Computer Hardware - Advancements vs. Falls

[Cyberkill]

I was asked to relay a post I made on another forum here and I figured why not forums are after all about communicating ideas.

In recent times we have seen amazing feets from hardware companies, dual/quad/sli/crossfire/2 x CPU (Skulltrail, Intel boards) all of these are recent advancements in the field of computing. It is interesting to sit back thought and look at what we REALLY have achieved and I will be the first to point out it's not much, as I am a buyer looking for parts.

Through researching the industry due cred must be paid to certain achievments, such as the lower nm on CPU's the ground breaking visual capacity, the ability to have 2 Quad core CPU's on a single Mobo and much much more... But let's be realistic what are we seeing with our tech, the answer is as Badzilla so boldly put it a milking station and yes, we are the cows, we the consumers are being milked for everything we have.

I expressed my view on this earlier, the only realistic reason for dual/quad core is the industries ability to use basic terms such as 2 is better then 1 and 4 is better than 2, so they can take advantage of the average joe who has no deeper understanding of CPU/GPU's. If you approach a person of the street that's over 25 and has the purchasing power for this stuff dual and quad to him sounds like a Ferrari so to speak. Little does he know that it's simple 4 OLD CPU's grouped as one which means no REAL enhancements have been made over the years.

Company A is on single Core | Company B is on dual Core

if you had no idea about computer what would you buy for your business and home? You have no patience to learn and thus 2 > 1 so you go with company B, little did you know that Company A had a single core with 8GHz as apposed to 2 x 1.6 GHz (pure example). Also for the computer fanatics, 8 > 4 > 2 >1 = more is better then less.

Badzilla is abolutly right, Instead of whacking on another 50 cores we should have a few years or should have had a few years of steady progress to enhance systems as a whole, faster bus, better architecture, nano tech and crazy speeds under less pressure pretty much an overhual of the current system. Once this is achieved a sub-group of the company should focus on dual, quad, octo capabilities. See most would say ummm... that's what there doing, but essentially there not. They are focusing on adding chips NOT enhancing them respectively.


Mind you this is a very slow process and is this way for a reason, If you take into consideration the diamond industry, they are simply not rare... Diamonds are one of the most common gems. The Diamond mines are stocking up on millions of diamonds every week and slowly releasing them so to maximize profits and not flood the market. It can be interpreted that the Computer industry is on the same path, we may technically be 5 years ahead but due to money hungry business a slow release literally milks us dry. After all why not? I would if I was the head of Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI, Asus and many others. You the consumer after all don't mean anything to me. We NEED the suppliers more than they need us because we want easier lives, and computerized houses, cars and what not. So we pay for it in progress and cash.


In essense our understanding of computers is so limited we are being blinded by numbers and sounds and the size of our heatsink. We have so much more technology available and we are capable of four fold but the paper stacks (money for those who don't listen to rap) are what make the world go round and this is the reason we aren't seeing any beautiful new power from our PC's.

Examples continued:

CPU - lower nm + literally 2 CPU's... We could be working on cores that could be architecturally perfect, cores that could attain 6GHz and AI capabilities. Instead where adding ANOTHER CPU instead of progressing.

GPU's - There is no current release that makes anyone wet there pants, another move to DUAL GPU boards has been made on ATI's part and Nvidia is essentially releasing a beefed up version of there 8 series boards, instead of re-inventing the wheel with the 9 series like the jump from 7-8

Mobo's - Doubling capacity with physical hardware, where's the specialization in speed or even a reworked Mobo capable of 12x faster speeds and power management.

Cases - Bigger is better? add a light increase its size and it's fatter then Fat Bastard from Austin Powers.

HDD's - finally a move worth waiting for, HDD's with NO moving parts are under way.


To finalize - this post is but a SMALL concept of todays computer industry with many missing facts and much more info needed to make a coherant post, although this is enough to generate discussion (hopefully). My question to you is - What is your stance on this? Good / Bad / Cheese?!

Sadly enough i'm more then willing to pay, because this luxury to me is worth more then $10 000 and so I respectively pay accordingly.

I hope this post is readable and profound enough to not cop flak so to speak but to make you think.

[CrAsHOvErRide]

You have basically no idea what you are talking about. You talk about getting everything smaller? Transistors are so small today that they have trouble getting even 1 single electron through it.

Show us something new.

[Haloking365]

You have basically no idea what you are talking about. You talk about getting everything smaller? Transistors are so small today that they have trouble getting even 1 single electron through it.

Show us something new.
Did you even read what he said?

He's saying, instead of saying "Hey, here's 2 crappy processors. Lets put them together and sell them with the title "Dual"!", they should be saying "Lets make better hardware, that would be even better than 2 old crappy processors".

So instead of adding same old to same old, put that money into advancing what technology we have now.

Its all about marketing. If someone offered someone on the street 2 options. One is a quad core processor, with a core clock of 1.8, they would pick that over a dual core with a 2.5 core clock. People who dont know squat about computers take everything at face value. And thats what everything is today.

[Limited]

Pats right, you dont have a clue about this in reality. Computer technology is the fastest growing, expanding and improving piece of technology in the history of the world. Over the past 10 years, computers have made a massive step in speed, I remember using my dads dell, 16mb hard disk and 32k of memory. At the time, that was reasonably high spec. Whereas now, you can get dual quad core CPU's, 16GB ram.

Technology isnt advancing enough for you? Look at USB. USB2 isnt THAT old really is it? Yet USB3 is coming out within a year, 100x faster than USB2, I think its like 4GB/s rate.

The problem is, cost, they can make an insanely fast ultra cpu, however the cost of that would be insane, they can not mass market that. People arent willing to pay $10k for a CPU. Thats why these big companies are trying tackling now, reducing the cost to manufacture these goods, they KNOW lowering that price and lowering the sell to buyer price will increase their profits.

The thing about slapping two processors together to make dual core, its not THAT simple. We're talking about science here, you cant bend the rules, you cant change how electricity works.

[Zeph]

You have next to no idea what you're talking about. Hardware hit a brick wall near the end of the Pentium 4 era. Developers pretty much maxed out what was physically possible. The only solutions were to spend years trying to come up with another architecture to squeeze some more performance out of a chip or to continue to make them smaller and work to network multiple chips together. The decision maker is money. You might scoff at that and say they're just trying to make a quick buck, but they are. It's less cynical though. If they dont make money, then they aren't able to fund their research.

Intel pretty much ended one era and began another with Yonah. There's a lot more ingenuity going on than you even consider giving credit. You claim a solid state hard drive is really going somewhere, but multi-core processors aren't? The only difference between solid state HDDs and the prior generation is essentially the speed. They both store data, but the solid state is simply much faster at doing so. No one reinvented the wheel here. Multi-core processors do the exact same thing as SSHDDs. It's nothing more than doing it faster.

I'd like to see you figure out a way to make a single core processor built on the same scale bench more than a multi-core.

[InnerGoat]

Examples continued:

CPU - lower nm + literally 2 CPU's... We could be working on cores that could be architecturally perfect, cores that could attain 6GHz and AI capabilities. Instead where adding ANOTHER CPU instead of progressing.
What? Each core alone is a noticible improvement over the last generation, but they still threw four of them on a chip anyways. There's nothing wrong with adding more and more cores. It's the software not being created to use multiple cores which is the problem.

GPU's - There is no current release that makes anyone wet there pants, another move to DUAL GPU boards has been made on ATI's part and Nvidia is essentially releasing a beefed up version of there 8 series boards, instead of re-inventing the wheel with the 9 series like the jump from 7-8
Because the 8800GTX/Ultra is still the fastest card out since 2006. Hopefully AMD gets it right at the end of this year. :D:D:D

Mobo's - Doubling capacity with physical hardware, where's the specialization in speed or even a reworked Mobo capable of 12x faster speeds and power management.
idgi. :confused:

Cases - Bigger is better? add a light increase its size and it's fatter then Fat Bastard from Austin Powers.
Wtf? Its a case who cares.

HDD's - finally a move worth waiting for, HDD's with NO moving parts are under way.
I have money in hand waiting for them to become cheaper :p
,

[Warsaw]

Actually, the HD3870 X2 is the fastest card out right now. :p

[InnerGoat]

If it's working right, yes. You can have new games come out and have to wait for driver updates to make crossfire work right. :p

[Mr Buckshot]

About your rant on HDDs:

Who cares about the moving parts, unless it's a laptop and you're afraid you might drop it. A standard 7200rpm hard drive costs under a half-dollar per gigabyte - that's why they still sell so well. Solid State drives, on the other hand, cost as much as $15 per gigabyte. They read faster than 7200rpm hard drives, but write slightly slower since they are flash-based, plus the actual lifespan is limited as a result, as flash memory doesn't write and rewrite 1/100 as long as hard drives. Trust me, my friend's PS1 memory card died last year because its write/rewrite lifespan ran out.

