[MUD-Dev] 3D graphics (Was: The impact of the web on muds)

[Chris Gray]

[Mike Sellers:]

[I humbly beg forgiveness for straying away from central MUD issues, but
system horsepower is on the edges of relevance.]

:I had a fascinating discussion with a guy from Intel recently.  Roughly,
:their plans (consider how much advance foundry planning alone they have to
:do) say that this Christmas the almost-highest-end consumer machine will be
:a 300MHz Pentium II (really high end is probably a 400 or 450 or so).
:Christmas 1999, probably a 450, with 800s mixed in at the very top end.
:End of the year 2000 you're looking at 800s, 2001 probably 1G to 1.2GHz
:machines.  Somewhere between 2000 and 2003 they go to copper-based chips
:which give another burst of speed (with a simultaneous drop in power, heat,
:and size), and around 2015 or so they go straight to laser-based optical
:chips -- at which point we basically have no clue what computing or
:computer usage will look like. 

I'm puzzled. Where does IA-64 fit into that? My understanding was that the
IA-32 machines would be around for another few years, but that they had a
definite limit and top end (around 1GHz?). I thought the plan was to use
IA-64 for server class machines initially, but to gradually migrate the
consumer base over to them. The way Microsoft is going, you're going to
need 64 bit machines to address the system memory not long after 2000!

Re: the earlier comment about us all running 1GHz Alphas in 1999: I've
been having a hard time settling on what my next computer (when $ allows)
should be - a Pentium running Linux or an Alpha running Linux. I'd like
to chose the one with the best performance, but also with a decent expected
lifetime. I just wish we knew what Compaq intended. I saw info on comp.arch
indicating that they had *given* the designs, etc. for the 21264 and
21364 to Samsung, and that Samsung wanted to push hard to get the 21364
out at the time the merced became viable. But, of course, nothing official
from anyone. Sigh.

To swing this a little bit back towards MUDs, and special clients: what
kind of byte-ordering does anyone use in custom binary protocols? I use
big-endian (also know as network byte order), but that wouldn't be the
best on Pentiums. What endian does Linux run Alphas in? Do a few byte-
flips make any difference? Any gut feelings for whether or not endianness
affects how well a given architecture can be an internet server?

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA