PC General Discussion Thread

[Power666]

Originally Posted by E6600

An architectural dead end! Can't they merge Power6 with Cell to simplify migration to a more flexible architecture?
It seems odd when an architecture like x86, once thought of as dead in the late 80s, was adapted to new technologies while the Cell can't be. What does this say of Sony, Toshiba and IBM's investment on the Cell.
Running Windows on Cell doesn't seem like an issue to me, they can offer a Virtual Machine that fix this, or can't they?

A virtual machine only allows what could already be run on the system. Windows has not gotten a port to Cell and never will so a virtual machine will not help here. (There was a port of Windows NT 4 for PowerPC so a virtual machine could run that in theory but its far too ancient to be a viable solution. It'd only use the PPE of Cell anyway.)

Originally Posted by E6600

It's even more odd that IBM had to modify the Cell for Roadrunner!
Was the Cell a mistake? A step in the wrong direction or ahead of its time?

Not really. RoadRuner is doing real scientific work, something which the PS3's version of Cell isn't that great. It certainly can do it but the performance isn't as impressive.

Cell I think was a year late for the market to accept it. Its level of performance has been eclipsed by the 8 core systems already and PC hardware is going to rapidly move such performance to the base line. The real failure of Cell isn't performance but rather the need to port software and the heavy optimizations required for best performance. That is a lot of time and money for companies to invest. By the time such changes are made and everything is running fine on Cell, the PC market offers similar performance without the need to re-engineer the software. If Cell would have arrived a year earlier, it'd have that time edge which would help justify the investment. There is also no clear roadmap for Cell beyond the special version being used for RoadRunner and higher clock speeds (a 4.8 Ghz model is expected).

Originally Posted by E6600

Trying to change topic again, so Microsoft says there's a new Windows coming in 2009, one more reason for me to not to switch to Vista, I'm currently running xp and Ubuntu, but next time for sure I'll get me a Mac. I wonder if Apple is thinking of a replacement to OS X, they went through 5 versions now, how long do they plan on keeping OS X around?

OS X 10.5 is rather nice and I'm using it right now. I've been using OS X since version 10.0 and I can say that it has been a slow but steady evolution. Thankfully, performance has increased with every major release but you also have to consider that OS X 10.0 was a step backwards from OS 9 in performance. OS X 10.2 was the first with usable speed and it just got faster with every version if you had the hardware to support all the acceleration. OS X 10.5 actually enables full hardware acceleration for GUI operations so the CPU isn't sitting around processing the look of a window. OS X 10.4 had this very same feature but was disabled so the developers could test it. Similarly there are a few hidden features in OS X 10.5 that are only designed for developers like ZFS. There will be an OS X 10.6 and more than likely OS X 10.7. Apple has a pretty good direction and time line for their operating system.

Windows Vista was one big huge jump and not everyone is pleased about it. Some software is broken, performance has declined. There are genuine improvements in Vista but they're just hidden beneath piles of bloat.

[E6600]

Originally Posted by Power666

A virtual machine only allows what could already be run on the system. Windows has not gotten a port to Cell and never will so a virtual machine will not help here. (There was a port of Windows NT 4 for PowerPC so a virtual machine could run that in theory but its far too ancient to be a viable solution. It'd only use the PPE of Cell anyway.)

Maybe not a virtual machine, but I'm sure hardware can be emulated in software. Kinda like how you can play SNES games on Windows. I think Itanium had some sort of emulation to allow compiling and running x86 programs on it, I could be wrong though.

Originally Posted by Power666

Windows Vista was one big huge jump and not everyone is pleased about it. Some software is broken, performance has declined. There are genuine improvements in Vista but they're just hidden beneath piles of bloat.

Really? I'll I noticed was bloat. Not that I'm willing to give Vista a second chance, to me Vista failed.

I really do not understand vista bashers. The bloat is in the services, which can be disabled and stream lined. The ram hogging is not at all an issue. The caching everyone bitches about is an efficient use of ram, when you need more ram it clears the cache quit effectively. Photoshop has never launched faster, and with the current drivers there are even games getting better frame rates under vista. Save for the lose of EAX games, even creative as some nice drivers going now. The only thing I've lost in switching from xp to vista is.... well, frankly nothing, its all worked out for the best with every program I've used. Was rough in the beginning as nvidia and creative had to get their act together but performance is better than ever.

