Slashdot Mirror
CPU Wars
msolnik writes: "Whether you say "0.13-micron" as most of us do, or "130-nanometer" as PR flacks prefer, the phrase is weighing heavily on both Intel's and AMD's minds. Indeed, each company's timeline in reaching that mark may determine who calls the CPU shots in 2002. Read more here at Hardware Central." Other submitters noted that AMD and Motorola have both updated their development roadmaps.
How about instead of 130 nanometers, they say half a mil? Guess nobody knows what a mil is?
I bet this is not "First Post."
This was the news of 1971
Now matter who hits 0.13 first, WE win.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
bloody hell, they really are hyping the G5, and they haven't got any confirmation of what technologies it will use, they simply assume that motorola's latest chip will be the basis, how much would you have to pay for a mac for them to make returns on their production process?
Software Freedom Day!.
Currently spiky, but turning to '69 dood' later today. Hast du meinen wald?
People always get exited at faster and faster CPUs.
But what is the use ?
Ok, it's a good marketing argument to make people buy new computers every 2 years.
But is there any significant advancement in computer programs ?
You would now say Quake and CS but these are only a few games. And most their functions could be spend up by dedicated co processors (this arguments is around for years but always stompe up by Intel and AMD to make people buy their expensive new processors).
And graphical user interfaces ?
These were running on old macs which had only 5 percent of the processing speed of modern cpus.
Are programs becoming more useful ?
Most software is today just silly bloatware, you need several 100 MB of storage for a program which fullfill just the functions a 2 1.44 MB floppys program did in 1990.
There is also an unholy connection to OO.
Programmers take often OO as an excuse for bloated (which is not the same a reusable) and uneffective code. When their program is too slow the don't fix this, they just claim that the computer is too slow.
And perhaps AI ?
This is nonsense, too. Most AI problems are in the core at least NP complete, sometimes even PSPACE.
So just speeding up the CPU doesn't help anyway, we need totally different computer models for such problems, e.g. read the recent slashdot article about ants (hello hex).
So the CPU capacity increase is just a scam from the computer manufacturers. We should boycott this and it can be done: we just make our open source software compatible to old system and let AMD and Intel to starve in the desert.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Before we get to 0.09 microns, lets start using nanometers to get rid of those preceding decimal places. Plus, unlike micron, a nanometer is an accepted SI unit (see http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html). Strange the PR people should use it first -- could this be a sign of the Apocalypse?
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
I know nothing about the chip manufacturing industry so I'll put my newbie propeller-cap on for a moment.
Nothing in that article tells me whether what they are doing (constructing really fast chips) is really that hard - in a scientific sense. Is it simply an engineering challenge? What spin-off technologies are likely to result? What's going to come 'next' from all this, apart from more chips?
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
Next year looks like the best time ever to buy a new performance PC.
Well, duh. Just exactly like every year since they were invented.. And just like every computer magazine pundit has said since day one
The Gardener
--
Ok, I admit it. I'm confused. I thought a smaller die size increased heat. Less surface area to radiate from.
Gotta love the last line:
Next year is always the best time to buy a new PC.
0.13-micron...
The term micron has been deprecated for over 20 years. The correct term for millionth of a meter is micrometer, symbol .
Whether you say "0.13-micron" as most of us do, or "130-nanometer" as PR flacks prefer, the phrase is weighing heavily on both Intel's and AMD's minds.
Egads! It's the son of Jon Katz.
will probaly bastardize that one too. Nanons it must be, by the same non-logic. That'll even make it sound less metric.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
- Real-time rendering of fractal worlds
- Compiling
- Fast simulations
- Resurrecting interpreted languages (like Java)
- Emulators! Mame! X64!
- Excellent screen savers
- Flash
- Discreet simulation
- Particle systems
Although, you're right, there are a lot of applications out there nowadays that don't run any faster with a faster processor. Witness all the absoute crap that Intel is pushing in it's ads about increasing Internet speeds. However, just because there are many programs that don't improve their performance if you buy a high-end graphics card, high speed ethernet card, or wireless networking card, but that doesn't mean that these cards aren't cool or interesting. I bet there are many more non-game programs that perform better with double the CPU speed than there are that perform better with double the polygon rate.So.. short version: Leave Santa's factory alone! I want neat toys, and 2 GHz processors are definitely on the list!
