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Comment Re:It's not dead, it's fun! (Score 1) 405

My server spends /some/ time idle, but a lot of the time it is handling 4 Java processes.

These processes do low-latency transactional stuff. Typically, each tick of a job is so small that it doesn't trigger a frequency stepping of the CPU. Windows doesn't schedule these very well, typically making the single threads hop between CPU cores and actual CPU's.

It all conspires to make performance suck unless I keep the CPU's running at full speed.

Yes, I've tried setting processor affinity. It's of limited use.

Comment Re:Maybe, maybe not... (Score 1) 405

Your great, my great and everyone else's great may be entirely different ;)

I've been waiting for true curved surfaces in games since... well, since there were 3D cards that did both 2D and 3D.

Improved lighting, reflections (including reflected light/shadow casting), caustics and fluid motion... these are things I want to see in games. These are also all things not requiring much more effort from modelers and artists but /do/ require more horsepower from GPU's.

Comment Re:Maybe, maybe not... (Score 1) 405

Would you prefer that we take e.g. the new ATI 7xxx series GPUs, set that as a "this is fast enough and has as many features as we ever need" benchmark and focus any future advancement on making GPU's that are exactly the same, only they use less power?

The 'need' for advancement comes not just from making players feel more immersed, it's about meeting the requirements of HPC in order to provide realtime data visualisation and rapid number crunching. A lot of drug research is done via simulation of protein interaction, which lends itself perfectly to running on GPU's (hence the Folding@Home project).

In 10 years time, most of us will be enjoying our Super-HD screens. Some of us may be enjoying our Super-HD, QLED, 48 bit colour, 120Hz, 3D, high dynamic range screens. Some of us may even have 3 of them in a multi-monitor config. That could potentially mean a GPU having to drive a (virtual) display resolution of 12288x2560. That is a minimum 180MB frame buffer needing to be refreshed 120 times per second.

It's the difference between having to process 7GB/s versus today's reasonable maximum of 0.35GB/s. That will require some advancements in (GDDR) memory technology as well as obvious improvements to GPU performance. If we maintain the current pace of advancement, this may be possible within the next 5 years.

Comment Re:Most people don't understand that it's a bad id (Score 1) 405

Perhaps they are content to derive £800+ from CPU's that run at a nominal 3.33GHz for now.

If you think marketing and pricing strategies are so simple, perhaps you ought to tell us more about how you could improve Intel's market position and profitability by making some simple changes to the way they do things?

Comment Re:Maybe, maybe not... (Score 1) 405

I've only recently swapped my 7800GTX 256MB for a GT440 (a nice GDDR5 version).

New card uses half the energy and performs quite a lot faster. When was a 7800GTX brand new? I paid >£300 for it, that much I can remember.

Next upgrade will be when I can buy a card requiring no more than 75W (i.e., no external PCIe power) yet runs slightly faster than a GTX580.

IMHO games to be more visually appealing need to ditch the idea of polygons altogether and be comprised of voxels or truly curved surfaces and implement at least some elements of ray-traced lighting and material properties.

Fairly sure this will be happening within 20 years.

Comment Re:v2 has been giving me crashes. (Score 1) 175

I'm not in the US. Also, sarcasm.

Not only am I going to look after their IT, I'm going to be jointly responsible for writing and enforcing their compliance policy.

Personal data is currently secured by dint of everyone using Remote Desktop to get into the Win 2008 server, where the full-on policy, claims, accounting and document management software resides. They're still going through a transition to this new software, away from a Citrix Metaframe accessible remote provider (which was utterly debilitating, having only been provisioned with 1Mb of access bandwidth and some clearly overtasked servers on the other end).

Unfortunately, the incumbent 3rd-party IT support company fail to recognise any of the already problematic malware attack vectors. The main one being that people are using the RDP shortcut from personal laptops with no control whatsoever. I took on the role a little over 1 full week ago and already there have been 2 instances of laptop users bringing in malware resulting from their home internet activity. My real job is explaining to the directors the why's and how's of this being a really bad idea.

Oh, and the Win 2008 server hasn't even got BitLocker switched on.

Comment Re:v2 has been giving me crashes. (Score 1) 175

I do hope I don't get to work tomorrow to find MSE has updated itself to V2.

I'm in the process of taking over responsibility of our entire IT and it's a nightmare of mis-matched, outdated hardware and utterly pathetic security policies (lack thereof). There are Win 2000 machines on the network with no AV installed and there are XP machines with MSE installed, a terminal services server (Win 2008, the 'Vista' version) with AVG on it.

Oh, and the company I work for is an insurance broker. Security somewhat essential.

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