15 replies to this topic

[CA3LE]

If you guys want to glimpse a little bit into the future.



PCI-E x8 512GB PCI Express SLC Internal Solid State Drive

I don't know about you guys but that's the fastest drive that I've ever seen.  ... straight into the northbridge, SICK!  It can sustain write at about 1GB/s (yes, Gigabyte not Gigabit.. so about 8 Gbps) (950 MB/s to be exact).  And can burst to 1400 MB/s -- YOWZER!

Priced for insane people... and people who wipe their ass with money at an affordable $9,149.00, hey... that's a killer deal!     It was $9,599.00  

We can experience it vicariously through the feedback at least.  I like this one...  


Smart asses rule    

[xs1]

christ sakes. Ill wait 5 years when its about 90 bucks

[CA3LE]

xs1, on 02 June 2011 - 07:13 PM, said:

christ sakes. Ill wait 5 years when its about 90 bucks

In five years we'll hopefully have a whole new age of storage... beyond what we can comprehend today.

[Blako]

Many years ago I saw a 40GB hard drive for $4000.  Now on newegg I see 400GB for around $25

Im seeing disk based hard drives at 50-120MB/s
and solid state hard drives at 70-300MB/s

"The only thing constant in life is change" - François de la Rochefoucauld.

[dlewis23]

The problem with storage on a PCI-E card is its not practical when you need multiple drives, it will never fit in a 1U, as far as I know you can't really raid them except at the OS level, and its very expensive.

It's a nice way to show off SSD's but I can't see this as being the future in anyway. Once everyone gets Thunderbolt in there computers this stuff is really done for.

[mudmanc4]

xs1, on 02 June 2011 - 07:13 PM, said:

christ sakes. Ill wait 5 years when its about 90 bucks

True that !!!........and it only fits in the nostalgic type legacy machines hahahaa

I dunno D , someone posted a while ago that a proc  ( or anything ) can not  " ever " get paste the speed of light " so that will be the bottleneck, if we think hard and long about it , the Earth was flat at one time as well. So my thoughts are memory itself in a machine will be as dynamic as it is today , but in more of a viral type (live) setting. As network throughput speeds increase along side virtualization and transistor size reaches the atomic level , physical memory will have no place.

And why does the pic remind me so much of EDO RAM crammed in a network card ?

[EBrown]

mudmanc4, on 15 June 2011 - 02:48 PM, said:

True that !!!........and it only fits in the nostalgic type legacy machines hahahaa

I dunno D , someone posted a while ago that a proc  ( or anything ) can not  " ever " get paste the speed of light " so that will be the bottleneck, if we think hard and long about it , the Earth was flat at one time as well. So my thoughts are memory itself in a machine will be as dynamic as it is today , but in more of a viral type (live) setting. As network throughput speeds increase along side virtualization and transistor size reaches the atomic level , physical memory will have no place.

And why does the pic remind me so much of EDO RAM crammed in a network card ?

Here's a couple things you might find interesting.

http://en.wikipedia....Moore's_law
Moore's Law: The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.

David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months.

Now, when considering this, you would think computers would be getting faster would you not? Well, the problem then becomes the software. We see that we have double the performance, so we double the bloat. Hence Wirth's law.

http://en.wikipedia....iki/Wirth's_law
Wirth's Law: Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.
Gates' Law: The speed of software halves every 18 months.

This is actually extremely true.

"The Great Moore's Law Compensator (TGMLC), generally referred to as bloat, and also known as Wirth's law, is the principle that successive generations of computer software acquire enough bloat to offset the performance gains predicted by Moore's Law. In a 2008 article in InfoWorld, Randall C. Kennedy,[32] formerly of Intel, introduces this term using successive versions of Microsoft Office between the year 2000 and 2007 as his premise. Despite the gains in computational performance during this time period according to Moore's law, Office 2007 performed the same task at half the speed on a prototypical year 2007 computer as compared to Office 2000 on a year 2000 computer."

So now, we have reason to believe that the PROGRAMMERS of the software are the real issue.

http://research.micr.../papers/law.htm
When you consider Proebsting's Law (Compiler Advances Double Computing Power Every 18 Years) it gives us the correlation of Hardware advances to Software bottlenecks.

Yet another argument that we can buy the fastest hardware out there, but we limit ourselves with the software. The amount of work done to achieve a gold has increased exponentially from 10 years ago. I dare you to run Windows Server 2000 on some newer hardware, then switch it out with Windows Server 2008. This will show you directly, what the difference is. When you go to install Active Directory, you will not see much of a performance increase from Windows Server 2000 to Windows Server 2008. (I didn't, and I tested both on the same exact hardware. With the same exact configuration. In fact, if anything, there was a performance increase on the Windows Server 2000 machine.)

Thanks,
EBrown

[CA3LE]

Very interesting Elliot...

[EBrown]

CA3LE, on 16 June 2011 - 12:17 AM, said:

Very interesting Elliott...

Two T's.

Yeah, a friend of mine introduced me to Proebsting's Law, and I felt intrigued. Further research into it led me to Moore's Law, and Wirth's Law, which led me into questioning, "Do we really need the more powerful hardware? Or do we need to teach the programmers to teach software to be smarter?"

Prime example, Java, and .NET. Both of these run in VM's on the host computer. Sure, they are easy to program in, and sure, they can save time in certain circumstances. (When a large library is implemented by default.) But do they really improve performance? In some cases, yes. In most, no. The fact that we are running them Virtually, means that we take more resources and time to implement the VM itself, thus causing another factor of the great Hardware Vs. Software battle, we just made the software tax the hardware more.

Consider this: In the 1990's Megabytes of RAM were expensive, so Programmers would write their programs to be memory efficient. Allowing the use of every bit of that RAM. (And I do literally mean BIT.) In 2011 you can buy a 2 Gigabyte stick of ram for $20. So what did the programmers do? They said to hell with memory management, "I only need 4 numbers, but I am allocating a 32-bit width area of the RAM, and I dare anyone to tell me to do different!" Thus creating 4,294,967,292 UNNEEDED possibilities. (I experience this issue with .NET, I have a direction system that requires a mere 2 Bits, but I cannot allocate less than 16, thus myself I created 65532 unnecessary combinations. Wasting valuable RAM. I shutter at the knowledge.)

So what do we end up with in the end? Dumber programming, trying to create smarter computers.

Thanks,
EBrown

[mudmanc4]

I'll back up your server experiment.

From my point of view , "something" happened when windows hit the market full blast, suddenly developers started thinking ,  " hey , I bet " they " the people , would like this to look pretty " , poof , there goes performance. And it's worsened for the last 20 years. Requiring , forcing consumers to buy that new machine with the latest hardware updated to be able to run the software. Just for a second , and great example would be the train wreck Vista , need I go any further on that one ? Of course that is the extreme, none the less perfect example.

[dlewis23]

EBrown, on 16 June 2011 - 01:39 AM, said:

Prime example, Java, and .NET. Both of these run in VM's on the host computer. Sure, they are easy to program in, and sure, they can save time in certain circumstances. (When a large library is implemented by default.) But do they really improve performance? In some cases, yes. In most, no.

Thats because Java and .NET suck ass. People use it too much and they use it in cases were it probably shouldn't be used. Java and .NET are part of the reason why QT and Titanium are kicking ass.

EBrown, on 16 June 2011 - 01:39 AM, said:

Yeah, a friend of mine introduced me to Proebsting's Law, and I felt intrigued. Further research into it led me to Moore's Law, and Wirth's Law, which led me into questioning, "Do we really need the more powerful hardware? Or do we need to teach the programmers to teach software to be smarter?

Consider this: In the 1990's Megabytes of RAM were expensive, so Programmers would write their programs to be memory efficient. Allowing the use of every bit of that RAM. (And I do literally mean BIT.) In 2011 you can buy a 2 Gigabyte stick of ram for $20. So what did the programmers do? They said to hell with memory management, "I only need 4 numbers, but I am allocating a 32-bit width area of the RAM, and I dare anyone to tell me to do different!" Thus creating 4,294,967,292 UNNEEDED possibilities. (I experience this issue with .NET, I have a direction system that requires a mere 2 Bits, but I cannot allocate less than 16, thus myself I created 65532 unnecessary combinations. Wasting valuable RAM. I shutter at the knowledge.)

So what do we end up with in the end? Dumber programming, trying to create smarter computers.

The simple answer to your question is yes, we need more powerful hardware because GUI's are getting much more intensive.

Look at your average GUI in the 90's it wasn't very pretty or CPU/GPU intensive, look at a GUI today. I don't care how good you are, your not putting that into 128 MB of ram. A modern GUI is a large part of the reason why we need 4 GB + of ram.  It's not just at the OS level too, apps and websites look at hell of a lot better today then they did 10 years ago. That comes at the expensive of ram. There is a reason why browsers use so much ram, it's not poor programming it's just websites use a ton ram because of the way they look and function.

I'm building a iPad app right now and if the iPad didn't have 512 MB of ram this app would be a problem. The UI alone will probably use 25 - 30 MB of ram, animations will use another 10 MB and thats with out any other code of the app running.

It's not that we have dumb programming, things have just changed. If you want things to look good it's going to be at the expense of memory.

[Blako]

Quote

It's not that we have dumb programming, things have just changed. If you want things to look good it's going to be at the expense of memory.

  
I would argue a little of both.  If the program testers have 4GB of memory and "computers of the future will have more" then why be modest with the requirements?  Yes If you want your interface to look better and do more to stay on the cutting edge then its going to cost you more resources.  It seems very few people have that real-time mindset.  There are mission critical programs that require response times measured in milliseconds.  I'm personally appalled when I see a bran new computer loaded with mostly junk with everything running on start up and 40-60 running processes.  There have been a few times where I load up a old game where the menu takes one second to load and the game another second.  Then I realize that modern games are super slow in comparison.  Taking 20 seconds to close a game that allocated 2GB... frustrating

[EBrown]

dlewis23, on 16 June 2011 - 06:28 AM, said:

Thats because Java and .NET suck ass. People use it too much and they use it in cases were it probably shouldn't be used. Java and .NET are part of the reason why QT and Titanium are kicking ass.




The simple answer to your question is yes, we need more powerful hardware because GUI's are getting much more intensive.

Look at your average GUI in the 90's it wasn't very pretty or CPU/GPU intensive, look at a GUI today. I don't care how good you are, your not putting that into 128 MB of ram. A modern GUI is a large part of the reason why we need 4 GB + of ram.  It's not just at the OS level too, apps and websites look at hell of a lot better today then they did 10 years ago. That comes at the expensive of ram. There is a reason why browsers use so much ram, it's not poor programming it's just websites use a ton ram because of the way they look and function.

I'm building a iPad app right now and if the iPad didn't have 512 MB of ram this app would be a problem. The UI alone will probably use 25 - 30 MB of ram, animations will use another 10 MB and thats with out any other code of the app running.

It's not that we have dumb programming, things have just changed. If you want things to look good it's going to be at the expense of memory.

So you use 35-40 MB of RAM for a GUI, when that's not even the argument here.

Pick any two games, one from the late 90's early 2000's, and one from today.

Example: Half Life Vs. Bad Company 2.

Now, both of these are 3D First Person Shooters, but, Half Life, was built back in 98, it required a whopping 96MB of RAM, for the Windows 98 system. Now? Windows 7 ITSELF requires more. Bad Company 2, released in 2010, requires 2GB of RAM. Now, I will admit, it should require more with the high detail textures, but the GUI's are not that different. Half Life required a 500Mhz Processor, Bad Company 2 requires at least a Dual-Core 2Ghz. Now, hold on. Both games are very similar in nature. (Albeit Bad Company 2 has vehicles whereas Half Life didn't.) But yet the requirements are so much different? I can see a slightly larger requirement on the CPU, but 8 times the required processing power? Why? Because computers haven't really gotten faster. The people that program them have decided they can waste processing cycles, etc. because we have MORE! Woo hoo! We have MORE RAM! LET'S WASTE IT! So you can still only run one program at a time, because it still uses half your RAM for something stupid. I used to be able to host a Half Life server at school, and have 8-16 people on it with NO lag. Now, you can't host a Bad Company 2 server without having at least a core for every 4 players. Why? What have we done wrong? Then network conditions start to kill you because you don't have a Gig-E port, when Half Life ran on a 10M Token Ring network just fine. Now there should be NO reason for this, as both multi-player systems do extremely similar things. (I will give Bad Company 2 a LITTLE Lee-Way considering you can pilot vehicles, but not much.)

Sure, I can see things changing and requiring a little more to make it look better, especially graphics cards, but when you have a 40x increase in the RAM requirement, (That's about what it is, slightly more.) There's something more happening here.

Addendum: I did not in fact ask a question, It was rhetorical. (All of them are, to be honest.)

Thanks,
EBrown

[dlewis23]

EBrown, on 16 June 2011 - 12:15 PM, said:

So you use 35-40 MB of RAM for a GUI, when that's not even the argument here.

Pick any two games, one from the late 90's early 2000's, and one from today.

Example: Half Life Vs. Bad Company 2.

Now, both of these are 3D First Person Shooters, but, Half Life, was built back in 98, it required a whopping 96MB of RAM, for the Windows 98 system. Now? Windows 7 ITSELF requires more. Bad Company 2, released in 2010, requires 2GB of RAM. Now, I will admit, it should require more with the high detail textures, but the GUI's are not that different. Half Life required a 500Mhz Processor, Bad Company 2 requires at least a Dual-Core 2Ghz. Now, hold on. Both games are very similar in nature. (Albeit Bad Company 2 has vehicles whereas Half Life didn't.) But yet the requirements are so much different? I can see a slightly larger requirement on the CPU, but 8 times the required processing power? Why? Because computers haven't really gotten faster. The people that program them have decided they can waste processing cycles, etc. because we have MORE! Woo hoo! We have MORE RAM! LET'S WASTE IT! So you can still only run one program at a time, because it still uses half your RAM for something stupid. I used to be able to host a Half Life server at school, and have 8-16 people on it with NO lag. Now, you can't host a Bad Company 2 server without having at least a core for every 4 players. Why? What have we done wrong? Then network conditions start to kill you because you don't have a Gig-E port, when Half Life ran on a 10M Token Ring network just fine. Now there should be NO reason for this, as both multi-player systems do extremely similar things. (I will give Bad Company 2 a LITTLE Lee-Way considering you can pilot vehicles, but not much.)

Sure, I can see things changing and requiring a little more to make it look better, especially graphics cards, but when you have a 40x increase in the RAM requirement, (That's about what it is, slightly more.) There's something more happening here.

Addendum: I did not in fact ask a question, It was rhetorical. (All of them are, to be honest.)

Thanks,
EBrown

Finally got some time to do this...

Except that is the argument. Ram usage. And the GUI is a massive part of ram usage. It's not wasting any ram, Modern applications just use a ton of ram.

Comparing Half Life to Bad Company 2 is like comparing an Apple thats being eaten to a piston that just shot through a head. It's retarded to even attempt to compare the two.

You say the GUI is not that different but they are insanely different. The level of detail alone in BC2 is 40+ times better HL. Textures are going to be made at a higher resolution, have a higher DPI, are going to have a much larger file size. There is a ton more ram usage right there. Your also forgetting things like the AI is much better, the environments much larger and more detailed, character animations are much better, gun animations are better, lets not forget the game engine it self that has to deal with destructible environments, more characters on the screen at the same time and so much more. Lets also not forget the audio,  were half life might have handled 16 tracks at the same time, BC2 might have to handle 256 tracks of audio at the same time that takes a lot of CPU and ram.

Your argument is half assed, they are not wasting ram, their aren't guys sitting around a table in some game studio going "Well how can we waste some more ram today".  All games today are written to be highly efficient with CPU, Ram and GPU usage. Heres the reason why, they have to play in the console world too.

And don't even go there with that "you can't host a Bad Company 2 server without having at least a core for every 4 players." because thats just totally untrue. And this: "Then network conditions start to kill you because you don't have a Gig-E port, when Half Life ran on a 10M Token Ring network just fine" thats just totally stupid to say that specifically the part about the Gig-E port, your internet connection isn't 1000 Mbps, your internet connection isn't 100 Mbps, hell its probably not even 50 Mbps. Even at the server end when playing a BC2 with 24 players the connection will never even spike to 1000 Mbps for a 100th of a MS, it wouldn't even spike at a 100 Mbps.

They didn't use that much ram back then because they didn't have it. If the norm was 2 GB of ram back when Half Life came out, I bet you they would have used it.

If you make things look, sound, and function better they are going to use a hell of a lot more ram.

Edited by dlewis23, 22 June 2011 - 08:28 AM.

[EBrown]

In that comparison you could easily replace Half Life with Battlefield (the original) and every argument still stands. Those were made by the same company even.

Another comparison:
Xbox 360 vs. PS3 vs. Wii

All three are "Next Gen" consoles, but, they all have entirely different specifications. (Well, the Xbox 360 and PS3 don't differ by much. But the Wii does.) And all three have great graphics, and the Wii even does motion with their controller, WITHOUT any special add-on. That requires a hugely powerful system, does it not? No, it doesn't. The software engineers determine how powerful the system is.

http://www.winsupers...ical-comparison

If you were to read the article (not that I expect you too) you would find that the Xbox 360 and PS3 have similar CPU chips, both at 3.2Ghz. And they are still relatively slow. The Wii, has 729Mhz. MEGAHERTZ. Not GigaHertz. The Xbox 360 has 512MB RAM GDDR3 Unified, at 700Mhz, the PS3 has 256 MB XDRAM at 400Mhz, and 256 GDDR3 at 700Mhz. The Wii has 88MB T-SRAM, and 64MB GDDR3. The Xbox 360 has an ATI "Xenos" chip containing 10MB EDRAM Cache all at 500Mhz, the PS3 an NVIDIA "RSX" 550Mhz graphics chip. The Wii has an ATI "Hollywood" at 243 Mhz.

Now, in my experience, all three act similar, except the Wii has Motion Detection with the Wii-Remote. Processing all of that WOULD require a large amount of hardware on today's software, but Nintendo programs SMART. They don't add the bloatware. Now, the Wii doesn't have the online capabilities, or the HD standards, but I have found that it works as well, if not better than the other two consoles.

Back to the software comparison.

Battlefield 1942 Vs. Bad Company 2 (I hope you're Ok with this comparison, I don't know if it's up to your standards since you must be the ONLY authority on the subject, and it must be everyone's job to please you. Although my only purpose here is to prove that most of the slowdown for computers is executed in software these days, not hardware.)

Battlefield 1942 received a handful of awards for it's gameplay both single, and multiplayer. Bad Company 2 never got any awards.

Both games had extremely good textures. (Albeit Bad Company 2's are more realistic looking.) And they both had similar mechanics. (Sure Bad Company 2 had environmental distruction, which is probably why they recommend 4 cores.)

Yet, Battlefield 1942 only needed 500Mhz, with 128MB of RAM, and a 32MB 3D Graphics Card. Bad Company 2, still requires a Dual-Core 2Ghz with 2GB of RAM. (That hasn't changed since my last post, sorry.) Both were created by the same company.

And if you still need a Software comparison, I am picking Microsoft Office next time, the difference between 2003 and 2007. How 2007 runs half as fast on it's recommended hardware and software, as 2003 did on it's recommended hardware. (What? Half as fast? Yes. Half as fast. This just continues to prove my point. They even changed the GUI on it, which forced me to have to reteach my parents, and my grandfather how to resize their paper settings, margins, etc. GREAT job Microsoft.)

