The High End Hardware of Today

Here is picture of a server with 128 GB of RAM. Looking into the box, all you can see is RAM. I'm told that there are 8 dual core 2,8GHz Opterons tucked away somewhere under this mountain of RAM. Just to put things in perspective - 2GB of RAM has just become normal for home computers, due to Vista and incredibly cheap DDR2 (499 EEK for 1GB of 800MHz RAM). Gamers like me are of course planning to take advantage of the situation by upgrading to 4 gigs. The only applications I can think of right now that would be capable of actually using such an amount of memory are the ever-greedy Windows Vista and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, running on all available mods and with a heavily tweaked .cfg file. In the fall we'll probably see Crysis make use of RAM in amounts of over 2GB.

It would be nice to see if this amount of RAM still feels awe-inspiring in 2010.

A small collection of video cards

This is my miniscule collection of old video cards originating from the period 1996 - 2005. I have to start collecting information on them some time, so I thought it would be smart to do it on my blog. This article will be updated as time constraints allow.

The suspects, starting from the top of the left row, are:

1. S3 Virge/GX - this little PCI 2D monster was created by S3 Graphics at the height of 2D acceleration in 1996. It sports an average-for-its-time 2MB of video memory (64bit width, which is quite good, I suppose). It did have support for primitive 3D-acceleration, but this feature was so poor, that people actually called this card the 3D-decelerator. Neveretheless, it has a great 2D picture, supporting a very clear-looking 75 Hz refresh rate for resolutions up to 1280 x 1024. The only complaint is that it cannot display 32bit colour depth images at resolutions greater than 800x600. This means that Windows XP graphics looked a bit funny at 1024x768. I mean, it was perfectly usable and it did not even bother me so much, but the difference is definitely there. This card was manufactured for Compaq.

2. ATI Rage 3D LT - I was a bit surprised at what this unassuming 8MB AGP card can do. According to Wikipedia, it "...the Rage LT PRO can drive two displays with different images and/or refresh rates with the use of integrated dual, independent CRT controllers." That's quite hardcore for a video card from 1998. This card certainly sports some degree of 3D-acceleration, however I would not like to play Quake III or anything newer on it.

3. Hercules 3D Prophet 4000 XT - this card sounds like aristocracy, doesn't it? Well, it's not. In fact, it was more like a bastard redheaded step-son with only one, but superhumanly skillful arm. How so? Well, it was kind of disabled when it was launched in the very end of 2001 because it did not support Transform & Lighting and it went up against the original ATI Radeon and GeForce 2 MX series, which obviously did. On the other hand (no pun intended), despite being disabled in a way, it did have a very special ability - it could do Tile Based Deferred Rendering. In layman's terms it means that only those polygons that are immediately visible in a frame are rendered. Other GPU architectures still render ALL the polygons in a scene, whether they can be seen or not. The result? In titles that are not limited by heavy use of T&L, the Kyro I GPU held its own against GeForce 2 MX and Voodoo 4500, beating both at 32 bit color depth at resolutions greater than 1024x768. That's one heck of an accomplishment. As for other technical data, it carries 32MB SDRAM and works at 125/125MHz. Also, quite a notably for its time, it renders everything internally in 32 bit color depth, meaning it can do 32 bit color depth without a performance penalty. Here are some numbers:

12 million transistors
0.25 micron process
125 MHz core / memory clock
32 MB SDRAM
2 Pixel Pipelines
250 megapixel/s fillrate (750 megapixel/s equivalent fillrate)
128-bit data path to memory (2GB/s bandwidth)
32-bit z-buffer
Tile rendering architecture
Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (2x and 4x)
Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM)
8-Layer Multitexturing
Motion compensation support
Support for AGP 4X, SBA, DiME
DXTC Texture Compression
Full OpenGL ICD
270 MHz RAMDAC

4. ATI Radeon VE 32MB - this one of the weakest cards in this lineup, mostly because it was meant for office use only. The only redeeming feature of this card is support for Hydravision (dual RAMDACs provide very good dual monitor capability). It's Transform & Lighting support has been disabled and it's memory bus is only 64 bits wide, resulting in a sub-par performance, to put it mildly. The chip that this card is based on was launched in summer 2000. Here's what the numbers have to say:

30 million transistors
0.18 micron process
167 MHz core / 183 MHz memory clock
32 MB SDRAM
2 Pixel Pipelines (3 Texture Mapping Units per pipeline)
167 megapixel/s fillrate and 500 megatexels/s fillrate
64-bit data path to memory (2,9GB/s bandwidth)
Support for AGP 4X, PCI
Dual RAMDAC

5. Now we come to the top of the right row, occupied by a real gem - the GeForce 256 32MB DDR. Launched in the end of 1999, it is hard to underestimate the impact that this card had on the marketplace. Being the quickest 3D accelerator at the time of its launch (and for quite some time to follow), it introduced the famous Transform & Lighting feature. Up to this time, all the geometry in 3D games had been handled by the CPU. GeForce 256 was the first card to do this in hardware, thus freeing up valuable CPU resources. In fact, many considered it to be an excellent card to upgrade to from a low-end CPU, such as the Celeron 400. The performance benefits of such a move were incredible. Also, this is the first video card that made gaming at 1600x1200 resolutions viable.

