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Historic hardware

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Reply 20 of 42, by Snover

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Now that will happen. Me, I'd be infinitely happy with a single-processor Athlon64 (754 or 939, leaning toward 939 now that they're getting cheaper) board with a PCI-X slot.

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Reply 22 of 42, by collector

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The Tyan Thunder S2895 is will have two CK8-04 (nForce4) chips and support SLI with 2xPCI-e x16, but the Thunder boards usually go for more than $400. Slap a couple of dual core Opterons and you'll have your quad CPU box with 2 16xPCI-e slots.

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Reply 23 of 42, by ribbon13

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Now you're talking 😜

Of course at that point you'd have to get a PC power and cooling full tower, 6U rackmount, or something larger... because you would need 2 PSUs for something like that.

I think a Single socket 939 with dual core chip would be enough for hardcore gamers though. How many games could take advantage of more than 2 cores?

Reply 24 of 42, by DosFreak

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That's one of my worries for the upcoming multi-core cpu's. Supposedly they speed will either be lower than or equal to current processor speeds due to the increased heat. That's one of the main reasons why we haven't seen the massive speed increase that we've seen in the past. Heat. Unfortunately, not many games take advantage of dual-processing/HT/Multi-Core and I don't see them doing so in the future either.

Seriously, do you really expect game developers to take advantage of multi-core?

What I am glad to see is finally the increase in FSB/memory speeds. Mabye with this speed issue we may eventually see our FSB/Memory speeds catch up with processing speeds which would be really cool.

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Reply 25 of 42, by ribbon13

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That's another reason why multi-socket configs won't have the greatest advantage.... It's called VapoChill. Potentially 1 4-core cpu would be better than anything else...

Yeah, but speed isn't all incumbent for memory... faster mhz usually = increased latency.

Reply 27 of 42, by collector

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Keep in mind, though, that a big disadvantage that a multi core Opteron has against a system with discrete Opterons is that the cores share the memory controller and the same bank of system RAM. Two separate Opterons each have their own memory controllers and potentially their own banks of system RAM.

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Reply 29 of 42, by collector

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In addition to the Opteron's Hyper Transport, increased number of general purpose registers, wider ALU registers, etc...

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Reply 30 of 42, by ribbon13

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Speaking of historic hardware, I'd have to say that the Opteron is one scandalous little processor... outdoing Mac on its home turf of content creation in even the most holy of apps: Photoshop. Beats Xeon too.

http://www.barefeats.com/g5op.html
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?i … cookie%5Ftest=1

But your probably seen that before.

Need I mention the Star Wars movies? 😜. Nothing like Opterons for Blade Servers for your new renderfarm or compilefarm.

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Reply 32 of 42, by ribbon13

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Ahh, another reason to not like Disney or thier minions. Excellent!

The rendering for PRMan is done on apple g5s, but it isn't the only RenderMan compliant implementation. Most of the rendering done with RenderMan isn't done by Pixar, but by thier customers. And anyone going out TODAY looking for hardware for a new renderfarm would be a major dumbass to choose G5s, based on hours per frame/power consumption/cluster density/multiple vendor support. Pixar uses Apple because of a longstanding relationship which makes for good business deals, not because of architecture superiority. Besides its possible, though unlikely, that Apple may one day use Opterons. They switched from 680xx to PowerPC at one point, because Motarola just didn't cut it. Of course a lot of Motarola chips ride their merry way into cash registers, vacuum cleaners, sex toys (Sybian :p), so whats the inclination to make faster chips?

Anyways.. sorry for ranting. I hate Apple, if only because of all the dumbass who incessantly made shitty 'music' at school with SimpleText's voice.

Reply 33 of 42, by collector

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The G5 is not a Motorola chip. It is an IBM chip, based on the Power 4, as in what has been several of the Blue machines (Deep Blue, etc.) Don't dismiss the G5 so readily. When applications are optimized for it, the G5 is impressive.

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Reply 38 of 42, by ribbon13

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If any of my old classmates break in to my house just to start making music with Fruity Loops saying "Poo poo poo poo poo" to the tune of "In the Hall of the Mountain King", I will know who to blame Snover.
😜

Staying of the subjet of hardware. My New Year's Resolution is to buy my girlfriend a Tyan Thunder K8WEX S2895 as an anniversary or birthday present.

Reply 39 of 42, by Snover

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Um, I'm not your girlfriend, nor am I a girl, but could you buy one for me, too? ^__^ It'd be super swell if you could throw in a 3ware SATA 4-channel 9500S-4LP controller and 4 Seagate 7200.8 400GB ST3400832AS drives too, as well as a couple Opteron 250s and a ton of high-quality ECC RAM.
Seriously. I'll be your slaaaaaaave.

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