50% of the time, it's covered every time.

The C6950 and C6970 can come from the same wafer yet not be equivalent. Semiconductor wafers, like everything else that is manufactured, do not always come out exactly to spec. Instead they lie within a certain tolerance. The C6970 may require etchings that are 45 nm +/- 0.5 nm. The C6950 could have more relaxed tolerances, and only require 45 nm +/- 2.0 nm. Only 10% of the yield may meet the specifications required by the C6970. Also, the C6950 does not use as much of the die area, so that zone does not need to be to spec.

Assuming they have identical warranties, the C6970 probably goes through more rigorous burn-in and testing at the factory.

Chips on the GTX 480, C2050, and C2070 come from the exact same die and wafer. The C20XX GPUs actually run at a lower clock speed for 32-bit floating-point and integer operations than a GTX 480.

C20XX series hardware is intended for physics/science/engineering calculations, where double-precision is preferred. The C20XX series is 4 times faster at double-precision calculations than the GTX 480. This is the sweet spot it is tuned for.

It's natural

Sure you do. Have you ever looked at the wheels of a car traveling next to you?

If our rods and cones were precisely synchronized, we would see perfectly sharp discrete changes in the rotation (like a stroboscope would produce). But we don't, it's blurry. The _net_ rotation appears to be clockwise, counterclockwise, or stationary, but there's some fuzziness in our perception of the current state of the wheel.

I'm waiting for the abacus Doom port.

Any hack can make a gorgeous looking 3D world. id has always led the pack by delivering that experience under real-world hardware constraints.

I downloaded this expecting a ported version of the 1993 Doom. I was pleasantly surprised and very impressed when a fully 3D environment with Doom 3 media loaded up.

NASA does super cool work, but they have billions of dollars and an army of PhD's at their disposal. We like MacGyver because he solves problems with whatever he's given. iPhone developers are given a 412 MHz ARM processor, 128 MB of RAM, a 3-axis accelerometer, and a touch screen.

I think John Carmack and Co. are excited about developing for the iPhone because it's a fresh technical challenge for them. DR is an impressive accomplishment. Given the hardware constraints, and the fact that the game needs to be fun, I'm not sure what I would have done differently.

If your school has Simulink, there's a physical modeling (e.g. circuits) module for it called Simscape. The circuit models are supported on and will run identically on Windows, Linux, and Mac.