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
Perhaps those who submit comments should come up with their own blurbs, rather than plagiarizing the first paragraph of whatever they're replying to.
I bought my first computer in 1995. It was a Packard Bell P75.
Go ahead. Laugh. If you told me you actually paid money for a PB, I'd laugh, too.
PB actually used good motherboards in their systems. It was the components that sucked.
Anyway, to this day, I *still* have and use my PB computer. Yes, it went from a P75 -> P133 -> P200 MMX, and went from 8MB -> 32MB -> 64MB -> 128MB and the hard drive went from 1GB -> 4GB -> 20GB, but it's stll in use.
Admittedly, I've bought other computers since and I no longer use it as my main machine, but I *could* if I wanted to. I only bought faster machines because I wanted to, not because I needed to.
It runs Win98 like a charm and runs Linux even better. It has always been stable and still is, 6 years later.
If people would cater to their needs instead of their wants, the CPU industry would either wither, or they would start offering REAL improvements. These 100MHz increases are BS.
They need to start with a minimum 1GHz jump and better internal architecture. Everything else is just them going wallet fishing.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
No friggen way I'll ever own a 13 nanoM chip. I'm just too supersticious. I've got enough to worry about with my data, and (jpg)'s to trust them to an unlucky number. It's worse than a hat on the bed!
They should switch to Angstroms.
Oh wait a minute, my calculator tells me that 0.13 Microns equals 666 Angstroms. Holy Ess, The end is Nigh.
While 0.13 micron/130 nanometer will help the heat on these chips, VIA has had 0.13 micron chips for about 6 months, and their sales aren't to great :-)
While we'd like a 0.13 micron chip (that's faster than 700mhz), a lot of people don't know what a micron is, and they're the ones buying P4's.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Does this indicate unanticipated troubles with x86-64?
"But don't you get a thrill out of the fact that you nearly have more processing power on your desktop than the entire world did twenty years ago?"
No, because some of us get laid.
I just don't get the desire for machines faster than 600 mghz. The CPU is going at least twice as fast as any other component on a PC machine. What I did recently was buy a DDR motherboard to get ram that ran at 133 mghz (advertised at 266 mghz) and so I got a AMD 1.4 gigahertz cpu with it. One of the nice features of the motherboard was the ability to change the clock rate of cpu and bus. I LOWERED the clock rate of my CPU to 800 mghz and my machine is as responsive as I would ever want it to be. When I hear that Intel is charging twice the price for thier 2.0 gigahertz CPU as thier 1.8 ghz and people go out in droves to buy the 2 ghz anyway boggles me! Most of them don't need the speed of either CPU AND people are willing to pay 100% more money for a measly 10% performance boost. Ten years ago, Most PC's came with a "turbo button" on the case with the idea that only when you really had to use the the cycles would you press turbo and the CPU would go twice as fast. Back then, the button was pointless because when computers were going at 66 mgz, processors would regularly be very busy. But today the Turbo Button would actually be a nice feature. When doing word-processing or surfing the web, have the machine go slow but then when playing quake 18 (Revenge of the killer CPU), press the turbo button so the bloatware can look sweet. However, for people who REALLY NEED more power (all of the time) *couph* *couph*... SMP looks to be the far better alternative than these monster single cpu solutions.
I miss the Karma Whores.
Well to be honest, I have been watching this sine the first Athlons came out and proved that Pentium was not all that. So far AMD has been able to bask down Intel at every turn. The 2 ghz p4 is still slower then amd's athlon 1900 (1.6 GHz). Its not the speed, its what you can do per clock cycle, and amd chips dose do a lot more.
But reading the article, I find that the again go after the ghz number,
Of these, the P4 Northwood could be the most compelling CPU release of 2002
Their reasoning, the p4 well be unto the 4 GHz barrier in a few months. The Athlon is planning to make some jumps as well which, makes this sounds to me like the article is written by someone leaning towards the users who love big GHz numbers and not real speed.
What makes this even funnier is the fact that most users could buy a 1 GHz and still play the latest games and the other things in 2 or 3 years.
my 2 cents plus 2 more
Unless you are ripping Divx movies left and right or a Seti@home freak you don't need a faster cpu, It will do nothing for you. Anyone notice that you pretty much have the same Harddrive as you did with your pentium 1 120, the size has increased but if you go IDE it is still 7200rpm and the data transfer rate isn't any faster.
It is funny, Xp Pro runs the exact same on my PII 400 with 384 meg of ram as it does on my PIII dual 1 gig with a gig of ram machine. The 400 actually boots faster!. So what does processor speed to for you in every day apps? everyone here knows exactly what i am saying. I am just complaining becaue we always hear about the new processor that is supposed to be so great that is coming out next year or whatever. WHEN AM I GOING TO SEE A SOLID STATE HARD DRIVE? Sure Serial ATA is coming up but the transfer rate on that is only starting at 166MB/s. ok. show me a harddrive that actually needs anything better than ata 100 first.
The bottleneck in every modern computer is still the hd, and the bus, we should fix those first and then jack up the mhz..
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
Anyone else notice that MSOfficesque error on the AMD link? Where it says "ClawHammer". I just thought that was funny.
A mil is 1/1000 of an inch. Let's see, at 2.54 cm/in, that gives us 25400 um per 1000 mils, or 25.4 um/mil. Half a mil would still be about 13 microns. So you're off by a factor of 100.
.013 microns, off by a factor of 10.
Even if you were under the mistaken idea that a mil is one millionth of an inch, you're wrong, because now half a mil would be
Sorry to be so pedantic, but your "Guess nobody knows what a mil is" was just a bit too snotty to not get a smackdown.
A mil is a millimetre. Join the metric revolution.
The idea is simple: though an Athlon can do more per clock cylcle than a Pentium4, Pentium4's clock frequency is going to increase faster than Athlon's. Thats what they're designed for... At a given time (in the near future I believe) the fastest Pentium4 avaliable will outperform the fastest Athlon available.
The big question for now is "How long will that situation last, before the Hammers get out?" The longer it lasts, the more it will hurt AMD. These recent delayings in AMD's roadmap don't look too good.
Am I the only one who notices that every week /. posts a news article about Intel or someone coming up with supar-dupar-mega-fantabulous technology that we never hear about again?
Like New Optical DSPs With Tera-ops Performanc
Or Intel Cites Breakthrough In Transistor Design
Perhaps Clockless Chips
Not forgetting Intel Promises A Cool Billion (Transistors)
Notwithstanding Intel Claims Smallest, Fastest Transistor
But who could forget Intel Claims 10Ghz Transistor
Which looks a lot like Intel Says 10GHz By 2005
But is just as vapor as Intel Creates 30-Nanometer Transistors
or my personal favorite: Intel Goes for Display Encryption
How can they get any work done when they're too busy telling us what they predict in a bajillion years?
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
With linux there has been little change in real performance since the P1-150. My machines run dual PPro 200's - very snappy for code editing and other interactive tasks, and dirt cheap. I keep a dual-533 PIII for occasional heavy number crunching. The BEST thing about ultra-fast CPU's is that they drive the prices WAAAAY down on perfectly good machines built 3-5 years ago. Go eBay!
bkr
I'm looking forward to ever-increasing clockspeeds, as this could get us away from programming applications in a low-level language like C/C++. Let's face it: Most of the bugs in current programs stem from the fact that C was not designed to handle sloppy or lazy coding. Dangling pointers, buffer overflows, memory leaks etc. result from the low-levelness of C (that's OK - for it to be efficient it needs to have the ability to do all kinds of things with the hardware directly). C should only be used for developing operating system kernels and device drivers, as no other higher language would handle the task well.
Faster processors and more memory would make higher languages such as Lisp or Python viable for applications (such as Browsers, Desktop environments etc.), which in turn would result in less bugs and increased stability when applied correctly. The current state with software makes me sick. I don't blame it on C per se, but on programmers using the wrong tool for the wrong job.
Writing in such a higher language would probably even increase portability (which C can't fulfill by a far shot) as you would program at a higher abstraction level. No need for autoconf/automake or ugly defines scattered throughout the code, making maintainance more difficult.
I hope that more coders switch to some better suited language than C/C++ for application development. I've switched to Lisp myself.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
I consider the Northwood to be the "real" Pentium 4, just as other second-generation products like the 100MHz Pentium and "Coppermine" Pentium III have proven to be the "real" versions of Intel processors in the past.
I agree with this. The Pentium 4s we see today are just puppies with very big feet. They will grow up and become something much more impressive.
Bush's education improvements were
Not bad at all... Programs in OO languages (e.g.Java) will be a lot faster. Plus, combined with the short development time of these OO languages, and the relative ease in creating new products, games (and other apps) will cost a lot less to the consumer. $15 for a quality 3-d game (e.g., REturn to Wolfenstein?) vs. $40.
:-) Obviously, development would be a bitch in terms of time and resources.
In my opinion, it's a lot more productive to create software that maybe huge, but written in 15% of the time than to try to squeeze the hell out of a C/C++ program. In addition, if a 6ghz processors will run the "bloated" programm 99.99% as fast as the unbloated program, I'm up for developing the "bloated" program.
This is seems to be the same argument with assembly and c/c++ 10 years ago!!! Ie., if you wanted to write a serious app (especially, 3-d programs), you would write c/c++ code that had inline assembly. Now a day nobody really cares for assem. People try to avoid it even though programs written in assem are smaller and faster
Khamla Savathphoune
I'm currently awaiting my first new PC in a long-time: Soyo Dragon+ mobo, AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with 512 MB DDR RAM, ATA/100 WD 100GB disk (yes, /me likes SCSI, but likes $$$ more), generic DVDROM, and Netstream2000 H/W MPEG2 board. In preparation of it's arrival I downloaded a copy of Red Hat Linux 7.2 with the intention of installing it on an old spare 1.5 GB drive I had free in my old, ailing PC (Intel P200, 80 MB RAM), just to give it a whirl.
Well, things were real tight with the small drive, and my on-board IDE controllers were acting flaky anyway, so I ended up getting a "spare" 20 GB ATA/100 Maxtor drive and Maxtor (re-labeled Promise) ATA/100 PCI controller. The 20 GB Maxtor was now UDAM5 hde on ide2.
The point of all this history is to illustrate that I now have a "soon to be spare" computer where the limiting factor is CPU and to a lesser extent RAM. I go ahead an install RH Linux 7.2 on the new drive.
After a bit of farkling around with kernel boot options (ide2=d000,c802 is your friend!) I boot into RH Linux 7.2, in all it's X 4.0.1 glory.
I'm fairly sure that the new box would make the speed difference between RH 6.2 and 7.2 imperceptible, but the experience left me wondering about the extent of bloat in RH Linux releases, not that I'd want to run anything significant on the P200 anymore, but I might want to use it as some type of low-duty server, with an up-to-date kernel. In a nutshell, what got slower?
No doubt, the new machine will be welcome.
You could've hired me.
...gives no dates and no new information that wasn't already announced. It isn't really a 'roadmap' per se, as it is 'things we are envisioning for the future of the product line, but aren't going to give any definites that anyone can plan around'.
When it comes to newer, better and faster technologies even geeks happen to be the ones that throw away their knowledge against better knowledge and buy whatever shows the higher measure unit/product number/version count.
It's a pity; whilst there is nothing wrong with spending your time to compile that new Linux kernel every three days or so, it is plain right stupid to scrap a 1400MHz cpu for, say, a 1800MHz cpu. The discrepancy in cost vs work efficiency is minimal in this example.