[Power666]

Why all the Vista bashing? Well its is finally getting up to speed after nearly a full year on the market. The drivers are starting to mature but they're still not quite on the level of what XP drivers were. Some games perform the same and a handful faster on Vista but many more still have the edge with XP. (Pay close attention to the settings between Vista and XP, the operating systems performance has a wider delta at lower resolutions as the CPU becomes a bottleneck.) DirectX 10 was designed to increase efficiency for faster games but most DirectX 10 games run slower than DirectX 9 with the same settings. RAM usage under Vista has gone up for games and applications. Application launch times are indeed faster but actually using the applications has taken a hit to their speed under Vista. I thought I'd take about a year for drivers to mature and SP1 for Vista to be really worth considering and it is looking like I was spot on. I think ultimately, Vista should have stayed in development a bit longer and received the polish and bug fixes that SP1 brings before actually being released for public consumption.

I really can't hold MS accountable for the sad state of Vista drivers upon release. MS did the wise thing by allowing a public beta. nVidia and AMD had plenty of time to field test drivers with the Vista beta testers before Vista hit retail shelves. Until Vista actually shipped, the drivers for the beta were like a secondary project that was neglected.

[Spindel]

I see Vistas RAM usage as a big deal because I don't want my OS to hog a lot of my RAM. I want my OS to be as invisible as possible and leave the RAM free for the applications I chose to run.

Also an MS solution that is still present in Vista that drives me insane is the page file. The page file made sense 13 years ago but not today.

I like my non MS system currently which boots up with a memory usage of 140MB (I could have less if I decided to tweak) then I chose what I want to use the rest of my RAM for.

An OS should be as invisible as possible, I only use it as a platform to run the applications I want to use.

[Power666]

Originally Posted by Spindel

I see Vistas RAM usage as a big deal because I don't want my OS to hog a lot of my RAM. I want my OS to be as invisible as possible and leave the RAM free for the applications I chose to run.

In defense of Vista, part of its RAM usage is used for caching. This caching speeds up application loads and recent files. It is uses RAM that is currently being used by other applications and that RAM can be reallocated for applications that do need more RAM as necessary. This is actually a good thing.

There is also the virtualization of the graphic memory. Every applicaiton that deals directly with graphics hardware uses up more RAM than before due to this. The advantage to this is that it allows 3D applications to utilize multiple monitors in 3D mode and several different applications can use the graphics card simultaneously for 3D without issue. Again, this is a good thing but its implementation really, really, really sucks. MS has a patch that significantly reduces the RAM bloat here but it won't reach consumers until SP1. (I've covered this a bit before too.)

Originally Posted by Spindel

Also an MS solution that is still present in Vista that drives me insane is the page file. The page file made sense 13 years ago but not today.

The page file still serves a purpose. Even though we're in the era that main memory is measured in gigabytes, OS and application memory foot prints have increased in size over those from 13 years ago. How much of that bloat is necessary is well open for debate but paging does have its place.

[Spindel]

Ok fair deal some of the big ram usage is for caching but not all.


As for the page file I know it serves a purpose and any system should have some HDD space set aside for paging. But the MS way makes me want to tear out my own eyes. You probably allready know that a Windows machine is paging from start. You boot up and BAM you are using 300 mb of the page file, WHY MS WHY!?!?

This made sense 13 years ago when we all had much less RAM but it does not make sense now. Use my RAM first damn it and then go on and start paging, surley there are occasions and applications where small amounts of data needs to be paged even if there is plenty of RAM available but this are usually amounts below 50 mb not several hundreds MB like Windows insists on paging all the time.

Just do this experiment of your own if you own i.e. both a Windows (Vista or XP) machine and a Linux machine and both have roughly the same amount of RAM (ideal to show this example is to have a machine with a bit less RAM around 512). Now open a couple of programs that are roughly the same (i.e. Firefox, some of the OpenOffice apps (I use OO as an example to make the test as even as possible)). Do this until you use around 400 mb of RAM on both systems (if the systems only have 512 mb RAM). When you reach 400 mb start to browse between the open windows on your systems and you will notice that the Windows based system will be slow and sluggish because it now constantly has to swap data from the page file while the linux system (that also has a page file) won't have any disc activity at all because it hasn't started to page yet.

[chedabob]

I dislike Vista because of all the niggly little bugs, like not being able to paste files into My Music, and installing Adobe Reader caused my network drivers to break in anything but IE7. Pretty much all the bugs would disappear after a reboot (except the network issue), but then another one would replace it.

Aside from caching, the second largest ram user is the desktop manager which is related to all those fancy 3d effects, if that really bugs you then just disable them all. Mainly for the increased framerates I'm thinking of Crysis, which runs about 6 fps faster in directx10 (and even faster in 64 bit).

[Spindel]

Originally Posted by LAN deRf HA

Aside from caching, the second largest ram user is the desktop manager which is related to all those fancy 3d effects, if that really bugs you then just disable them all.

It shouldn't have to hog RAM try Compiz-Fusion takes basically no extra RAM and gives you 3D effects.