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Linux* Operating System Based PCs
Intel is working with the Linux community to get necessary optimizations for HT Technology included in distributions. Note that while Linux operating system based PCs may have HT Technology enabled, only PCs based on Microsoft* Windows* XP Professional Edition or Microsoft* Windows* Home Edition are currently eligible to carry the new Intel Pentium 4 Processor with HT Technology logo. If purchasing a Linux OS-based PC, check with your PC vendor to determine if the PC includes the necessary system ingredients for HT Technology and has HT Technology enabled

Not sure if that means yes or no, but I guess "working with" tends to imply no...

Can't help you much on packages, but can on a definition.

NURBS - Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline

Essentially, a NURBS surface is a mesh of B-Splines, and B-Splines are a way to represent a curve using knots and points (sometimes called control points or de Boor points). A B-Spline is similar to a Bezier curve (try it in Photoshop). The only difference is you add "knots" which force the curve to go through some fixed points. The first point and first knot are always the same, as are the last point and last knot (these are the "edges" of the mesh), so you need at least 3 points and two knots to make a B-Spline curve and 4 knots and 5 points to represent a mesh (if the B-splines share point between their curves, which not normal - 6 is normal - you end up with an hourglass shape).

The mesh itself is called non-uniform because the knots don't need to be equally spaced from one another. Rational means simply using real numbers not Imaginary.

here's a picture of a B-spline

There are numerous problems with NURBS surfaces, most of which you'll never worry about (us developer types do). There's a pretty good article on this by Intel

On the other hand, NURBS have the advantage of being able to remove knots and control points and scale performance for processors (sacrificing quality).

Interestingly (to me, at least), the points aren't called weighted control points anywhere (at least not from most google results I looked at), as they were in most texts when I took computer graphics in college. All weighted control points means is describing the points of the NURBS curve as a unit vector (vhat, v with the carat symbol on top) and a multiple (weight) of that vector, rather than the actual x,y,z of the point. The point formula was thus w*vhat, where vhat=v/Norm(v). That's probably technobabble to most people, so I'll shut up now :)

In Vernor Vinges sci-fi novel A fire upon the deep, he presents the idea of software archeology. Vinges future has software engineers spending large amounts of time digging through layers of decades-old code in a computer system like layers of dirt and rubbish in real-world archeology to find out how, or why, something works.

So far, in 2002, this problem isnt so bad. We call such electronic garbage cruft, and promise to get rid of it someday. But its not really important right now, we tell ourselves, because computers keep getting faster, and we havent quite got to the point where single programs are too large for highly coordinated teams to understand.

But what if cruft makes its way into the human-computer interface? Then you have problems, because human brains arent getting noticably faster. (At least, not in the time period were concerned with here.) So the more cruft there is in an interface, the more difficult it will be to use.

Unfortunately, over the past 20 years, Ive noticed that cruft has been appearing in computer interfaces. And few people are trying to fix it. I see two main reasons for this.

1. Microsoft and Apple dont want to make their users go through any retraining, at all, for fear of losing market share. So rather than make their interfaces less crufty, they concentrate on making everything look pretty.

2. Free Software developers have the ability to start from a relatively cruft-free base, but (as a gratuitously broad generalization) they have no imagination whatsoever. So rather than making their interfaces more usable, they concentrate on copying whatever Microsoft and Apple are doing, cruft and all.

Here are a few examples of interface cruft.

1. In the 1970s and early 80s, transferring documents from a computers memory to permanent storage (such as a floppy disk) was slow. It took many seconds, and you had to wait for the transfer to finish before you could continue your work. So, to avoid disrupting typists, software designers made this transfer a manual task. Every few minutes, you would save your work to permanent storage by entering a particular command.

   Trouble is, since the earliest days of personal computers, people have been forgetting to do this, because its not natural. They dont have to save when using a pencil, or a pen, or a paintbrush, or a typewriter, so they forget to save when theyre using a computer. So, when something bad happens, theyve often gone too long without saving, and they lose their work.

   Fortunately, technology has improved since the 1970s. We have the power, in todays computers, to pick a sensible name for a document, and to save it to a persons desktop as soon as she begins typing, just like a piece of paper in real life. We also have the ability to save changes to that document every couple of minutes (or, perhaps, every paragraph) without any user intervention.

   We have the technology. So why do we still make people save each of their documents, at least once, manually? Cruft.

2. The original Macintosh, which introduced graphical interfaces to the general public, could only run one program at a time. If you wanted to use a second program, or even return to the file manager, the first program needed to be unloaded first. To make things worse, launching programs was slow, often taking tens of seconds.

   This presented a problem. What if you had one document open in a program, and you closed that document before opening another one? If the program unloaded itself as soon as the first document was closed, the program would need to be loaded again to open the second document, and that would take too long. But if the program didnt unload itself, you couldnt launch any other program.

   So, the Macs designers made unloading a program a manual operation. If you wanted to load a second program, or go back to the file manager, you first chose a menu item called Quit to unload the first program. And if you closed all the windows in a program, it didnt unload by itself it stayed running, usually displaying nothing more than a menu bar, just in case you wanted to open another document in the same program.

   Trouble is, the Quit command has always been annoying and confusing people, because its exposing an implementation detail the lack of multitasking in the operating system. It annoys people, because occasionally they choose Quit by accident, losing their careful arrangement of windows, documents, toolboxes, and the like with an instantaneity which is totally disproportionate to how difficult it was to open and arrange them all in the first place. And it confuses people, because a program can be running without any windows being open, so while all open windows may belong to the file manager, which is now always running in the background menus and keyboard shortcuts get sent to the invisible program instead, producing unexpected behavior.

   Fortunately, technology has improved since 1984. We have the power, in todays computers, to run more than one program at once, and to load programs in less than five seconds.

   We have the technology. So why do we still punish people by including Quit or Exit menu items in programs? Cruft.

3. As I said, the original Macintosh could only run one program at a time. If you wanted to use a second program, or even return to the file manager, the first program needed to be unloaded first.

   This presented a problem when opening or saving files. The obvious way to open a document is to launch it (or drag it) from the file manager. And the obvious way to save a document in a particular folder is to drag it to that folder in the file manager. But on the Mac, if another program was already running, you couldnt get to the file manager. What to do? What to do?

   So, the Macs designers invented something called a file selection dialog, or filepicker a lobotomized file manager, for opening and saving documents when the main file manager wasnt running. If you wanted to open a document, you chose an Open menu item, and navigated your way through the filepicker to the document you wanted. Similarly, if you wanted to save a document, you chose a Save menu item, entered a name for the document, and navigated your way through the filepicker to the folder you wanted.

   Trouble is, this interface has always been awkward to use, because its not consistent with the file manager. If youre in the file manager and you want to make a new folder, you do it one way; if youre in a filepicker and you want to make a new folder, you do it another way. In the file manager, opening two folders in separate windows is easy; in a filepicker, it cant be done.

   Fortunately, technology has improved since 1984. We have the power, in todays computers, to run more than one program at once, and to run the file manager all the time. We can open documents from the file manager without quitting all other programs first, and we can save copies of documents (if necessary) by dragging them into folders in the file manager.

   We have the technology. So why do we still make people use filepickers at all? Cruft.

4. This last example is particularly nasty, because it shows how interface cruft can be piled up, layer upon layer.

   1. In Microsofts MS-DOS operating system, the canonical way of identifying a file was by its pathname: the concatenation of the drive name, the hierarchy of directories, and the filename, something like C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\CTL3DV2.DLL. If a program wanted to keep track of a file in a menu of recently-opened documents, for example it used the files pathname. For backward compatibility with MS-DOS, all Microsofts later operating systems, right up to Windows XP, do the same thing.

      Trouble is, this system causes a plethora of usability problems in Windows, because filenames are used by humans.

   2. What if a human renames a document in the file manager, and later on tries to open it from that menu of recently-opened documents? He gets an error message complaining that the file could not be found.

   3. What if he makes a shortcut to a file, moves the original file, and then tries to open the shortcut? He gets an error message, as Windows scurries to find a file which looks vaguely similar to the one the shortcut was supposed to be pointing at.

   4. What happens if he opens a file in a word processor, then renames it to a more sensible name in the file manager, and then saves it (automatically or otherwise) in the word processor? He gets another copy of the file with the old name, which he didnt want.

   5. What happens if a program installs itself in the wrong place, and our fearless human moves it to the right place? If hes lucky, the program will still work but hell get a steady trickle of error messages, the next time he launches each of the shortcuts to that program, and the next time he opens any document associated with the program.

   6. Fortunately, technology has improved since 1981. We have the power, in todays computers, to use filesystems which store a unique identifier for every file, separate from the pathname such as the file ID in the HFS and HFS+ filesystems, or the inode in most filesystems used with Linux and Unix. In these filesystems, shortcuts and other references to particular files can keep track of these unchanging identifiers, rather than the pathname, so none of those errors will ever happen.

      We have the technology. So why does Windows still suffer from all these problems? Cruft.

      Lest it seem like Im picking on Microsoft, Windows is not the worst offender here. GNU/Linux applications are arguably worse, because they could be avoiding all these problems (by using inodes), but their programmers so far have been too lazy. At least Windows programmers have an excuse.

   7. To see how the next bit of cruft follows from the previous one, we need to look at the mechanics of dragging and dropping. On the Macintosh, when you drag a file from one folder to another, what happens is fairly predictable.

   8. If the source and the destination are on different storage devices, the item will be copied.
   9. If the source and destination are on the same storage device, the item will be moved.
   10. If you want the item to be copied rather than moved in the latter case, you hold down the Option key.

   11. Windows has a similar scheme, for most kinds of files. But as Ive just explained, if you move a program in Windows, every shortcut to that program (and perhaps the program itself) will stop working. So as a workaround for that problem, when you drag a program from one place to another in Windows, Windows makes a shortcut to it instead of moving it and lands in the Interface Hall of Shame as a result.

       Naturally, this inconsistency makes people rather confused about exactly what will happen when they drag an item from one place to another. So, rather than fixing the root problem which led to the workaround, Microsoft invented a workaround to the workaround. If you drag an item with the right mouse button, when you drop it youll get a menu of possible actions: move, copy, make a shortcut, or cancel. That way, by spending a couple of extra seconds choosing a menu item, you can be sure of what is going to happen. Unfortunately this earns Microsoft another citation in the Interface Hall of Shame for inventing the right-click-drag, perhaps the least intuitive operation ever conceived in interface design. Say it with me: Cruft.

   12. It gets worse. Dragging a file with the right mouse button does that fancy what-do-you-want-to-do-now-menu thing. But normally, when you click the right mouse button on something, you want a shortcut menu a menu of common actions to perform on that item. But if pressing the right mouse button might mean the user is dragging a file, it might not mean you want a shortcut menu. What to do, what to do?

       So, Windows designers made a slight tweak to the way shortcut menus work. Instead of making them open when the right mouse button goes down, they made them open when the right mouse button comes up. That way, they can tell the difference between a right-click-drag (where the mouse moves) and a right-click-I-want-a-shortcut-menu (where it doesnt).

       Trouble is, that makes the behavior of shortcut menus so much worse that they end up being pretty useless as an alternative to the main menus.

   13. They take nearly twice as long to use, since you need to release the mouse button before you can see the menu, and click and release a second time to select an item.

   14. Theyre inconsistent with every other kind of menu in Windows, which opens as soon as you push down on the mouse button.

   15. Once youve pushed the right mouse button down on something which has a menu, there is no way you can get rid of the menu without releasing, clicking the other mouse button, and releasing again. This breaks the basic GUI rule that you can cancel out of something youve pushed down on by dragging away from it, and it slows you down still further.

   16. In short, Windows native shortcut menus are so horrible to use that application developers would be best advised to implement their own shortcut menus which can be used with a single click, and avoid the native shortcut menus completely. Once more, with feeling: Cruft.

   17. Meanwhile, we still have the problem that programs on Windows cant be moved around after installation, otherwise things are likely to break. Trouble is, this makes it rather difficult for people to find the programs they want. In theory you can find programs by drilling down into the Program Files folder, but theyre arranged rather uselessly (by vendor, rather than by subject) and if you try to rearrange them for quick access, stuff will break.

       So, Windows designers invented something called the Start menu, which contained a Programs submenu for providing access to programs. Instead of containing a few frequently-used programs (like Mac OSs Apple menu did, before OS X), this Programs submenu has the weighty responsibility of providing access to all the useful programs present on the computer.

       Naturally, the only practical way of doing this is by using multiple levels of submenus thereby breaking Microsofts own guidelines about how deep submenus should be.

       And naturally, rearranging items in this menu is a little bit less obvious than moving around the programs themselves. So, in Windows 98 and later, Microsoft lets you drag and drop items in the menu itself thereby again breaking the general guideline about being able to cancel a click action by dragging away from it.

       This Programs menu is the ultimate in cruft. It is an entire system for categorizing programs, on top of a Windows filesystem hierarchy which theoretically exists for exactly the same purpose. Gnome and KDE, on top of a Unix filesystem hierarchy which is even more obtuse than that of Windows, naturally copy this cruft with with great enthusiasm.

Following those examples, its necessary to make two disclaimers.

Firstly, if youve used computers for more than six months, and become dulled to the pain, you may well be objecting to one or another of the examples. Hey!, youre saying. Thats not cruft, its useful! And, no doubt, for you that is true. In human-computer interfaces, as in real life, horrible things often have minor benefits to some people. These people manage to avoid, work around, or blame on user stupidity, the large inconvenience which the cruft imposes on the majority of people.

Secondly, there are some software designers who have waged war against cruft. Word Places Yeah Write word processor abolished the need for saving documents. Microsofts Internet Explorer for Windows, while having many interface flaws, sensibly abolished the Exit menu item. The Acorns RISC OS abolished filepickers. The Mac OS uses file IDs to refer to files, avoiding all the problems I described with moving or renaming. And the ROX Desktop eschews the idea of a Start menu, in favor of using the filesystem itself to categorize programs.

However, for the most part, this effort has been piecemeal and on the fringe. So far, there has not been a mainstream computing platform which has seriously attacked the cruft that graphical interfaces have been dragging around since the early 1980s.

So far.

Discuss

at least from the intel press release :D

The new manufacturing technology enabled by the 300-mm technology also provides significant benefits from an environmental perspective. The chips manufactured in Fab11X will require less water and generate fewer emissions per chip than other fabs. Water and chemical use will be more efficient. When compared to a 200-mm facility Fab 11X will produce 48 percent less volatile organic compound emissions, use 42 percent less ultra pure water and will use approximately 40 percent less energy.

I haven't tried, but I would be surprised if VTune ran on an AMD processor.

For the very fastest code, you can take advantage of special instruction, write stuff in assembly with the clever use of registers, etc. But the performance gains won't be portable.

Optimizing cache use could be considered a non-portable optimization, but it can be done directly in C or C++, and any processor most people are likely to use will use a cache. There will just be some variations in its size, the size of a cache line and stuff like that.

A Mobile P4 1.4Ghz to 2.0 Ghz will run at 1.20Ghz unplugged

Somehow I doubt we will see great progress in the future with 2.0Ghz unplugged until maybe 2004. :)

If your laptop is used on a plane or outdoors half the time, consider buying a 1.4Ghz instead of 2.0Ghz :)

And for PIII, 850, 900, and 1.0Ghz run at 750mhz unplugged. Same exact performance! :)

Yeah, all of Intel's mobile chips have this so-called Speed-Step "technology". An unusual way to describe a core clock throttle, but alright. When you're plugged into the wall, you run at the chip's advertised core clock, but use battery power and it scales down to some fraction of that.

Intel doesn't even advertise the lower core clock speed anymore for the P4, but on the P3-M 1 GHZ, the technology dropped the chip to 733 MHz when on battery power.

Pentium4 2.2 GHz tech specs.

This is a clear explanation of SpeedStep, it says as clear as day "You 500 mhz chip will operate at 300 mhz speeds"

I don't mean to give anyone a hard time but if you are going to spend more than $100 (or 0x64 dollars for that stupid hex guy) you would save a lot of aggrevation by doing some research.

Motorola makes a couple of PowerPC based microcontrollers. These come with a number of usefull peripherals (USB endpoints, ethernet interfaces, serial ports, parallel I/O ports, etc.), some RAM and some EPROM all on a single chip. In decades past, Steve Ciarcia built a small publishing empire on the practice of building homebrew personal computers on similar microcontrollers (Z80 variants, in his case). The same approach could be used today. If you don't want to use a PowerPC, there are similar beasts available based on other popular architectures.

The Ars paper seems a bit light on details to me. In case anyone wants to dig deeper, this article from Intel themselves, talks about the internal details of what the hyperthreading technology is and what it is doing inside the processor. Check the web for some real-world benchmark results and you'll see that the performance is anywhere from 80%-150% with hyperthreading enabled. In other words, the tasks being hyperthreaded together vastly affect the performance results.

Alas, now if only I could get Linux or Win2k to understand that hyperthreading is enabled on my (P4) system, I could get some first-hand experience with the technology.

1.) Patriot missile failure
2.) Intel f*cking up floating-point calculations in one of their chips
3.) High-tech toilet glitch (no, really!)
4.) Windows ME

The spec hasn't even been released yet.

What about curing cancer? Try this.

Though I am a SCSI man, i can see the future need for SATA. Right now it may be mainly a marketing ploy... But in a couple years it will be a necessity. Parallel cabling is nearing the end of the road..

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20 020610corp_a.htm

Since the site is slashdotted, here are further links about Serial ATA:

Cnet

SATA and ISCSI

Intel Dev Paper

Maxtor White Paper

Natural Microsystems (NMS) actually does release Linux drivers now (it didn't two years ago, Solaris was the only Unix available) but it's doubtful Intel ever will.

Just FYI, Intel Dialogic has been shipping Linux drivers for a while. They support most of their products, including the CompactPCI cards.

I do! But guess what? I didn't have to write the drivers because someone
already wrote them.

In my opinion, there is not a device driver problem here. Intel/Dialogic isn't the only vendor supporting Linux. And they don't support it out of the kindness of their heart: they support it because doing so helps sell hardware.

-- Hamster

Here's one. I don't know whether they use AA or not :)
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 15, 2002 - Intel Corporation today announced third-quarter revenue of $6.5 billion, up 3 percent sequentially and flat year-over-year. Third-quarter net income was $686 million, up 54 percent sequentially and up 547 percent year-over-year. Earnings per share were $0.10, up 43 percent sequentially and up 400 percent from $0.02 in the third quarter of 2001.

Well, that would of course depend on the type of CPU.

The P4 @ 2.8 GHz in the PC in the article should be OK up to 75C, according to Intel.

I've got a dual Athlon MP 1900+ (i.e. 1660 MHz) box, slightly overclocked to 1740 MHz. Under full CPU load (which is 24/7 thanks to distributed.net) CPU0 temperature is around 50C, and 60C for CPU1 (which I think is weird. CPU1 is close to the graphics card, but I still wouldn't think that this would account for a 10 degree difference.) This is with active air cooling using a couple of WhisperRock II HSFs and Arctic Silver 3 "thermal goo".
Anyway, AMD says I'll be fine as long as I stay below 95C! There's a setting in my BIOS that will that shutdown the system if the temp hits a user defined value (80C here), detected by the on-die sensors of the CPUs. I suppose it's the same with the CPU and mobo in the article.

I'd be more worried about the temp of his graphics card. Personally I think I'd keep a quiet fan on the GPU, especially if it's overclocked. In my experience it's the case fans, sucking air in and blowing it out of the case through grilles, cables and plastic decorations that are the noisiest. Get some quiet case fans, or remove them like in this... case... and use some sort of insulation in the box to keep the noise of the internal stuff to a minimum.

