Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The 4th quarter of 2016 Intel released their 7th generation CPU. As of now, I can’t find the chips for sale. Apparently, all the chips are going to OEM’s.
The 7th gen chips are based on 14nm tech. The CPU’s deliver 12% more performance than the 6th generation CPU’s. Power consumption remains about the same in 6th and 7th gen CPU’s for general computing and gaming.
The Intel HD Graphics 2000 and 4000 series chips have a driver problem. This has been a thorn in my side the last 3 months as clients want it fixed and Intel has yet to resolve the problem, AFAIK (Nov 2016). It is known to be in their driver… or what Microsoft has Windows 10 do with it.
I keep hoping for a fix and update. If not soon, I probably will put cheap video cards in the desktop machines and tell the laptop users they are pretty much screwed until Intel or Microsoft fixes it.
The problems on the MAC/Apple side are bad enough the Lab has been holding up release of a 32-bit version of the MAC viewer.
The latest information I have seen is here (Nov 2016):
I’ve been trough every fix I can find for machines using HD 4000 series video chips. Some machines continue to have problems. Restarts help.
Talking with Ormand Lionheart about the images in a video I made, he mentioned Dynamic Super Resolution. A bit of research shows this is a way to make your 2k-1920×1080 monitor look more like a 4k monitor. The keywords are “more like”.
The video explains and shows what is being talked about. It touches on the fact that a 1080 or 2k monitor is physically limited to showing that fixed number of pixels. Nothing anyone can do will change that. You have 1920×1080 pixels, horizontal and vertical, for a total of 2,073,600 pixels. Those manufactured into the screen. To get more pixels you need a screen manufactured with more.
Intel is promoting two new Solid State Drives (SSD); Intel® SSD DC P3520 Series (PCIe) and the Intel® SSD DC S3520 Series (SATA). These are enterprise level drives. Put into layman’s English, these puppies are way expensive. US$300 to $3,000. Amazon
They do yield 35% more performance per watt. If you are running a server farm that is a big deal. The link above leads to the specs. Read speed: 1700 MB/s, write: 1350 MB/s. My SSD can only move 300 to 400 MB/s. See: Hardware: Disk Performance Compared. These new SSD’s are performing at RAM Drive speeds.
Word is that large data centers are driving the demand for these new fast, large SSD’s. As prices come down the consumer market will use more of these drives.
Will they make your Second Life experience better? Probably. But, RAM drives are currently cheaper and provide similar performance but, less storage space.
Google is releasing a $79 headset named Daydream. Road to VR has an article on the headset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLAA4ENIP4
The headset uses a phone, not included. But, the phone has to be Daydream Certified. I’m not sure exactly what that means and I didn’t dee anyone explaining it. The most they say in the way of an explanation is: the Daydream headset works exclusively with Android’s integrated VR support.
Over the last 4 months I’ve been dealing with what I can buy now and what is the best for the money. But, when considering what to buy it makes sense to look ahead. Earlier I wrote about looking at AMD CPU’s and what they have coming. Now I’ll write about what Intel has coming.
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