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[Ltheb]

well, I read an article a while ago (a year or two ago?) about some IBM guys who made a high-power processor the size of a dinner plate (as opposed to the modern concept of making lima-bean sized processors). Under unoptimized conditions, it ran at 500Ghz. (Likely could go up to 1Thz with cooling and an efficient setup) So a $15,000 computer, if you know the right people, isn't just about quad Video Cards and 10 1Tb Hard Drives.
That said, I have a 3.2 Ghz Core 2 and a Case that air cools extremly effectively, so I overclock it a bit and it runs DF at 100+FPS in most cases. Comp in total cost me a little less than 2k Last year. A 500Ghz core would be... Wow. My rough guesswork puts it at ~23,000 Fps. That's... Way Too Much.

[DJ]

For $15k I could buy a wagon filled with supplies and hire six other people to help me.

[Fossaman]

I can run a 3x3 map with a moderate number of z-levels at 200 FPS, for the first thirty dwarves or so, anyway. That's with a 2.4GHz processor. (quad core, but that doesn't matter. Individual cores are 2.4) More power would be nice for bigger maps, maps with lots of z levels, etc. But it's not really necessary.

[Behrooz Wolf]

Semi-serious overclocking just requires a quality power-supply, enthusiast-quality mobo, good cooling/case, and quality RAM.

Sooo, add a couple hundred to the cost of any decent new computer and you're almost as fast as the best  DF machine money can buy, like the core2 2.6GHz OC'd to 3.5GHz I put together for DF last year.  So much love...

[sneakey pete]

Also what is this obsession with FPS? Above 60 FPS the dwarves are running around at lightspeed, its pretty much unplayable, or at least annoying.

People Want more FPS so they can do more stuff, have bigger maps, and have more dwarves. Not so that they can run the same stuff that they do now faster.

[Blacken]

well, I read an article a while ago (a year or two ago?) about some IBM guys who made a high-power processor the size of a dinner plate (as opposed to the modern concept of making lima-bean sized processors). Under unoptimized conditions, it ran at 500Ghz. (Likely could go up to 1Thz with cooling and an efficient setup) So a $15,000 computer, if you know the right people, isn't just about quad Video Cards and 10 1Tb Hard Drives.

A very large-scale chip like that (assuming it is real and not something you misremember) would be much slower (and not made for anything like what DF does). Processors are small for one major reason: because electrons have a finite speed. We are at, and have been for a good bit now, the limit of what we can really do with silicon in large part because the speed of light has become a factor. The bigger a chip is, the longer the distance the electrons moving through the chip must go and thus slower it is; that's why we have stuff like ULSI chips on the same size wafers as their predecessors. In addition, "500GHz" means nothing in and of itself. All that means is that the chip clocks five hundred billion times per second. It says nothing about the actual speed of a chip, especially when you take into account something like that would almost certainly not be x86.

[sneakey pete]

The capacity of a dinner plate sized chip to do things of a non time critical manner would be mind boggling though.

[Earthquake Damage]

The capacity of a dinner plate sized chip to do things of a non time critical manner is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

For some reason when I started reading your post, that's how I expected it to end.

[Blacken]

The capacity of a dinner plate sized chip to do things of a non time critical manner would be mind boggling though.

Not really, though. Chips have to be small to do anything remotely productive. What are you going to do with a gigantic chip like that that offsets the speed penalties of being too big? Add more cache? If it's that big, off-chip memory is going to be as efficient or more. Add more assembly instructions? They'll be less efficient than using many smaller ones on a smaller, faster chip.

It's not an idea that has any real practical applications. Or even impractical ones. Which is why I'm pretty sure the previous poster made it up, because IBM isn't the sort to do something that stupid. (Or he's confusing the fact that Wikipedia says a manufacturing wafer is 300mm--"wider than a common dinner plate"--which is not at all the same thing.)

[Soralin]

There are uses for chips that size, for example: Wafer-scale integration  I mean think about motherboards that have slots for more then one cpu, or especially anything set up with racks of computers, those are even further apart then putting all of that stuff on a single die would be, just making it massively-multicored for example.  You could also set it up to run some large hard-coded function for a specific task very quickly.  But it probably wouldn't be too useful for DF unless multithreaded support gets added.

[Novocain]

In the end it would be a collosal waste of money with zero gain over simply buying a good computer.

That's still true. If you wanted a "good" DF computer, you just need to overclock something with an E8400, a aftermarket heat sink, and good case airflow. after that, there isn't much to be gained compared to the increase in cost.

Running that exact setup, overclocked to 3.75ghz, I get ~30 fps with 200 dwarves, 200 animals, lava and liquid systems(mainly contained), and a 6x6 mountain map with a few features. It's not bad.

Although the map isn't turning out very well, since my favorite metalsmith has been the target for the past three failed mandates(my duchess and duke consort enjoy several rare varieties of metal), and is about to be hit by nine hammerstrikes.

(He's been passed out in bed since the past two punishments, too, which makes it extra cruel, since he's being dragged around while unconcious.)

[Blacken]

There are uses for chips that size, for example: Wafer-scale integration  I mean think about motherboards that have slots for more then one cpu, or especially anything set up with racks of computers, those are even further apart then putting all of that stuff on a single die would be, just making it massively-multicored for example.  You could also set it up to run some large hard-coded function for a specific task very quickly.  But it probably wouldn't be too useful for DF unless multithreaded support gets added.

WSI isn't the same thing at all, though. It's an upmarket flavor of SoaC--a system on a really big chip. And, as you said, it's parallelized, not "super fast" as the original poster suggested.

[Draco18s]

Double it.

[Tormy]

In the end it would be a collosal waste of money with zero gain over simply buying a good computer.

That's still true. If you wanted a "good" DF computer, you just need to overclock something with an E8400, a aftermarket heat sink, and good case airflow. after that, there isn't much to be gained compared to the increase in cost.

Running that exact setup, overclocked to 3.75ghz, I get ~30 fps with 200 dwarves, 200 animals, lava and liquid systems(mainly contained), and a 6x6 mountain map with a few features. It's not bad.

I myself also have an E8400 based system, but I have much more FPS with 200 dwarves + everything on. Something is not right with your system I guess.

[Novocain]

In the end it would be a collosal waste of money with zero gain over simply buying a good computer.

That's still true. If you wanted a "good" DF computer, you just need to overclock something with an E8400, a aftermarket heat sink, and good case airflow. after that, there isn't much to be gained compared to the increase in cost.

Running that exact setup, overclocked to 3.75ghz, I get ~30 fps with 200 dwarves, 200 animals, lava and liquid systems(mainly contained), and a 6x6 mountain map with a few features. It's not bad.

I myself also have an E8400 based system, but I have much more FPS with 200 dwarves + everything on. Something is not right with your system I guess.

Maybe, but how big is the map? I don't think 30 FPS is too bad for a 9x9 map with 90 z-levels(thought it was 6x6 originally since it's my first fort with the new viewport allowances).