Mandelbrot Screensaver

Locality Counts

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 12 Aug 2009 - 11:52am

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to an interesting article "Not Your Father's Von Neumann Machine: A Crash Course in Modern Hardware".

One of the interesting elements discussed in this article is the relative cost of memory access. An access satisfied from L1 cache (closest to the processor) might take just 3 clock cycles, but an access requiring access to main memory might take 200 clock cycles.

That's a massive difference in performance.

Nova's Fractals

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 11 Dec 2008 - 7:58am

I hadn't thought to check for a while, but today when I looked at the Nova website, I spotted that they now have their show "Hunting the Hidden Dimension" mentioned.

(You may recall that I mentioned Nova back in August when they contacted me concerning use of some of my Mandelbrot images.)

The documentary looks pretty cool - and they've remembered to give credit where due. Neato!

Mandelbrots on TV

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 18 Aug 2008 - 7:32pm

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email out of the blue from NOVA, a documentary series produced by the American PBS television channel.

Turns out they want to use pictures generated by my Mandelbrot Fractal screensaver!

Here's the official quote they graciously supplied ...

Mandelbrot Screensaver v3.1

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 14 Jul 2008 - 7:42pm
mandelbrotStar.jpg
mandelbrotStar.jpg

Based on feedback from some users, and with special thanks to sobriquet, I've made some improvements to the screensaver that are now available for download.

Mandelbrot Screensaver v3

Submitted by Bevan on Sun, 1 Jun 2008 - 8:37pm
Screenshot
Screenshot

After four years and a complete rewrite in the latest technology, I'm delighted to announce the release of the latest edition of my Mandelbrot screensaver.

This new release is both more efficient and more robust that the previous release, and lays the groundwork for making full use of the multicore processors of todays high power personal computers.

Key features of this release include:

  • More efficient internal algorithm for fractal calculation;
  • Full Vista compatibility;
  • Leverages the power of .NET 3.5;
  • Much smaller download;
  • No more "divide by zero" error on faster processors;

Update 14 July: Version 3.1 now released, with improved performance.

A Settings Problem Solved

Submitted by Bevan on Fri, 30 May 2008 - 2:28pm

Following up on my previous post, I've found the cause of the problem.

A Settings problem

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 26 May 2008 - 10:04pm

I've been working on a major update to my Mandelbrot screensaver, a complete rewrite that brings it firmly into the world of .NET.

The project has been going pretty well, but now I've run into the darndest bug - one that is causing me no end of trouble.