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2000 iMac compared to the 2010 iPhone

arstechnica.com

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Re: 2000 iMac compared to the 2010 iPhone

#11

Post by petercooper »

Metalan wrote: post #8
petercooper wrote: post #7

Taking another stride forward, your brain implant in 2020 will, then, be faster than an i7, have 16GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, and be able to re-render the whole of Toy Story 3 in 10 minutes. Somehow, that doesn't even sound surprising to me anymore.

What numbers did you base yourself on for the Toy Story claim? I'm curious.

That's the one piece I pulled out of my ass to conclude with a bit of hyperbole :-) I doubt a 2010 PC could render Toy Story 3 in a year if things are similar now to how they were with Toy Story 1 in 1995. I'd also be curious to see how modern PCs would cope with Toy Story 1 though..

[Update: If it helps rescue me, I found a page about the difference between rendering TS1 and TS3 in their respective times:

http://watchingapple.com/2009/09/pixars-blistering-rendering...

It turns out the original Toy Story took an hour per frame to render, whereas Toy Story 3 can render in real-time (or 24fps, at least.) Given that's probably on a server farm, my claim is still hyperbole, unless you expect cloud processing to be mainstream on all devices by then ;-)]

Re: 2000 iMac compared to the 2010 iPhone

#12

Post by kinetik »

petercooper wrote: post #11
Metalan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What numbers did you base yourself on for the Toy Story claim? I'm curious.

That's the one piece I pulled out of my ass to conclude with a bit of hyperbole :-) I doubt a 2010 PC could render Toy Story 3 in a year if things are similar now to how they were with Toy Story 1 in 1995. I'd also be curious to see how modern PCs would cope with Toy Story 1 though.. [Update: If it helps rescue me, I found a page about the difference between rendering TS1 and TS3 in their respective times: http://wat…

The Wired article claims that the average render time is seven hours per frame: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/process_pixar/all/1

Assuming a single machine (which is obviously not true, but I can't find any details about the size of the render farm), that'd mean the entire film would take something like two hundred and thirty seven years to render.

Also, note that the WSJ article you linked to is talking about Toy Story 3D which is a re-rendering of the original film in stereoscopic 3D.

Re: 2000 iMac compared to the 2010 iPhone

#14

Post by martinkallstrom »

petercooper wrote: post #7

Taking another stride forward, your brain implant in 2020 will, then, be faster than an i7, have 16GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, and be able to re-render the whole of Toy Story 3 in 10 minutes. Somehow, that doesn't even sound surprising to me anymore.

Except that it will not be an implant because individual neurons in the brain have an irritatingly low bandwidth of only a few bits per sec.

Instead it is much cheaper and hassle-free to use the firehose connection that already exists into the brain: the eyes, for which even protocols for communication are established. Screens in contact lenses are my bet on where the future of computers are headed. That will with time largely remove the need for physical objects that transfer information.

The interesting part is how Apple in 2020 will spin that they ten years earlier named a display far to bulky to fit into your eye "Retina display".

Re: 2000 iMac compared to the 2010 iPhone

#15

Post by drx »

martinkallstrom wrote: post #14
petercooper wrote: post #7

Taking another stride forward, your brain implant in 2020 will, then, be faster than an i7, have 16GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, and be able to re-render the whole of Toy Story 3 in 10 minutes. Somehow, that doesn't even sound surprising to me anymore.

Except that it will not be an implant because individual neurons in the brain have an irritatingly low bandwidth of only a few bits per sec. Instead it is much cheaper and hassle-free to use the firehose connection that already exists into the brain: the eyes, for which even protocols for communication are established. Screens in contact lenses are my bet on where the future of computers are headed. That will with ti…

It might be possible to connect the brain implant to the brain in a similar way that the eyes are connected to it, thus creating an additional input instead of using an existing one. Brains seem to have an uncanny ability to adapt to new inputs.

Re: 2000 iMac compared to the 2010 iPhone

#16

Post by cstross »

Apropos the prognostications about circa-2020 brain implants, when I was a twenty-something, back in the mid-1980s, I read Neuromancer.

And I wanted to be the first guy on my block to have a cyberspace jack in his skull.

Now I am middle-aged and cynical and slightly chewed-up by the dot-com 1.0 startup experience, I want to be the first guy on my block to have, for a brain implant ... a firewall!

(One lesson I've drawn from 20 years of reading comp.risks is that the closer we integrate software into our lives, the deadlier the consequences of security exploits. Also? The exploit may be transient but the fallout from it can potentially last for a lifetime.)

Re: 2000 iMac compared to the 2010 iPhone

#17

Post by modeless »

Don't forget: GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, second microphone, still/video camera, second still/video camera, flash/light, touchscreen, proximity sensor, light sensor, and to top it all off an internal battery with a minimum life of 6 hours.

Re: 2000 iMac compared to the 2010 iPhone

#18

Post by superjohan »

henning wrote: post #3
thunk wrote: post #2

You even had to run unapproved software on the 2000 iMac! How far we've come.

FruityLoops and Reason compete with Garage Band too closely, application denied. Firefox competes with Safari, application delayed and then withdrawn...

Yes, it is a damn shame that Apple imposes its crazy App Store rules on the Mac as well.

(I get what you're trying to say, but that's hardly the point of the post)

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