Sure there is a bit of latency in reading from a hard drive with moving parts. But for gamers, who cares. Once the level actually finishes loading, the hard drive does almost nothing to affect the game performance.

About your multi-core CPU rant:

Multiple cores are awesome.

[Cyberkill]

:D Ok, for the sake of it. You missed my point, I was focusing on CPU/GPU but fair enough I can see how that can be missed, I agree screens, USB what not are great and constantly getting better in leaps and bounds but CPU's and GPU's are not. I fail to see how anything currently out is worth it's $ value. I'm yet to see a CPU that has really made leaps and bounds with a single core... the problem IS the fact we keep stacking components in order to sell more if you think people are honestly trying to make things for the betterment of us then you are ignorent and have never had any experience in business. It's about the money... If we can cut costs, stack on an extra chip and tell people it will solve there problems they will buy. I'm stressing more effort has to be put on genuine advancements which need money, for instance let's take the governments money, how about whatever help the governments give to the design of hardware (and i mean all aspects) doubles or triples? You don't think we would see a significant increase in performance and power?


This isn't about what we can do in terms of the physics involved or the manpower and intellegence being put behind it, it's about the money... increase funding and watch them build a single core that could effectively cripple any Quad Core of today. You all have good points. I agree with most of it and I knew people would attack my lack of credit that's why i tried to give some, you must understand for me to make my point valid I would literally have to spend 2 months research and write 30 pages on it... Although I don't have that time and this is a simple observation and opinion, thanks for contributing! :)

[legionaire45]

OH FUCK WALL OF TEXT!

I highly recommend you read this article (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2748) and then reformulate your argument. If you have been paying attention you will have also noticed that Intel just released a revision of the Core 2 architecture that not only shrinks the process from 65 to 45 nm (which is a big deal because it cuts the power consumption and allows Intel to make more CPUs per sheet of silicon which means the consumer pays less) but also makes each clock cycle much faster, making the new Penryn based chips clock-for-clock faster then the "old" core 2 architecture. EDIT: Intel is also prepping another revision of the architecture soon that will have an integrated memory controller, making the core even faster. At the same time 6 and 8 core chips will be released that will blow the old architectures out of the water in terms of raw performance.

If you need someone to bitch to then bitch to the developers who haven't begun to utilize multi core processors yet. Considering you can buy a dual core Core 2 Duo E6600 for roughly $230 retail and a quad core Core 2 Quad for roughly $250 OEM or $266 retail (prices in USD from newegg) and that now almost every regular consumer computer sold that isn't an Eee PC or a $200 E-Machine from 2 years ago has a dual core CPU in it there is a lot of power being left untouched by some developers.

If anything the only one holding the CPU industry back at the moment is AMD (or rather Hector Ruiz, the ruiner of companies), which can't seem to design a CPU unless they buy the design from someone else or have another company help them design it. Phenom fails phenomenally and until AMD can get back in the game Intel can just cruise by (as they have been, which is annoying but understandable considering Intel probably has a huge stock of old processors that they need to sell. Things sitting in a warehouse cost money just by sitting there not being sold and taking up space that could be used for newer procs).

As per memory....well, memory is memory. Considering just today a company announced that they had practically quadrupled the amount of memory they can shove into a PCB (http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/25/metaram-aims-to-bumps-ram-capacity-by-4x-overnight/), I would actually make the opposite arguement, that now memory has advanced lightyears beyond what it was before. Now you can fit 8 Gigs onto a single PCB, which is incredibly impressive because now Joe Consumer can have 4 8 gig modules for a total of 32 gigs of ram. That way you can finally run Vista without running out of ram ;D.

Motherboards aren't a very exciting subject because they generally only have serious revisions when a new CPU architecture/revision comes out that either changes the way power is supplied to the CPU or something to that effect. Really the only things that spice up the market are the off-the-wall crazy motherboards that have 15 miles of copper heat piping and a few square acres of copper heatsinks. That and things like the Spider Platform, although very few people can actually afford something like that (a point I will bring up later)

Hard drives have advanced slowly, but then again they have always been this way. Besides adding more space to our older mechanical HDDs the only thing they could really do is increase the platter speed, which isn't very economical considering a Raptor X 150 Gb HDD has a hideous $/GB ratio when compared to something like a Seagate 7200.11 1 TB drive, which isn't all that much slower in practice due to the perpendicular recording. Until 512 GB and bigger SSD's are actually affordable I won't even consider them viable for the average consumer, let alone a semi-casual/moderate gamer like myself.

Video cards have become boring as of late because until recently AMD didn't have anything to compete with Intel (once again, DAMN YOU HECTOR RUIZ D=). While I would personally consider the HD3870 X2 a half assed attempt to beat Nvidia's 8800 Ultra, it certainly is an effective half-assed method and that I can't argue with, especially considering it is cheaper. Nvidia needs to stop it with the year and a half development cycles between architectures/revisions or they will end up just like 3DFX. However, if they can get Geforce 10 (or whatever it will be called) out the door by the end of the year they should be fine. In the long run, Nvidia should seriously begin developing something to combat Intel's future raytracing hardware because if Nvidia can't compete in graphical prettiness with that they will be fucked. Raytracing is beautiful but until recently has been completely impractical, however now that we have quad core CPUs slowly becoming what dual cores were a few years ago I think raytracing will become the next big thing. <3 Quake 3 & 4 RT.

Cases - who gives a fuck. You have a pretty looking ATX case. That is fine.

As a final counter arguement, considering most PC sales are in the low end $400 to $1000 range and that most people do not build their own PCs, things have actually advanced quite a bit. Ram has become cheap as chips now, and unless you are buying a Mac (hell, even they have decent memory prices now xD) ram is not such a big deal anymore. Most CPUs in these new lower end computers are dual core now and considering the average person buys a computer to read emails, surf the net, watch some youtube videos here and there and play the occasional flash game even current single cores are probably overkill. Almost every video chipset sold happens to be an Intel Integrated chipset, which is completely shitty but for the average twit watching a DVD/HD movie on his computer it is fine. Most of the people at my high school (High Tech High LA) can't tell the difference between RAM and Hard Drive Space, and as my friend put it best (I'm paraphrasing a bit here), "As long as I can store all my iTunes stuff I don't care what makes it work. Just make it work =P!". Most people hardly fill up 500 Gig HDDs (roughly $130 - $150 on Newegg) anyway, which is slowly starting to become the norm.

So once again, for less then $1,000, which is 1/3 of the price of most computers 15 years ago, you get a machine that has a CPU that is overkill for what most people do, more RAM then most people can possibly utilize, more hard drive space then most people can possibly fill up and a decent video chipset that lets people watch high def movies and play the occasional game. Not bad at all considering what we had only a few years ago.

However, I still maintain that Windows Vista is the Great Satan of the computer world =P.

EDIT:


This isn't about what we can do in terms of the physics involved or the manpower and intellegence being put behind it, it's about the money... increase funding and watch them build a single core that could effectively cripple any Quad Core of today. You all have good points. I agree with most of it and I knew people would attack my lack of credit that's why i tried to give some, you must understand for me to make my point valid I would literally have to spend 2 months research and write 30 pages on it... Although I don't have that time and this is a simple observation and opinion, thanks for contributing! :)

And what happens if you want to do an antivirus scan while playing Crysis, for example? Suppose you have a "Core 2 Solo" (no idea if they actually have those =P) at 5 GHZ. If you are using a multithreaded operating system (ex. Windows 2000, XP, Vista or their server variants, Mac OS X, or pretty much any modern distribution of Linux) then no matter what a 3.0 GHz dual or 2.4 GHz quad core CPU will still beat that 5Ghz Single Core CPU because it will be able to dedicate a core to the antivirus scan and any other background task while the 3 cores work their magic for Crysis. Yes, in this case 4 cores are in fact greater then 1 that is faster. Taking this example further, now you can have one core dedicated to Physics, one for sound, networking and other tasks and then another core for whatever else needs to be done, which means that instead of everything fighting for CPU cycles you have a core dedicated to all the processor-heavy stuff.

If we were talking about a non-threaded game then sure, the 5 GHz CPU will win. However, most modern games (I consider Oblivion to be the first "modern" game) have at least limited multithreading. Multicore CPUs have gotten fast enough now that older single threaded games are not limited by the CPU or anything for that matter with the settings absolutely maxed -- as an example I can play FEAR (which is not multithreaded to my knowledge) absolutely maxed on my current setup (if you aren't aware, click the little computer icon in between the little green circle and the scales to see it) at both stock (1.8 GHz) and at ~3.0Ghz. If I LN2'ed my current CPU and got it up to 5.0 GHz it probably wouldn't make much of a difference in performance.

