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Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
The encoding engine will be nice for video chat and poo poo like that, saving power and such.

But for proper video encoding (like "archiving" movies), it's loving useless. For one there's no two-pass mode, if necessary, like to hit a certain file size, and two, I really doubt that an on-chip implementation can reach the complexity of a software implementation. You know, when it comes to analyzing the image content and deciding how to compress something efficiently in both size and quality.

I really wanted the GPU to have GPGPU capability, to get free physics acceleration. But hey, can't have everything.

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Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

Doc Block posted:

Kind of annoying then that the article you quoted says the hardware is fixed-function only when they actually just meant no GPGPU support but still supports DirectX/OpenGL shaders.

Anandtech posted:

SNB graphics is the anti-Larrabee. While Larrabee focused on extensive use of fully programmable hardware (with the exception of the texture hardware), SNB graphics (internally referred to as Gen 6 graphics) makes extensive use of fixed function hardware. The design mentality was anything that could be described by a fixed function should be implemented in fixed function hardware. The benefit is performance/power/die area efficiency, at the expense of flexibility. Keeping much of the GPU fixed function is in-line with Intel’s CPU centric view of the world. By contrast, taking the GPU as programmable as possible makes more sense for a GPU focused company like NVIDIA.
The point is that everything that could be fixed-function is fixed-function, but it still has the bare minimum of programmable functionality (the Execution Units).

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Combat Pretzel posted:

The encoding engine will be nice for video chat and poo poo like that, saving power and such.
It seems obvious to me that this is targeted at netbooks and similar form-factors, and I don't know why people are putting so much effort into dissecting how horrible it is at replacing their GPGPUs and video encoders.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

Misogynist posted:

It seems obvious to me that this is targeted at netbooks and similar form-factors, and I don't know why people are putting so much effort into dissecting how horrible it is at replacing their GPGPUs and video encoders.
It's actually for regular desktops and laptops, though the Atom System-on-a-Chips that Intel has been debuting at IDF have the same Media Engine.

BangersInMyKnickers
Nov 3, 2004

I have a thing for courageous dongles

Misogynist posted:

It seems obvious to me that this is targeted at netbooks and similar form-factors, and I don't know why people are putting so much effort into dissecting how horrible it is at replacing their GPGPUs and video encoders.

What do you mean it won't do something for a market segment they were never targeting?? I demand satisfaction!!

BangersInMyKnickers
Nov 3, 2004

I have a thing for courageous dongles

Assuming Dell starts offering on-board video with dual-display outputs on the next gen of Optiplexes, this will probably get us to drop add-in video cards for everything except Autodesk product users.

Ryokurin
Jul 14, 2001

Wanna Die?
I'm interested in Sandy Bridge, but I'm more interested in Zacate as it's benching faster than a i5m chip. It's giving me hope that Llano will be nice hardware.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3920/amd-benchmarks-zacate-apu-2x-faster-gpu-performance-than-core-i5

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3933/amds-zacate-apu-performance-update

I still think that at least for next year, most of us are still going to want discrete cards, so what I'm shopping for is for HTPCs, which sandy bridge may be a little bit overkill for. if Zacate can handle 1080i without the need for a discrete card I will be overjoyed. I have to ignore all the atoms or most onboard solutions nowadays because no one cares about 1080i.

Doc Block
Apr 15, 2003
Fun Shoe

Alereon posted:

The point is that everything that could be fixed-function is fixed-function, but it still has the bare minimum of programmable functionality (the Execution Units).

Yes, I realize that now. I was just referring to your own quote in the OP, where it says no programmability, and thought that meant no sharer support.

Still kind of lame for Intel to gimp the GPU so as to not threaten their CPU business.

BangersInMyKnickers
Nov 3, 2004

I have a thing for courageous dongles

Doc Block posted:

Yes, I realize that now. I was just referring to your own quote in the OP, where it says no programmability, and thought that meant no sharer support.

Still kind of lame for Intel to gimp the GPU so as to not threaten their CPU business.

They're "gimping" their GPU to fulfill power/speed/size demands of a market segment that in no way gives a poo poo about their graphics hardware being fully programmable.

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

Ryokurin posted:

I'm interested in Sandy Bridge, but I'm more interested in Zacate as it's benching faster than a i5m chip. It's giving me hope that Llano will be nice hardware.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3920/amd-benchmarks-zacate-apu-2x-faster-gpu-performance-than-core-i5

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3933/amds-zacate-apu-performance-update

I still think that at least for next year, most of us are still going to want discrete cards, so what I'm shopping for is for HTPCs, which sandy bridge may be a little bit overkill for. if Zacate can handle 1080i without the need for a discrete card I will be overjoyed. I have to ignore all the atoms or most onboard solutions nowadays because no one cares about 1080i.
Yeah Zacate looks to be pretty cool. I wouldn't say Sandy Bridge will be overkill for HTPC applications, as you need a reasonably fast GPU (R5570/GT 220) to do the vector adaptive deinterlacing that makes interlaced content look good. It looks like Zacate will bring that kind of performance to the table, but it remains to be seen what kind of video quality Sandy Bridge will offer. I do think Sandy Bridge will pair extremely well with nVidia's Optimus switchable graphics technology in notebooks, since it will let the dedicated GPU stay completely powered down except when gaming. For some strange reason Optimus implementations so far have tended to use crap GPUs, so having a decent integrated GPU will force nVidia to provide decent solutions to provide some contrast.

movax
Aug 30, 2008

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

Assuming Dell starts offering on-board video with dual-display outputs on the next gen of Optiplexes, this will probably get us to drop add-in video cards for everything except Autodesk product users.

This would be sexiful. I hate having to run two full-size graphics card for four displays...even having one output available on the mobo would be nice. DisplayPort connectors are tiny...I'm sure the Asus and Gigabyte "premium holy-poo poo" mobos will probably offer 2x DP (or 1xDP + HDMI) connectivity, in addition to strapping on USB3.0 hardware.

Now to decide which CPU to get...2600 or 2500. Not terribly interested in OCing now, I just want to strap an awesome CPU to like, 12GB of RAM and a bitchin' SSD.

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

Assuming Dell starts offering on-board video with dual-display outputs on the next gen of Optiplexes, this will probably get us to drop add-in video cards for everything except Autodesk product users.

That really seems to be the main design goal. Much better solution than some lovely OB graphics processor or cheapo drop-in card that isn't good for games anyway.

I do see the concern that it might stifle GPU development to a degree. Personally, I see a future where computers are based around 2 separate main chips. One that is blazingly fast at serial, or not quite parallel tasks, and one that can handle those (comparably) rare scenarios that benefit from massive, fully-independent parallelization. The existence of GPGPU proves that there is a need, but until s/w starts to take advantage of massive parallelization for things other than, well, graphics/physics, there won't be much movement

Zhentar
Sep 28, 2003

Brilliant Master Genius

Misogynist posted:

It seems obvious to me that this is targeted at netbooks and similar form-factors, and I don't know why people are putting so much effort into dissecting how horrible it is at replacing their GPGPUs and video encoders.

Probably because the thread title proclaims it will "change the face of computing".

B-Nasty posted:

Personally, I see a future where computers are based around 2 separate main chips. One that is blazingly fast at serial, or not quite parallel tasks, and one that can handle those (comparably) rare scenarios that benefit from massive, fully-independent parallelization.

You're sort of wrong. It's only going to be a single chip, and we can already see it's first stage in the form of Turbo Boost. The future is a single chip which can reconfigure itself for better parallel or serial throughput based on the current task.

ate shit on live tv
Feb 15, 2004

by Azathoth
I'll be keeping an eye on these as I'm feeling the itch to build another "1-step below" best computer. And it seems with the way the Hardware/Software market is going, I probably won't need to be building another computer for a LOOOONG time, like 5+ years.

The computer I have is a pretty old E6600 that I built right when C2D came out. I put about 300 more dollars into it since then, and I could probably keep this computer for the next 3 years without any problems.

TOOT BOOT
May 25, 2010

I'm actually worried a little by the trend that computers are 'fast enough' for most people.

The public sees a lot of benefits from fast processors being available, even if it doesn't relate to how they use their own personal computer. Unfortunately chip fabrication is very expensive and we probably still need to be selling those chips at consumer volumes.

Gucci Loafers
May 20, 2006

Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?


Eh. I'm more interested in, how long is going to take until we can play all our games @1080p without any hiccups? Yea, most of the time it runs well, but there's still that occasional stutter - which I think is really unacceptable.

El Bandit
Mar 6, 2010

Powercrazy posted:

The computer I have is a pretty old E6600 that I built right when C2D came out. I put about 300 more dollars into it since then, and I could probably keep this computer for the next 3 years without any problems.
I'm in the same boat - I bought a E6750 three years ago, now overclocked to 3.2GHz, and replaced my old Nvidia card with a 4890 about 18 months ago. I don't do anything that really benefits from four or six cores and games still run great, so there's no need to upgrade. This build will last at least another 12-18 months.

As someone said above, the mind blowing days of going from a P60 to P266 seem to be over.

Ethereal
Mar 8, 2003

TOOT BOOT posted:

I'm actually worried a little by the trend that computers are 'fast enough' for most people.

The public sees a lot of benefits from fast processors being available, even if it doesn't relate to how they use their own personal computer. Unfortunately chip fabrication is very expensive and we probably still need to be selling those chips at consumer volumes.

Computers are never going to be fast enough or power efficient enough for companies with large data centers. I don't think a slowdown in the consumer space would really affect much.

movax
Aug 30, 2008

Ethereal posted:

Computers are never going to be fast enough or power efficient enough for companies with large data centers. I don't think a slowdown in the consumer space would really affect much.

I'd imagine that they are pretty pumped about any advances that let you pack more cores into a smaller space with lesser power consumption. Good for regular-Joe consumers too.

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


Ethereal posted:

Computers are never going to be fast enough or power efficient enough for companies with large data centers. I don't think a slowdown in the consumer space would really affect much.

Exactly, business and science will always demand more more more.

What I'm interested in is seeing what things might crop up in the consumer space since all this incredible computing power is available.

~Coxy
Dec 9, 2003

R.I.P. Inter-OS Sass - b.2000AD d.2003AD
I'm a bit disappointed by the lack of PCI-E lanes and USB 3 support.
Do we have a rough date for the 1366 replacement?

Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice
One thing to keep in mind is that we're not going to see much development of interesting applications until Windows XP is dead and gone and everyone has switched to Windows Vista/7 64-bit. Without DirectX10 developers can't make applications that take advantage of hardware accelerated rendering via Direct2D, and without 64-bit support applications can't use more than 2GB of RAM, and the system can't have more than ~3GB of RAM total. Thankfully we've finally reached the point where any hardware old enough to not have 64-bit drivers is probably too old to be useful, and adoption of Windows 7 64-bit is growing at a pretty rapid rate. Once developers no longer have to target the lowest common denominator running Windows XP on a Pentium 4, we might see some cool stuff.

Doc Block
Apr 15, 2003
Fun Shoe
Unfortunately there are a lot of businesses with no plans whatsoever to upgrade beyond XP in the immediate future.

Fats
Oct 14, 2006

What I cannot create, I do not understand
Fun Shoe

El Bandit posted:

As someone said above, the mind blowing days of going from a P60 to P266 seem to be over.

I went from a Pentium 4 to an i7 920, that was pretty incredible.

WhyteRyce
Dec 30, 2001

~Coxy posted:

I'm a bit disappointed by the lack of PCI-E lanes and USB 3 support.
Do we have a rough date for the 1366 replacement?

What lack of PCIe lanes?

The lack of USB3 is kind of a shame but it's less bad now that DMI and the PCIe lanes on the PCH are gen 2.

WhyteRyce fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Sep 16, 2010

~Coxy
Dec 9, 2003

R.I.P. Inter-OS Sass - b.2000AD d.2003AD
16 + 4 lanes in total, right? Main graphics interface + DMI bus.
It would be enough assuming your only intended PCI-E card is a GPU, but I would like enough for a RAID card and a few spare on top as well.

Space Gopher
Jul 31, 2006

BLITHERING IDIOT AND HARDCORE DURIAN APOLOGIST. LET ME TELL YOU WHY THIS SHIT DON'T STINK EVEN THOUGH WE ALL KNOW IT DOES BECAUSE I'M SUPER CULTURED.

~Coxy posted:

16 + 4 lanes in total, right? Main graphics interface + DMI bus.
It would be enough assuming your only intended PCI-E card is a GPU, but I would like enough for a RAID card and a few spare on top as well.

Well, first off, if you really need non-chipset RAID on the desktop you're almost certainly building a workstation, and Intel would very much prefer that you buy one of their fancier chipsets for that. They're not really trying to cater to you, here. 99% of the desktop market will get by just fine with 16 PCIe lanes off of the CPU, and a handful from the southbridge.

Second, there are plenty of P55 chipset boards which support x8/x8 operation. That's enough to run a video card and RAID card at the same time, and you still have the southbridge connections (up to 8 lanes, although of course you're limited by the 10Gbps link between CPU and southbridge) if you want more peripherals. If you really must have more, there are boards available with PCIe switch chips, as well.

Ryokurin
Jul 14, 2001

Wanna Die?

Doc Block posted:

Unfortunately there are a lot of businesses with no plans whatsoever to upgrade beyond XP in the immediate future.

The same thing happened when NT4 was released. They'll move when MS drops support completely and developers stop writing drivers. I got a feeling developers are going to start dropping driver support next year, and despite what Gizmodo and a other blogs think XP support ends 2014, not 2020. (that's when Windows 7 support ends. MS just said they will allow you to downgrade to XP if you wish but you are unsupported) By 2014 we should be on Windows 8 anyways.

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!

Mr VacBob posted:

A CPU is a much better video encoder than any kind of GPU for all kinds of great reasons
AFAIK this has to do with the quality of the current software for GPU's rather than the GPU's themselves. nV has been pushing GPU software (CUDA) development along more than AMD, at least up until recently, which is kind've bizarre considering AMD's long term strategy WRT GPU's (Fusion).

The software/hardware issue for GPU's has always been a sort of chicken/egg scenario, so either AMD or nV will have to write their own video encoding software or pay someone else to do it. If they do it properly though it should be better, possibly quite a bit better, than what SB has.

KKKLIP ART posted:

I'm also waiting for a reasonably priced 120+ GB SSD (I may be waiting for a while) for a boot and some app drive. Ive watched enough of those "boot windows and launch 150 program" videos to see how stupidly fast they are.
They're starting to get reasonably priced in the last few weeks. Starting to see deals like this pop up more and more now. Well under $2/GB is not bad at all right now for a SSD with speeds like that. If you wait 'til the end of the year or early next the price per GB is supposedly going to drop quite a bit from there, also new controllers from Intel too should be faster and more reliable.

TOOT BOOT posted:

I imagine this will provide a bit of a boost to PC Gaming as soon as these start filtering down into pre-built PCs.
Oh yes. This really raises the bar on the lower end that developers will have to target when writing future software both from a performance and feature (DX10!) standpoint.

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

They're "gimping" their GPU to fulfill power/speed/size demands of a market segment that in no way gives a poo poo about their graphics hardware being fully programmable.
This is certainly true right now, but in a few years or so maybe (maaaybe) not. It'd be nice to have a GPU in most every PC that would support GPGPU apps, it'd certainly help foster the development of GPGPU apps.

BangersInMyKnickers
Nov 3, 2004

I have a thing for courageous dongles

Doc Block posted:

Unfortunately there are a lot of businesses with no plans whatsoever to upgrade beyond XP in the immediate future.

I'm guessing at some point a proper study about TCO for XP vs Win7 is going to come out factoring in all the man hours sunk in having tier 1 chase down the stupid viruses that would have easily been stopped by just having Win7 in place, it'll get hyped through a bunch of management tech rags, and then CTOs will start screaming about migrating. The only business requirement that is actually forcing people in to upgrading at this point is graphics design people and engineers/3d modeling.

PC LOAD LETTER posted:

This is certainly true right now, but in a few years or so maybe (maaaybe) not. It'd be nice to have a GPU in most every PC that would support GPGPU apps, it'd certainly help foster the development of GPGPU apps.

Possibly, but there is a huge sector of their business customers that simply aren't going to see any use out of this and if dropping it means cheaper chips, they'll go that route because their workload is serial in nature and 2-4 cores is going to be enough to handle small spikes in load and background tasks while being responsive. Where are you going to shoehorn GPGPU support in to the Office suite besides Excel jockeys? Especially considering Microsoft is already trying to abstract heavy lifting there to a server cluster behind the workstation.

