Windows8, GPU's, & RC5

[Dirk Broer]

PC's are running just fine, businesses are running just fine. Time will tell whether the business world buys into this at all.

Is it because I'm old (53)? I've heard the exact same arguments against the Apple MacIntosh, The DOS-shell, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 2000 and Windows XP...
(and Vista, but that still has the be adopted by businesses, if it ever will. If the business does not want Win8 they are free to do so as well.)

Point two is fine you are one of those that like BOINC

Yes, I like the idea of one interface for all my projects. One thing to rule them all so to speak. But as Vaughan pointed out, I'd like to be more in control myself because the BOINC task manager has sometimes stupid ideas of its own.

I'll just most likely keep my XP stuff running as long as I can

Crunching takes bux as everyone knows

So does operating old hardware! I am the for opposite approach: try to phase out all that's not efficient anymore. Sometimes you have to spend before you can earn “De cost gaet voor de baet uyt” (old Dutch saying), you reap what you sow, etc.
WinXP only supports up to 3GB of memory (unless you have the driver-restricted 64-bit edition),
anything under a triple core CPUs is power inefficient, has a too limited instruction set and costs too much to operate in Credits/KWh (and they are really expensive here in the Netherlands, those KWhs!)
All my nVidia cards below their latest 600-series have to go as soon as possible, because they don't have a GFlop/Watt ratio higher than 5.49
My AGP HD 3850 will have to go as the mobo's it can fit into do not fall in the efficient category and because it is my weakest Ati/AMD card. My PCIe HD 3870 is already retired with it's GFlop/Watt ratio of 4.68 -the lowest for a Ati/AMD card I've encountered.

Long live the HD 6670 and HD 7770: decent performance, both in credits and KWh. Long live Llano and Trinity: decent performance, both in credits and KWh.

If there is any truth in "this greenhouse gas stuff", I'd be one of the first to know as the surf of the North Sea will be against my window (at some 10 feet above current ground level)

[Brucifer]

Dirk, you are a whippersnapper yet........... As my dad told me when I hit 50 and commented that I was old, he said old is when your kid turns fifty. :-) Well I'm closing in on that as I turned 69 this summer past.

As for the business world, Win8 is trying to shift the playing field much much more than anything MS has put out in a long time. The retraining expenses are going to be very high. Sure some places will go for it, others won't until absolutely forced into it. Some are very large like where I worked where it involved thousands and thousands of licenses, even just doing an incremental upgrade. These are the companies that really eyeball the dickens out of these MS upgrades. And MS has to listen to them because the upgrades cost the companies many millions just in licensing expenses, let alone training and revamping of internally designed software, so it isn't just an easy thing for them to upgrade. Upgrades keep the MS cash flow running, but remember software and hardware is a huge expense to companies not in the software/hardware business. Going to Win8 isn't like going from W2K to XP for instance. Because of this many companies are still on XP. Others went to terminal server running clients, both win and apple. So for MS, they *are* putting a lot on the line here, and Ballmer has acknowledged this. John Q Public buys a lot of tables, but the real money is in the commercial business accounts. You can bet many hours of midnight oil are being burned keeping the lamps on at night while this is being hashed over in the IT departments around the planet.

Once upon a horse we used to have a bunch of folks crunching. We don't now for various reasons, but a major one is the cost, both in terms of hardware/software and sadly the rising costs of electricity as Vaughan has mentioned. Besides the hobby cruncher, this has also severely impacted the corporate related crunchers that were fortunate enough to work for an employer that would allow them to utilize unused corporate computer time/cycles/whatever. With the demise of the PC's, and the upsurge of the tablets we are going to see further erosion of the number of crunchers and also the amount of "horsepower" that the hobby crunchers can bring to distributed computing. Sure, limited crunching can be accomplished on low power platforms, but we aren't going to realistically see much coming forth from the tablet world.

My opinion, and it's just my opinion, is that the win8 thing is going to impact further the erosion of the old desktop computer world and reduce the number of PC's out there. That will slow PC chip development. We will end up with some multi core server chips in the game, for those that are fortunate enough to be able to afford one or more of them to crunch with. The net effect I fear is that our already dwindling hobby is going to dwindle even more.

So while things do evolve, I fear that time is showing that our hobby is evolving into a slow death. I think that win8 is going to accelerate that to some extent. Again, just my opinion.

[Dirk Broer]

Whippersnapper, yes all still working there yet.

I think it will all blow over, like any other upgrade to existing software. It would be nice if the MicroSoft certification circus would be exposed for the scam it is,
as the basis of things has hardly been changed since the days of WindowsNT and skills learned then can still be applied now.
And it might very well be that Balmer has put his stakes too high, MicroSoft hasn't always been the dominant payer and surely won't continue to be forever.
Just as OS/2, Dr-DOS, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBAse suddenly lost their share of the market, so can Microsoft. This might just be the opportunity for either Linus Thorvalds or some now still unknown Chinese or Russian software entrepeneur.

Smart business people will wait some years to see whether Win8 will catch on. Around 2001 I worked for a company still on DOS 6.23, when I left AT&T in 2008 they were still on Win2K (and the servers still ran WinNT and AIX).

And as for the hardware, both the business and John Q Public have to buy something new over time. That new can be of the same general performance and consuming far less energy, or using as much energy but performing a lot better. John Q's tablets can be used for crunching, just as his PS3.
Handy system administrators/tier1 crunchers will still be able to gather crunching farms. Dedicated hobby crunchers -like the most of us- can build relatively cheap
crunching monsters by combining multi-core CPUs/APUs with as many low-powered HD 6670s/HD 7750s as the mobo supports.