"Nouveau is a community project that is working on producing open-source 3D display drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards. Nouveau is not affiliated with Nvidia Corp and is an X.Org project. While this project is still far from being completed, for this holiday special we are sharing some of our first thoughts on this project from our experience thus far. We would like to make it very clear, however, that the Nouveau driver is no where near completed and still has a great deal of work ahead for the 3D component. This article today will also hopefully shed some light on the advancements of this project so far."
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Member since:2006-10-24
Member since:2006-01-06
Nope, basing it on experience. Look at televisions, computers, any number of technologies. As they mature the rate of change just diminishes. Face it.
The reason that televisions had slowed in terms of resolution in quality had nothing to do with technology or capability limits or failure of vision. It had to do with the pipeline that was feeding the sets with bits; namely, the limited, least-common-denominator, low-resolution NTSC/PAL video signals that have become de rigeur. There's really no reason to attempt to optimize technology that can't get significantly better due to poor video signals. Even DVD's relatively low-resolution (720x480) has held back the technology. The introduction of HD, though, has caused a brand new growth cycle in this technology. But, again, televisions are slaves of the signals that are provided to them. The market recognizes this fact, and you're not going to see things advance unless resolution standards improve.
As for computers, they haven't slowed. Moore's Law is still kicking along nicely despite lots of predictions from skeptics in recent years. People were saying, "How can Intel possibly increase transistor density and increase processor speeds?" Consequently, no one saw multi-core processors coming. But they've changed the technology equation substantially, to the point that people are now talking about 32- or 64-core processors in desktop computers in the not-too-distant future. No one is declaring Moore dead anymore, as it relates to CPU power.
Video chipsets are doing more and more every year. Tasks which were previously being done in software are moving steadily to hardware. Not only that, but the potential for parallelization of processing in both the 2D and 3D pipelines is enormous and has only begun to be tapped.
We're going to have simply agree to disagree on this matter. I'm quite optimistic, though, that this technology will still be evolving for at least the next decade -- which in terms of technology is foreeeeeeeeeever.
Member since:
2006-01-06
You're right of course, but they made the mistake of specifying a specific quantity. You say yourself you can see a limit 50 years out, maybe it's a 100. But that really wasn't the main point: the exponential _rate_ of change will diminish just as we see Moores law starting to taper off in the CPU realm.
Nah. That's a prediction that you're basing on vapor. Air.