wishlists

[Norman Vine]

Ed McNierney writes:
>
> Having (formerly) been in the business of building accelerated graphics
> hardware for a while, I'll respectfully disagree unless you've got some
> test data.  You're presuming that, for small patterned vectors, a
> graphics processor can "blow the doors off" a general-purpose processor,
> and that's really not likely to be the case.  These operations are quite
> simple, and the limiting factor tends to be memory bandwidth, rather
> than the drawing capabilities of the processor.  Preloading the pattern
> is trivial - it's manipulating the RAM that's the bulk of the work.
>
> 3D graphics rendering requires quite a bit of math, and the construction
> and acceleration of rendering pipelines is a BIG improvement.  But 2D
> line drawing, pattern filling and the like primarily consists of loading
> patterns and stamping them out into RAM, and most CPUs manage RAM
> read/modify/write cycles just fine.
>
> In fact, many of the recent major improvements in graphics hardware have
> focused more on improving the card's access to memory than on anything
> else.

"""Quartz Extreme uses a supported graphics card built into your Mac to
relieve the main PowerPC chip of on screen calculations.  This dramatically
improves system performance, making Panther much more responsive."""
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/

Also expect the 'bus' to get quite a bit better in the near future :-)
http://www.interfacebus.com/Design_Connector_PCI_Express.html

Cheers

Norman