John Carmack poo-poos PPUs

John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, co-creator of industry defining video game titles such as Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3d, DOOM (and its sequels), and Quake (and its sequels), and whose graphics engines have been used in games such as Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Half-Life, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and many others, spoke on his belief in the unimportance of Physics Processing Units (PPUs) which are dedicated physics processors for the PC. At the moment Ageia's PhysX card is the only PPU on the market. Current hardware can't handle the computational load that complex physics calculations place on the CPU. PPUs are there only to handle physics calculations, similar to how a graphics card takes the load off the CPU for graphics rendering. Carmack believes that future multi-core CPUs should easily be able to handle these types of physics calculations. ATI/AMD and nVidia also have plans in the works to use additional graphics cards as physics processors in the future, though it would require 2 or more graphics cards in a system.

I would tend to agree with Carmack on this one for three reasons. First, because he is a freaking genius, and he knows what he's talking about. If Carmack says PPUs are unnecessary, he's probably designed a system with his newest graphics engine, or a future prototype, to circumvent the problem. Second, at the rate that CPU and GPU technology is increasing, I don't think realistic physics will be a problem before long, with Intel coming out with 8 core CPUs here in the next couple years. Third, the market for these kinds of add-in cards is very small. The hard-core gamer who needs everything looking spectacular on a 30" monitor is about 1% of the total computer user market, and maybe 5% of the gaming market. These are the people that shell out $1,000 for dual graphics cards, $700 on a CPU, 4GB of RAM, etc... That doesn't leave a lot of opportunities for sales for companies like Ageia. The casual gamer with a mid-range graphics card, a gig or two of RAM, and a $100 CPU, who plays their favorite games 2 or 3 days a week, isn't going to shell out $300 more on a card that just makes physics better. This is the large majority of gamers. These types of people care more about the fun factor of the game, not so much the eye candy.

I know I won't be buying one of these PPUs anytime soon. I don't game nearly as much as I used to anymore, and I'd rather wait until nVidia and ATI/AMD get their physics processing technologies out. I'd rather have 2 graphics cards with 1 set of drivers, than a graphics card and a physics card, each with their own drivers. Fewer different devices and fewer drivers leads to less complications and headaches, which is just fine with me. :)

source: Engadget

Gaming Mouse Benchmarks

I'm not much in the mood for writing today, and probably won't write anything for the next couple days, so here something to tide you guys over for a while.

ESReality.com has figured out an awesome way to test mice for gaming. It's an ingenious system, and a lot better than the subjective method of "Oh, I think this one feels pretty good to me" method that most reviewers use. Enjoy!

Mouse Benchmarks

edit: I changed my mind about not writing today, obviously. Here's my take on this review.

I like how this review was done. It gives you actual solid, quantifiable results. Most mouse reviews go like this. "After 2 weeks on my desk, Xbrand Xmouse was still very comfortable and didn't make my wrist sore, even after long hours of gaming. I experienced no skipping or anything while playing Xfastpacedgame." That's all well and good, but there are so many variables that change from user to user, this is hardly a good way to judge which mouse YOU should get.

It would seem from this guy's tests that the good ol' optical mouse is still vastly superior to the newer laser mouse for gaming. This is most likely due to the immaturity of the technology behind the laser mouse.

Under his "Perfect Control" rankings, measuring the speeds at which you have complete control over your movement, 3 of the top 5 mice were from Logitech. Not much of a surprise there to me. Nearly everything sitting on my desk says Logitech on it, only my monitor and speakers don't. The Logitech MX500 tops the charts here, with the MX300 in 2nd. This is only after overclocking the USB polling rate to 1000MHz from it's 125MHz stock setting. The highest ranking laser mouse was the Logitech G1, at 7th place.

The "Malfunction Speed" tests measure the speed at which the mouse begins to control erratically, and makes it's own random movements. 4 of the top 5 mice here are from Logitech again. The Logitech MX518 and the Diamondback from Razer had no malfunctioning limit. He was unable to make them not work correctly at any speed he could test. The highest speed he was able to test was 4.5 m/s, which is way faster than anyone's gonna be moving their arm or hand playing a video game. Again, the Logitech G1 bested all other laser mice at 8th place.

Oddly enough, only 2 of the top 5 mice are from Logitech in DPI ratings. Seems to me that all these new mice touting 2500dpi, 3200dpi, and so on are just spouting marketing fluff with high numbers like Intel did with their Pentium 4 line after AMD introduced the Athlon 64 and began a thorough 4 year arse-whooping. I am currently using an MX518, which has an adjustable resolution up to 1600DPI, but I rarely use it that high. I hardly ever even take it over 1000DPI. Most of my time is spent in the 400-800DPI range.

In the overall rankings, the MX500, MX518, and MX300 from Logitech, and the Razer Diamondback and Krait take the top 5 spots, in that order. All 5 are optical.

The MX500 is also their top scorer for "Bang for the Buck".

I have owned the MX500 and I use the MX518 now, and I can tell you from personal experience they are fantastic mice. Very comfortable, very rugged, and perfectly reliable. I've not had any experience with Razer mice, but I hear great things about them. I've owned nothing but Logitech keyboards and mice for years, and this is precisely why. They make fantastic products. The Logitech joystick I'm using now has only ever been bested in my experience by my very old Microsoft Sidewinder 3d, which stopped working for me just a couple years ago after nearly 7 years of duty.

Wow IBM... Wow!!

IBM announced a new revision of its Blue Gene supercomputers last week, the Blue Gene/P. The current revision, the Blue Gene/L, owned by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is currently the world's most powerful supercomputer, with 131,072 700MHz IBM PowerPC 440 processors for a total processing power of 280 teraFLOPs, or 280 trillion floating point operations per second. The average consumer desktop PC can do about 3 gigaFLOPs, or 3 billion operations per second. So the older Blue Gene/L is about 140,000 times more powerful than that box sitting under your desk. Blue Gene/P on the other hand, is fully capable of pushing 1 petaFLOP! 1 QUADRILLION operations per second.

That's a 1 with 15 zeros. Three times more powerful than the current most powerful supercomputer on the planet. And IBM has already released plans for an alternate configuration capable of 3 petaFLOPs! The petaFLOP version of the Blue Gene/P has 294,912 850mhz IBM PowerPC 450 processors. The 3 petaFLOP version has 884,736 of the same 850 mhz processors. The Blue Gene/P is also at least seven times more energy efficient than any other current supercomputer, according to IBM. The first Blue Gene/P system will be used by the US Dept of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, right here in the great state of Illinois.

source: Dailytech

Who knew a table could be so awesome??

This has to be one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. It's Microsoft Surface. OK, so the name isn't all that cool, but that's exactly what it is. A surface. It can take the place of any surface. A table, a desk, a counter-top in a store. It responds to touch, can sense items laid on it, and best of all, it can sense multiple touches and items at once, unlike a traditional touchscreen, which can only sense one. Beyond that, it's kinda hard to explain. You really just have to visit the Microsoft Surface website to check it out.

Phenom, Fusion and Stars! Oh my!!

The folks from AMD have recently released new names for upcoming projects they're working on: the AMD Phenom processor, the new Stars CPU naming, and the Fusion platform.

First off, we have the new Phenom CPU. This is simply AMD's replacement for the Athlon name on their high end desktop CPUs. Instead of the Athlon X2, X4, and Athlon FX, we'll now have the Phenom X2 and X4, and Phenom FX. The Athlon and Sempron names will stay where they are on the mid-range and low end respectively. The Phenom name should start coming on packages when the Agena (aka Barcelona) core CPUs start shipping later this year. It's gonna take this geek a little time to get used to saying he has an AMD Phenom CPU now... AMD also announced a new naming standard for all their processors. No longer will you have to tell everyone you have an AMD Athlon (or Phenom) X2 4400+ 1MB L2 Toledo core. According to Dailytech, it will be more like "Athlon 64 X2 4000+ 45W 1MB L2 Brisbane" to "AMD BE-2400." For more info on the full lineup of Phenom CPUs, check out this article from Anandtech.

