OT: RE: [rescue] XBOX vs PS2

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 11:33:54PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On January 22, George Adkins wrote:
> > > IMO, for games, and most things in general, 32bit floats are good enough.
> > > For scientific work, obviously not as good as 64bit floats, but still,
> > > nobody is buying a PS2 for scientific work, and for the most part, people
> > > aren't buying R5ks for scientific work either.
> >
> > heh heh, how about for missile guidance?
> > that's why they were export-restricted to Iraq.
> 
>   Yeah, I wasn't really going to go there, but there are metric
> buttloads of MIPS processors in the defense industry as well...doing
> scientific work of sorts...

True, but how many of them are R5ks for doing the hard CPU crunching?  The
original design of the R5k (according to a Byte article on it) was to 
make the fastest desktop machine possible on a budget.  If you wanted a 
better float cruncher, go for an R8k or R10k (which aren't as good
at other tasks as the R5k).  Ie, specialized chips for special goals, 
rather than 1 chip for everything.

I like R10ks, but I feel more at home with an R5k if I am contemplating
assembly coding.  Also, R5ks, for some reason are better at video processing
and playback in the O2s than the R1?k family is.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd