Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Demophobe]

This is an interesting read. It's John Carmack's old blog archives.

You know when you watch a movie from ten years ago, and they are using what is by today's standards, ridiculously old technology? Well, going back to read Carmack's blog entries from 1996~ is like that.

An interesting snippet from 1997:

"We got the new processors running in our big compute server today. We are now running 16 180mhz r10000 processors in an origin2000. Six months ago, that would have been on the list of the top 500 supercomputing systems in the world. I bet they weren�t expecting many game companies.

Some comparative timings (in seconds):

mips = 180 mhz R10000, 1meg secondary cache
intel = 200 mhz ppro, 512k secondary cache
alpha = 433 mhz 21164a, 2meg secondary cache

qvis3 on cashspace:

cpus mips intel alpha
�- �- �- �-
1 608 905 470
2 309 459
3 208 308
4 158 233
8 81
12 57
16 43

(14 to 1 scalability on 16 cpus, and that�s including the IO!)

The timings vary somewhat on other tools � qrad3 stresses the main memory a lot harder, and the intel system doesn�t scale as well, but I have found these times to be fairly representative. Alpha is almost twice as fast as intel, and mips is in between.

None of these processors are absolutely top of the line � you can get 195 mhz r10k with 4meg L2, 300 mhz PII, and 600 mhz 21164a. Because my codes are highly scalable, we were better off buing more processors at a lower price, rather than the absolute fastest available.

Some comments on the cost of speed:

A 4 cpu pentium pro with plenty of memory can be had for around $20k from bargain integrators. Most of our Quake licensees have one of these.

For about $60k you can get a 4 cpu, 466 mhz alphaserver 4100. Ion Storm has one of these, and it is twice as fast as a quad intel, and a bit faster than six of our mips processors."

Wow.

Things today will look pretty stupid to our kids as well, but man....

Anyhow....some interesting reading about the way things were. Tech is so concerned about moving forward; sometimes it's just plain funny to look back.