On Tue, 17 May 2005, William Chops Westfield wrote:

> On May 17, 2005, at 6:29 AM, Peter wrote:
>
>> Next year's games consoles will feature 2x3.2GHz cpus (Xbox 360)
>
> ouch.  I have a dual 3.2GHz motherboard in my office right now.  I guess
> with a game console the sounds of gunshots will overwhelm noise of the fans?

huh ;-) There are some nice new fanless coolers out there. At least one 
uses heatpipes and a huge case-radiator (a whole side of the case is the 
radiator - no need for fins at that size). Conduction cooling is pretty 
much standard in more serious equipment (even in camcorders and dvd 
players!). It is not cheap. It can easily add $100 to a machine's cost 
(pc level hardware).

>> If that is true than the consoles will outperform most desktop systems sold 
>> in 2006
> Game consoles have exceeded desktop performance for a long time, if 
> you benchmark things like end graphics performance.  For things OTHER 
> than graphics and similar, most desktop systems aren't CPU-limited 
> anyway.

I am not so sure. The PS2 had a relatively low power cpu one year after 
it was released. Sometimes playing the same game on a PS2 and on a PC 
was better on the PC (with accelerated AGP graphics) (saw it myself, the 
game was Rayman afaik, the PC was a 1.something GHz all-in-one with a 
nvidia agp video card).

>>  (few of which will feature dual CPUs).
> I think you underestimate the number of dual-cpu desktops being deployed, 
> too.

Maybe I do but most desktop users will not buy a dual anything. You are 
probably not the average desktop user (and very few people on this list 
would be). Most low cost systems sold today are the all-in-one variety, 
with single CPU and huge penalty on concurrent access by cpu and video 
to RAM via PCI bus.

Peter
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist