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Microprocessor Forum
Manufacturers are strutting their stuff at the Microprocessor Forum. Some of the rollouts: Turmoil writes "AMD has demonstrated working SMP. http://www.amd.com/news/prodpr/20165.html" hol writes: "German news site Heise.de reports that a German startup named PACT surprise-announced their processor design at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose. Apparently this thing is a 128 cpu parallel computing deal which has its roots in the programmable gate array world." infodragon writes "All Linux Devices.com is running a pretty cool article about an X86 chip running on 1 AA battery. They demonstrated it by playing a VCD movie. They also say that mp3s can be decoded/played on it."
This article says that 3D Studio Max was used for the demonstration which means NT/2000 to me.
If dual-proc Thunderbird motherboards were to arrive on the market a month from now, is the code for linux to take advantage already in place?
Did I just get information when I heard that AMD's SMP is different?
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
Pair this CPU up with the low power consumption organic displays seen here/a&g t; and you've got yourself quite a nice notebook.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
The only Mac near me is the Quadra 800 that I wiped clean and installed NetBSD on this weekend. Really, I only do stuff like that for the sheer satisfaction of eliminating another instance of MacOS. You know, the same feeling that Anti-Virus software developers probably get from their work.
Now you've gone and made the Rock lose his patience.
Just as you pour over your posters of Natalie Portman, just as you beat your tiny penis to a bloody pulp, the Rock is gonna beat your candy ass!
So bring it jabroney, just bring it!
Now, the Rock says this. You see, that first posting lameness thing has pushed the Rock just a little too far. Just a little TOO far....
So here's what the Rock is gonna do. The Rock's gonna take your first post, turn that sumbitch sideways, and shove it straight up, your candy ass!
The people's champion isn't going to put up with the first posting morons. It's time for someone to stand up to the foolishness. It's time once again for the people's champ to take the ring.
You stand up there, every story. You stand up there and run your mouth. You run your mouth, and you whine, and you bitch, and you wine some more. Well, the Rock says this, he doesn't care how much crap you whine about! He doesn't care how much garbage you bitch about! But what the Rock does care about is WHIPPING THAT CANDY ASS ALl OVER SLASHDOT!
So you go on and whine. You go on and bitch. You go on and be a lame ass first poster. You go ahead and lick that lama's anus! The Rock is gonna take you out. And he's gonna take you out, TONIGHT!
If you SMELLLLLLLLLLLLLLOW! What the Rock! Is cookin'.
Signed, The Rock
Bite my yammer.
The world of CPU design has been quite stagnant in recent years. Yes, there have been truly massive improvements in an engineering sense, but architecturally speaking, the latest Pentium and the various 64-bit candidates are really no different to a little ol' Motorola 68000 at heart. Harvard, RISC and superscaler designs haven't departed significantly from the same basic and extremely limited architecture which dates back to three decades ago or more.
But PACT's XPP is a different thing altogether, a dataflow computing engine on a chip. This thing is so far outside the current norm that it holds exhalted company with only a very few select others: my list of such exceptional architectures would probably comprise the Intel iA432, the Inmos Transputer, the Crusoe, and now the XPP. (I'm only including real candidates for implementation as micros, not research or demonstrator platforms of which there have been many hundreds of great ones.)
It's beautiful!
My research work on parallel architectures and concurrent languages really needed hardware like this to blossom. I wish the XPP had appeared then!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Ah, that explains it. Well, to hell with them.
I still say that turning off Javascript was the best thing that ever happened to my Web usage.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/ias/pub-dept/abbreviation. pdf
Not there.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html
Hrm not there either.
http://computer.org/author/style/mno.htm
Fer crying out loud, not there EITHER!
Put up or shut up now, troll.
Come on, that's so last year. In order to gain karma these days you need to say whatever is against the perceived party-line, and complain about how all the moderators will moderate you down for being so avant-garde.
Also rejected were the other 30 people who submitted this story.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Thankyou for applying to sell your living brain to us. After extensive tests on your cognitive ability, we are happy to offer you $1.80 for your brain. Our trained staff will be with you to perform the extraction in the next hour.
Thankyou, once again, for donating your unused brain.
Motorola announcements used to excite me. Now they just make me angry.
Where the fuck is my POP board?! Anyone sellin'? If Motorola doesn't start shipping their damn chips, I'm just gonna buy more Athlons...
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
it has already been stated here on /. that the p4 will not be able to support smp. It is being pitched as a "multimedia chip" much as the failed and aging mediaGX chip was.
bats = bugs
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Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> I installed Linux, and now I can read Chinese!
Which is really amazing, as he didn't know
Chinese before he installed Linux!
Chris Mattern
They meant Mini-Wheat. It's a cereal and a measure of power.
And a processor (chip) is one IC.
-bugg
No, I just thought it was funny enough that it applied to both posts. Ya know, humor, that thing you heard of once. :)
A
I'll be interested to see how AMD's 64 benches against Alphas. Pity it'll be several months off.
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Try this.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I can see the right frame, but no menu. Then again, lots of stupid web sites are not made to work with a real standard browser like Opera.
-
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Maybe I'm having a mental fit or something, I don't recall ever seeing that anywhere.
I see a LOT of comments asking how the AA battery powered CPU stacks up against a Transmeta. While I have no stats on the dinky x86, I have an equivalent that you'll find interesting.
I bought a Micro-ATX Cyrix MediaGX mobo a while back, $59/+shipping, to use as a part of a custom router setup. Well, lo and behold, I'm reading the manual, and it states that it will do full-frame rate MPEG1 (VCD) and DVD playback. Now, don't get me wrong, but this is a 166 chip. What do I do? I pop in a DVD drive, ghost Windows 98SE to it and install the software player (OEM version of PowerDVD, with support for the funny accelerated video chipset.) And it plays 'The Road Warrior' just fine!
It doesn't take much to do VCD/DVD playback. The 166 Cyrix is about equivalent to a Pentium 120. The Transmeta Crusoe is equivalent to a Pentium III-500, for a max of seven times faster.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Explain!
Seriously now, anyone have trouble seeing anything at all on that page?
It requires javascript. Just look at the source. I had to look at the source for AMD's site because they chose a font size of "1", which on my system equates with "a few pixels". I'm not even going to enable javascript to look at PACT's site. If they don't care about security minded people then I don't care about them.
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
K7s are essentially RISC, and have more in common with a G4 than with a PIII.
Check out the comparison at Ars Technica.
- Because it doesn't exist yet
- Because it doesn't exist yet
(I know it's only one reason, but it's such a biggy I thought I'd say it twice*)AMD have yet to ship engineering samples of Sledgehammer, for the simple reason that the design isn't fully nailed yet.
Intel have largely stopped marketing Merced/Itanium, because their later designs will probably blow it out of the market.
What is wrong with a company failing to support a non-existant product?
</RANT>
If you need 64-bit processors in your server, you buy Sun SPARC, IBM PPC/64 or DEC Alpha. You spend a lot of money, you get a lot of them in one box, and you don't care about the price, because $5,000,000 for a server (OK, maybe $200,000 at the low end) is trivial.
The good thing is that the companies that sell these chips support Linux (and other free OS projects). The bad thing is that no sane company will ever run a free OS on a box that costs this much.
AMD and Intel are both building 64-bit chips. That's nice. Real computers, running real operating systems have had them for years. Until you need >4GB RAM in your cute little desktop peecee, forget about 64-bit processors. One day they will be there for you, and AMD and Intel will be selling them, But the real processors, in the world of the grown-ups, will still be so far ahead that the leet peecee brigade won't be able to comprehend it
*Apologies to Kryten
Hardware review website Sheiss.de has a section on a liquid-nitrogen block Athlon SMP system. The system achieved 1.41 GHz before boiling the entire liquid nitrogen reservoir and almost obliterating the lab. After the cataclysm, one of the system technicians uttered: "Zehr gut, ja?"
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Granted, even M$ legion designers, managers, programmers, paper shufflers, spinmeisters, manager-managers, lawyers, window washers, manager-manager-managers and Bill can only do so many things at once. Interestingly though, that this horde hasn't embraced a new processors as quickly as the [Linux-zealot Microsoft bashers] have.
Possibly the burden of all that bloated code has taxed their agility and finally pinned them to the mat.
