Why are computer cases so dull?

seebart · 02 Jun 2017, 19:58

Khers wrote:
seebart wrote: I love how the lian li is called "cheese grater" while the original Mac G5 case was never referred to in this manner.

bb30d1be1f9c063a6eec2b2b33baad4d98fd4a721f5364627d25911d3ffe56c2.jpg
Except it is...

Really? OK I did not know.

Even the hardcore Apple fans called it that? I always liked that case BTW.

wobbled · 02 Jun 2017, 20:09

seebart wrote:
Khers wrote:
seebart wrote: I love how the lian li is called "cheese grater" while the original Mac G5 case was never referred to in this manner.

bb30d1be1f9c063a6eec2b2b33baad4d98fd4a721f5364627d25911d3ffe56c2.jpg
Except it is...
Really? OK I did not know. Even the hardcore Apple fans called it that? I always liked that case BTW.

Yeh I've always been a fan of the G5's and Mac Pro's and have always heard them being referred to as a cheese grater. They actually can be like a cheese grater on the inside of the case, I've opened up my knuckles a few times when catching them on the inside.

seebart · 02 Jun 2017, 20:18

Well I have not owned any Apple hardware since the Power Macintosh 8500/180 so I should probably watch it with the Apple facts. Of course people bulit their own hackintosh in the G5 case:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/ ... enclosure/

wobbled · 02 Jun 2017, 20:22

That guy did such a neat job but he has really limited himself with ports, I prefer the method of dremeling out the back and riveting in an ATX tray. Here's mine

: 20160518_211413-min.jpg (1.51 MiB) Viewed 2667 times

seebart · 02 Jun 2017, 20:25

Ahh very nice what kind of hardware you got in there? I see 6 USB3 ports so that mainboard cannot be very old.

wobbled · 02 Jun 2017, 20:27

seebart wrote: Ahh very nice what kind of hardware you got in there? I see 6 USB3 ports so that mainboard cannot be very old.

Got an i7 3770k, 24GB RAM, GTX 980, 2x SSD's one for Windows, the other for OS X, and a crap load of storage
Looking to upgrade at some point, maybe to a Xeon based system but this does everything I need it to at the moment.

seebart · 02 Jun 2017, 20:30

wobbled wrote:
seebart wrote: Ahh very nice what kind of hardware you got in there? I see 6 USB3 ports so that mainboard cannot be very old.
Got an i7 3770k, 24GB RAM, GTX 980, 2x SSD's one for Windows, the other for OS X, and a crap load of storage
Looking to upgrade at some point, maybe to a Xeon based system but this does everything I need it to at the moment.

Sweet that should do for now depending on your needs. I'm still running on my old sandy bridge i5 2500k / HD7950 setup here and I'm still content with the performance for now. Of course with the money I spend on keyboards I could have
a serious rig...

wobbled · 02 Jun 2017, 20:33

seebart wrote:
wobbled wrote:
seebart wrote: Ahh very nice what kind of hardware you got in there? I see 6 USB3 ports so that mainboard cannot be very old.
Got an i7 3770k, 24GB RAM, GTX 980, 2x SSD's one for Windows, the other for OS X, and a crap load of storage
Looking to upgrade at some point, maybe to a Xeon based system but this does everything I need it to at the moment.
Sweet that should do for now depending on your needs. I'm still running on my old sandy bridge i5 2500k / HD7950 setup here and I'm still content with the performance for now. Of course with the money I spend on keyboards I could have
a serious rig...

Yeh the 2500k doesn't seem to age but I suppose Intel CPU's aren't really improving all that much unless you're talking power consumption. We should be ok for another few years.

seebart · 02 Jun 2017, 20:39

wobbled wrote: suppose Intel CPU's aren't really improving all that much unless you're talking power consumption. We should be ok for another few years.

That's right, the only big news now being that AMD finally closed the gap and it only took them like ten years. Ryzen is all the rage now and if I had to build a new rig now it might be AMD but the performance difference is subtle from what I understand. Now graphics cards have improved in the performance/consumption ratio quite a bit in recent years.

wobbled · 02 Jun 2017, 20:53

seebart wrote:
wobbled wrote: suppose Intel CPU's aren't really improving all that much unless you're talking power consumption. We should be ok for another few years.
That's right, the only big news now being that AMD finally closed the gap and it only took them like ten years. Ryzen is all the rage now and if I had to build a new rig now it might be AMD but the performance difference is subtle from what I understand. Now graphics cards have improved in the performance/consumption ratio quite a bit in recent years.

If Ryzen somehow gets Hackintosh support I'll be all over that, AMD have really produced some amazing stuff. I do hate the fact they put the PGA on the CPU chip itself though...

seebart · 02 Jun 2017, 21:01

wobbled wrote:
seebart wrote:
wobbled wrote: suppose Intel CPU's aren't really improving all that much unless you're talking power consumption. We should be ok for another few years.
That's right, the only big news now being that AMD finally closed the gap and it only took them like ten years. Ryzen is all the rage now and if I had to build a new rig now it might be AMD but the performance difference is subtle from what I understand. Now graphics cards have improved in the performance/consumption ratio quite a bit in recent years.
If Ryzen somehow gets Hackintosh support I'll be all over that, AMD have really produced some amazing stuff. I do hate the fact they put the PGA on the CPU chip itself though...

From what I read it seems AMD rushed Ryzen out and now they got some problems...let's just wait for the next Ryzen generation.

vometia · 02 Jun 2017, 21:54

I'm a bit concerned at the direction new CPU development is taking. It seems all they're doing is throwing more and more cores on the die without actually improving the per-core performance all that much. I'm not sure that 12 or 18 or whatever number of cores will give me any performance advantage over a quad core, and even there I'm not totally convinced I get that much more performance than I did from a two-core arrangement. I know that I used to find it hard to keep a quad core Unix box busy going waaaay back even with multiple users and all sorts of other stuff going on and while multithreading is much more of a thing than it was I'm not convinced it's really filling in those gaps.

I did recently upgrade my CPU and motherboard but that's mostly so I could have more memory: 6GB wasn't cutting it and my old tri-channel motherboard was a bit questionable when it came to adding more. So now I have much more memory than I had but I can't say that my i7 6700 feels noticeably faster than the now ancient i7 920 it replaced...

seebart · 02 Jun 2017, 22:04

vometia wrote: I'm a bit concerned at the direction new CPU development is taking. It seems all they're doing is throwing more and more cores on the die without actually improving the per-core performance all that much. I'm not sure that 12 or 18 or whatever number of cores will give me any performance advantage over a quad core, and even there I'm not totally convinced I get that much more performance than I did from a two-core arrangement. I know that I used to find it hard to keep a quad core Unix box busy going waaaay back even with multiple users and all sorts of other stuff going on and while multithreading is much more of a thing than it was I'm not convinced it's really filling in those gaps.

I'm pretty sure Intel and AMD are doing whatever they can in order to keep marketing and sales happy because on the development side of it is the options are quite limited to what's even possible from what I understand. The software optimization side of it is a whole other issue from what I understand. Intel was able to slack off in the last years it took AMD to catch up but now it's starting to get interesting again.

Findecanor · 02 Jun 2017, 22:34

CPU clock/power consumption is dictated by how small process the chips can be fabricated in. Kaby Lake and Ryzen are made in a 14 nm process, and the number of silicon atoms between features is already a two-digit number. There are issues with leakage currents and other things at this level that I don't understand. The next generation of fabs is expected to go down only to 10 nm, and many think that 7nm will be the limit for silicon.

I think this is the main reason why CPUs are getting more cores. There are only so many tricks you can pull to get more single-core performance per clock out of the x86 architecture.
The only other way forward is to abandon x86 for something else. If they used the same tricks for ARM that they had used for Intel then I think it would be possible to get a couple more instructions per clock only because of it having more registers but I don't believe in any revolution.
There have been speculations that Apple might go with ARM on the desktop, only because their own CPUs they use in the latest iOS devices are so fast.

I have hopes for a startup called Mill Computing. They have their own architecture that is a bit different at many different aspects, made to get around some of the problems that can't be solved on x86. So far, they have mostly filed patents and held talks about their inventions to gather interest from investors, and they are working on emulating the processor in software. That one could get better single-core performance, partly by being better at SIMD (parallel processing in single-threaded code) and in many ways by avoiding stalling where the x86 has no choice but to stall.

vometia · 02 Jun 2017, 22:42

I think it is pretty much to keep the marketing departments happy. It looks good in adverts but probably doesn't translate into anything useful in the real world. I must admit that I am wondering where they go next, and me saying "they should just make the cores faster" is getting dangerously close to the mindset of a PHB who a colleague overheard effectively complaining that the engineers couldn't exceed the speed of light.

I am surprised how far AMD and Intel have managed to push the x86 architecture between them considering it was so often derided as being a bit brain dead. I think maybe the ARM would be more efficient, but with all the fancy technology with register windows the x86 now has I'm not sure that's the direction to more processing horsepower. Then again, I know little about CPU design other than to agree that Intel have been able to sit on their bum and do nothing for years since AMD dropped the ball. Things could indeed get more interesting now they look set to catch up.

Of course software is the other approach, but a method of coding that could transparently and effectively multithread has been a bit of a holy grail for decades...

And then there's quantum computing. *snerk*