Tuesday - July 27, 2010

Two More Years

Busy busy today. Getting set up for tomorrow’s window job; I’m building a sort of easel to clean storm windows on. The house I’m doing has lots of them, the old flat kind in the raw aluminum mounts. What I’m going to build is a rack that attaches to the back of my 6 foot ladder, made out of a couple of L brackets, some adjustable shelf channel, and a 3 foot plastic flower planter. The shelf channel bolts to the L brackets and forms a non-intrusive shelf for the storm windows to rest on. The flower planter also bolts to the ladder, but below that. It gets a towel in it, and it’s function is to catch drips. Easy on, easy off if I make it with wing nuts, and the easel arrangement lets me wash those windows at a comfortable waist height. Trust me, cleaning storms across your knee while holding on with one hand sucks. And squatting down on the ground to do them is a back buster. Sure, I could buy a rig like this, for $300, or I could make my own for $10. Guess which one wins? You got it.

But why “Two More Years”? Because I’m gluing two posts in one here. After an insanely long download, I found out that my good old PC does not have the processing power to properly play HD movies. I have the software to do it, and I’ve got a good monitor that can handle that resolution. But this PC is from 1999 and so is it’s graphics card. I get the picture on the screen just fine, but everything plays at 1/8 speed. And since I don’t have a Steve Austin slo-mo fixation, that’s not really good. So that got me looking around, and burned up a couple hours learning about where the PC market is today. And that’s the Mac market too you know, since they both use the same chips and architecture these days. And what I found out is phenomenal.

The current cutting edge CPU is the Core i7 970X from Intel. Holy cow. This is a 6 core monster that runs at 3.2Ghz with a 12MB L3 cache and built-in overclocking that can run it as fast as 4Ghz for short time periods. Assuming your software has parallelism built into it, each core can be split in half, so that it operates as if it had 12 CPUs. Insane. Even 6 CPUs is insane. And even though this chip just came out a couple months ago, the prices are dropping already and a little-brother chip (no overclocking) is now on the market. Performance-wise, this new chip is about unfrickin believable faster than my steadfast old 733Mhz Pentium III. The bus speed is more than 10 times faster on the latest motherboards, and the memory chips they can use is 6 times faster and more than 10 times larger. Hard drives? Phah, you’re stuck in the past. Samsung has a solid state drive out now. Half a flippin’ terabyte, and it’s on a single chip. Expensive? You betcha. But your software will load almost instantly:

The new 512GB SSD makes use of a 30 nanometer-class 32 gigabit chip that the company began producing last November. The toggle-mode DDR structure together with the SATA 3.0Gbps interface generates a maximum sequential read speed of 250 Megabyte per second (MBps) and a 220MBps sequential write speed, both of which provide three-fold the performance of a typical hard disk drive. At these speeds, two standard length DVD movies (approximately 4GB each) can be stored in just a minute.
...
Samsung also provides streamlined boot time and application access with this new SSD, showing an approximately nine-fold improvement in random performance over HDDs.

So even boot time is down to only a bit slower than “hit the On button”. Unreal. And the SSD uses almost no electricity, so it’s “green”. And no moving parts. Ought to last forever, but you can always pick up a 10,000rpm 1TB super ATA II regular HD as a Raid 1 backup for about $100. You do NOT want to know what I paid for a 32Mb Seagate ST-4096 hard drive in 1989. I’m not telling, but it was a full width, double height piglet that weighed 8 pounds. Today, that puny amount of storage might fit on the head of a pin. With enough room left over to land airplanes on probably.

So I indulged myself, and spent a little time over at Dell building out one of their ultimate PCs. With liquid cooling even. And they’ll build it with ultra fast RAM chips that have more capacity than the 32 bit architecture can address. Say what? That’s right, 32 bits worth of binary is only 3.2GB. You build your PC with 8 or even 16GB of RAM. Wasteful? No, because the extra memory can be addressed by the latest generation of video cards, I’m not sure how, and they’ll use it as a buffer or something. Dell “recommends” that I build a PC with more than one video card in it. I guess so I can use 2 or 3 monitors? Not sure how just one monitor can use 2 or more video cards at once. Whatever ... my dream box at Dell topped out at nearly $8000. Horry Clap. Which is why ...

I don’t want one of these PCs. Not now. This latest chip uses the Nehalem architecture which is due to be updated to the Sandy Bridges architecture in just a few months. That will increase efficiency and use less electricity, resulting in a considerable speed improvement. But wait, that’s not all!!! One major reason that the latest Core i7 chip is so fast is because Intel shrunk things down by a third. By which I mean that the latest and greatest i7 chip is built on a 32nm (freaking NANOMETERS!!!) scale, compared to the slightly older chips built on a 45nm scale. ( I think my first PC, a Dell 80286, was built to the nearest quarter inch). Now that they can do 32nm, the next step is 22nm. That’s the Sandy Bridge thingy, which will shrink to that size around the time Obama gets voted out of office in 2012. But like everything else in computer world, as soon as 22nm architecture manufacturing stabilizes, and improved version that takes advantage of that smaller scale will hit the market. That’s the Haswell architecture, itself slated for a 16nm upgrade about a year after that. The smaller the nm numbers get, the closer the microscopic parts are inside the computer chips, and the faster things run while using even less electricity.

So when the Haswell architecture starts phasing in sometime in 2012-2013, today’s insanely fast and expensive chipsets will be old hat, and found in the bargain bin at Kmart. And that’s when I’ll strike, even though the Haswell series of computers will have FMA, “fused multiply add”, an instruction simplification which will make every non-FMA machine a canoe anchor. It’s going to be that big of an improvement, seriously. Down at the very bottom of things, almost everything a computer does is binary math, followed by assignment. Do the math and the assignment at the same time, and you can cut the instruction set in half. Which doubles the effective speed of things, except for reading back and forth to the drives. Which will all be solid state by then, and 16 times faster than the latest solid state drives (and 32 times bigger), which are 3 times faster than the best mechanical drives you can buy, which are at least twice as fast as the ones you actually bought. Probably 20 times faster than my dear old 27Gb piggy wiggy HD on this system. So a cutting edge Haswell machine ought to be at least twice as fast, if not four times as fast, as the best machines money can buy right now. We are on the real verge, finally, of all-encompassing cheap computing power. Beam me up, Scotty!

Today’s cutting edge machines are about 60 times faster than my old tank, yet this old tank does everything I want eyeblink fast and I hardly ever have to wait for it other than the boot. But I would like to watch HD movies, which I can’t even do on my perfectly fine and sturdy old CRT 32” TV. It’s a decade old too. And it works fine, especially after I had it in to the shop a few months back for a minor fix and a full physical. The cable company called up today, trying to sell me some package deal. I think they are at the point where every package they offer will include HDTV, whether I use it or not. So I’m way behind the technology curve there too, but the newest TVs are so damn expensive, and they keep getting better every 6 months. I want today’s TV but at 1/5 the price. $3000 is just too damn much to spend on a TV if all that’s on is Idol. Blech.

So please, let this old warhorse make it through the next 2 years. Let it last longer than the Obama presidency. Then I can score an insanely hot PC for less cash than I paid for this thing back in 1999, even though that cash won’t be worth 1/10th as much.

Ok, break time’s over. Have to get down to the hardware store and get the parts for the easel thingy.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/27/2010 at 01:08 PM   
Filed Under: • work and the workplace •  
• Comments (9) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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