Een engineer die liever anoniem wil blijven heeft eens wat benchmarks gerund die aantonen dat de K7 wat sneller is dan de PIII wat FPU-snelheid betreft. Maar FPU is natuurlijk niet het enige wat de snelheid van een processor bepaalt.

The engineer, who insists on strict anonymity, said that the K7 running at 500MHz has an FPU Winmark of 2767. That compares to a Pentium III/500 which, he says, has an FPU Winmark of around 2562. But at the same time he has said he is disappointed at the management and production problems at the firm. He said that he wanted to make clear that while AMD's technology is impressive, management "always give an optimistic outlook but then turn around and execute poorly."

Het ding moet nu toch echt in juli uitkomen. We wachten vol spanning af.

Intel heeft plannen om een soort internetprovider te worden, die naast toegang ook aan applicatieserving doet. Dat betekent dat het bedrijf zich in de toekomst meer wil gaan toeleggen op dienstverlening dan het verkopen van processoren, zoals ze nu doen.

The well-guarded plan, first detailed at the company's analyst briefing in New York this afternoon, represents yet another element in the company's goal of becoming a communications powerhouse. With PC prices dropping, Intel has set out on a strategy to diversify its business away from being mostly a manufacturer of PC microprocessors, moving, for instance, into networking products and networking chips.

The strategy to provide "Internet data services," the term given by chief executive Craig Barrett, represents a conceptual leap for the company. Rather than manufacture products, Intel will be essentially selling services.

Manufacturing PC microprocessors will still be job No. 1 at Intel, Barrett said. But increasingly, the company will "provide the backbone for anyone that wants to have data" on the Internet, he said. "We are going to build server farms around the world. Our intent is simply that data traffic be shipped and shaped by Intel silicon and services," said chairman Andy Grove.

Op http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/cosm/ vond ik iets wat ik heel erg interessant vond. Het heeft wel wat weg van de RC5-64 kraak contest van distributed.net. Lees maar eens ff door:

Cosm is a set of protocols designed to allow computers all over the world to work together on projects. The project may be a mathematical challenge, or rendering an animation. Any large project that can be broken up into pieces and assigned to different machines.

For the Researcher: Researchers gain access to huge pools of CPU time to run their projects on. Studies can be done in a fraction of the time, theories can be proven or disproved, and since it takes hours instead of weeks, the next big development is that much closer.

For the User: Users have something for their computers to do in all their idle cycles, and get access to all the results generated by projects. You also have the opportunity to make your own projects and recruit cycles from others. It's also nice to be able to point at a project and be able to say "I helped with that".

A business gets the same advantages as everyone else, plus some of the tools like the distributed file system are very useful for operations. Businesses can also use the global pool provided they are willing to play well with others and share the results.

Cosm is the real name for the system codenamed 'v3'. [you didn't think that was really its name did you?] So if you've heard about that, then this probably is a bit familiar. A word about distributed.net.

Op AGN 3D vond ik een stuk over video-memory. Even wat quootjes:

The framebuffer is the portion of the memory that contains the image that is seen on the monitor. In 3D graphics, there are always two framebuffers (double buffering.) The front framebuffer displays the frame that is sent to the monitor, while the the back buffer is where the next frame is rendered. In this manner, a frame is only displayed once it is 100% complete. In other words, you won't see the frame as each triangle is being rasterized, you will only see the end result.

A few things have to be explained before you can understand the purpose of the z-buffer. The conventional rendering pipeline deals with triangles one at a time. As each triangle gets processed, the pixels making up that triangle may or may not be written to the framebuffer. It depends on whether or not the new pixels are in front of, or behind whatever is currently stored in the framebuffer. The z-buffer helps in this regard by storing the z-value (or depth) of each pixel. For every pixel in the framebuffer, there is a corresponding depth value stored in the z-buffer.

Ideally, you want enough room leftover after the framebuffer and z-buffer to store the textures without having to resort to AGP texturing. In the case of 3dfx hardware, AGP texturing is not an option. AGP Texturing, technically referred to as Direct Memory Execute (DME), allows the graphics chip to use textures out of the system memory as opposed to the video card's local memory and thus overcome the memory limitations of the video card. The drawback, however, is that the bandwidth of the AGP2X bus is one sixth that of the local memory on a Voodoo3 or a TNT2 card. This sounds a bit sever, but in order not to mislead anyone, it should be noted that the performance hit does not directly translate to one sixth due to the presence of other bottlenecks (ie: CPU, geometry throughput, fillrate.)

Niet dat wij PC-ers er wat aan hebben maar dit vond ik op AGN3D:

Sierra Studios™ announced today their hit game Half-Life will be available for Macintosh gamers this fall. Originally developed by Valve Software, the Macintosh version of the game will be developed by Southern California-based Logicware, recognized for Macintosh gaming development and well-known for working with some of the top computer game publishers in the industry.

“The PC version has sold nearly one million units worldwide – bringing Half-Life to the Mac is a natural next step, especially since there is such unwavering devotion in the Macintosh gaming community,” said Jim Veevaert, director of marketing for Sierra Studios. “We are excited to be working with a company like Logicware that has such a strong reputation in the Mac gaming market.”