite handle it. As Amiga Format described it, "the
difficulty is to come up with a compression algorithm sophisticated to
squeeze all the data onto the disk, yet simple enough to decompress in
real-time".
The solution? Well, Moore's law. Computers got faster. Today you can buy
a $15 computer that can decode HD video in realtime without issue.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are all living in the future! We have cheap
audio and video digitising hardware. We have digital films and TV. We
have computer games that render a fully-interactive 3D world of stunning
realism in real-time. We have 3D TV. And nobody really cares any more.
That's the thing. Ten years ago, the idea of being able to actually
*edit* video on a mere *home computer* was... shocking. Sensational.
Stunning. Only people with expensive TV studios can actually *edit*
video. Hell, a camera to merely *shoot* video costs thousands of pounds,
so only the very richest people can afford one.
Yet today, a bunch of bored college students can make a
blockbuster-style full length feature film in their spare time! Complete
with (what appear to be) big-budget special effects, such as lengthy
space battles in full CGI.
You would *think* people would be shouting from the rooftops in awe of
how utterly epic all of this is... But that's the thing. The revolution
has happened. It's over. We're here now. If I could show my teenage self
a guy watching TV live over the Internet, I think my little head would
have exploded. But today, it's a case of "been there, done that". Now it
isn't *hard* any more, it just doesn't seem *impressive*. What was once
futuristic science fiction and become mundane familiar reality.
All this technology, and we use it to make viral cat videos. (Which are
all seemingly copies of each other, I might add...)
Even the prodigious march of CPU power no longer seems to impress
anyone. For one thing, we seem to have hit some kind of a wall with how
fast you can make a CPU run before it requires an active refrigeration
system. So now they want to just add more cores instead. I'm sure they
*could* quite easily gives us not two cores or four cores, but twenty
cores if there was a market for it. But most workloads simply aren't
very parallel.
And you know what? I'm not sure it matters. I think if you could take
the average computer user and somehow make their processor suddenly able
to execute single-threaded code 10x faster, THEY WOULDN'T EVEN NOTICE!
Because it seems to me that today, your PC is almost always waiting for
disk or network access. The CPU is hardly ever the thing you're waiting
for. (Hardcore gaming aside... and even then, most of the hard work is
GPU-limited. GPUs, BTW, have a bazillion cores and it's trivial to add
more...)
The party is over, my friends. We have all this sensational technology,
and nobody even seems to notice any more.
It's as if technology that can just barely manage to perform a given
task is somehow "more impressive" than technology that can trivially
perform it with ease. Even though, logically, the latter is obviously
far superior...
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Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> Ladies and gentlemen, we are all living in the future!
Actually we are living in the present.
> The CPU is hardly ever the thing you're waiting
> for. (Hardcore gaming aside... and even then, most of the hard work is
> GPU-limited.
Not always. There are many computationally-intensive things that games
have to do with the CPU because the GPU is too specialized for that.
(And besides, it's already pretty busy calculating pixel shaders to do
other things.)
The is not just theoretical, because some games *do* benefit from
extra CPU cores, and in fact some of them require additional cores if
you want to turn on certain features.
One recent example I have played is RAGE. It will work on a dual-core,
but will benefit from four cores. However, more to the point, there's
an optional graphical feature in it that will require you to have at
least *six* cores or else it will be too inefficient. (Yes, I tried
it with my quad-core, and it indeed was too heavy for it.)
(The game engine in RAGE uses tons and tons of textures. The game
developers can basically add any specialized texture anywhere in the
entire game world. The engine loads and unloads textures on-the-fly,
as the player moves in the world. Naturally because of the sheer amount
of textures, they take an enormous amount of memory, and because texture
RAM and disk space is limited, the "least important" textures will have
a lower resolution. What the feature in question does is that, while
loading textures to the GPU's texture RAM, it will "sharpen" them to
add more detail and remove pixelation. Since textures are being constantly
loaded in an almost endless stream, this requires a lot of computing
power, which is where the extra CPU cores come handy. Or this is what
I have gathered from the info on the subject out there.)
--
- Warp
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On 19-4-2014 21:02, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> Does anybody here remember the Industrial Revolution?
you mean the 2nd industrial revolution?
No I was not born then. Neither was anybody else that is alive today.
---
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is
active.
http://www.avast.com
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On 19/04/2014 8:02 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> Does anybody here remember the Industrial Revolution?
F.O.
And when you come back.
F.O. again. :-P
--
Regards
Stephen
I solemnly promise to kick the next angle, I see.
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Le 19/04/2014 21:02, Orchid Win7 v1 nous fit lire :
> I'm sure they *could* quite easily gives us not two cores or four cores,
> but twenty cores if there was a market for it. But most workloads simply
> aren't very parallel.
Did you look at Intel schedule for the next two years ?
They plan to have cpu with 15 true core, IIRC... and assembling them by
2, 4 or 8. Alas, it's the expensive branch for servers.
I'm glad to have a 6/12 cores here (at a raisonable price).
Most parallel works now are aimed at GPU (with 2048 WU... or more)
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> The party is over, my friends.
I would imagine a lot of people said the same in 1850 about the
Industrial Revolution. And look what's changed since then (in terms of
manufacturing).
