any technical people make some sense out of this ?
 

ok here is an article comparing the two specifications of two gaming consoles now what would like to know is what does some of this actually mean ?

:erm:

so what the hell are synergistic process elements ? (DSP)

what is a branch predicter ?

what are vector registers ?

also whats 'Z' compression and HDR ?

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html

i know its for a console but i want to know more about the computing side so input is appreciated reps for the people that make sense :disturbd: possibly kisses :D :disturbd:

Re: any technical people make some sense out of this ?
 

DSP - Digital Signal Processor, usually processes sound in some way but can do any task and is optimised for that particular task.
HDR - High Dynamic Range (lighting), a link would be best for this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...DRLighting.asp
http://www.deathfall.com/article.php?sid=2836

Re: any technical people make some sense out of this ?
 

ok, i'm not exactly what you'd call an expert, but here goes:

i *think* from looking at that site that they are floating point units designed to do exactly the same thing (eg a dot product) to a continuous input of numbers. presumably then a branch predictor tries to figure out when one of these units needs to switch to doing something else?

a vector register can be thought of as a memory location on the chip, designed with storing vectors in mind (ie groups of numbers, rather than just one)

the z buffer stores how far away an object is, so you can reduce gpu load by fguring out what s obscured and so doesnt need to be drawn. z compression is basically just compressing the data in the z buffer!

hdr is high dynamic range, means that you will be able to see lots of different shades of almost black in an image (for example...). you can think of it as bit depth, but its not quite the same thing.

hope it makes some sense, the first bit is all interpretations, inferences and guesswork so it doesnt make all that much sense to me either!

Re: any technical people make some sense out of this ?
 

I just tried a HDR demo and it looks rather nice, you can download it from here:
http://www.daionet.gr.jp/%7Emasa/rthdribl/index.html

Re: any technical people make some sense out of this ?
 

Downloading now - I love my BroadBand, this 20mb d/l is going to take less than a minute!!!
__________________

Yep, that's pretty impressive.....

Glad I went for a laptop with a decent graphics card now :)

Re: any technical people make some sense out of this ?
 

Z compression

http://www20.graphics.tomshardware.c...force3-34.html

Re: any technical people make some sense out of this ?
 

Branch predictor 'guesses' what instructions are going to go to the CPU next and pre-executes them. Obviously if it gets it wrong it slows things down but it can be a performance enhancer.

More info http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1155321,00.asp

Re: any technical people make some sense out of this ?
 

The same could be said of my girlfriend, but please don't tell her ! :p:

Re: any technical people make some sense out of this ?
 

Not quite. It guesses what the outcome of a condition statement is and pre-fetches the instructions hoping that it is right. If it gets it right, then the time taken to fetch the instructions into memory is saved. If it's wrong, then the correct instructions have to be fetched and everything is slowed up.

Re: any technical people make some sense out of this ?
 

Sigh :rolleyes: You're not supposed to ask what it means - you're just meant to go "Cooooooo" in that naive consumer kind of way. Marketing people slave for hours on this stuff and you have the cheek to ask what it means. Don't know what the world's coming to.

:p: :D

Re: any technical people make some sense out of this ?
 

personally, i think the late Bill Hicks had the right idea about marketing... :erm: