It seems Robb and I are on similar wavelengths this weekend.
Note to Self: When installing a new video card, ensure you plug both PCI-e tails into said card before trying to use it for its intended purpose. Otherwise, Linux tends to get extremely pissed off and not start the window system.
It turns out that Linux will function just fine in 2D, non-accelerated mode since it doesn't really use the GPU but the nVidia binary drivers get a wee bit wonky when the card is getting only half its required power needs. Two hours, endless frustration and a near constant stream of "WTF is going on here?!?". Shove the machine aside, resolve to pull the card in the morning and take it back for a different brand that might work. Go to pull the card look down and...
...just felt like the world's dumbest moron. Sheepishly, I plugged in the second power cable I had left off and not-so-amazingly, this technology actually works!
Bear in mind, we're talking about a circuit board assembly slightly smaller than a brick that requires more power (20A) to run that a large vacuum cleaner and has a heat sink on it that would get you a nice sum as scrap metal.
But does it ever make those zombies come to life! Getting hordes charging down the street in Left 4 Dead with every setting maxed out and the thing doesn't even hiccup. EVE Online is pushing 60-100fps with loaded scenes and everything likewise turned on.
As far as I am concerned, you can buy happiness. Anyone need an nVidia 7950GT OC?
Which leads me to my thoughts of the day. Do you realize we have a couple generations with us now who will never know anything but this level of computational horsepower and see it as uninspiring and just normal?
On my desk, I have two PCs and three LCD displays. Aggregate storage between the two machines internally, the external hard drive and the NAS is 2.6TB. The machines have 2GB and 4GB respectively. Each machine has a dual-core 64-bit processor running at 2.6Ghz. That's four CPUs. The graphics hardware in each is what I want to focus on.
At current market prices, my new nVidia 9800GTX+ is around $200. Not the fastest board out there but comfortably mid-to-high end. Very capable. Next to that, my smaller machine has an 8600GT. That was a $100 board bought on sale almost a year ago. Decent enough and runs all the software I want it to. The board the 9800GTX+ replaced, my 7950GT OC was on the low-side of the high-end a little over two years ago and cost more than the two boards mentioned above put together.
These graphics cards are inexpensive add-ons. What many people don't realize is just how powerful they are. The 8600GT is capable of a peak of 113.9 GFlops. That's 113 billion floating point operations per second. Basically adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing a floating point number. For you normal folks, a floating point number is a number with decimal places like 23.452. These types of numbers lie at the heart of all computer graphics calculations. When you want to draw a zombie on the screen, all that zombie is made up of in a computer is thousand or millions of these numbers. When that zombie changes direction, all of those numbers that make him up are multiplied with another to represent his new position. Such calculations are made whenever the zombie moves on the screen.
It's heavy duty work. So heavy duty, in fact, that graphics cards are specifically designed to do that one task of managing those numbers very well. Those Intel and AMD processors in our computers, as powerful as they are, literally cannot handle the volume of calculations required to display one zombie, let alone a horde, and do it without stuttering or looking like a stop-action slide show on the screen. That task has been performed for many years by such dedicated graphics hardware.
And the 8600GT is a low-end card by today's standards. It is considered a "budget" card. For someone who wants a decent game experience but not fancy and doesn't have a lot to spend.
Contrast this to my newest 9800GTX+. This card can do a staggering 470.016 GFlops. Four times the performance of the 8600GT for only twice the price. I said it was on low-side of the high-end. Above that are boards like Robb's in the form of the GTX 260 which can put out 803.52 GFlops. At the very high end is the GTX 295 with 1788.48 GFlops or 1.788 Teraflops (TFlops). That level of peak performance costs you around $500.
Roll the clock back 20 odd years to 1985. Cray Research, the undisputed world leader in supercomputing, just introduced the Cray-2. This was the most powerful computer in the world. It was clocked at a whopping 500Mhz, had 2GB of memory (256M words of 64 bits each), had four CPUs, used immersion liquid cooling, drew 196Kw (that's kilowatts) of power and cost 25 million dollars.
