Recent content by aphorism

  1. aphorism

    question about blacklights

    thanks but this does not satisfy my curiosity. i want a highly technical answer or at least an explanation of how to calculate irradiance or whatever unit i am looking for.
  2. aphorism

    question about blacklights

    what i want to know is how much flux, or radiant energy, (or whatever you optics people call it) a standard 40W black light lamp outputs relative to the sun, and at UVA frequencies. for example is one hour of sunlight exposure equal to 10 hours of blacklight exposure? an explanation would be...
  3. aphorism

    Radeon HD5xxx filtering issue

    "As you can see, the MIP maps in our venerable D3D AF Tester are perfectly circular, the hallmark of an angle-independent implementation. With angle-independent filtering, this effectively marks the end of the filtering arms race. AMD has won, and should NVIDIA catch up in the future the two...
  4. aphorism

    Are 64 bits really faster than 32?

    then why did you double registers?!?!?!? a good x86-64 compiler should be able to beat a 32bit app by a decent margin. you'd have to ask a compiler guru for an accurate figure. oh and instructions are variable length. did you take any time to think about that? they add prefetch for...
  5. aphorism

    Why don't CPU makers have 'factory outlets', irregulars, etc.

    manufacturing costs are cheap, particularly for in-house fabs like intel. yields are very high because that's one of their main goals with their designs. when you sell at a level of volume like intel it can make a big difference.
  6. aphorism

    ARM announces 2GHZ -Dual Core Processor

    eDRAM: 2.7x smaller than intel's 45nm standard SRAM cell and 40% smaller than intel's 32nm standard SRAM cell. 7.9TB/s L3->L2 bandwidth.D: they have done more chip stacking research and currently have the best TSV/mm2 of anyone. their 45nm process uses the best low-k dielectric physically...
  7. aphorism

    What is the maximum # of cpu's that can be used for cgi rendering?

    it depends on the scene. ray tracing is more task parallel than data parallel. rather than running the same function over x pixels a ray tracer would do x functions per pixel. for a complex scene with many secondary rays you could send out 128*128 shadow rays or ~16,000 total shadow ray that...
  8. aphorism

    How much smaller can chips go? [article]

    yes, processing/repairing the mask design is a lot of the cost but there are some costs related to materials and other issues. for example intel's 22nm node uses computational lithography. according to ACML it requires a sustained 10tflops for 24hours to process one layer. on 22nm this could...
  9. aphorism

    How much smaller can chips go? [article]

    the cost of masks is on a per transistor basis, unlike ic's where all transistors are made simultaneously. the cost of masks has been doubling for many years. a 65nm mask set is ~3million dollars, a 45nm mask set is ~6million, 32nm is 12million, etc. also the number of masks is increasing...
  10. aphorism

    How much smaller can chips go? [article]

    yeah, computers would destroy us if they kept doubling in speed. we are already dependent on them. we could eventually make a processor faster than our own brain in every aspect, making humans useless, especially the ones that were once smart. also i would like to add that there are physical...
  11. aphorism

    How much smaller can chips go? [article]

    i think i could have dont a better job in a single post, no offense. yes, lithography is a big issue but that's not the only limitation. breakthroughs must occurr in almost every area from, doping, lithography, interconnect delay, leakage issues, etc. cost is probably going to be the largest...
  12. aphorism

    ARM announces 2GHZ -Dual Core Processor

    your example isnt exactly fair either. merced was a rushed, unfinished processor. improving upon it was not hard, all they needed was time. another thing i have never understood about itanium is that they use domino gates throughout the entire pipeline. that's not a good choice for something...
  13. aphorism

    ARM announces 2GHZ -Dual Core Processor

    2-3x would be a good guess although we are going through another ISA philosophy transition so it is becoming irrelevant. it is a very hard comparison because the two main x86 manufacturers have huge R&D budgets. intel could make an extremely fast RISC processor but it would open up room for...
  14. aphorism

    ARM announces 2GHZ -Dual Core Processor

    x86 has a lot of overhead not in area but in terms of circuit design, it is going to use a lot of power is very difficult to design. this will end up costing more pipeline stages or higher power consumption. x86 has to decode a lot more information too. instruction lengths must be decoded...
  15. aphorism

    First Bulldozer Numbers?

    it's an april fools joke. look at the date. edit: you beat me to it!