Now, other apps that really benefit from multi-core systems are things like 3DS Max and other multithreaded professional modeling/high end software packages. Render times can be cut dramatically by having multiple cores, something that would require massive overclocking of a single core CPU to achieve.

EDIT2:
Just to expand a bit on my HDD counterargument, an HDD will last several years of being powered on non stop, so unless you don't turn your comp off at night a hard drive will last a very long time. SDDs will also last a very long time because of the way that writes are managed, at least on most of them. By the time your drive has failed, whether it is HDD or SSD it will be obsolete anyway, so I don't think that MTBF really matters here unless you intend on storing your data on a single HDD for the next 20 years (in which case you should be slapped because drives can fail seemingly randomly anyway and if you have all your stuff on one HDD you are bound to be fucked anyway :D).

[Bodzilla]

i'm more annoyed about Multi-boards, then Multi-cores.

such as how to get the same performance percentage increase for 9 series cards (nvidia) as we did going from 7 to 8, we need to dwelve into things like SLI and Crossover.
which means double to tripple the price for the same performance then we got earlier.

Thats where i have a problem.

[Limited]

I fail to see how anything currently out is worth it's $ value.

This is your problem, your working out whether its worth it. Theres technology out there, your complaining there isnt any new advancements, because YOU dont see it worth its value. I agree I dont want ot pay say $10k for a CPU. But dont think that means the technology isnt out there, it is.

I feel my post prettyt much summed up the cost side of things.

Multi cores win because of multitasking, cpu's cant multitask, how do you make things faster? TRUE multitasking. Just like the guy said about Crysis.

[Mr Buckshot]

Also, Cyberkill probably didn't realize that all these useless overpriced overrated computer hardware are the reason why game developers were able to create all these groundbreaking game engines, PC or console, in the first place. They're also the reason why Pixar 3D animation is so damn good-looking.

[Cyberkill]

legionaire45 I'll be honest I didn't read your post, I simply skimmed, but you are correct. Just for my sake I did mention the nm drop in CPU's. (bows and steps away from thread)...


OMG just read your post, Rep +2u916234896 :P very well articulated.

Just some notes to finish of on, I don't believe dual and quad are a waste of time I think they are amazing to say the least, my only point on them would be I don't think there where they should be, you know? As for the rest I will add I don't care for money, I have heaps to blow so the price doesn't worry me. What worries me is that instead of stopping at 4 cores and improving them beyond belief where adding ANOTHER 4 cores.

Thanks for the interesting info in the thread guys really well put :D


Also, Cyberkill probably didn't realize that all these useless overpriced overrated computer hardware are the reason why game developers were able to create all these groundbreaking game engines, PC or console, in the first place. They're also the reason why Pixar 3D animation is so damn good-looking.
__________________


Hey you completely missed the bullet there. Yes amazing, yes we use them, no there NOT the reason we have this amazing stuff, if we had better hardware which is my point im pushing for a revision and increase in performance from the beginning, then we would have BETTER movies and what not. You all keep telling me we're great we've accomplished so much, I don't care I don't think it's good enough, i'm saying make it better... stop with this oh it's the fastest growing blah blah blah make it faster, it's my attitude that makes things better in this world , I pay respect where needed and i'm payign it but please... we can and WILL do better we just need to pick up the pace, since CPU/GPU are my main points of argument Look at them closely over the past few years... Nvidia slow as dog shit as far as new gen is concerned, ATI i'm still waiting... Intel wow a new Quad Core, it's not that fast... Stop praising it and start asking for more squeeze as much out of the lemon as possible... think about it. I'm not attacking you, just asking you to want more, build drive, drive for more. Don't tell me to try and make single cores better i'm not specialist, leave that to the experts but stop trying to bleed the consumer dry spend a year or two seriosuly trying to make some ground breaking work. :P think about it.

[legionaire45]

I do agree that if Intel didn't have as much of a monopoly as they have had for the past few years then things would be much faster. Basically since 2006 Intel has been cruising since AMD can't get anything out the door fast enough. At the moment the same thing is going on with Nvidia. However, I believe it's just a slow period in the tech industry. They happen occasionally, nothing all that exciting has really happened in a while =P.