I've seen a lot of these Deadmeat-esque threads about estimated performance of the newfangled game playing hoodads, and it saddens me to see so much bunk reasoning being thrown around. If we're going to do this on the boards, we should all sit down and make sure that everyone understands the fundamentals of architecture, and above that, the whos whats and whys of parallelism and performance.
Also, I just drank a crapload more caffeine than I should have, so I'm not getting any work done at all.
SO, if you have a question about how math gets done on a computer these days, ask away, and if you have an answers (please be educated if you plan on chiming in though. this is about information, not misinformation - if you have some notion that you think is right but are not sure about, or something that you've heard, feel free to mention it, but be explicit in how confident you are in this information), feel free to jump in!
What this should be:
An informative resource for those in and outside of the field to learn about high and low level concepts and implementation-issues inherent in parallel computing (of all degrees). Examples of great topics of discussion are: thread-abstractions in different languages, historical, modern, and future ILP, multi-core CPUs from the VLSI to the systems level, performance modeling in parallel vs full sequential environments, etc.
What this should not be:
A debate thread. I don't want to talk about whether Ps3.14.. or XBOX about-face is faster than all/some/any competitor products. I especially don't want this to devolve into a fanboy bitchfest or a pseudo-science drivel arena.
I also don't want it to turn into an engineering chest puffing contest. This should be about explaining computer science concepts and making sure everyone is on the same page. If you do have useful anecdotes, please share them, but make sure they're relevant, and try not to portray yourself as some kind of engineering god/dess because you can switch on thread-safe std libs in studio.NET.
Finally: PLEASE try to refrain from the deadmeat math. If you absolutely have to throw numbers aroun, back everything up, with references if possible.
Also, I just drank a crapload more caffeine than I should have, so I'm not getting any work done at all.
SO, if you have a question about how math gets done on a computer these days, ask away, and if you have an answers (please be educated if you plan on chiming in though. this is about information, not misinformation - if you have some notion that you think is right but are not sure about, or something that you've heard, feel free to mention it, but be explicit in how confident you are in this information), feel free to jump in!
What this should be:
An informative resource for those in and outside of the field to learn about high and low level concepts and implementation-issues inherent in parallel computing (of all degrees). Examples of great topics of discussion are: thread-abstractions in different languages, historical, modern, and future ILP, multi-core CPUs from the VLSI to the systems level, performance modeling in parallel vs full sequential environments, etc.
What this should not be:
A debate thread. I don't want to talk about whether Ps3.14.. or XBOX about-face is faster than all/some/any competitor products. I especially don't want this to devolve into a fanboy bitchfest or a pseudo-science drivel arena.
I also don't want it to turn into an engineering chest puffing contest. This should be about explaining computer science concepts and making sure everyone is on the same page. If you do have useful anecdotes, please share them, but make sure they're relevant, and try not to portray yourself as some kind of engineering god/dess because you can switch on thread-safe std libs in studio.NET.
Finally: PLEASE try to refrain from the deadmeat math. If you absolutely have to throw numbers aroun, back everything up, with references if possible.