resource hungry....
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The hard-drive comment earlier today and a comment from a new customer really has me thinking. Yes, we have seriously high end hardware requirements, at least from a home-PC perspective. But a $2000-$3000 computer will provide satisfactory performance, and some customers still go for the $8000 monster boxes.... 90% of the time our customers not only don't blink at the hardware requirements, but they are surprised we do what we do on a $2K box. But every now and then you get the customer.... We would like to run on 512K RAM, 20gig hard-drive, single core 1ghz, and integrated Video graphics.... Sometimes those are notebooks, but sometimes those are actually desktops.... Do people really expect 3D graphics visualization of the whole earth in real-time excrutiating detail to run rapidly on a $500 or less PC? We're only a tad higher than the newest games as far as requirements, and a few of those have hasher requirements outside of disk-space (and minimal installation is very similar to high end games). Does every industry have the 10%'ers trying to do everything with nothing?
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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The hard-drive comment earlier today and a comment from a new customer really has me thinking. Yes, we have seriously high end hardware requirements, at least from a home-PC perspective. But a $2000-$3000 computer will provide satisfactory performance, and some customers still go for the $8000 monster boxes.... 90% of the time our customers not only don't blink at the hardware requirements, but they are surprised we do what we do on a $2K box. But every now and then you get the customer.... We would like to run on 512K RAM, 20gig hard-drive, single core 1ghz, and integrated Video graphics.... Sometimes those are notebooks, but sometimes those are actually desktops.... Do people really expect 3D graphics visualization of the whole earth in real-time excrutiating detail to run rapidly on a $500 or less PC? We're only a tad higher than the newest games as far as requirements, and a few of those have hasher requirements outside of disk-space (and minimal installation is very similar to high end games). Does every industry have the 10%'ers trying to do everything with nothing?
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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The hard-drive comment earlier today and a comment from a new customer really has me thinking. Yes, we have seriously high end hardware requirements, at least from a home-PC perspective. But a $2000-$3000 computer will provide satisfactory performance, and some customers still go for the $8000 monster boxes.... 90% of the time our customers not only don't blink at the hardware requirements, but they are surprised we do what we do on a $2K box. But every now and then you get the customer.... We would like to run on 512K RAM, 20gig hard-drive, single core 1ghz, and integrated Video graphics.... Sometimes those are notebooks, but sometimes those are actually desktops.... Do people really expect 3D graphics visualization of the whole earth in real-time excrutiating detail to run rapidly on a $500 or less PC? We're only a tad higher than the newest games as far as requirements, and a few of those have hasher requirements outside of disk-space (and minimal installation is very similar to high end games). Does every industry have the 10%'ers trying to do everything with nothing?
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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The hard-drive comment earlier today and a comment from a new customer really has me thinking. Yes, we have seriously high end hardware requirements, at least from a home-PC perspective. But a $2000-$3000 computer will provide satisfactory performance, and some customers still go for the $8000 monster boxes.... 90% of the time our customers not only don't blink at the hardware requirements, but they are surprised we do what we do on a $2K box. But every now and then you get the customer.... We would like to run on 512K RAM, 20gig hard-drive, single core 1ghz, and integrated Video graphics.... Sometimes those are notebooks, but sometimes those are actually desktops.... Do people really expect 3D graphics visualization of the whole earth in real-time excrutiating detail to run rapidly on a $500 or less PC? We're only a tad higher than the newest games as far as requirements, and a few of those have hasher requirements outside of disk-space (and minimal installation is very similar to high end games). Does every industry have the 10%'ers trying to do everything with nothing?
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
I"m stuck with this at the moment. I've written an image viewer program. Here's what it does 1 - the UI shows 16 large images per pane on 4 panes. 2 - the images can be zoomed in real time 3 - another thread downloads the images for up to six cases in advance 4 - another thread processes those images to get ready for viewing I don't even remember what the other two threads do I am on a dual core machine ( still < $1000 in the US, it's a base level system ), and they are on single core. we have constant issues with them reporting jerky zoom, which doesn't happen to me locally. They are also reporting regular CPU spikes, this is when the thread that checks if there are other cases to download calls the web service. We're currently in discussion over if they will buy a dual core machine for testing or not. I'm saying they should at least see how it runs differently, so we can establish what our problems are, even tho we will always try to get it running on the slowest machine possible.
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ Metal Musings - Rex and my new metal blog "I am working on a project that will convert a FORTRAN code to corresponding C++ code.I am not aware of FORTRAN syntax" ( spotted in the C++/CLI forum )
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The hard-drive comment earlier today and a comment from a new customer really has me thinking. Yes, we have seriously high end hardware requirements, at least from a home-PC perspective. But a $2000-$3000 computer will provide satisfactory performance, and some customers still go for the $8000 monster boxes.... 90% of the time our customers not only don't blink at the hardware requirements, but they are surprised we do what we do on a $2K box. But every now and then you get the customer.... We would like to run on 512K RAM, 20gig hard-drive, single core 1ghz, and integrated Video graphics.... Sometimes those are notebooks, but sometimes those are actually desktops.... Do people really expect 3D graphics visualization of the whole earth in real-time excrutiating detail to run rapidly on a $500 or less PC? We're only a tad higher than the newest games as far as requirements, and a few of those have hasher requirements outside of disk-space (and minimal installation is very similar to high end games). Does every industry have the 10%'ers trying to do everything with nothing?
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
Most of the dedicated vertical apps have power in abundance on the device. The device we sell most of for our thin-client system is a 520MHz XScale PXA270-based device with 64MB of RAM, where the application uses fractions of that. Ports of old applications written for DOS-based handhelds really fly. If using Compact Framework it's a different matter, and on Windows Mobile devices, we're always running out of virtual address space. Problems in Windows CE's architecture (at least before v6.0) and the sheer number and size of DLLs loaded mean that you get a 'DLL Crunch' where a DLL load fails because it would have to load into address space that's already occupied by the managed heap. It may be that there's something fundamentally wrong in the application framework we've built on top of .NET CF which is exacerbating the problem, making the heap grow larger than necessary. Now the tools finally exist to investigate the problem in .NET CF 2.0 SP2, I might be able to address it.
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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The hard-drive comment earlier today and a comment from a new customer really has me thinking. Yes, we have seriously high end hardware requirements, at least from a home-PC perspective. But a $2000-$3000 computer will provide satisfactory performance, and some customers still go for the $8000 monster boxes.... 90% of the time our customers not only don't blink at the hardware requirements, but they are surprised we do what we do on a $2K box. But every now and then you get the customer.... We would like to run on 512K RAM, 20gig hard-drive, single core 1ghz, and integrated Video graphics.... Sometimes those are notebooks, but sometimes those are actually desktops.... Do people really expect 3D graphics visualization of the whole earth in real-time excrutiating detail to run rapidly on a $500 or less PC? We're only a tad higher than the newest games as far as requirements, and a few of those have hasher requirements outside of disk-space (and minimal installation is very similar to high end games). Does every industry have the 10%'ers trying to do everything with nothing?
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
El Corazon wrote:
Does every industry have the 10%'ers trying to do everything with nothing?
That's, um, rhetorical, right? My employer does 4-year leases on laptops. I have huge cracks in the chasis, about half of the hardware replaced, and there's still a year left - my goal for the next thirteen months is to see if i can get the thing to actually turn to dust in front of me...
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...the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more...
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The hard-drive comment earlier today and a comment from a new customer really has me thinking. Yes, we have seriously high end hardware requirements, at least from a home-PC perspective. But a $2000-$3000 computer will provide satisfactory performance, and some customers still go for the $8000 monster boxes.... 90% of the time our customers not only don't blink at the hardware requirements, but they are surprised we do what we do on a $2K box. But every now and then you get the customer.... We would like to run on 512K RAM, 20gig hard-drive, single core 1ghz, and integrated Video graphics.... Sometimes those are notebooks, but sometimes those are actually desktops.... Do people really expect 3D graphics visualization of the whole earth in real-time excrutiating detail to run rapidly on a $500 or less PC? We're only a tad higher than the newest games as far as requirements, and a few of those have hasher requirements outside of disk-space (and minimal installation is very similar to high end games). Does every industry have the 10%'ers trying to do everything with nothing?
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
I may be off topic but it seems to me that even what we consider "low-end" machines have plenty of power left in them. I'm still amazed every time I play Halo 2 on my XBox, which is essentially a 733 MHz PIII PC ! Think of all those polygons, all those 3D matrix transformations, the physics, collision detection - and yet, smooth frame rates ! It just blows your mind ! And do I even have to talk about Half-Life 2 ? Are we as developers today, stopping short ? Not delivering the best the hardware can deliver ? Are we looking at just delivering functionally correct code, and pointing fingers at the hardware when it comes to performance ? How many of us have really bothered to tune the code we spew ? Incidentally, I'm a big fan of Micheal Abrash & his code optimization books, really good reads. Anybody remember 'Graphics Programming Black Book' ? :)
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The hard-drive comment earlier today and a comment from a new customer really has me thinking. Yes, we have seriously high end hardware requirements, at least from a home-PC perspective. But a $2000-$3000 computer will provide satisfactory performance, and some customers still go for the $8000 monster boxes.... 90% of the time our customers not only don't blink at the hardware requirements, but they are surprised we do what we do on a $2K box. But every now and then you get the customer.... We would like to run on 512K RAM, 20gig hard-drive, single core 1ghz, and integrated Video graphics.... Sometimes those are notebooks, but sometimes those are actually desktops.... Do people really expect 3D graphics visualization of the whole earth in real-time excrutiating detail to run rapidly on a $500 or less PC? We're only a tad higher than the newest games as far as requirements, and a few of those have hasher requirements outside of disk-space (and minimal installation is very similar to high end games). Does every industry have the 10%'ers trying to do everything with nothing?
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
El Corazon wrote:
would like to run on 512K RAM, 20gig hard-drive, single core 1ghz, and integrated Video graphics.... desktops....
WOW, I don't know what I would do if I had such a speed demon at work (sadly the specs for my work computer are slightly shorter than those) complete with a smoken token network connection. It's nice to go home to a real or semi real computer.
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I may be off topic but it seems to me that even what we consider "low-end" machines have plenty of power left in them. I'm still amazed every time I play Halo 2 on my XBox, which is essentially a 733 MHz PIII PC ! Think of all those polygons, all those 3D matrix transformations, the physics, collision detection - and yet, smooth frame rates ! It just blows your mind ! And do I even have to talk about Half-Life 2 ? Are we as developers today, stopping short ? Not delivering the best the hardware can deliver ? Are we looking at just delivering functionally correct code, and pointing fingers at the hardware when it comes to performance ? How many of us have really bothered to tune the code we spew ? Incidentally, I'm a big fan of Micheal Abrash & his code optimization books, really good reads. Anybody remember 'Graphics Programming Black Book' ? :)
im_srini wrote:
Are we as developers today, stopping short ? Not delivering the best the hardware can deliver ? Are we looking at just delivering functionally correct code, and pointing fingers at the hardware when it comes to performance ? How many of us have really bothered to tune the code we spew ?
Actually I am also a big fan of Micheal Abrash and code optimization. :) I got this job from doing efficiency operations programming in accounting (find the slow-down, improve it) in both programs and physical operations. This is something few programming books cover. If you have an operation that takes an hour for the operator to "prepare" data for entry, the big question is if there is anyway to take the "raw" data directly so that the operator does less manual work, and less human error. I go head-to-head with the big projects regularly, SimDIS is one of the biggest, they have a customer list that is a mile long. And it is true they do almost the same thing I do. I simply do the "same thing" 10x faster, with 10x the extra detail, and with 10x the amount of data. People listen to my specs and often scoff. I can't process that many objects in real-time, even games have difficulty keeping up with that many objects except at the high end. But I actually employ gaming algorithms to improve speed. I profile and rewrite. I just had a discussion yesterday with my team over efficiency, its a tough call.... but if "full organization" costs 60% of your speed, I ask what we can do with a different design that isn't quite so slow! They grumble and growl and tell me I am "old school..." speed is a function of "hardware" if you slow down too much you buy bigger machines. :) I do a lot with very little. The problem is I do a LOT! In 1994 I was fully utilizing a 16processor 200Mhz SGI graphics engine, now we run on high-end PCs. We've gone from 100m elevation grid to 30m elevation grid and 10m grey or 30m color imagery to 4m color imagery, and we went from about 16K sq km to 38 sq km in detail area, and added the rest of the earth in background. We've nearly quadroupled the data input, and doubled the frame rate. All of that combined means some efficiency has had to happen. We didn't have a physics engine back then or real-time line-of-sight analysis (non graphical, I love GPUs, but if you have level-of-detail then LOS analysis changes if you use the polygons which to me means analysis by polygon is bad-news). And that is just the public information I give in my pr