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Thumb-2 is a great idea but unfortunately it is not supported for 64 bit mode. 64 bit mode is AArch64 which used 32 bit fixed length instructions

http://www.arm.com/files/downl...

That being said it's not as bad as ARM32

https://groups.google.com/d/to...

So far, the LZSS routine in my code looks like this:
      THUMB2: 76 bytes
      THUMB: 76 bytes
      ARM64: 96 bytes
      ARM32: 116 bytes
(for comparison, x86 is 63 bytes)

Still it is quite a bit worse than x86. x64 incidentally is the same code size as x86

http://www.deater.net/weave/vm...

8086 58 bytes
x86_x32 66 bytes
x86_64 66 bytes
arm_thumb2 76 bytes
arm_thumb 76 bytes
m68k 88 bytes
arm64 96 bytes
z80 96 bytes
arm eabi 116 bytes

Of course this benchmark is a bit silly.

It's easier to complain than check your facts, I guess.

The kernel support and userspace software for automated CPU scaling is already here. Ubuntu 5.10 runs powernowd by default, for example. I have a small Mini-ITX fileserver at home running this, and the CPU is currently running at 500MHz (normal maximum is 1GHz). As soon as the load climbs, the CPU speed is adjusted.

See:

http://www.deater.net/john/powernowd.html

Granted, but it'd be nice to see it enabled in future core revisions and motherboards.

I too am one of those weird people who wants themselves a dual op workstation (I do lots of video work), and it'd be nice to know that, when I'm not crunching frames, my CPU's aren't melting a hole through the floor.

I'm sure even colo servers have "quiet" times when the revs could be dropped down, and save the server staff some power and and air-con bills. For opterons used for things like a national DB server (i.e. one that's primarily only in use for a 9 to 5 shift), it would also bring huge advantages.

Enabling cool'n'quiet on my home systems (and yes, it is supported in Linux* but only under 2.6 with the right kernel options enabled IIRC) has resulted in a much less toasty room whenever I get back from work :)

*FYI, I use the PowerNowd userspace daemon http://www.deater.net/john/powernowd.html to control CnQ under Linux. It's pretty much zero configuration, and works a treat.

I've installed PowerNowD . Again, I haven't run it long enough to definitively say what it does for battery life, but my laptop runs so much cooler!. When I'm not putting a load on it, the PowerNowD daemon clocks the cpu down to 500MHz. If I increase the load, it clocks right back up. Before adding the daemon, GKrellM was reporting the cpu temp at ~80C, now it's usually in the low 70s.

Anyone know of a GKrellM plugin that will monitor the cpu freq?

right here Assembled on x86 Linux, the binary is 8 KB. Since it's in assembly it probably won't work on anything but x86 anyway...

It's possible to make your own CPU-meter with a few simple electronic components available at your favorite electronics retailer. I wouldn't be suprised of a custom LED CPU meter is at least half the price of prebuilt ones.

A wide range of comments:

The trident BladeXP is a low end chip, but offers several nice things. For starters, it uses up a total of .8W of power. It has an integrated T&L Engine, and it's windows performance is decent. It is not an SMA chipset either. It has it's own framebuffer.

HP is the major vendor that ships with Trident in thier laptops. Complain to HP as well, and tell them they're losing business. THEY will put pressure on trident.

I baught my HP N5430 (Duron 850) BECAUSE it has a trident chip and not an ATI one. (Compaq ships their duron notebooks with ATI). I figured that trident has always supported Linux, so this would be no different.. Now HP got my money, Trident got my money, and I got shafted.

I've been in touch with trident to get the docs, and they gave me the Blade3D (same line as CyberBlade series in Vaio's, etc..) specs easily enough, but the BladeXP requires a restrictive NDA.

Alan Houraine (sp?) is the XFree developer who's been workingon this, and is having the same problem I did.

The 2D support is unaccelerated, but quite tolerable with shadowFB enabled for this chipset. I'm writing this from my laptop now and in general, I'm quite happy about how 2D is working. Makes me wonder just how good accelerated 2D would be. Go here for info on how to configure this chip under Linux.

pm.