GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

What PC Games are you Waiting For?
Posted in Gamer PC | June 9, 2009 6am

I was reading an interview with Epic’s Tim Sweeney the other day and Tim brought up a very interesting point:“That's a tricky case though, because we could do vastly more than we're currently doing if we focused on supporting dual high-end video cards, which have about 10 times the graphics horsepower of a console today.” - Tim SweeneyTake a high end gaming PC with two GPUs and you’ve got 10x the graphics power of an Xbox 360.  That’s pretty ridiculous.  With only a single GPU we’re talking 5x the graphics power.  Yet today’s games are designed for the least common denominator.  With Microsoft and Sony trying to extend console life spans into 2011 and beyond it kills me to see a serious lack of pushing-the-envelope games on the PC.  Honestly, BioShock 2 is probably going to be the biggest title for me on the PC this year.  Everything else is either a console exclusive or won’t hit the PC until sometime after a console release.  With 5 - 10x more graphics horsepower on high end gaming PCs today and even more by the end of this year, I’m hoping that eventually the performance gap will tempt more developers over to PCs once more.

What about all of you - what PC games are you looking forward to this year? 

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

Two Important Trends in the CPU Industry
Posted in Gamer PC | May 31, 2009 9pm

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about cores and clock speeds lately and I think we’re seeing some very important trends starting to form in the microprocessor industry.

It’s not about cores or clock speeds, it’s about resources.  Today’s x86 processors have anywhere from one to eight cores and run at anywhere from low 1GHz clocks all the way up to 3.33GHz.  The problem is that clock speeds go up a lot from one to two cores but then drop down a lot from two to four and eight cores.  You have to make a lot of decisions based on what sorts of applications you run.  Do you pick more cores at lower speeds or fewer cores at higher speeds?  What about when we get products like Larrabee that have 32+ very weak cores?  In the long run this is unsustainable.  Will we really be expected to choose between a faster general purpose 8 core processor or a mixed purpose 24 core processor?  No one wants to make those sorts of decisions.  With technologies like variable clock frequencies (aka Intel’s turbo mode) I believe we’ll see CPUs that can always deliver optimal performance depending on the workload.  We’ll see variable clock frequencies (to much greater degrees) depending on how many cores are in use and also varying types of cores; low power, low performance ones for light tasks, high performance ones for getting real work done.
Managing all of these resources takes a lot of effort.  Intel’s Core i7 dedicates around 1 million transistors (about as many as Intel’s 486) just to power and clock speed management; future processors will need to dedicate more.  The original Pentium processor had 3.1 million transistors.  In only a couple of processor generations we will need a more complex processor just to handle core power and clock speed management for our desktop and notebook CPUs.

To the uninformed end user it’s going to be kept as simple as possible.  If anything, it’ll be even better to be a consumer once all of these trends pan out.  Today you have to make decisions about core count vs. clock speed, in the future I’m guessing it’ll be more about general performance; the CPU itself will worry about how many cores you need and how fast you need them to run.  In essence, the simplicity of choosing a CPU from a decade ago will return.
 Intel’s vision for the future of microprocessors.  I’m starting to believe it’s right....as long as marketing doesn’t flub things up too much.

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

Building a HTPC is Easier than Ever
Posted in Gamer PC | May 19, 2009 8am

I built my first real HTPC in May of 2008.  I’d built machines to play videos on a TV before, but this thing was designed to go in my home theater.  It was quiet, could play HD content and generally worked pretty well.

I used an AMD 780G micro-ATX motherboard with an Athlon X2 4850e processor.  The CPU wasn’t fast enough to decode Blu-ray discs but the 780G could do all of the video decoding on its graphics core, negating the need for a fast CPU.  I paired the entire system up with a 385W Enermax Pro82+ power supply and connected it via HDMI to my receiver.I don’t like the idea of swapping discs so I used AnyDVD HD to decrypt Blu-ray discs and tossed them on a large NAS I built on my network.  I then used two applications: MyMovies and Sam Saffron’s Video Browser (now just called Video Browser for MCE) to manage content on the box.  The end result was a pretty sweet interface for browsing movies under Vista Media Center:

The machine worked quite well but just this past month I had the opportunity to test something that was just as capable, but consumed far less power and was noticeably smaller.I’ve talked about NVIDIA’s Ion platform before, it’s the combination of a CPU and NVIDIA’s GeForce 9300 chipset.  The first incarnation of Ion uses Intel’s Atom processor and Zotac was the first manufacturer to release a mini-ITX motherboard based on this platform.I reviewed Zotac’s Ion last week and was thoroughly impressed.  The system just worked.
With minimal configuration (thanks to a better state of codecs and DXVA acceleration under Vista to begin with), I had a drop in replacement to my HTPC.  Decoding Blu-rays wasn’t an issue, although admittedly the Media Browser interface was a bit sluggish compared to my regular box.  Power consumption is a meager 28W under load and the board/CPU/GPU are fine running without a fan (although a slow spinning case fan wouldn’t hurt to keep things cool.I believe a HTPC is still the best way to get access to all of your content on a TV and with fairly modest (and affordable) PC hardware, it’s now even more possible.
 

GAMER PC PC : DISCUSSION

Q4, 2009 or Q1, 2010: When you Should Buy your Next Notebook
Posted in Gamer PC | May 12, 2009 7am

It’s codenamed Arrandale and if you’re looking for a reason to upgrade your notebook, I believe this may just be that reason.

Intel’s Arrandale processor is a member of the Westmere family.  None of these code names really matter because they’ll be gone by the time the product ships.  All you need to know is that Arrandale will be the 32nm mobile version of Intel’s Core i7.  It may get called something else (Core i5 perhaps?), but it’s the lineage that counts folks.
Arrandale is a dual core chip with Hyper Threading, meaning it can work on four threads at once.  If the impact of HT on Core i7 is any indication, we should see some serious performance gains simply due to HT on its dual core brethren.
Intel launched i7 at the very high end and the technology will trickle down over time.  Thanks to its high end nature, the chips all drew high wattages. Despite that fact, the Core i7 was particularly power efficient.  At the same TDP as its Core 2 predecessor, the Core i7 will generally draw less power while offering the same performance, or offer better performance per watt.  While this is a nice feature to have on a high end desktop, it’s absolutely necessary on a notebook.
My guess for performance?  I believe, depending on the app, you’ll see similar improvements to what we saw on the desktop with i7.  That is 0 - 30% at the same clock speed compared to an existing Core 2 notebook.Battery life should improve as well thanks to Arrandale’s superior power efficiency.
All of these are safe bets but there’s just one more thing.  Arrandale ships with a 45nm graphics core on the same package as the CPU.  It’s not going to be anything earth shattering in terms of gaming performance (albeit better than existing Intel graphics), but power consumption should be quite good.
Arrandale is due out in the last three months of 2009, but OEMs may not have notebooks until the start of 2010 (hence the range in the title).  I’m betting the wait will be worth it.