"Pentium 4s have no multi-cpu board designs..." Really?
Intel seem to think otherwise
And here's a nice quad processor board for them.

Don't get me wrong, I love S@H but I ditched it when I heard they were running out of

Cash

Bandwidth

New data to process

And I do mean that multiply and shift are absolute slower on the P4 than on the (fastest) P3. Multiplies/shifts take 4/1 clock cycles to complete on the Pentium 3, and 16/4 on the P4. That is a factor of 4, and the P4 is not yet at 4 GHz - let alone 4 x 1.4 GHz (the fastest the Tualtin core goes).

MS already has 64-bit Windows that runs on a chip that's currently shipping. For that matter, so does Linux.

Apple moving into this market is unlikely to provide them a bump. If an ( Intel && ( Windows || Linux ) ) user wants 64-bit today, they can go get it.

My big bet is that storage is going to be the interesting area in high-tech next year...and I don't just say that because I happen to work in that area. CPUs, video cards, and memory will all get faster in not-very-interesting ways. Wireless networks will grow in not-very-interesting ways (mostly; see below). But there will be heaps of storage-related news:

• Portable removable storage devices will be a growth market. Wireless versions, probably based on some flavor of wireless 1394 will be particularly handy.
• Someone will start shipping some form of removable storage (probably optical) that offers 50GB or more on something the size of a CD or smaller. Initial versions will be write-once and expensive; lower costs and rewritable versions won't hit until 2004.
• Products and services to synchronize and distribute data will grow steadily as people want to share that data between more and more devices.
• People will continue to ignore distributed filesystems and their cousins as alternatives to the above-mentioned synchronization nightmare.
• iSCSI will continue to be hyped until (about mid-year) people realize that it doesn't give them anything they didn't already have. That plus a continuing soft IT economy will create a wave of rolled-back claims and changed strategies from all the router-company refugees behind the hype.
• The BFDA (Big Fine Disk Array) vendors will continue to pay more attention to lawsuits among themselves than to designing and implementing actual products that meet customers' needs.
• More and more storage-related functionality will be packaged as separate appliances (for reasons see above). People will eventually realize that all this "virtualization" hype is just a bunch of garbage anyway, but will continue to support the appliance approach for other kinds of functionality.

While the software side of things seems to be pretty similar to that of the Zaurus (Lineo Embedix, Trolltech QTEmbedded/Qtopia, Insignia Jeaode JVM, Opera, Hancom Office suite) there are some important hardware differences. Rather than any of Intel's StrongARM based chips they're using an Hitatchi SH7727[PDF] and are citing USB Host Control as a capability of the device. I'm an owner and big fan of the Linux-based Zaurus, but the SA-1110 leaves a lot to be desired when USB connectivity is concerned. It can only act as a slave device and the silicon has numerous bugs and conflicts with general USB support and the USB CDC Spec (just check out Intel's own docs on the chip if you want to check up on this). This causes great problems with connectivity. The SA-1111 companion chip adds USB Host capability and some other nifty features, but is not used in any Linux handhelds that I know of. It would also increase size and power consumption if used. It will be interesting to see how the SH7727, with it's similar approach to "handheld on a chip" functionality stands up against Intel's offering. It could end up showing the Pro's and Cons of these chips at the core of the devices more than the handheld as a whole. There's also more info on India's movements into the handheld market here

While the software side of things seems to be pretty similar to that of the Zaurus (Lineo Embedix, Trolltech QTEmbedded/Qtopia, Insignia Jeaode JVM, Opera, Hancom Office suite) there are some important hardware differences. Rather than any of Intel's StrongARM based chips they're using an Hitatchi SH7727[PDF] and are citing USB Host Control as a capability of the device. I'm an owner and big fan of the Linux-based Zaurus, but the SA-1110 leaves a lot to be desired when USB connectivity is concerned. It can only act as a slave device and the silicon has numerous bugs and conflicts with general USB support and the USB CDC Spec (just check out Intel's own docs on the chip if you want to check up on this). This causes great problems with connectivity. The SA-1111 companion chip adds USB Host capability and some other nifty features, but is not used in any Linux handhelds that I know of. It would also increase size and power consumption if used. It will be interesting to see how the SH7727, with it's similar approach to "handheld on a chip" functionality stands up against Intel's offering. It could end up showing the Pro's and Cons of these chips at the core of the devices more than the handheld as a whole. There's also more info on India's movements into the handheld market here

The exact motherboard that supports Serial ATA is the D845PEBT2

The technical documentation is here

What I found disappointing (maybe I just haven't read enough about serial ATA) is that it only supports two drives. Why only two? I thought serial ATA was supposed to be more like SCSI, with more drives (like 15)?

Shango

The exact motherboard that supports Serial ATA is the D845PEBT2

The technical documentation is here

What I found disappointing (maybe I just haven't read enough about serial ATA) is that it only supports two drives. Why only two? I thought serial ATA was supposed to be more like SCSI, with more drives (like 15)?

