[sldev] Reformatting Textures for the cache

[Dzonatas]

John Hurliman wrote:
> I agree with you wholeheartedly. If I had it my way, Second Life 
> wouldn't even run on an AGP card and would require a latest top end 
> system just to get to the login screen. These people running less than 
> 2Ghz dual-core processors and GPUs with only 128MB and less than pixel 
> shader 3.0 support are cramping my artistic style. But unless we are 
> talking about a fork, LL has been very clear that they aren't budging 
> on the minimum requirements and we have to work with the limitations 
> of the system. You don't try and do DVD decoding on a 40MHz embedded 
> processor, and you don't try and use ultra-high quality textures in a 
> real-time 3D environment running on 64MB of memory.

I believe there is a significant decrease in interest to require a 
high-end graphics card. Instead, there is a greater increase in interest 
to provide higher bandwidth and parallelism in the CPU.

The Intel x8086 processor is the proof-of-concept for such interest and 
what it can achieve. The x8086 has 80 cores on one die. Each core has 
FPU. They all have their own cache. They are networked together on a 
2-dimensional matrix. Without the best optimization for the x8086, it 
can achieve over 1 Teraflop in calculations. The best marketed high-end 
video card can only achieve 500 Gigaflops.

Even if a high-end video card with PCIe was attached to a quad-core 
system, the x8086 still will beat it down with the overall wattage use. 
The x8086 uses less wattage then the high-end Pentiums and Xeons alone. 
Add a video card in comparison, and it becomes a no brainer!


For those that missed the video about what a 200 Gigaflop Cell processor 
can achieve:

http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/Riding%20The%20Multi-core%20Revolution.html