3 Oct
2010
3 Oct
'10
8:06 a.m.
On 2 October 2010 00:48, Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
Hmmm. Good point. But if one were talking about a very small
motherboard with no expansion slots - smaller than mini-ITX - might it
not still be doable?
Liam Proven wrote:
No, true, but it might start the programs much quicker. If the
performance ends up being cheap, it will be offered anyway, even if
not "needed". Also, vast parallel performance and stupidly-cheap local
storage opens up possibilities of brute-force solutions to some of the
hard problems of face/gesture/speech/etc recognition.
On 30 September 2010 20:21, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Overall, I'd agree. For mass-market consumer kit, I think it might be
good. Cheaper, faster computers are a good thing. Also, for the random
punter, *simpler* computers are a good thing.
cheaper and faster is good if that's what the consumer really needs (rather
than what marketing and peers can convince them that they need). Otherwise,
it's just wasteful.
A quadrillion GHz CPU and a metric buttload of memory doesn't let me send
more email or allow me to write documents any faster :-)
But more generally, I think I am seeing an interesting trend which I
find positive: the gradual removal of mechanical, moving parts from
PCs (and Macs). Spinning HDDs are gradually being replaced by SSDs.
Hmm... I see this often as a negative trend in that I can fix the
mechanical bits (other than HDDs) and can't fix custom silicon. It may
be cheaper to replace, but when you have a deadline looming, the ability
ot get the machine workign again is very useful... I could play the
latest must-have game, I suppose, if I had any interest in [modern] games.
Nor do I, but I spent yesterday with some friends at a computer-games
exhibition here in London. My $DEITY but some of the modern immersive
3D games are *stunning* now. Really truly beautiful rapid high-refresh
real-time high-resolution wrap-around rendering, in actual 3D if you
wear special LCD shutter glasses (which are tiny, light and wireless.
Good job I wore contact lenses, though.)
The kit is about ?250-?300 and a ?1000 PC is more than capable of
generating the effects.
It was really truly impressive to behold. Suddenly one realises the
/point/ of an individual owning a quad-core PC with 4G of RAM and a
terabyte of disk, when it can do this.
The gap between the state-of-the-art and photorealistic rendering is a
sort of Zeno's paradox. You are forever getting closer but never
quite there. However, now, a ?40 game is at the level where at a
casual glance walking past, I sometimes can't tell in-game graphics
from movie footage. If you stop and look, you can, but
they're getting
there. /Avatar/-level rendering isn't far away.
Well, one idea
I am surprised I have not seen exploited in PCs, that I
have already seen in hifi, is large external passive heatsinks,
outside the case. I presume they're connected by heatpipes or
something. Gets the heat outside the box, in the open air, where the
user can easily clean the fins with a duster, and where it will be
carried away by open-air circulation.
For many* of the hifi's that I've seen, the heatsinks were usually just on
the main power transistors, and these could be mounted on the rear wall of
the case on the reverse side of the heatsink. As someone else mentioned,
there's quite a lot of stuff in a modern PC which needs cooling, and
reorganising it so that it could all sit on the back wall of the case could
be tricky. * I did have a wonderful old Pioneer with the hot zone
somewhere in the
middle of the chassis; there was a grille on the underside and another one
in the middle of the wooden case-top to allow the heat to escape. I bet a
lot of them failed when people managed to block the vents :-)
Oh dear...
--
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