It was designed as a scientific workhorse. Weather simulations, nuclear weapons study, geological analysis and physical calculations are no different than those used in computer graphics today. Thus, the level of performance is measured the same way in terms of GFlops or TFlops.
In 1985, the Cray-2 did 1.9 GFlops. You bought 76 Flops for $1. It was the best in the world and remained so for several years.
Today at my local Micro Center, I can buy 1,139,000 Flops for $1. On sale. In the budget bin.
The lowly 8600GT has 15,000 times the performance of the Cray-2 at peak performance at 1/250000th the cost.
The highest end video boards today would place any system that had one comfortably in the top half of the fastest supercomputers in the world in June 2005. Today, those boards are within 1/8th of the peak performance of the 500th most powerful computer in the world.
Could you imagine if you could take a modern PC back in time to 1985 and let Lawrence Livermore play with one of them? Back then, a Teraflop of computing power was a science fiction dream to a software engineer. A refurbished budget PC today for a couple hundred dollars including the video card has hundreds of times the power of the Cray-2 and in some cases, you can't give that hardware away.
People always used to ask when we'd have our own Cray supercomputers on our desks. Folks, we've had them for a very long time and never realized it. What do we use them for?
Playing games.
Same goes for storage and all the other aspects of computing. The one thing that was truly impressive about the Cray-2 other than its speed was its memory. Even by 1990s and early 21st century standards, 2GB of RAM was a lot of memory. In 1985 that was unimaginable. There were programmers that didn't think they could feed problems large enough to use all of that memory in the Cray. 2GB of RAM is pretty much standard today but even in 2000, that was a lot of memory. So the Cray-2 having it back then make it truly awe-inspiring.
What was 25 million dollars not including costs for facilities, power, staff and the millions of dollars of supplemental storage and networking needed to support such a machine can be bought today as consumer pluck-and-play from the parts section of any well-stocked computer store for a few hundred dollars and assembled on a kitchen table in an hour.
Children today don't know how good they have it.
So like Robb, I fully appreciate the advances we've made in computing power. I have more than I ever dreamed possible and can likely ever take advantage of. Kids today have no experience with the advances made in the past 30 years. People my age can remember going from computer kits with 1 or 2 kilobytes of memory in the late 1970s all the way up to today with every stop in-between. We may laugh at Robb's example of Doom but I do remember how cool it was that the computer could do it at all. Let alone Doom 2 with curved surfaces.
Same goes for scientific workstations like Suns and SGIs that cost as much as a house in their prime and today are rescued to save them from the trash by collectors wanting to keep these old machines alive for fun. I know, I have a stack of them in storage. An old SGI Indigo (a collectors item today) that cost $10000 in the early 90s is a wheezing old fart compared to my iPod Touch.
So Robb, I am blown away but for different reasons. But there are days I miss the old Crays. Hell, I still have a letter and a brochure from Cray Research inquiring about what it would take to work there while I was in college. Sadly, that is a collector's item today too.
Off to play Left 4 Dead.
Note to Self: When installing a new video card, ensure you plug both PCI-e tails into said card before trying to use it for its intended purpose. Otherwise, Linux tends to get extremely pissed off and not start the window system.
It turns out that Linux will function just fine in 2D, non-accelerated mode since it doesn't really use the GPU but the nVidia binary drivers get a wee bit wonky when the card is getting only half its required power needs. Two hours, endless frustration and a near constant stream of "WTF is going on here?!?". Shove the machine aside, resolve to pull the card in the morning and take it back for a different brand that might work. Go to pull the card look down and...
...just felt like the world's dumbest moron. Sheepishly, I plugged in the second power cable I had left off and not-so-amazingly, this technology actually works!
Bear in mind, we're talking about a circuit board assembly slightly smaller than a brick that requires more power (20A) to run that a large vacuum cleaner and has a heat sink on it that would get you a nice sum as scrap metal.
