Grammerjack

Here's the first public version of the slides from Tom Forsyth and Michael Abrash's GDC 2009 talks on Larrabee's instruction set, by way of Japanese magazine PC Watch, as seen on Beyond 3D's Forums. (You have to manually click on each of the little thumbnails of each slide.): http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2009/0330/kaigai498.htm Hopefully Intel (or GDC) will release a better version of these slide decks sometime soon. Say, was it just me, or was blogging really light about GDC this year? In past years I was a lot more technical writeups than I saw this year. I wonder if blogging is down in general? Is everyone on Facebook and Twitter now? I can't imagine Twitter being very useful for reporting technical information. Here's Michael Abrash's Doctor Dobbs Journal article on the Larrabee instruction set. http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/216402188 Here's the Intel GDC 2009 Larrabee talks: Rasterization on Larrabee: A First Look at t...

The Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is a nifty open-source application for watching videos. It was originally designed for use on modified Xbox video game consoles, but has more recently become popular for Intel-based Home Theater Personal Computers. It has been ported to Windows, Mac, and Linux. It has no PVR features, instead it concentrates on displaying streaming and downloaded videos. Its big advantage over using the Xbox 360's similar application is that it handles a much wider variety of streaming video sources and downloaded video codecs. I've been running Plex , an OSX-specific version of the Xbox Media Center, on my Mac Mini for several months now. Overall it's a good product, but I had some issues for my application. I wanted Plex to serve as a consumer electronic device that my mother-in-law (who doesn't use computers and can't read English) could use by herself to watch videos. The system I put together didn't work very well for her. The problems we ran in...

Perhaps in preparation for Friday's GDC talks by Michael Abrash and Tom Forsyth, Intel has described the Larrabee instruction set: Prototype Primitives Guide Intel includes a C source file that implements their new instruction set, so people can play around with the instructions before Larrabee ships. The instruction set looks alot like a typical GPU shader instruction set. Lots of "log" and "rsqrt" type instructions. But there are also some interesting variations on MADD, such as MADD233_{PI,PS}, which I assume help shave cycles off of inner loops. The compress and expand instructions also look very useful. I look forward to reading code examples from Abrash and Forsyth in the near future!

For some time I've wanted to listen to my home music collection on my computer at work. I tried a bunch of different approaches, and finally came up with one that works pretty well: I run the free SqueezeCenter program on my home machine to serve music. I run the free Softsqueeze program on my work machine to listen to the music. To keep the whole world from listening to my music, I set up an SSH tunnel . The resulting system works pretty well. In case you're wondering, the SqueezeCenter program's main use is to serve music to the Squeezebox brand of internet radios. The ability to use it with a regular computer, without purchasing a Squeezebox internet radio, is a nice gesture on the part of the Logitec company that makes and sells Squeezebox internet radios.