So, just because you think it's a good idea (That's a Rhetorical you.), doesn't mean it is. Microsoft thought it was a great idea to change the GUI, then they had to put the File button back in the 2010 version. So really, they accomplished nothing.

Thanks,
EBrown

[dlewis23]

EBrown, on 22 June 2011 - 02:38 PM, said:

In that comparison you could easily replace Half Life with Battlefield (the original) and every argument still stands. Those were made by the same company even.

Another comparison:
Xbox 360 vs. PS3 vs. Wii

All three are "Next Gen" consoles, but, they all have entirely different specifications. (Well, the Xbox 360 and PS3 don't differ by much. But the Wii does.) And all three have great graphics, and the Wii even does motion with their controller, WITHOUT any special add-on. That requires a hugely powerful system, does it not? No, it doesn't. The software engineers determine how powerful the system is.

http://www.winsupers...ical-comparison

If you were to read the article (not that I expect you too) you would find that the Xbox 360 and PS3 have similar CPU chips, both at 3.2Ghz. And they are still relatively slow. The Wii, has 729Mhz. MEGAHERTZ. Not GigaHertz. The Xbox 360 has 512MB RAM GDDR3 Unified, at 700Mhz, the PS3 has 256 MB XDRAM at 400Mhz, and 256 GDDR3 at 700Mhz. The Wii has 88MB T-SRAM, and 64MB GDDR3. The Xbox 360 has an ATI "Xenos" chip containing 10MB EDRAM Cache all at 500Mhz, the PS3 an NVIDIA "RSX" 550Mhz graphics chip. The Wii has an ATI "Hollywood" at 243 Mhz.

Now, in my experience, all three act similar, except the Wii has Motion Detection with the Wii-Remote. Processing all of that WOULD require a large amount of hardware on today's software, but Nintendo programs SMART. They don't add the bloatware. Now, the Wii doesn't have the online capabilities, or the HD standards, but I have found that it works as well, if not better than the other two consoles.

Again you do the same thing. You can not compare a game that was released in 2002 with a game released in 2010 when it comes to system requirements.

"HD" textures alone will make the difference in system usage, not to mention things like realtime effects.

You also can not compare the Wii to an Xbox 360 or PS3. (Partly because the wii isn't a "Next Gen" console but thats a different argument) You say they all act the same but they really don't (and the PS3 and Xbox 360 also both have motion). The biggest difference between the Wii and Xbox 360/PS3 is obviously HD graphics. The Wii only does 480p the Xbox 360 does 1080p 6 times the number of pixels being displayed at the same time.

It has nothing nothing to do with Nintendo programing "SMART". All game developers code smart, there is no "bloatware" running on a console when a game is being played. You can't sit there and say Nintendo programs smart, and no mention say DICE who is pulling every possible resource out of the Xbox 360 and PS3 to get the best for Battlefield 3. Which by the way would never run on a wii.

You keep comparing things that you can't really compare in any valid sense.  Lets keep it very simple here...

If I have say a 500 KB image that will be used and displayed in a wii game it's going to use 500 KB of ram while that image is displayed. I also have the same game for an Xbox 360 with the same image, but I can't use that 500 KB image because of the resolution so I have to make it again at 1080p. Since I have so much more resolution to work with I can put a ton more detail into the image so that image might be 5 MB or more in the end depending on how much detail I put into it. That has to be loaded into ram, IE. using more then the wii version which is why the Xbox and PS3 need more ram, which leads back to my original point. If you want things to look better (HD hello) and function better its going to use more system resources.

It comes back to the iPad app I'm building, I want it to look so fucking good that people mistake it for something real. To achieve that I have to put such a high level of detail in that it uses a ton of ram/CPU just for the GUI alone and there is no getting around that. No matter how good I code it, it will sill use a ton of resources because of how it looks. And modern games do the same thing with modern hardware. Guess what. The old games did the same thing. Half Life and Battlefield when they came out required high end systems too.

It will get even worse as resolutions get higher. Just wait till 4k displays replace 2k displays we have now.