Stars, on the other hand, is a much wider name change. The last several generations of AMD CPU cores have all had city names. Barcelona, Winchester, Windsor, Brisbane, Venice, etc... Now AMD is switching to star names for its CPU cores. Agena, Kuma, Rana, and Spica are among the first. Pretty cool, eh? But that's not all. With the new names comes new technology too. The Stars CPUs will incorporate the new HyperTransport 3.0 technology, replacing HyperTransport 1.0. HT 3.0 will still be backwards compatible with HT 1.0. HT 3.0 should provide about double the memory bandwidth of HT 1.0, and will also allow the integrated memory controller and CPU to run at different frequencies. This should provide a great deal better performance with new PCI-Express 2.0 and multi-CPU systems in the near future. Stars processors will also introduce a 128-bit floating point unit for each core of the CPU, and support for DDR2-1066 RAM. Also supported are SSE4A instruction sets. Another big new feature is the addition of a shared L3 cache on Agena and Kuma core CPUs. All Stars CPUs will be compatible with both socket AM2+ and AM2.

While Phenom and Stars are changes that will be made in the next year or so, Fusion is a way off, but no less exciting. Fusion, at it's core, is the combination of CPU and GPU onto a single processing chip, for massive processing power. GPUs currently have tremendous parellel processing power, which, along with the ability to generate realistic 3d images, gives them incredible floating point processing capabilities, which goes largely unexploited. CPUs on the other hand, handle data sequentially. GPUs are good at handling certain types of data that CPUs are rather slow at, and vice versa. Fusion aims to combine them, to create a chip that can handle all types of data, and handle it at speeds unheard of today. But, the success of this depends on software support of the system, among other things. Just like 64-bit CPUs today, which have largely gone unsupported by the software industry, Fusion may not gain their support either. If it does not, then it will merely be a CPU, with an integrated graphics processor built onto the same chip. The GPU will not be used to its full capability for running programs where massive parallel processing is ideal. It will stay much as it is today. A 3d rendering chip. This is seen by much of the industry as a big gamble by AMD. Will it pay off? Who knows. It certainly looks like the next logical step in technology to me though.

If you'd like to read more about Fusion, read these stories at TGDaily, and Anandtech.

Laptop hard drives get another boost

Fujitsu announced today that they are in the process of developing a 250GB 2.5" hard drive for laptops. The drive should be available in the 2nd quarter of this year. Fujitsi released in March the world's first 160GB 2.5" 7200 RPM hard drive. Exciting stuff for mobile users! More info here.

ATI X2900XT out finally!!

At long last, ATI's R600 GPU has hit the market in the form of the X2900XT! As of right now, Ewiz.com is the only etailer I can find carrying it. With 512MB of GDDR3 RAM onboard, a core clock of 750mhz, and RAM speeds hitting 1.65ghz, it looks pretty impressive. Preliminary benchmarks put it fairly even with the Nvidia Geforce 8800GTX, but I haven't seen any official benchmarks yet. The main addition to the X2K line is the addition of DirectX10 compatibility. It's sitting at $410 per card tonight, but should drop fairly soon. That's all I have for right now. Hopefully some official benchmarks will surface soon. Goodnight folks!


edit: The official name for this card is not X2900XT. It is in fact the HD 2900XT.

AMD cuts CPU prices again

AMD, or Advanced Micro Devices, dropped prices on their microprocessor chips again today. For those of you who don't know the name, AMD is the worlds second largest producer of CPUs, or Central Processing Units. They are now also the worlds second largest producer of GPUs, or Graphics Processing Units, after their aquisition of ATI at the end of 2006. ATI also produces the graphics processors for the Xbox-360 and Nintendo Wii, along with processors for devices like cell phones and HD TVs.

Some of the cuts on AMDs mainstream Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors were as large as 48%. You can now purchase a dual-core AMD CPU for a mere $73!! Those of you looking to build a budget desktop system with an AMD CPU, now would be a good time.

You can read the full story (here) at Extremetech and (here) at TG Daily.