4 Day Weekend
Jan 16, 2009

Tab8715 posted:

Eh. I'm more interested in, how long is going to take until we can play all our games @1080p without any hiccups? Yea, most of the time it runs well, but there's still that occasional stutter - which I think is really unacceptable.

I'm not sure if this is correct or not, but I swear I read somewhere that the reason most games don't need much processing power is that most are designed to be able to run on consoles as well. So once next gen consoles roll around, we'll see a big jump in system requirements.

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


BangersInMyKnickers posted:

The only business requirement that is actually forcing people in to upgrading at this point is graphics design people and engineers/3d modeling.



Not necessarily. The same pressure that kept older versions of windows around (browser support) will also drive the older ones to go away too for general business users.

Web apps are still becoming more and more prevalent and the capabilities of older browsers just flat out suck. We don't support IE6 any more due to it's lovely handling of AJAX and anyone who wants to use our apps has to either use 7 or some other browser. As a result, we prompted an upgrade of a major pharmacy computer network so they could run IE7 (they were on XP embedded SP1 and Windows 2000). Yeah, they are still going to be on XP (just a newer version) but that sort of pressure is going to continue. IE9 will not go to XP and if companies are going to start utilizing web apps that require GPU acceleration for complex UIs, they need to upgrade.

freeforumuser
Aug 11, 2007

4 Day Weekend posted:

I'm not sure if this is correct or not, but I swear I read somewhere that the reason most games don't need much processing power is that most are designed to be able to run on consoles as well. So once next gen consoles roll around, we'll see a big jump in system requirements.

Assuming they aren't ported over to the PC craptacularly like Splinter Cell: Conviction. I didn't upgrade my graphics card to play games that look worse AND runs slower than before.

BangersInMyKnickers
Nov 3, 2004

I have a thing for courageous dongles

bull3964 posted:

Not necessarily. The same pressure that kept older versions of windows around (browser support) will also drive the older ones to go away too for general business users.

Web apps are still becoming more and more prevalent and the capabilities of older browsers just flat out suck. We don't support IE6 any more due to it's lovely handling of AJAX and anyone who wants to use our apps has to either use 7 or some other browser. As a result, we prompted an upgrade of a major pharmacy computer network so they could run IE7 (they were on XP embedded SP1 and Windows 2000). Yeah, they are still going to be on XP (just a newer version) but that sort of pressure is going to continue. IE9 will not go to XP and if companies are going to start utilizing web apps that require GPU acceleration for complex UIs, they need to upgrade.

We are so far away from the point where IE8 won't be supported and therefor need to get off XP to update it that it isn't even worth considering. Other factors will drive it before that.

Nebulis01
Dec 30, 2003
Technical Support Ninny

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

Assuming Dell starts offering on-board video with dual-display outputs on the next gen of Optiplexes, this will probably get us to drop add-in video cards for everything except Autodesk product users.

They do this now with a PCI-E add-on card that adds a DVI port and can be used in addition to the on board VGA connector. We've gotten all of our Optiplex 780s configured this way.

EDIT: the PCI-E add-on card isn't a second graphics card it just adds a DVI port to the on board Intel graphics.

Nomenklatura
Dec 4, 2002

If Canada is to survive, it can only survive in mutual respect and in love for one another.

TOOT BOOT posted:

I imagine this will provide a bit of a boost to PC Gaming as soon as these start filtering down into pre-built PCs.
This is the big take-away for me. Gaben must be dancing over this (before getting tired and eating another pizza...) because this is going to bring a SHITTON of people back to PC gaming who were too confused/frustrated/broke to buy discrete.

(It was also probably inevitable, since with the AMD buyout, Intel was basically at NVIDIA's mercy.)

It's also going to really help the browser game market out, since they can be more confident that people will have at least tolerable graphics capability. Nothing too overwhelming, and they wouldn't want that anyway because of costs, but enough to get the job done.

TOOT BOOT posted:

I'm actually worried a little by the trend that computers are 'fast enough' for most people.

The public sees a lot of benefits from fast processors being available, even if it doesn't relate to how they use their own personal computer. Unfortunately chip fabrication is very expensive and we probably still need to be selling those chips at consumer volumes.
Well, it's not really surprising. The killer app for the public is this here Internet we're sitting on, and the requirements it needs are dropping all the time. (Which is why we're seeing the big transition from desktop to laptop to netbook to gay little tablet thing.)

The big exception for consumer use was, and is, computer games. And, yes, they are completely locked down by the current extended hardware generation, though I suspect that will resolve itself when/if Move and Kinect fail to recapture the Wii's success. I suspect they're going to need to move ahead sooner than they'd like.

Gaben's little network does helps by providing an excellent distribution avenue for computer games that aren't simple console ports, but it's still early days for Steam. I don't think Steam will really hit critical mass until Microsoft gives up GFW for good and gets in bed with Valve like everybody else. In the meantime, what people have is generally what they need.

Nomenklatura fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Sep 16, 2010

BangersInMyKnickers
Nov 3, 2004

I have a thing for courageous dongles

Nebulis01 posted:

They do this now with a PCI-E add-on card that adds a DVI port and can be used in addition to the on board VGA connector. We've gotten all of our Optiplex 780s configured this way.

EDIT: the PCI-E add-on card isn't a second graphics card it just adds a DVI port to the on board Intel graphics.

I understand that. It just doesn't have enough oomph to do Aero composition well which is why we've been going with the 256MB addin to handle it.

MrBond
Feb 19, 2004

FYI, Cheese NIPS are not the same as Cheez ITS

Combat Pretzel posted:

The encoding engine will be nice for video chat and poo poo like that, saving power and such.

But for proper video encoding (like "archiving" movies), it's loving useless. For one there's no two-pass mode, if necessary, like to hit a certain file size, and two, I really doubt that an on-chip implementation can reach the complexity of a software implementation. You know, when it comes to analyzing the image content and deciding how to compress something efficiently in both size and quality.

I really wanted the GPU to have GPGPU capability, to get free physics acceleration. But hey, can't have everything.

I thought Handbrake and x264 shun 2-pass encodes in favor of the "quality based" ones now?

PC LOAD LETTER
May 23, 2005
WTF?!

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

Possibly, but there is a huge sector of their business customers that simply aren't going to see any use out of this and if dropping it means cheaper chips, they'll go that route because their workload is serial in nature and 2-4 cores is going to be enough to handle small spikes in load and background tasks while being responsive.
If you want to use business apps as your measuring stick for utility/market direction then you've got a whole other problem as we passed the point of diminishing returns at least a couple of years ago as far as CPU's go. Today's 2,4,6, and 8 cored 2-3Ghz+ CPU's are all insane overkill for office apps and thus "pointless" by that measure. For them a single ~2Ghz Core 2 or PhenomII are probably "good enough". From a bang vs. buck perspective they'd probably benefit quite a bit more by putting money towards RAM or a SSD rather than a faster CPU.

Also while I have no proof I kind've doubt it'd be all that power/cost intensive for Intel to have made the SB GPU more programmable. Look at what AMD is doing with Zacate for instance, and on a much inferior process too.

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

Where are you going to shoehorn GPGPU support in to the Office suite besides Excel jockeys? Especially considering Microsoft is already trying to abstract heavy lifting there to a server cluster behind the workstation.
I don't know if GPGPU will ever make sense for apps like Office, except perhaps for doing some sort of super duper near perfect voice to text recognition or really good voice command into the OS, assuming MS decides to build something like that in. I just think that it would be a fairly short sighted view to disregard GPGPU just because it doesn't make sense for business/serial apps. Remember when some people once thought that only 640K of memory was needed?

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Alereon
Feb 6, 2004

Dehumanize yourself and face to Trumpshed
College Slice

MrBond posted:

I thought Handbrake and x264 shun 2-pass encodes in favor of the "quality based" ones now?
2-pass is used if you need to hit a target filesize, otherwise they can only do a moving average bitrate which makes more complex scenes look ugly. It's probably simpler when encoding for portable devices since they're extremely limited on maximum bitrate and available encoding settings anyway, and the resolution is low enough that the files will come out pretty tiny.

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