Shango

I don't think that I did prove your point though, all I said was that Intel's offering was selling for less; acquisition price as you noted, and performing comparably. Actually I was just repeating the comments made by the post you replied to. I have no hard data about what their actual costs to manufacture an Itanium are, nor did I post any. I'll go along, however, and speculate that they're not recouping their R&D costs at the moment, but are instead hoping that lower costs will mean larger acceptance. If dumping is illegal in domestic trade I'm sure Intel is selling just at or above actual costs of manufacture. And yes, it is rather doubtless that their strong presence in the PC market is helping to keep their business afloat, along with the networking division and whereever else Intel has diversified to. However, Intel isn't a monopoly on the desktop. A little over a week ago AMD anounced it has about 19% market share. Here's a read about it. That doesn't count the people using Macs or older Sun's or SGI's or anything, though that is a pretty small portion. Just because it's their architecture that has a monopoly on the PC market doesn't mean that they have a monopoly. Had you made the assertion before the Athlon, however, I would have been quite inclined to agree.

This proves you know little...
See, now you have to go and be a jerk. I hadn't read about VLIW, and thus EPIC's compiler optimizations not carrying forward generations. A simple pointing it out would have sufficed. If you could supply a link with detail I would appreciate it. The best I've found is that because of heavy compile time optimization future EPIC processors may run the code essentially the same since the number of functional units the code was compiled for remains the same in the compiled code. And while a recompile would make it all better, I too would rather have it just work with a new processor.
It'll still run older code though and it doesn't sound like they're changing the ISA in a way that would break it with their next Itanium. That was the basis of my statement.

I'm actually kinda upset that we're going to see only one more Alpha. I wish DEC and then Compaq would have done something about marketing or anything to keep the things around. Why Intel, upon aquiring a lot of the talent that went into Alpha, isn't going to do more to further what the Alpha had going is beyond me. Intel would have a hell of an offering if they extended the Alpha.

And why EPIC indeed. The performance of the Itanium shows that it isn't a total flop, despite whatever issues about size/heat/actual cost are brought up. I don't think that at this stage you can classify the Itanium line as inferior. The performance is on par and we've yet to really see how it scales. If, when Itanium 2 has gone though its rigors, I hear that there are a whole slew of problems and performance is going nowhere I'll be the next to say that there are problems with the architechture. I'm not about to discount it on the basis of size, heat, or potential issues. Of course, I'd probably wait to see if I were thinking about buying one too.

Lastly again I'm not sure about the power of the IA-32 deal. I'm no EE, but looking around at Intel's and Motorola's pages I see the Pentium 4 with a core voltage no higher than 1.75V and the G4 fixed at 1.8V. From personal experience I've run a dual Pentium 3 with two hard drives, two cd drives, two floppies, and a decently powered video card off of a 235W power supply. My 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 has a 300W power supply and is perfectly happy. I couldn't find a smaller one, and I'm not sure if it needs that kind of power either. Comparably I did a little poking around and the G4 cube uses a modest 205W power supply (part 611-0150) and I found a G4 power supply (part 661-2303) that's a 235W piece. From the images, however, that one didn't appear to have the ability to run many drives off of it. So while the numbers are smaller I'm not sure I'd call it absurd to have a machine as powerful as the IA-32 line with power requirements at least in the neighborhood of where Apple's are. Heck, Apple doesn't post much information about what is used where, so I'm not sure the newer, comparable G4's can even use the 235W power supply either. I would say from my experience that most of the older G4 models were comparable in performance to my dual Pentium 3 machine. The cubes I've used always seemed slower.

Do you have pointers regarding the amount of dynamic optimization in the IA-64? In other words, if the compiler in only run-of-the-mill, can the IA-64 still perform?

Itanium Manuals
Itanium 2 Manuals

I haven't read it myself but you might want to give a look at the Reference Manual for Software Development and Optimization which "describes microarchitectural details of the Intel Itanium 2 processor, including cache hierarchies, memory management, and instruction execution latencies. It is targeted for developers of compilers and performance software".

I know a little bit about the Itanium because I wrote a paper arguing that we could cut down on the cost of context switches thanks to the Itanium's large address space, large TLB and page-level protection keys. It might bring microkernel research back to life.

Do you have pointers regarding the amount of dynamic optimization in the IA-64? In other words, if the compiler in only run-of-the-mill, can the IA-64 still perform?

Itanium Manuals
Itanium 2 Manuals

I haven't read it myself but you might want to give a look at the Reference Manual for Software Development and Optimization which "describes microarchitectural details of the Intel Itanium 2 processor, including cache hierarchies, memory management, and instruction execution latencies. It is targeted for developers of compilers and performance software".

I know a little bit about the Itanium because I wrote a paper arguing that we could cut down on the cost of context switches thanks to the Itanium's large address space, large TLB and page-level protection keys. It might bring microkernel research back to life.

Do you have pointers regarding the amount of dynamic optimization in the IA-64? In other words, if the compiler in only run-of-the-mill, can the IA-64 still perform?