I have asked myself the question: What advantage will a new CPU give me? Will it make that windowed os which I love so much boot faster? Will it make my email download faster? As funny as it sounds, that's what Intel is advertizing their p4 chips with in my country.
When I now look at how I could possibly speed this already incredibly fast FreeBSD toy of mine even more, in terms of effective result, which steps do I need to take? First off, I need to get rid of this old and awkward IDE harddisk. Preferably I'd tune in a SCSI raid, with lots of cache on those harddisks. That would probably give me a serious advantage, probably the highest I could achieve this easily; though, that would be redudant, because my X starts in less than two seconds ( with enlightenment and gnome) when I start it the second time anyway.
&& aemula C. ab stirpe interiit
Yawn. Another article purely pushing Intel's and AMD's chips going another notch in clock speed. In the meantime, Cyrix and Transmeta have both shipped CPUs based on new cores, the Cyrix one at .13 micron, and no one bothers to mention it.
Faster CPUs fail to make computers more useful mainly because the rest of the system stays largely the same.
User input is still max a few bytes a second because most people still use mouse and keyboard. Supporting more and bigger displays with more colours has been nice over the last few years, but connections between computers over the internet are not speeding up at anything like the rate at which processors are accelerating.
Give us a neural interface and a fiber bundle into every home, and the nature of the beast will change.
but I'm sick of this "C for kernel, bloatlang for everything else" BS. I'm writing a ALife sim of language evolution program (for my thesis) in C and I'm thinking about writing agent ai code in *asm*, because compiler generated code won't be fast enough. I wrote simple AI apps for fun, multivariable optimization programs and finite element solvers for modelling at work, ran sound and video editing programs and ALL could use some more optimization at a lower level. C, asm, fortran aren't going anywhere until compiler technology advances to the point that they can produce better code from a problem description than a human can.
Unfortunately your wishes have already come true, and I (and many in industry) would draw the exact opposite conclusions you have done. Faster CPUs encourage laziness (which you seem to be advocating by claiming that C[++] is bad because it prohibits laziness - which in itself is not strictly true either). Laziness is bad; look at all the bloated, useless Visual Basic code out there. Business critical enterprise level software should almost never be written in a scripting langauge (even a good one, like Perl). Faster CPUs together with easily abused and easily learnt (at least to a basic level) scripting langauges produce undisciplined programmers . These, especially MS VB script hackers (in the correct, though non-complimentary sense of the term), are the scourge of the industry - churning out buggy, insecure, and monstrously inefficent code. That's not to say that all VB/Lisp/Perl is bad (I've seen good VB coders take bad production code and speed up business processes by orders of magnitude), just that every lanuage has its place and scripting languages are of little use for hard computing and business tasks.
No, a mil is not a millimeter. Leave it to some idiot to bring in side issues of incompatable systems of measurement. Check out the defenition over at m-w.com before you jump in with statements implying Americans are ignorant of the metric system. A mil is a number of things, but I don't see it listed as a standard abbreviation for millimeter. The third definition is the one to be used here, as microelectronics often use a mil as a unit of measurement in thin and thick film circuits, and hence it's relevance to die lithography.
Anyone resorting to arguing semantics (what a mil is or is not; others arguing if micron is a valid abbreviation of micrometer, or micrometre, as the case may be) is often otherwise lacking in any meaningful argument. So do you all you lame-ass pedants have anything useful to contribute to this thread? Argh! Slashdot vexes me so!
That's too late. They need it sooner to compete with the Inanium.
I hate to be the Mac geek around here... but whatever.
.13micron, uses moto's new SOI technology that came out a while ago, and was developed with a lot of "help" from Apple this time.
;)
Motorola tends to remain very vague about new PPC products to the public. They wait until they are actually in other vendors devices before the start to really talk about them. Motorola does this so other companies, like anal Apple, can have first dibs on telling the public about the new toys they are going to ship.
If you hunt you actually can find interesting info on the G5. Variations of the "g5" have already begun to ship within certain routers, and as usual, a lot of Apple's hardware beta testers have been breaking their NDA and telling sites like The Register and MOSR what's in the beige test boxes.
Who know s what this thing will really be like. But we know for sure now that it is 64/32bit,
Ya, this is very little info, but I do believe that this this is going to be quite sick. Obviously the G4 was a dud. It happens...hell, it did happen. Moto had an awful time trying to get the stupid CPU off the damn die, the thing didn't scale for beens, and it was seemingly aimed at bumping heads wit the last generation of CPUs. However now Apple has stepped in, the CPU seems to work well if you believe the rumors, moto seems to have a lot of buyers and potential buyers, they can actually produce and scale this next gen chip (thank god), yada yada yada. Moto and Apple have stepped back and collected their thoughts for a looooong time now. Apple/Moto practically skipped a generation (or half generation) of CPUs and motherboards. It makes sense that they would just come out with a product that is going to bump heads with hammer and itanium. They have had more development time since it didn't make sense to try and save the G4.
god that was a big mac geek post...sorry
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Don't confuse so called "scripting languages" with high-level languages. Lisp is by no means a scripting language and can be compiled to native machine code. Perhaps Python was a bad example, so substitute Java if you like.
Further, I was not claiming that C prohibits laziness - It's just that laziness can produce disastrous result (buffer overflows are a good example). Laziness when writing code is _generally_ bad and should be tackled more.
You raise some valid points, but I'd prefer a little slower, but more stable and bugfree program over an slightly faster, instable and probably insecure one.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Why persist in coming here, if it vexes you?
Anyway, I worked in a machine shop for 4 years making bits of aeroplanes. A mil was a millimetre and a thou was a thousandth of an inch. It may be UK colloquialism, but I speak from my experience, not from a definition.
I have a 1.4 MgHz chip. thats plenty fast. the reason I want .13 is so it will run cooler
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
personally I would rether drum all the sloppy and lazy coders out of the business.
screw ease of programming and code readability. I want someone who is smart enough to figure it out to be coding, not some high level coder wanna-be.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
True, but I guess this doesn't work in the real world. Just compile the latest mozilla (or any 50% of open source "projects") and count the warnings the compiler emits. These are possible pitfalls the compiler detected, but there are certainly enough others which didn't get detected and can someday bite somebody.
This happened to me: the latest mozilla would crash on me randomly and take the whole Xserver with it. I doubt something like that would happen, if it was written in some higher language (and properly designed).
But you're right, it's not really the languages fault - it's the coders. As much as I'd want everyone to be disciplined and smart enough to figure it out, real world sadly doesn't work like this.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Had I posted it with my account, it would have been marked as "troll" or "flamebait" or I would have to watch my tongue. Now it is posted as AC, and it even gets an "insightful" rating. The same with this message too, (almost) nobody bothers to mark an AC "Offtopic" unless it is a "FP"
Look at the transition from processor specific assembly to (possibly portable) C code. (Were computers not originally programmed with direct binary instructions?) More software is being written in interpretive languages (such as Perl and Java) than ever before. The transition you are asking for is occuring, whether you realize it or not. It has been occurring since computers came to be.
AMD will create the fastest switching speeds in the industry, the company claimed today. The CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) transistor has a gate length of .015 microns and AMD said the design will be a prototype for future generations of CPU it contemplates.
And the invention will make for a 20-fold increase in the number of transistors per chip and a 10-fold performance bump in CPU speeds by 2010, claimed AMD.
The 15 nm prototype device will be a key factor in the development of 30 nanometer (.03 micron) process technology which AMD said will be out by 2009 and use 12-inch (300 mm)silicon wafers.
Craig Sander, VP of AMD's tech development group, said the 15-nm transistor is .8 volt device which will work at 3.33 trillion switches per second.
AMD said it will release further details of its invention at the International Electron Devices Meeting tomorrow.
Help fight continental drift.
Anyways, the only definition of "mil" as a unit of length that I've heard of is 1/1000 of an inch.
Enough with your damn Solid state Hard drive!!!!!!!!!! you are driving us all nuts with your retarded dream. I am sure SSHD will come but stop whining about it.....do somthing about it.....you act like there is some conspericy to stop a SSHD from being created......got news for you.....you won't see it until they can perfect and create and affordable Holographic storage system. that will have the most density and least search/access time out of any SRAM soulution you can imagine.
so.......
SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!!!!
I ditched my ATA 100 hard drive for an adaptec 39160 and a 35GB 10k rpm hard drive, that made a huge difference!
I'm contemplating installing my Adaptec 2400A IDE raid controller with some 100 GB ATA 100 hard drives in raid 5 config....that will be even better.
My last 3 CPU upgrades didn't impact performance as much as the disks did.
-ted
Should I be surprised that I've never noticed the P4 ads until I saw the one popping up at the top of this thread?
--Blair
They are already shippping at .13 micron.
No, it's european for what you call billion. What we call a billion is a million millions (what you call a trillion). What we call a trillion in turn is a million billions (what you call a quintillion). I guess you gun carrying republican voting (or not voting) anti abortion pro death penalty hamburger eater get the idea.
What we call a milliard is a thousand millions, what we call a billiard is a thousand billions, what we call a trilliard is a thousand trillions and so on. This is perfect English, but also works in French, Italian, Dutch and many others.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. I also was considering making the same types of choices you are looking at.
My code deals with building massive 3d arrays containing tens of millions of cells and manipulating them. Obviously, the inner loops of the manipulation would be the bottleneck.
So I ran my trusty profiler.... And found out that 90% of my time was being spent READING THE DATA IN.
It took two lines of code to make that three times faster, making my program 2.5x faster.
Interesting... Then, a couple of weeks later, I took a large deployed system with an active developer community, www.squeak.org, and ran that through a profiler, and found out how changing one line of code lead to 4% speedup in the core intererpreter, and lead to other simple changes that were just as valuable. I also ran the benchmarking in the interpreter, and sped up syntax hilighting by 40%.
If I was doing something like what you were, I'd probably go all-out at using a more dynamic language (Smalltalk) for the extreme flexibility.
Only devolve into C/assembly for the critical parts.
Many times, the bottlenecks aren't where you think or might predict they are. Why spend weeks guessing incorrectly and optimizing code that won't help you go faster when the profiler will tell you exactly what magic bits to re-examine.
It can also find O(n^2) artifacts and all the rest.
If your code is currently running, run it through gprof and see where the CPU time is really going.
The display encryption idea from intel, that is the much ballyhooed HDCP, that was the subject of Niels Ferguson a few months ago. (also on slashdot), and one week ago, slashdot posted a news story announcing that it is completely broken.
BTW, its not vapor, Apparently, a ten thousand bux 42 inch rear-projection TV from JVC actually is using the piece of digital control crap.
A mil?
That's easy -- as a volume it's 1ml (or 1 cubic centemetre, if you prefer); as a measurement it's 1 milimetre.
So 568 "mils" is a pint, and 304 "mils" is a foot.
You really do have to like the english language for being so damn complex...
On the contrary, laziness is one of the three chief virtues of a programmer.
... less code means fewer bugs!
It's especially good when it keeps them from writing code in the first place
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
C is *so* not a cure for laziness. Some of the most lazy and careless code I've ever seen has been C.
It could be argued that a language that lets you express yourself tersely is less prone to laziness problems. If there aren't a million t's to cross and i's to dot, then there's no way to have a million uncrossed t's and undotted i's laying around at the end of the day.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
There's no relationship between using MIDI and being behind the times -- none at all.
.midi files that you consider backwards can be literally the same as what the performer played on his synth.
:)
I've invested a significant chunk of money in music equipment, and MIDI is the protocol that controls it. Listening to ".midis" doesn't need to mean cheap FM synthesis; rather, anyone playing a modern synthesizer is using it implicitly (as these systems frequently use MIDI internally to describe commands from the keyboard/foot pedals/etc to the synth module), and if a keyboard player records his instrument's data stream the same
Okay, rant over... just be nice to MIDI... mmm-kay?
So, why do I need these speedy chips?
Finally; a person that "sees" what the P4 WILL become and not what it is currently(WHEW). With so many "experts" touting how a change from 1.2 Ghz to 2.2 Ghz will make XXX run faster, how about better, Hmmm? Faster is good, as long as that speed increase ALSO allows faster and STABLE throughput advances as well, otherwise one might as well run a pair of 486DX4/100s with a few gigs of memory and superclocked to boot(pipelined, of course). Why CPU speed is so important when the whole system is in dire need of revamping, THAT is what's really needed, not raw CPU clock speeds. The P4 is just starting to grow and "walk" now....but soon, we'll all see apps targeted for the huge bandwidth that has yet to be tapped into, let alone made use of with out-of-date whetstone this; drystone that "speed" tests that prove NADA about the TOTAL SYSTEM THROUGHPUT, not just the dumb CPUs core architecture! Athlon/Duron this, P-whatever that...SO WHAT! Personal choices dictate what we buy and use, no matter what is talked about on /..
I don't see the relevance of AMD over INTEL when the main discussion is over clock speed; it's useless data that many here neither make use of, nor need, just a form of bragging rights to say that, Hey! I've got an Athlon that'll blast those chumpy PIIIs out the hatch, and those PII users claiming the Athlon is crappy oven gear!
It all boils down to one thing ONLY....CHOICE!
If I "want" a P4, but can only afford a Celeron, so what...same goes for those crying for sledgehammers being able to afford only a K5 CPU..
It's all about choice and now; price.
I have been reading numerous threads over clock cycles and it's getting to be very monotonous to say the least. NOBODY cares for processing POWER,
the true measure of ALL systems, not just clock cycles......It's how fast you can do many things at once and still maintain a high throughput speed on the CPU, bus, FPU/ALU and video.
How many here can run this oft exhalted "quake" game to the max, PLUS access I-net, browse, chat and still keep the whole system running at the rated clock speed/s? NONE, I am more than willing to bet....shame though, 'cuz THAT is where the speed comes into play. "Power is the system, not the CPU"!(not alone, anyhow).
If the clock speed of any CPU is so "hot"...take the damn thing out of its "cage" and run the whole system without the support architecture...can't be done, huh? Chipsets, bus architecture/s, memory, cache, H.D. access speed; all of the "system" comes into play heavily, and that is where you MUST begin. Slowest component that needs speeding up, then the next and so on....til you have the fastest PC on the planet. Then of course,
it'll be time to buy new again because AMD/INTEL desided to up the anty and "make" you get more, faster, better, slicker...LMAO!
206.39.38.2, DDN-BLK-36, DOD NET INFO CENTER. 800.365.3642 206.36.0.0-206.39.255.255 NET RANGE.
Okay now, I have a father that owns a machine shop, and i too, have been a machinist as well. The "mil" in "our" jargon/lingo stands for 1/1000th of an inch(.001). This folks, is NOT difficult to comprehend is it? Okay, here goes a small sampling: 10 mils = 10/1,000s inch, or .10
100 mils = 1/10th of an inch, or .10
1,000 mils is...ONE INCH!
get it?
Got it?
GOOD!!!
Good day!
P.S. By the way, if any of you have a few PIs or PPros or even PIIs and PIIIs lying about and "need" to part with them or just plain toss them away...send them to ME!
C.O.D of course....
They have no value, except in my computer room where they will be popped open, pins up and coated in resin and placed under a magnification device so people can see what REAL silicon looks like when the hood's opened.
I have 20 so far...need many more though to give a show..Hell, I'll even take AMD too.
I show no prejudice in my electrosurgical methods,
they all die equally, but do NOT float though.
Let's see, what CPUs would be "fun" to fracture....PIs, PIIs, PIIIs...PPros...486DX4/100s....you get the pic I think*S*.
Thank you fellow power users for your generous gifts....
Sincerely
Crazy Ivan...
206.39.38.2, DDN-BLK-36, DOD NET INFO CENTER. 800.365.3642 206.36.0.0-206.39.255.255 NET RANGE.