On Saturday 23 March 2019 22:28:48 Chris Albertson wrote:

> Would be faster to dumpster dive a PC.   I doubt you'd ever get a
> modern CAD app to compile on a small ARM-based board.   It would take
> weeks of work
>
This is an 10 yo 2.1 GHz quad core phenom, and I know its too slow. There 
are quad core i5's in the garage, one is running the g0704 and they are 
too slow too, and think they are i686's to boot. 17,000+ bogomips.

> Don't you have a good Linux PC with at least an i7 processor?  3D CAD,
> even if you could get it to build on low-end hardware would be
> horrible to use. You want at least the i5, 4GB RAM and a 20" screen
> with a good GPU card. But even that would lag badly.  A newer quad
> core i7 is a better processor.   You want the image to re-render
> nearly instantly, faster than human reflexes can detect. Otherwise,
> you don't get smooth rotations. To be usable the 3D model on the
> screen has to move as well as if you were holding a physical model in
> your hand.  If the screen image lags detectably it is unnatural to
> use.

Maybe its time to build a new machine here.  But this one is like an old 
friend.  Hate to put it out to pasture. I've looked around, and by the 
time I put a new board and cpu with a dozen cores and enough memory to 
adequately run some of this stuff, (and still be fighting with a video 
card that runs at 5% speed on linux. I'll have 2Gs in it.  All to do gfx 
like the amiga 4000-060 in the basement, which in its day could roll and 
rotate to see the back side of a full color ntsc image in real time just 
by grabbing a corner of it and dragging the mouse. And it did it with 16 
megs of dram and a dual core 68060 50 MHz processor. What the hell has 
happened?  We are spinning a lot of wheels doing nothing is whats going 
on. Discouraging.

> CAD is one of the use cases that justify "workstation" class
> computers. The other might be video editing and sound mixing or
> high-end video games.
>
When the amiga was king, the "workstation" for really high end gfx 
production  was a $5.5k mac g5.  Worked well, till it caught fire 
because a 75 cent fan failed and apple wouldn't touch it because it 
wasn't running apple SW. $14G's we put it that A/B roll gfx system and 
it was all up in smoke in 5 months. We got screwed, and I don't think 
the tv station has bought an apple product since.  We had bought some 
pizzabox video servers at about the same time, and their fans were junk 
too.  We have several $ I think) each capable of recording and playing 6 
channels of 20mhz digital video now, rigged up as auto-failover so if 
one fails, the next is online, and in synch, in a few milliseconds, and 
Jim Hines built them all. Running centos.

And we haven't seen a BSOD on the air since we terminated the 'weather 
channel'. They built their own building in our back yard and filled it 
with winderz XP machines, but they wouldn't replace it when it turned 
into a crasher a dozen times a day.

The owner, who was a personal friend of mine, died about 2 years back and 
his daughter sold it, to Grey. For an obscene amount of money. Grey's 
people toured the place and dictated that the linux machines had to go.  

Funny thing, nearly 2 years later, the 2 linux servers there then are 
still there and 2 more have been added once they looked at how 
dependable they were vs the cost of all the winderz machines it would 
take to replace them.

Computing has come a long ways, but despite huge improvements in the 
hardware, you can measure the progress with a shirt pocket ruler.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>



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