Itanium Manuals
Itanium 2 Manuals

I haven't read it myself but you might want to give a look at the Reference Manual for Software Development and Optimization which "describes microarchitectural details of the Intel Itanium 2 processor, including cache hierarchies, memory management, and instruction execution latencies. It is targeted for developers of compilers and performance software".

I know a little bit about the Itanium because I wrote a paper arguing that we could cut down on the cost of context switches thanks to the Itanium's large address space, large TLB and page-level protection keys. It might bring microkernel research back to life.

Do you have pointers regarding the amount of dynamic optimization in the IA-64? In other words, if the compiler in only run-of-the-mill, can the IA-64 still perform?

Itanium Manuals
Itanium 2 Manuals

I haven't read it myself but you might want to give a look at the Reference Manual for Software Development and Optimization which "describes microarchitectural details of the Intel Itanium 2 processor, including cache hierarchies, memory management, and instruction execution latencies. It is targeted for developers of compilers and performance software".

I know a little bit about the Itanium because I wrote a paper arguing that we could cut down on the cost of context switches thanks to the Itanium's large address space, large TLB and page-level protection keys. It might bring microkernel research back to life.

Do you have pointers regarding the amount of dynamic optimization in the IA-64? In other words, if the compiler in only run-of-the-mill, can the IA-64 still perform?

Itanium Manuals
Itanium 2 Manuals

I haven't read it myself but you might want to give a look at the Reference Manual for Software Development and Optimization which "describes microarchitectural details of the Intel Itanium 2 processor, including cache hierarchies, memory management, and instruction execution latencies. It is targeted for developers of compilers and performance software".

I know a little bit about the Itanium because I wrote a paper arguing that we could cut down on the cost of context switches thanks to the Itanium's large address space, large TLB and page-level protection keys. It might bring microkernel research back to life.

You know, you can download the compiler for evaluation purposes to actually see if there is a speedup in your application. The linux version is even free for non-commercial use.

It [the 486dx4] was a 25MHz chip with a 4x clock multiplyer. Built several hundred.

From the 486 FAQ .

Does the Intel486(TM) processor, 80486DX4 have a clock multiplier?
The Intel486(TM) processor, 80486DX4 has clock doubling and tripling. CLKMUL on the 80486DX4 allows this to happen. When held high, it performs clock tripling. When held low it performs clock doubling. The Intel486(TM), 80486DX2 has internal clock doubling. Possible Symptoms: Looking for clock speed.

This question came up in another slashdot discussion, a couple of months ago.

Also note that MS isn't the only folks supplying UPnP, Intel also developed a lot which is now Open Sourced.

Rendevous & Zeroconf information:

• IETF Zero Configuration Networking (Zeroconf) Group
• IETF Zeroconf on Apple Rendezvous and Zeroconf
• Apple's Customer-pitch for Rendezvous
• Apple's Developer-pitch for Rendezvous

• Service Location Protocol Project
• Service Location Protocol Overview

Finally, for completeness here is UPnP:

• Universal Plug and Play Forum
• MS's Developer kit
• Intel's Developer info
• Intel-developed SDK, Open Sourced.

It's not as fancy as looking for Darth Vader, but I'm sure most of you had somebody close with cancer, alzheimer, diabetes, etc.

Right you are. And any editor worth his salt might have noticed that this news is several weeks old. The article is dated (09/09/02 06:04 p.m. EST)

This was part of Paul Otellini's keynote at the Intel Developer Forum. Just the boys in the lab showing that they can overclock with the best of them.

but for some odd reason, Intel Museum and many other history sites refer to it as 5MHz

- HeXa

• IETF Zero Configuration Networking (Zeroconf) Group
• IETF Zeroconf on Apple Rendezvous and Zeroconf
• Apple's Customer-pitch for Rendezvous
• Apple's Developer-pitch for Rendezvous

• Service Location Protocol

Finally, for completeness here is UPnP:

• Universal Plug and Play Forum
• MS's Developer kit
• Intel's Developer info
• Intel-developed SDK, Open Sourced.

OK, well 2pF may not seem like alot and in most cases its not. However, what you are forgetting is the scale we are working at here. I tried to lookup the exact memory module for a GeForce card, but I couldn't so I just went to Micron's site and looked up their spec on their 256Mb DDR333 SDRAM. If you will look on page six you will see the capacitance ratings for each signal line are as low as 0.5pF for three of the signal lines and max out at 4.0pF for the I/O (data) lines on the memory module. So lets look at the 2pF number again. By adding a connector you increase your input capacitance by 400% in some cases and 50% in the best case scenario. This is very bad and will directly impact how much memory can be put on one bus and how fast the memory can be timed. The more input capacitance you have on a line the harder the output buffers of the graphics chip (or memory controller) have to work. More input capacitance directly affects how fast you can get that nice little square wave signal to look nice enough to be registered on the other side. The more input capacitance the longer it takes, and this is all very relevant at the speeds we are talking about here. Also, FYI other factors for not using a connector include trace length. By adding modules you are increasing trace length by a large amount (relatively speaking of course). This also adds input capacitance.