Sure, desktop CPU clock frequency is not as important as it used to be,
but there are plenty of other metrics. Two off the top of my head are
battery energy density and internet connection speed, both show no sign
of having reached the limit, and both will give real benefits to a large
number of people.
Bring on 8000x4000x120p streaming video, projected from my phone :-)
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On 22/04/2014 09:30 AM, scott wrote:
>> The party is over, my friends.
>
> I would imagine a lot of people said the same in 1850 about the
> Industrial Revolution. And look what's changed since then (in terms of
> manufacturing).
Um... has anything changed? Apart from the invention of plastic, I can't
really think of anything.
> Sure, desktop CPU clock frequency is not as important as it used to be,
> but there are plenty of other metrics. Two off the top of my head are
> battery energy density and internet connection speed, both show no sign
> of having reached the limit, and both will give real benefits to a large
> number of people.
I don't know, man. I think Internet speeds have now reached the point
where page loading is near-instant, and any further boost is of no real
benefit.
...until you try to download a large file, but that's reasonably rare.
Still, with Bioshock: Infinite clocking in at 17 GB, I'm sure glad of
the speed on the rare occasions where I use it! o_O
Actually, come to think of it, it seems that now Firefox is that's
holding things up! It seems to take longer for Firefox to do the page
rendering than it does to actually download the files! So all that stuff
I said about CPU speed not mattering anymore? I guess I was wrong. :-S
(Assuming it's actually CPU-limited, and not disk-limited...)
> Bring on 8000x4000x120p streaming video, projected from my phone :-)
From what I've seen, the limitation is that all projectors work at
800x600, or if you buy an expensive one, 1024x768. Christ only knows why
they don't make them in any higher resolutions...
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On 19/04/2014 09:08 PM, Warp wrote:
> Orchid Win7 v1<voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Ladies and gentlemen, we are all living in the future!
>
> Actually we are living in the present.
*sigh* O RLY?
>> The CPU is hardly ever the thing you're waiting
>> for. (Hardcore gaming aside... and even then, most of the hard work is
>> GPU-limited.
>
> Not always. There are many computationally-intensive things that games
> have to do with the CPU because the GPU is too specialized for that.
> (And besides, it's already pretty busy calculating pixel shaders to do
> other things.)
>
> The is not just theoretical, because some games *do* benefit from
> extra CPU cores, and in fact some of them require additional cores if
> you want to turn on certain features.
AI would be the main one, I guess... depending on what algorithm the
game uses.
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On Tue, 22 Apr 2014 20:17:55 +0200, Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On 19/04/2014 09:08 PM, Warp wrote:
>> Orchid Win7 v1<voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>> Ladies and gentlemen, we are all living in the future!
>>
>> Actually we are living in the present.
>
> *sigh* O RLY?
>
>>> The CPU is hardly ever the thing you're waiting
>>> for. (Hardcore gaming aside... and even then, most of the hard work is
>>> GPU-limited.
>>
>> Not always. There are many computationally-intensive things that games
>> have to do with the CPU because the GPU is too specialized for that.
>> (And besides, it's already pretty busy calculating pixel shaders to do
>> other things.)
>>
>> The is not just theoretical, because some games *do* benefit from
>> extra CPU cores, and in fact some of them require additional cores if
>> you want to turn on certain features.
>
> AI would be the main one, I guess... depending on what algorithm the
> game uses.
I've noticed physics takes a big chunk as well.
--
-Nekar Xenos-
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On 22/04/2014 7:16 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> On 22/04/2014 09:30 AM, scott wrote:
>>> The party is over, my friends.
>>
>> I would imagine a lot of people said the same in 1850 about the
>> Industrial Revolution. And look what's changed since then (in terms of
>> manufacturing).
>
> Um... has anything changed? Apart from the invention of plastic, I can't
> really think of anything.
>
I despair of the youth of today. </echo, echo, echo...>
How are we to keep The Empire if the, the ... others are so abysmally
wanting.
The change that I've seen in my lifetime, and it is not really that
long, is quite a lot. From few cars on the road (car spotting was going
out of fashion) to going to an airport to watch plains taking off, in
the 50's and 60's. To Dick Tracey video watches and to watch 40 year old
TV programmes on demand. From thinking 9600 baud was state of the art
to fibre optic speeds. I could go on and I do. ;-)
> I don't know, man. I think Internet speeds have now reached the point
> where page loading is near-instant, and any further boost is of no real
> benefit.
>
> ....until you try to download a large file, but that's reasonably rare.
> Still, with Bioshock: Infinite clocking in at 17 GB, I'm sure glad of
> the speed on the rare occasions where I use it! o_O
>
A lot of people use their broadband connection to stream Terrestrial TV.
They might not know it but they do.
> Actually, come to think of it, it seems that now Firefox is that's
> holding things up! It seems to take longer for Firefox to do the page
> rendering than it does to actually download the files! So all that stuff
> I said about CPU speed not mattering anymore? I guess I was wrong. :-S
> (Assuming it's actually CPU-limited, and not disk-limited...)
>
I've noticed that too, recently. But if you think that is bad. Try it on
a thin client. </boak>
--
Regards
Stephen
I solemnly promise to kick the next angle, I see.
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