For some reason that post makes me want to write the following:

Atari announces Jaguar, the first 64 bit console.

Except, of course, Jaguar was more or less a fraud committed upon consumers, and AMD will truly have quadrupled best available core counts by the time this thread is 6 months old.

I never claimed any relevance whatsoever.

I guess, other than comparing real announcements to a fake number that Atari made up.

Well, Nintendo 64 stuck in my head also. Actually, I wanted the Jaguar so much. I think it was an EB Games or Babbages in one of the malls in Anchorage I would stop by and ogle often. I think it was AvP and Iron Soldier that had me so interested.

I remember how I never actually knew what was 64 Bit about the N64. I still don't know and am too lazy to research it.

64-bit machine word.

Edit: “machine word” roughly means “the number size that is most comfortable for the computer”. Like, if you can easily do mental arithmetic with 3 digit numbers, but you have trouble with 4, I’d say that your machine word is 3 digits. It’s the same way for a microprocessor, except instead of digits they use bits.

In more technical detail, it means the N64’s CPU has general purpose registers or accumulators that are 64 bits wide, has 64 bit load/store instructions, has an ALU (arithmetic and logic unit) that is 64 bits wide, etc.

Talking about bits was always silly though because even if a CPU could do 64 bit, it wasn’t always a good idea to do so. N64 games were all compiled for 32 bit because it was faster. Even if the ALU is pure 64 bit, a 32 bit executable still makes better use of memory and caches when you don’t need really big numbers.

Summing up the bits in my ram, I have the world's first 16gb system.

Thanks, that would've been my next question. I can't actually imagine that many games made actual use of the 64 bit CPU.

None did. I’ve never developed for the N64, but the official documentation suggests games were all either required or forced to run in 32-bit kernel mode. 64-bit arithmetic operations were available, but the chip was set to use a 32-bit calling convention and a flat 32-bit addressing mode. Kinda like how the original Pentium MMX added 64-bit registers and ALUs, even though the rest of the chip was 32-bit through and through.

The only reason the N64 was 64-bit is because their vendor, SGI, selected a desktop-grade MIPS R4300, and that chip happened to be 64-bit. There’s a lot of other stuff that’s disabled or unused too; the R4300 was designed to run real-deal operating systems, so it had interrupt timers, protection rings, virtual memory, stuff that isn’t useful for an old school console. They just ignored that stuff. It’s still way cheaper to ship dead silicon than design a custom chip, especially back then.

From this discussion it sounds like Intel is falling behind AMD. That, and the bad press Intel has been getting surrounding things like the i10. The theme seems to be that Intel is panicking and resorting to cheating and lying.

Intel has been falling behind/cheating/lying for a really long time. For a few years they’ve been giving major customers early access to next gen Xeons to stop them from switching over to ARM. The small customers can’t afford to develop ARM server parts so they’re trapped, and for the big ones having a structural performance/power advantage over upstarts is good enough.

Intel is very much on borrowed time. Sooner or later they’re going to be forced to spin off their fab and IP businesses, and whether Jim Keller can turn around their CPU business is still an open question. Intel hasn’t been flat footed like this since ever. It’s worse than even the netburst/Athlon XP era because the markets so much bigger and more diverse now, and intel has been shut out of everything except the premium high power single threaded performance market.

“Today we are launching EC2 instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton Processors. Built around Arm cores and making extensive use of custom-built silicon, the A1 instances are optimized for performance and cost.”

💥

Yeah, I saw that the other day.

For hobbyist purposes, my main reason for sticking with x86-64 other than performance to cost is convenience, since just trying to run a Linux desktop OS on an Arm SoC is likely to expose more untested (or unwritten) branches of code (whether in some library, build script, or kernel driver), to the point that even seeking out something like an Arm or MIPS based laptop is not even worth it. Also, a lot of the hobbyist single board computers using Arm SoC's you see on the market (like the so-called "plug computers") still have the usual plethora of hardware bugs in their peripheral cores, but which kernel developers seem NOT to have contributed patches for workarounds to (unless, of course, your Arm SoC happens to be used by Android, but in that case, say hello to various proprietary binary blobs in the kernel just to get things like Wifi and bluetooth working--although I could say the exact same thing about Realtek on x86-64).

But if Intel chips really do start to show general flaws in comparison to the performance that Arm can achieve with the same level of fabrication technology, then, well, server applications are probably the most trivial to repackage, and you don't even need to worry about all the drivers or whatever weird laptop issue you might have at all: just stick a Docker binary in an AWS instance and do the math for performance / cost, and maybe it'll be the beginning of the end for Intel....

For hobbyist purposes, I'd guess your main reason for sticking to x86-64 is the fact that nobody makes a high performance ARM workstation/desktop.

I'm a system software developer and I've had to care what microarchitecture I'm using exactly once in the last decade, when I had to make a system call from a library that couldn't link to libc. A normal person might grumble about their old games not working but otherwise they'd never notice.

That's true. But even with a Raspberry Pi, you get HDMI and ethernet, which is good enough for a thin client, which is good enough to run Emacs and ssh on a nice screen and basically zero heat / noise / power consumption.

In my experience though even with an anaemic CPU, the deal-breaker is that you still have ****ty I/O (not just bad performance, but often unreliable components on the SoC that lead to data corruption because the eMMC driver doesn't work around hardware bugs). But probably the worst part of Arm is that because the market is so thoroughly driven by cell phones, gigabit ethernet controllers are basically non-existent (or were a few years ago last I was into this stuff).

Well, I am not saying the software wouldn't actually compile. I just don't want to deal with the build scripts failing to work without modification on a case-by-case basis. Sure, I could just use Debian or Ubuntu, where most OSS has already been packaged for Arm, but there is a long tail of either brittle or abandoned build scripts for software I use but hasn't been recompiled into a dpkg for me against recent libraries, and I am not about to dive into the source just to make sure it doesn't break because of some variable in a shell script or a header file. (And, guess what, if somebody has had the problem on x86, there's a good chance there's a magic answer on SO to get the damn thing to build without needing to know too much of what's actually going on.)

I mean, if 99% of the system works fine, but there is one package that I really like but refuses to build, then the entire system is much worse for me. This happened to me often enough that I don't bother with Arm for messing around with open source for fun. That probably makes me a bad developer though for clinging to the x86 monoculture for lame reasons of laziness.

.

Hi thread from 15 months ago, just checking in to report how the 18 month treadmill is coming along.

Ryzen Threadripper 3990WX leaked this week. 64 cores, 128 threads, rumored for release in November. This product supersedes the Threadripper 2990WX that inspired me to make this post last year, which only had 32 cores.

No idea when I'm going to update my computers the next time (aside from adding in hard drives) - I still don't know what parts I should be following for FL Studio purposes (especially considering how the program suddenly became far more multi-core friendly after a software update).

does this mean the singularity is here

I've read stories of people getting counterfeit and broken computer hardware **** from Amazon these days. Is there a good alternative that isn't Newegg anymore for hardware components? Or is this the type of game I have to play these days with online buying.

What happened with Newegg?

Personally I'm annoyed at all these sites that are trying to be like amazon or ebay; trying to be a "platform." I want to buy something from someone I trust, not some 3rd party pushing counterfeit, refurbished, or broken goods. At least with Amazon if you get screwed over by the 3rd party sellers they generally make it right (although I've had a couple of experiences with really crappy sellers who made this process extremely difficult). I do my best never to buy from a 3rd party seller on amazon (or walmart, or sears, or newegg, or whatever other "platform" of the day), but sounds like you can get screwed over by 3rd party sellers anyway due to commingling of inventory.

It can't be a coincidence that on the same day when I was informed that Newegg now delivers to Finland - i.e. to me (something that could have been useful 10 years ago), this thread is heavily implying that Newegg sucks these days.

HMMMMMMMMMMMM

I like all the Chinese sellers on amazon for small stuff. Usually when you've got a problem they just refund you and tell you to keep it because sending it back and restocking are probably too expensive.

Stores make profit. Platforms make rent.

The Steam Controller is apparently being discontinued and therefore is currently on sale for 5.5 €.
But although I have it on my wishlist those Steam bastards only mentioned some games I didn't want to buy yet in their "OMG, buy our discounted stuff" mail. And now it's sold out.

Inneresting, at some point this year I actually heard someone say that they liked the Steam Controller quite a lot.

I own a steam controller.

It is shockingly terrible.

I actually wanted one to try with the Steamlink and now I will have one thanks to you. They're still available for $5 here. I had seen them for that price (I think) a long time ago but didn't really expect a repeat.

WTF, it still tells me that they are sold out every time I reload the page. :-(

Hm, I couldn't buy it with Paypal but with Visa it worked.

The Steam Controller only has one control stick and two touchpads that are hardware-identical to the Vive wand's touchpad. The left touchpad replaces what should be a D-pad, and the right touchpad replaces what should be a second control stick. If you have a Vive for comparison, you already know why this is a bad idea.

Your fingers get lost on the touchpads. Despite being embossed as a d-pad, the left touchpad does not work like a d-pad whatsoever: you can't roll your finger on it; pressing it is a heavy click, it doesn't tilt or feel spongy the way a good d-pad should feel; if you don't want a heavy straight-down click, your only other option is touch, which means you can't rest your finger anywhere on the touchpad at idle. It is easily the worst d-pad ever attempted. The Steam Controller is ok for patching gaps in the 6' experience, since you can use a touchpad like a mouse. But a media remote is better, and before the Steam Controller was discontinued could be had for cheaper. I could also see the Steam Controller being alright for first-person shooters, but if you're playing a Steam first person shooter with a controller at all you are living your life very wrong. Other than that, it is almost entirely unsuitable for playing games: anything that uses a D-pad is out, anything that wants a right analog stick for e.g. third person camera controls is out.

It's also not a reliable or well designed piece of hardware, even if you discount the fact that it's a bad idea in the first place. The touchpads break on the Vive wands constantly. Probably the most popular use case for a Steam Controller these days is to provide spare parts for a Vive.


If you still want it, you still want it. Peace be with you. I just want to be clear, this is like finding a $5 copy of Battlefield Earth in the clearance bin. You're buying a bad thing to experience it, you're not getting a great deal.

Ah, well, they're going for 20-30 € on ebay used. So I can easily get rid of it if I don't like it.

In my case it's doubtful it'll even see as much use as the Steamlink I bought and I never use that thing! I got that for like 5 or $15 as well too. The cool thing about the Steamlink is that you can minimize the ten foot interface and you then have your PC desktop mirrored on your television.

Would it better if the Steam Controller just used one touchpad instead of two (left side being a d-pad or joystick)? I never understood having two touchpads, seems like a swiping nightmare.

For those who used it, do you have to point your thumb downward for better touchpad registration? Like if you rest your thumb parallel to the surface, is it good enough to reject non-tip thumb parts? Seems kinda tiring if so.

Also, is it annoying that the right touchpad is completely flat? I can see it being a usability problem if you can't tell quickly where on the completely flat pad your thumb is hitting.

1. Like most bad products the root cause of the Steam Controller's problems is that it wasn't designed because people wanted it, it was designed for Valve's convenience. Valve wanted to sell consoles, but they didn't want to do the hard work of building an actual console platform. Instead they wanted to leverage the existing Steam game library, most of which requires mice if only for a launcher or main menu. So they made this weird hyper-customizable wireless mouse thing that nobody could love, but it sure would have been convenient for Valve if they had.

If you start with something people actually want, and work back towards Valve's business interests, you basically end up at the DualShock 4 (which was released 2 years earlier and was already a popular PC gamepad by the Steam Controller's release). Considering such a high-profile existence proof of such a controller done properly, the fact that Valve is purportedly a video game company staffed by people who know what it's like to play video games, there's absolutely no excuse for the Steam Controller to be so terrible.

2. If the Steam Controller does any sort of touch rejection, I could never tell. It's the main reason the D-pad is so useless. The right touchpad is also really close to the buttons. It's hard to avoid grazing the edge of it, which is fun times if you're playing a third person game with a camera stick. I wouldn't say it's tiring though, I don't know how anybody can stand using it long enough to get tired.

3. Yes, you get lost on the pads very easily.

Remember what I said about the vive wands also using them? Now imagine wearing a helmet that also makes it so you can't look down and see where your thumbs are. Vive games have to treat the touchpads like big clicky buttons, because they're useless for anything else. Unfortunately they're also useless as big clicky buttons, because the clicky parts quickly wear down.

Thanks for the insight. It's funny out of the whole Steam Machine consoles endeavor, the only thing I can remember are the controllers and not the machine itself. Like the controller, the console seemed like a solution no one was asking for.

I hope Valve put more thought into their Index VR kit. I keep hearing Half Life Alyx is the "killer app" for VR, but Valve hasn't made a game in over 10 years and it could very well just be a 3 hour tech demo.

Jon what's the best controller made thus far and why? I've never tried the Steam controller, but I'm a fan of controllers and I own many various ones.