So now you are probably asking. How much capacitance can a typical graphics chip or processor drive? Well I tried to find the datasheet on nVidia's website for their GeForce chips, but didn't turn up a thing. So I went to Intel's site and looked up the datasheet for their 845G chipset with integrated graphics. If you look on page 525 you will see that the output drive for the Intel chip is 12pF. So now you can probably see the problem. Assuming all we drove were memory modules directly from the 845G (which we wouldn't in real life) we could put just two to three 256Mb (32MB) modules on board without connectors. If we put the Molex connector you specified in between that number changes from 1 - 2 chips. In real life we would put a nice buffer in between that has a stronger output drive in between the 845G and the memory. Like TI's 24-Bit to 48-Bit Registered Buffer. That sucker has a 30pF drive and each buffer could easily drive 6 - 7 modules for a total of 256MB of RAM without the connector. Add a connector and this number deindles to 4 - 5. Anyway, I'm sure you get the point. At this scale even a 2pF connector makes a big difference.

However, after saying all that I should mention that I do not believe that these electrical considerations are the main or only reason the cards are not expandable. I think alot of it has to do with demand. Very few people are gonna upgrade their video card with more memory. I don't know any Matrox Millenium owners, including me, that upgraded their memory on their video cards. Because the economies of scale for a specialized memory make them much more expensive to produce than consumers like myself are willing to pay. In adition, by the time I am gonna upgrade a cards memory I can probably buy a brand new one with that amount of memory for the price of the piddly module ;)

JOhn

Sun needs a transition plan to make migration from the low end Linux/x86 based desktops and servers to their Solaris/Sparc based high end workstations and enterprise servers. Otherwise they will not be able to bring as much sales up to the higher tier. There are two ways to do this. One is to run Solaris on x86 hardware as the middle tier. The other is to run Linux on Sparc hardware as the middle tier. One of these approaches leaves Sun subject to the whims of another CPU maker, which has it's own plans for 64-bit domination. The other leaves Sun subject to the whims of a huge open source software community and a few choices in Linux distributions (such as Debian, Mandrake, and SuSE) as well as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Which way do you think would be better for Sun?

Sun needs a transition plan to make migration from the low end Linux/x86 based desktops and servers to their Solaris/Sparc based high end workstations and enterprise servers. Otherwise they will not be able to bring as much sales up to the higher tier. There are two ways to do this. One is to run Solaris on x86 hardware as the middle tier. The other is to run Linux on Sparc hardware as the middle tier. One of these approaches leaves Sun subject to the whims of another CPU maker, which has it's own plans for 64-bit domination. The other leaves Sun subject to the whims of a huge open source software community and a few choices in Linux distributions (such as Debian, Mandrake, and SuSE) as well as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Which way do you think would be better for Sun?

Actually, Photoshop is widely known to be more heavily optimized for Macs than for PCs, nevermind the plugins.

Hmm, i wonder why Intel keeps praising it as a Posterchild-example for P4-optimized software!
Same goes for Quake3 btw!

I agree with you on the renderfarm bit below btw!.. Macs don't make that much sense for a renderfarm, although a few xserves do the job just nicely, although a bit more pricey for this job, but cheaper for others! (Large & fast HDs! ;-)

Actually, Photoshop is widely known to be more heavily optimized for Macs than for PCs, nevermind the plugins.

Hmm, i wonder why Intel keeps praising it as a Posterchild-example for P4-optimized software!
Same goes for Quake3 btw!

I agree with you on the renderfarm bit below btw!.. Macs don't make that much sense for a renderfarm, although a few xserves do the job just nicely, although a bit more pricey for this job, but cheaper for others! (Large & fast HDs! ;-)

Those prices are at acceptable levels today. Go to Intel's pricelist and subtract off the cost of cache from the Itantium 2 you'll find it doesn't run much more than the pentium4. All it takes is an OS app manufacturer ready to make the switch. I don't see MS doing it, I hope Apple does (since they need to make a switch anyway).

I think what should be the focus here is that Intel is planning on hitting the 90nm scale. Hell the 130nm scale has barely been accepted by all chip manufacturers, and it's already becoming obselete. The chip process technology is the thing that should really be the focus here. This is an article related to this. Essentially Intel will be using Silicon Germanium like IBM. According to Intel, this will not only mean a smaller scale production, but will also produce a chip that can tolerate higher frequencies. Here is another article relating to this: click

You are completely right about mixed signal chips being a reality for a long time: you don't need to look any further than a video card in your computer to see that. Intel mentions "silicon radio" as if it is a new idea, but a company already exists called Cambridge Silicon Radio, so you can see it isn't just Intel in this business.

I have a feeling that something important is being left out of this article. If you look at the original press release you see that it is a total mishmash of different Intel developments. The poor journalist was stuck trying to find a lead in this story (other than "Intel has bunches o' innovation") and zeroed in on the part that mentioned Moore's law, which he had heard before.

The most interesting part that I see is the tunable laser using silicon photonics. Si has an indirect band-gap, which makes it not very good for making lasers and optical devices. That could be big news.