But does it ever make those zombies come to life! Getting hordes charging down the street in Left 4 Dead with every setting maxed out and the thing doesn't even hiccup. EVE Online is pushing 60-100fps with loaded scenes and everything likewise turned on.
As far as I am concerned, you can buy happiness. Anyone need an nVidia 7950GT OC?
Which leads me to my thoughts of the day. Do you realize we have a couple generations with us now who will never know anything but this level of computational horsepower and see it as uninspiring and just normal?
On my desk, I have two PCs and three LCD displays. Aggregate storage between the two machines internally, the external hard drive and the NAS is 2.6TB. The machines have 2GB and 4GB respectively. Each machine has a dual-core 64-bit processor running at 2.6Ghz. That's four CPUs. The graphics hardware in each is what I want to focus on.
At current market prices, my new nVidia 9800GTX+ is around $200. Not the fastest board out there but comfortably mid-to-high end. Very capable. Next to that, my smaller machine has an 8600GT. That was a $100 board bought on sale almost a year ago. Decent enough and runs all the software I want it to. The board the 9800GTX+ replaced, my 7950GT OC was on the low-side of the high-end a little over two years ago and cost more than the two boards mentioned above put together.
These graphics cards are inexpensive add-ons. What many people don't realize is just how powerful they are. The 8600GT is capable of a peak of 113.9 GFlops. That's 113 billion floating point operations per second. Basically adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing a floating point number. For you normal folks, a floating point number is a number with decimal places like 23.452. These types of numbers lie at the heart of all computer graphics calculations. When you want to draw a zombie on the screen, all that zombie is made up of in a computer is thousand or millions of these numbers. When that zombie changes direction, all of those numbers that make him up are multiplied with another to represent his new position. Such calculations are made whenever the zombie moves on the screen.
It's heavy duty work. So heavy duty, in fact, that graphics cards are specifically designed to do that one task of managing those numbers very well. Those Intel and AMD processors in our computers, as powerful as they are, literally cannot handle the volume of calculations required to display one zombie, let alone a horde, and do it without stuttering or looking like a stop-action slide show on the screen. That task has been performed for many years by such dedicated graphics hardware.
And the 8600GT is a low-end card by today's standards. It is considered a "budget" card. For someone who wants a decent game experience but not fancy and doesn't have a lot to spend.
Contrast this to my newest 9800GTX+. This card can do a staggering 470.016 GFlops. Four times the performance of the 8600GT for only twice the price. I said it was on low-side of the high-end. Above that are boards like Robb's in the form of the GTX 260 which can put out 803.52 GFlops. At the very high end is the GTX 295 with 1788.48 GFlops or 1.788 Teraflops (TFlops). That level of peak performance costs you around $500.
Roll the clock back 20 odd years to 1985. Cray Research, the undisputed world leader in supercomputing, just introduced the Cray-2. This was the most powerful computer in the world. It was clocked at a whopping 500Mhz, had 2GB of memory (256M words of 64 bits each), had four CPUs, used immersion liquid cooling, drew 196Kw (that's kilowatts) of power and cost 25 million dollars.
It was designed as a scientific workhorse. Weather simulations, nuclear weapons study, geological analysis and physical calculations are no different than those used in computer graphics today. Thus, the level of performance is measured the same way in terms of GFlops or TFlops.
In 1985, the Cray-2 did 1.9 GFlops. You bought 76 Flops for $1. It was the best in the world and remained so for several years.
Today at my local Micro Center, I can buy 1,139,000 Flops for $1. On sale. In the budget bin.
The lowly 8600GT has 15,000 times the performance of the Cray-2 at peak performance at 1/250000th the cost.
The highest end video boards today would place any system that had one comfortably in the top half of the fastest supercomputers in the world in June 2005. Today, those boards are within 1/8th of the peak performance of the 500th most powerful computer in the world.
Could you imagine if you could take a modern PC back in time to 1985 and let Lawrence Livermore play with one of them? Back then, a Teraflop of computing power was a science fiction dream to a software engineer. A refurbished budget PC today for a couple hundred dollars including the video card has hundreds of times the power of the Cray-2 and in some cases, you can't give that hardware away.
People always used to ask when we'd have our own Cray supercomputers on our desks. Folks, we've had them for a very long time and never realized it. What do we use them for?
Playing games.
Same goes for storage and all the other aspects of computing. The one thing that was truly impressive about the Cray-2 other than its speed was its memory. Even by 1990s and early 21st century standards, 2GB of RAM was a lot of memory. In 1985 that was unimaginable. There were programmers that didn't think they could feed problems large enough to use all of that memory in the Cray. 2GB of RAM is pretty much standard today but even in 2000, that was a lot of memory. So the Cray-2 having it back then make it truly awe-inspiring.
What was 25 million dollars not including costs for facilities, power, staff and the millions of dollars of supplemental storage and networking needed to support such a machine can be bought today as consumer pluck-and-play from the parts section of any well-stocked computer store for a few hundred dollars and assembled on a kitchen table in an hour.
Children today don't know how good they have it.
So like Robb, I fully appreciate the advances we've made in computing power. I have more than I ever dreamed possible and can likely ever take advantage of. Kids today have no experience with the advances made in the past 30 years. People my age can remember going from computer kits with 1 or 2 kilobytes of memory in the late 1970s all the way up to today with every stop in-between. We may laugh at Robb's example of Doom but I do remember how cool it was that the computer could do it at all. Let alone Doom 2 with curved surfaces.
Same goes for scientific workstations like Suns and SGIs that cost as much as a house in their prime and today are rescued to save them from the trash by collectors wanting to keep these old machines alive for fun. I know, I have a stack of them in storage. An old SGI Indigo (a collectors item today) that cost $10000 in the early 90s is a wheezing old fart compared to my iPod Touch.
So Robb, I am blown away but for different reasons. But there are days I miss the old Crays. Hell, I still have a letter and a brochure from Cray Research inquiring about what it would take to work there while I was in college. Sadly, that is a collector's item today too.
Off to play Left 4 Dead.
4 comments:
I should dust off my commodore 64 and see if it still works
Having been a professional geek since PDP-8's were bleeding edge, it still all comes down to the same little 1's and 0's.
Bear in mind, we're talking about a circuit board assembly slightly smaller than a brick that requires more power (20A) to run that a large vacuum cleaner and has a heat sink on it that would get you a nice sum as scrap metal.
Well, not quite; power is watts, not amps.
20A at 12V is 240 watts (Nvidia claims it uses a maximum of 140 watts, though, but maybe that wasn't quite the identical card).
12A and 120V (for the Dyson I found searching for "vacuum cleaner") is 1,440 watts; not quite 6 times as much power as the video card; 10 times as much if nVidia's numbers are correct.
Modern high-end video cards use a lot of power, but not more than a vacuum cleaner.
Indeed, it's quite amazing. I too, collect old hardware just to have it and occasionally to make it work.
In my pile are a bunch of old relics that were incredibly expensive in their day.
One of my favorite is the Apple Quadra 950, Apples first real server design. It ran A/UX, AT&T UNIX ported to the apple 68K platform, running on top of the finder. It had a price of $7200 when it was new. I picked mine up for free when a friend's company was tossing it out around 2001. It's pretty cool to see this old 1992 relic running X, and fiddling with its unixy-ness and running xeyes for kicks.
I've also got the obligatory Indigo 2, rescued at a hardware show in Dallas after being liquidated by CSC.
I try to diversify the collection with whatever platform I can find, and have some SPARC boxes, an HP-RISC box, and some other examples of high-tech gone by. I still cringe at the thought that my dad threw out our old Commodore VIC-20 before I could rescue it, with its cassette tape drive and awesome programmability.
Goodwill in Austin actually has a computer museum with about 100 pieces of interesting old technology on display. They have a Cray on display, and there's a beautiful Digital PDP-8/S there. A guy on flickr has some interesting photos up.
http://www.austincomputerworks.org/museum/index.html
If you're ever in or around Austin, let me know, and we'll go shooting and hit up the museum.
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