The next technology the american consumer won't be able to do without.

[Requia ☣]

Given my current laptop has a 1.66 GHz computer chip, one of these would be nice.  Shit, I can't even play games that came out a year before this model.

Hmm, my (very rough) estimates put this on the same order of power as a top end nVidia card.. you really could do laptop gaming with it.  Not needing to spend 300 dollars on a extra part is actually pretty useful.

Of course, the gaming companies will probably start making games that require even more hardware as soon as these hit the shelves.

RE: Sig,

A) That's the inquirer

B) Pentium 4, what?

C) Oh, its from 2003.

D) Scam.  To start with you'd never be allowed to sell a Pentium 4 pin compatible processor in the US.  Intel keeps a tight reign on that bit of IP ever since it finally decoupled itself from AMD.

[Cain]

Given my current laptop has a 1.66 GHz computer chip, one of these would be nice.  Shit, I can't even play games that came out a year before this model.

Hmm, my (very rough) estimates put this on the same order of power as a top end nVidia card.. you really could do laptop gaming with it.  Not needing to spend 300 dollars on a extra part is actually pretty useful.

Maybe.  I would think it was OK, given how it handles my current games, but a lot of stuff I look at suggests 2.2 GHz as a minimum, up to three in some cases.  And obviously, I don't want to spend money just to have to send something back or wait until I upgrade.

[Requia ☣]

I meant that the IBM chip could game.

graphics power normally has little to do with processors because well...

high end intel i7 ~60 GFlops

50$ low end ATI card ~90 Gflops.

A good processor will give a system that little extra something, but its the graphics power that really does it, and its hard to cram graphics power into a low power poorly cooled device like a laptop.

[Soylent Green]

I meant that the IBM chip could game.

graphics power normally has little to do with processors because well...

high end intel i7 ~60 GFlops

50$ low end ATI card ~90 Gflops.

A good processor will give a system that little extra something, but its the graphics power that really does it, and its hard to cram graphics power into a low power poorly cooled device like a laptop.

Actually the new Nvidia ION processor can play most games on medium. Hell, it can even play Crysis on low.

So I would suggest getting that if you want awesome graphics in a small laptop.

[Requia ☣]

ION isn't a cpu.

[Kai]

If you can keep all the data in registers or cache, then yeah.. but the question is how much data are you comparing between different taxa?  E.g. here it looks (from my uneducated quick scan) like it's comparing dna sequences.. in which case you're talking quite a bit of data -- wiki puts the human genome at around 750mb uncompressed.  CPU cache sizes are (I think - I don't keep up) still in the single figures of mb, so I'd guess you'd have to be focussed upon a pretty small chunk of the genome for this to give a significant boost, assuming nothing else changes.

Say you are doing a parsimony analysis for a 500 bp (base pair) long sequence of COI mtDNA (cytochrome oxidase I mitochondrial DNA) for 40 taxa, in which you have to compare the character state (C,T,G or A)of every position (the positions are considered homologues) determine maximum congruence (how well the characters fit to each other) while computing consistency (how well the characters fit to the topology) to infer a cladogram (dicotomously branching phylogenetic tree)...yeah, it takes time.

[Soylent Green]

its hard to cram graphics power into a low power poorly cooled device like a laptop.

that is what I was responding to. I probably should have indicated that lol...

[Requia ☣]

If you can keep all the data in registers or cache, then yeah.. but the question is how much data are you comparing between different taxa?  E.g. here it looks (from my uneducated quick scan) like it's comparing dna sequences.. in which case you're talking quite a bit of data -- wiki puts the human genome at around 750mb uncompressed.  CPU cache sizes are (I think - I don't keep up) still in the single figures of mb, so I'd guess you'd have to be focussed upon a pretty small chunk of the genome for this to give a significant boost, assuming nothing else changes.

Say you are doing a parsimony analysis for a 500 bp (base pair) long sequence of COI mtDNA (cytochrome oxidase I mitochondrial DNA) for 40 taxa, in which you have to compare the character state (C,T,G or A)of every position (the positions are considered homologues) determine maximum congruence (how well the characters fit to each other) while computing consistency (how well the characters fit to the topology) to infer a cladogram (dicotomously branching phylogenetic tree)...yeah, it takes time.

That sounds like these chips would help a lot, since the data set isn't that huge.

[Triple Zero]

If you can keep all the data in registers or cache, then yeah.. but the question is how much data are you comparing between different taxa?  E.g. here it looks (from my uneducated quick scan) like it's comparing dna sequences.. in which case you're talking quite a bit of data -- wiki puts the human genome at around 750mb uncompressed.  CPU cache sizes are (I think - I don't keep up) still in the single figures of mb, so I'd guess you'd have to be focussed upon a pretty small chunk of the genome for this to give a significant boost, assuming nothing else changes.

Say you are doing a parsimony analysis for a 500 bp (base pair) long sequence of COI mtDNA (cytochrome oxidase I mitochondrial DNA) for 40 taxa, in which you have to compare the character state (C,T,G or A)of every position (the positions are considered homologues) determine maximum congruence (how well the characters fit to each other) while computing consistency (how well the characters fit to the topology) to infer a cladogram (dicotomously branching phylogenetic tree)...yeah, it takes time.

fuck, I'd love to take a class or two on the hardcore computational algorithms that must be involved with this.

is it based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_common_substring_problem ?

[Xooxe]

Yeah. It would be nice, but as soon as we've bought the 100+ghz chip, Left 4 Dead 5, and Halo 6 and Civilisation 7 will require the 200+ghz chip ...

That'll probably be around the time game content development is outsourced to 'sweatshops' to deal with the need for a team of thousands just to keep up with market expectations of progress.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I imagine that a super-fast processor could be leveraged with clever coding to significantly speed up something wherein the biggest bottleneck is the storage speed. That said, increases in processor speed (and decreases in storage cost, be it cache, ram, disk space, etc) have historically always eventually become excuses for lazier programming, negating their actual upsides. That said, 100ghz is enough of a jump that it may take a few years before everyone starts using bogo-sort and similar brain damaged algorithms and the speeds of typical applications fatten down to average.

[Triple Zero]

I imagine that a super-fast processor could be leveraged with clever coding to significantly speed up something wherein the biggest bottleneck is the storage speed.

Good point, I suppose the idea of speed/memory tradeoffs [see: rainbow tables] work the other way around as well.

[Jasper]

Given my current laptop has a 1.66 GHz computer chip, one of these would be nice.  Shit, I can't even play games that came out a year before this model.

Hmm, my (very rough) estimates put this on the same order of power as a top end nVidia card.. you really could do laptop gaming with it.  Not needing to spend 300 dollars on a extra part is actually pretty useful.

Of course, the gaming companies will probably start making games that require even more hardware as soon as these hit the shelves.

RE: Sig,

A) That's the inquirer

B) Pentium 4, what?

C) Oh, its from 2003.

D) Scam.  To start with you'd never be allowed to sell a Pentium 4 pin compatible processor in the US.  Intel keeps a tight reign on that bit of IP ever since it finally decoupled itself from AMD.

Ack, rebuttal fail.

I'm just going to stop making claims about CS/CE for a while, and merely phrase my thoughts as musings in the form of questions.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

Boring. Let me know when they can graft this chip to my brain along with a terabyte of storage and one of those things that let me stream infomercials 24/7 into my prefrontal cortex.

[Jasper]

...I hate to ask, really, but why infomercials?