Appearances being what they are, these days, M$ _could_ be viewed as exercising monopoly power by _not_ supporting a platform. I'd expect them to be better tactful, but that's still something they haven't grasped. A better choice of reply would have been, "It certainly is an interesting architecture and we're very eager to see what we can do with it", just before returning to a hotel suite and finishing with, "the day after hell freezes over."
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Actually no because this will be a cascaded setup so you would need 3 Northbridges one would connect the other two, which talk to the CPUs.
--Ulrich
--Ulrich
On no accounts allow a Vogon to read poetry at you
I would still run a dual EV6 against a dual Athlon any day.
"All linux Devices.com is running a pretty cool article about an X86 chip running on 1 AA battery.
Finally. Maybe I'll get a laptop that can actually last from Atlanta to SeaTac on one battery pack, and not even sear my crotch in the process. And a bonus, running Linux
1Alpha7
Live to be Moderated
I guess the long wait is kinda over... funny cause before the K7 came out, all the talk was on how the EV-6 would be the thing to have for SMP setups.. well I guess this means that the MOBO manufacturers will get their act together and maybe release something towards summer/autumn next year. now for another long wait!
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
AMD needed SMP...It's just one more step toward their full-scale processor market take-over...AMD has always been superior in my eyes anyway...
How Jaded Are You?
"Traditionally the battery-powered handheld appliances, like PDAs and mobile phones, are based on RISC microprocessors, which normally consume only a few hundred mini-watts while the traditional X86 microprocessors consume more than ten times of that figure."
Ask Slashdot - What is a mini-watt?
Al Gore - I invented mini-watts.
G. Bush - My daddy gave me mini-watts.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Sure they have SMP, but when are they going to use RISC?
Motorola also annouced 1Ghz G4's, as planned. Coming to a Mac near you.
Burn Hollywood Burn
An entire VCD with an AA Battery? Now that is slick... and even though the Voltage slipped from 1.5V to 1.1V, the processor remained functional? Man, this is very cool... Anyone know how the Transmetta chips take a slipping Voltage? can it handel this?
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
When it comes to single processors, the Athlon and the PIII are pretty much equal on a clock for clock basis (Athlons reach higher speeds).
But when it comes to SMP, the Athlons should have a BIG advantage; the EV6-protocol.
The EV6 which is the bus used by the Athlon-arcitechture, and licensed from Compaq (Alpha)
provides DEDICATED bandwith for each of the CPUs,
(to the chipset). The PIII's however must all share the bandwith, which is not really sufficient for optimal operation. Don't know what Intel has done for the P4 though..
Go take a look at the XPP page. It sits on a PCI card, it runs linux (it really does! there's both the weird XPP bit and a 32bit RISC core programmed with gcc), and it delivers amazing processing power. It sounds awfully familiar to the SETI accelerator PCI card hoax! Except this seems to be for real. So, can I get it to do SETI? I think I recall from the last set of comments that they don't treat ports as legit; that's no fun, cuz the thing is intended for DSP/image analysis, which is all SETI is anyway. I think I can get it to distributed.net though; after all, it's also suggested for crypto stuff. I mean heck, it can sit there, talk to the net every so often to get a new key, and with 256MB of RAM and 51.2 GFLOPs available I think it will do just fine at moving me up the ranks in distributed.net, or the great internet mersenne prime search. Too bad its expensive... and no software yet (plz? I don't think this thing should die too soon). Does anyone have pricing info?
duh, Sledgehammer vs. Itanium Spitfire (Duron) vs. Celeron Athlon vs. Pentium III or even Coppermine I think the winner is self-evident.
This is an interesting architecture, but I don't think you'll see it in a personal computer any time soon. It appears from the bits of technical information that I looked over on their web page that you have to program the reconfigurable part of the chip differently from the rest of the chip. What this means is that you can't just take a C program and create a new compiler backend to dump out a program for this beast; or if you can, it will take some SERIOUS work by the compiler people.
I am currently involved in some research where we are trying to solve the same problem, roughly. However, we are trying to make the change as transparent to users (i.e. compiler writers & assembly code writers) as possible by making small tweaks to the standard RISC concept that will allow our chip to extract large amounts of parallelism. It is clear that with these reconfiguration based architectures it is possible to have huge performance gains at the expense of programming complexity. Hopefully our architecture will be to these reconfigurable systems what superscalar was to VLIW. VLIW has been around for a long time, but it wasn't popularized until architects came up with ways of making a VLIW core look like a scalar processor to the outside world.
