[clug] Modern laptops, nVidia, Optimus and Linux

[David Austin]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Hugh Fisher <hugh.fisher at anu.edu.au> wrote:

> <snip>
>
> True, but this is where rational thinking collides with human
> nature. The vast majority of users may never actually need
> that kind of bandwidth, but they think they *might* one day.
>
>
I did enclose with <if I ran the world> :-)

This all started me thinking.  There are approximately 1.2million
nerves in the optic nerve.  I can't easily find bit rates for human
nerves(!!).
But lets assume an upper bound of 100bits/s (we certainly can't
perceive monitor refresh rates above about 75Hz).  Then if
we assume normal stereo scenes I guess that the information
content for two eyes is only 25% more than for one eye.

Result: 150Mbits/s.

So it's an interesting world that leads engineers to build systems
with 10-64Gb/s in order to deliver to the human visual system
that can only really deal with of the order of 150Mb/s.

David