From: Clinton Alexander (clinton@clintonalexander.com)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 22:01:13 MDT
Samantha wrote:
I'm trying to imagine the real-time rendering capability of a chip
running at this speed.
Of course, it will largely depend on developers taking advantage of it,
but holy cow
-------------
I work in design and development along with many of my friends. If IBM
makes graphics hardware run that fast, designers and developers will
defintely take advantage of it and push it's limits. We love video
games. The more immersive, the better. Eventually, I think we'd like
full immersion in a whole new digital world via virtual reality. When
it becomes good enough to mimic reality without breaking the suspension
of disbelief, now that will be something.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-extropians@extropy.org [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]
On Behalf Of Samantha Tennison
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 11:59 AM
To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: The 2005 PC: Quantum Leap?
I've been following many of the bleeding edge trends
the last few months, and from all appearances there
appears to be a quantum leap in computer performance
and capacity on its way. Here are the following leaps
I am currently aware of:
MRAM - Magnetic RAM:
According to most sources MRAM will be commercially
available in early 2004. And mass production by the
end of 2004. For those who don't know, MRAM allows for instant-on
computing - no more boot up time! The question posed here, is do you see
it coming into wide use by 2005, and will it replace normal DDR-II or
III RAM or supplement it?
Holographic Storage:
Already In-Phase Technologies has a working prototype
that stores over 100 Gbytes per removable disk. A
company in Japan has demonstrated a system that can
hold over a Terabyte per CD-sized Disk. The Japanees
expect this to become commercially avaialble by
2004-5. Imagine what you could do with a Terabyte -
Thats equiavalent to a million books (a university
library), 100 DVD movies, 1400 CD's of music, etc.
Question posed here, is do you believe these reports?
Are we seeing the birth of the new de-facto removable
storage media?
PCI Express (previously 3GIO):
This new motherboard architecture is the most
substantial improvement in over a decade. AGP speeds
are expected to exceed x32, and the throuput on the
board itself will be accelerated dramatically.
Graphics Acceleration - post NV30, and IBM's "The
Cell":
IBM is claiming their new graphics processor is
capable of performaing a Teraflop (thats 1 trillion
floating point operations per second)! I find this
somewhat hard to believe, but if its true, we are
talking about more than a 100-fold increase in
graphics processing power. They are expecting these
new chips to be avaialble in early 2004, and already
there is talk of becoming the core chip in the
Playstation 3. I'm trying to imagine the real-time
rendering capability of a chip running at this speed.
Of course, it will largely depend on developers taking advantage of it,
but holy cow. What types of graphics applications do you see. Will this
be the power we need to finally have realistic VR?
Samantha
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