We'll see.
Ben
Just saw that M$ isn't voicing any upcoming support for AMD's Hammer. Heaven forbid anyone accuse M$ of using that old Monopoly power to kill a product...
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Does anyone know if the 760MP chipset is scalable to over two processors. A large portion of the high-end server market focuses on 4, 8, or 16 way boxes.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
PACT's website sure is well-designed. I must say, I haven't seen such a... um, clean design in a long time.
Seriously now, anyone have trouble seeing anything at all on that page?
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Analysts bemoan the downfall of Intel, as yet another Slashdot article fails to mention the aging chipmaker. Insiders say this is a great tradgedy that geeks actually have choices in the PC x86 processor market. "We used to run the show," said one anonymous employee. Analysts also mentioned that unless Intel can discover a way to compete in a non-monoplistic market, hoards of "Open Source" assembler and processor gurus will migrate to helping Transmeta and AMD build better products.
Shameless Plug! If you like trance, tell me what you think!!
2000-10-10 17:34:00 AMD Demonstrates Dual Athlon Workstation (articles,amd) (rejected)
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I was hoping that they'd be able to demonstrate at least a quad configuration by now. I thought that part of AMD's sell was that their bus architecture was better and could support more CPUs than Intel's.
X86 chip running on 1 AA battery. They demonstrated it by playing a VCD movie. They also say that mp3s can be decoded/played on it."
This gadget is portable, plays MP3s, VCDs, audio CDs and comes with a lithium rechargeable. You can buy it already in the UK from Jungle. I have one on my desk, my only complaint is that it doesn't play some CD-RWs reliably.
Isn't wresting kinda gay? Plus stupid, I know wrestling is stupid, and I pretty sure about the gay part too.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
The whole field of Configurable Computing has been trying out architectures like this for some time (don't know why /. hasn't covered this technology more).
/. hasn't covered the technology more: because FPGAs on their own are mainly just an amorphous sea of gates. You need a lot more than that before you have a viable (and therefore interesting) computing engine. StarBridge came up with such a working system and so it was no surprise to see it featured on Slashdot.
I'll tell you why
In contrast, Xilinx's strides in FPGA and RC technology tend not to feature because there's a gulf between a beautiful RC chip like the 6200 and actually being able to compute with it. Even Xilinx know that now -- their newer devices are more advanced FPGAs but they don't even attempt to carry the generic RC mantle like the 6200 tried to do, unsuccessfully. It came close, but you need a lot more than just an FPGA to make a useful RC: you needs a preconfigured computing architecture to start with, otherwise the programmer needs to think in terms of gates, and that's one paradigm shift too far. The 6200 suffered from not being specific enough. That's a peculiar observation to make in the FPGA field, but it reflects reality in the computing field, and even RCs need to take that into account.
And that's what PACT seem to have done with their XPP. Sure, its reconfigurable parts are based on FPGA technology (the only sensible way of doing it), but they've created a whole new dataflow computing engine with that RC resource, and it's the latter that's interesting for computing people, not the FPGA itself nor the internal RC mechanism.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Another Slashdot feature was posted on the same topic within the same day, probably by mistake. Here's a pointer to that continuation of the subject thread, for those that like to browse the archives.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Yeah, but everybody has to have something to do. I'm just glad that the big slobbering idiots are entertaining to watch. Nothing's funnier than watching two big stupid guys beating the hell out of eachother.
Oh yeah, and it's not like I've got much choice. My wife watches it (for obvious reasons, I feel so inadequate), and wants me to watch it with her (I don't think it's working, I'm still fat and lazy).
Bite my yammer.
Right now, it's not an issue for single-chip Athlon systems, but the Alpha market seems to compare performance based on the number of "D" chips in the system. The more "D" chips on a board, the better the routing and bandwidth possibilities. Athlons and single proc Alphas have 2, dual Alphas have 4 or 8.
It does reduce the contention some, make the board easier to design, but to make best use of this on a dual processor board, you should have two independent PCI busses and two independent memory banks.
Check this out. (Scroll down to the middle of the "PC Processors" session.)
Pretty interesting for us PPC-heads....