Gadget attack

I recently acquired this sleek and stylish-looking piece of technology called Sony Playstation Portable. It's one of those hand-held thingies that are supposed to let you game on the go. When Sony launched this, they had big plans for raking in massive amounts of money. They had movie deals lined up for it, games, and even music. But unfortunately they could not harness the full potential of their creation.

As I soon discovered, the circuit board behind its brilliantly bright mini-widescreen is capable of much, much more than Sony credits it for. All thanks to a bunch of PSP enthusiasts, who don't think it too much to program for it on their spare time.

Basically, it can emulate almost every gaming system up to and including Sony Playstation. Yes, that includes consoles such as the good old Famicom or NES, Super Nintendo, Sega Saturn etc. Also, it can emulate a lot of stuff that was all the rage when I was about 4 years old - Colecovision and ZX80 for example. Basically, it's a retro-gamer's wet dream come true. My wet dream came true when I installed the latest hacked firmware and fired up Gran Turismo, a legendary driving/tuning game for Playstation One.

Emulation is fun, but what about when you're not gaming? Well, there's a host of options available - you can use it to read books, watch movies and anime, listen to music, and surf the net in WiFi areas. I have to say that it beats an iPod or any other glorified media player by lightyears, mostly due to its extremely well-lit and beautiful LCD screen. And the funniest bit - it costs about the same.

I must say I've been spoiled by it and can no longer imagine going on a longer-than-15-minute trip without it. The pure joy I feel on a bus or on a train when I'm watching my favourite TV-shows or a new movie is incredible. It's like I've broken free from boredom - forever. No more 2,5 hour bus rides that you just barely get through. And the best bit - it's battery lasts for 6-7 hours of film watching. That beats laptops by a mile. And the whole package fits snugly in your breast pocket or the palm of your hand without making you squint at the screen because the display is too small.

Of course I'm just scratching the surface of its possible uses. I frequent a forum that has about a hundred homebrew applications for the PSP, ranging from very useful to very nutty. In the end, I can't but admire this little piece of technology that left it's corporate creators behind to become one of the best homebrew platforms of its time.

The Hardcore Hardware of Yore

This is a RAM board for the VAX 8600 mini-computer from circa 1986, measuring 55 x 38cm. It packs a whopping 4MB of RAM. By the way, it would have been sufficient to play the original Doom, the single most demanding game when it came out in 1993, 7 years later!

If you think that this is nothing special, ponder on this for a moment - Dark Messiah demands 2GB of RAM to run flawlessly in 2006. How much RAM would a very new and demanding PC game need in 2013?

The correct answer? Oodles.

(If my extrapolations are not completely off the mark, "oodles" is about 32GB)

The most powerful component

So I'm a bit of a hardware geek, as mentioned before. My special interest lies with the latest and greatest video cards. Mainly because these have the most to do with how good the PC games look. Also, they are the most powerful parts of a computer.

Take a modern sports car for example. There's the electronic brain, that controls and oversees the functions of each component (that would be the equivalent of a CPU or processor in a computer) and then there's the engine, that roaring, raving power which makes the car go super-fucking-fast (that would be the equivalent of a videocard in a computer). That's the bit that gives you the most enjoyment, obviously.

A CPU is like a jack-of-all-trades by nature. It can do anything you ask it to do - it can generate graphics like the video card, generate sound like the sound card and run almost any sort of code or program. The trouble is, it does none of these things very well. That's the price you pay for being versatile. Any roleplayer knows what I'm talking about.

That's why special cards popped up in the first place. At first they were simple low-power crutches for the CPU to lean on when things got tough, but now they far surpass the CPU in their own line of work.

An example - in 2003 a test was conducted, to see how big of a difference there is between the video card and CPU when rendering 3D images. The results? CPU rendered one frame in about 2 minutes 30 seconds, while the video card rendered the same scene at about 15 frames per second. That's a 2250x difference.

Today, this difference is even greater. Unfortunately no-one has repeated this test, so we have only raw numbers to go by. There are two of those - the number of calculations per second and the amount of available memory bandwidth to move data and results to and from the CPU/GPU (graphics processing unit, the heart of the video card).

The most modern and powerful Intel Core 2 Quad 2,66 GHz CPU (that's actually four 2,66GHz CPU-s in one package) does calculations at a rate of 41 GigaFLOPS (that's 41 billion floating point operations per second. Floating point operation is the kind of calculation where there is no final outcome, like calculating the value of PI - it just keeps on going for millions and millions of decimal places). It has a memory bandwidth of 12,8 Gigabytes/s available to it.

Now let's take the most powerful video card in existance, which should appear somewhere around February 2007. It will be known as ATI Radeon X2900 XTX, probably. The GPU on this monster does 512 GigaFLOPS and the memory bandwith available to it is about 128 GB/s. Put two of them to work in a pair, and you have 1024 GigaFLOPS and 256 GB/s available power.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EDIT: As it turns out, this card never saw the light of day. AMD had serious issues with achieveing the clockspeeds they wanted within a reasonable power envelope (it's enough to just mention that the GPU overclocks wonderfully to 1,2GHz and beyond, but unfortunately even LIQUID NITROGEN does not seem to be sufficient to cool the beast!). In May 17, they launched the 2900 XT 512MB, which, while definitely an interesting piece of technology, utterly failed to take on the GF 8800 GTX, vieing for a win over the 8800 GTS most of the time. At least it's priced competitively - 5800 EEK could buy you one right now, while the 8800 GTX prices have skyrocketed to 9000 EEK and above.

However, 1 TERAFLOPS in a box is still quite doable with these 2 cards in Crossfire and two 4-core AMD "Barcelona" processors thrown in.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now that's the kind of power I'm talking about. I mean, it's ridiculously powerful. Speaking from the graphics viewpoint, it is the equivalent of having 25 Core 2 Quad 2,66GHz CPU-s doing your graphics processing (one of those CPU-s will set you back a hefty $1000, while the video card costs about $550 a piece).

And man, does it show. Look at the screenshot above (and follow this link for a demo video). This is what the last generation was capable of, fall 2005.

I can't wait to see what they can do with this one. It will probably blow my mind.

Cool Oldskool

This is Alley Cat, the computer game from 1984. This was top of the line graphics in 1984 on an Intel 8088 CPU.

So, the other day my co-worker gave me this link.
It shows a Youtube video clip of a 4,77MHz 8o88 CPU (from 1979) playing back a full-motion video @ 30fps with sound. o.O

Incredible stuff. I know it takes at least a Pentium 120Mhz to play back a .mp3, and at least a Pentium II 400MHz to play DivX video files.

Of course the oldskool hardware "Hercules" is a bit aided by the fact that at it puts out only 320x200 pixels using only 16 colors (4bit color depth). Hence the blockyness. However, I dare say it gives some multimedia cellphones of last year some stiff competition ;)

An amazing feat of programming in any case. If only we'd have had programmes like this when 8088 was in mainstream use...

Rev it up, sweet memories

Just watched an episode of Modern Marvels, which dealt with the muscle cars of 50's and 60's. When an average working man could go out and buy a brand new 350 - 450 horsepower Pontiac or Chevy or Dodge for a mere $3000, which did not dent his wallet too much.

Some 50 and 60-year old guys talked sentimentally about those times, recalling the best bang for buck cars the automotive industry has seen in a century. I guess it is the feeling that once you could have cutting edge power at your fingertips, cheap and cool, which brings bitter-sweet tears in the eyes of those guys.

I can't help but draw parallels with the modern computer.

Remember these days well, my friends, cherish the old Opteron 144 (1800MHz @ 3000MHz), the A64 3000+ (1800 MHz @ 2700 Mhz), the Athlon XP 2500+ Barton (1833MHz @ 2200 MHz), the P4 Northwood (2600MHz @ 3600 MHz) and the new Core 2 Duo E6300 (2x 1862MHz @ 2x 3200 MHz). These are the processors that cost very little buck for the bang they provide. A little overclocking and you can have a $150 CPU that wastes the $999 XTREME monstrosities.

Remember these good times, for it may not always be so.
There's talk of the new AMD/ATI Fusion CPU, the one that is supposed to become modular. That's it, then. 2 cores for low end, 4 cores for midrange and 8 cores for high-end. And no matter how hard you pump those 2 cores, THEY WILL NEVER TOP THE 8 CORES. Never.

The future looks bleak.

A random thought

Have you ever wondered if people with lousy swimming skills should have their own version of the verb "swim"? Well, here you go:

swim-swam-swollen

where "swollen" describes the last stage for bad swimmers' bodies going through the usual decomposition process...