Slashback: Vaidhyanathan, Oregon, Opteron

Slashback this evening with a few more notes on AMD's upcoming Opteron processor, Siva Vaidhyanathan (three times quickly), Oregon's open source bill, and more. Read on below for this round of updates and amplifications. That Charlie's no dummy. softwareJoe writes "Tim Bray has come right out saying that if IP chancer Charlie Northrup manages to enforce his most recent claim, the consequences would be 'disastrous.'

'It would become impossible to have Open Source implementations of key pieces of the infrastructure. This would be harmful, perhaps fatal, to the grand plans of those who want to deploy Web services everywhere,' Bray is reported as saying, in XML Industry Newsletter ."

Waiting for the low-power version. Jethro writes "Ace's hardware Opteron review was a very interesting read which shows some real Java webserver benchmarks on SUSE and Debian Linux, and real world database performance in MySQL and MS SQL server 2000. A lot better than those synthetic mysql benchmarks that Tom's hardware served up."

And Distinguished Hero writes "[H]ardocp.com ([H]ardNews 1oth Edition) is reporting that the Opteron processor does not actually have an integrated dual channel controller. This explains why all the Opteron reviews only used a single channel configuration. While the integrated memory controlled is not dual channel, it can be bypassed by an external (Northbridge) memory controller connected to the processor via the HyperTransport bus."

One more: EconolineCrush writes "Yesterday's Opteron launch gave us all glimpse at AMD's new 64-bit platform, but the Opteron is a server and workstation chip that will be out of reach for the majority of consumers. AMD's upcoming Athlon 64, however, will bring 64-bit computing to the desktop. Drawing heavily from what we've seen of the Opteron's performance thus far, Tech-Report has posted its thoughts on what it will take for the Athlon 64 to succeed. It's an interesting read for anyone salivating at the thought of an affordable 64-bit desktop platform."

Ma'am, can you please ask those anarchists in the carrels to pipe down a bit? BrianWCarver writes "Readers may recall a Slashdot interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor at NYU, and author of Copyrights and Copywrongs. Vaidhyanathan is working on a new book, The Anarchist in the Library, and was interviewed on the blog, Eyeteeth. This is a brilliant and amazing interview where Vaidhyanathan discusses how creative communities share, the DMCA, the American industrial production of culture, the USA Patriot Act, the importance of libraries and librarians, and the policies of the FCC. It is a must-read for those who care about the future of creative and democratic culture."

Technically, Oregon is not Washington. Daniel Phillips is among the many folks who have been following the progress of a bill in Oregon (HB 2892) to encourage open source software, and he points out this Register story (picked up from NewsForge, actually), writing "Apparently, moving Oregon's open source bill forward comes down to convincing the house speaker."

Reader PotatoHead fleshes that out just a bit: " Despite reports detailing the demise of HB 2982, this bill continues to be a topic at the Oregon Legislature. We have broad support for HB 2892, but need everyone to continue showing support in the form of your phone calls, e-mails, faxes and snail-mail to your Oregon Representatives. We have the attention of the Oregon Legislature in a pretty big way and need to keep up the good work if HB 2892 is to move forward against the constant efforts of the usual industry lobbyists. If you don't already know, here is how you contact your representative. Please take a moment --right now-- and show your support for HB 2982. Every contact matters as we continue to move forward with HB 2892!"

Sir, can you direct me to the nearest buggy whip store so I can beat this dead horse? If $98 billion seems to you a bit much for the music cartel to charge students for even the most indiscriminant file swapping, you may be interested in following the chilling effects that it generates, too: PL_2003 writes "A follow up on a previous slashdot article. It really seems like the recording industry is determined to continue its fight.Check this NYTimes article (free reg. required). My Take: Couldn't they use their brains for a better business model?"

OK, here are the rules ... Grub (mentioned previously) is apparently causing consternation among many webmasters. Though they claim the client honors robots.txt , it seems that only the central servers check it (and don't honor it properly) and that grub clients don't don't check it at all. Ooops.

Time to round up and segregate the arrogant. jtheory writes "There's an AP story today here on Yahoo news) that the Justice department has dropped its probe into the recommendation policy of a Texas Tech bio professor. It's encouraging that all he had to do to stop the investigation was make some very minor changes in his policy, but it's still horrifying to me that he got into trouble in the first place. Is it even safe to encourage strict Creationists (or others with strong anti-scientific beliefs) to become doctors? Would they ignore animal research results, etc?"

Comments

Opteron memory controller details

[Eric Smith]

The announced Opteron parts do not have dual DDR memory channels. They would need even more pins on the package, and it already has 940! But I imagine the source for the confusion in the early reports is that the single channel does support the optional use of 128-bit wide memory (144 bits including ECC). This would most commonly be implemented using pairs of 64-bit (or 72-bit with ECC) DDR DIMMs. It can support up to four pairs of DIMMs at up to DDR266 speed (PC-2100) or two pairs of DIMMs at DDR333 (PC-2700).

The various motherboard photos seem to indicate that their are DIMM sockets to accomodate 128-bit memory. I would hope that the various benchmarks have been done with this configuration, since it obviously increases the memory bandwidth considerably.

Reference: page 15 of the AMD Opteron Processor data sheet, AMD document 23932 rev 3.00 dated April 2003.

Re:Opteron memory controller details

[turm]

The announced Opteron parts do not have dual DDR memory channels

I don't know where this crap is coming from. Certainly not from the document referenced in the parent post.

A DIMM is 64-bits wide. The Opteron has a 128-bit wide memory bus, which means you need to use pairs of DIMMS much like the older P4's with Rambus memory.

There are plenty of pins for this in the 940 package. The block diagram on page 11 of the the data sheet even shows the 128 MEMDATA pins.

The memory controller is configurable to support a 64-bit memory bus (probably for desktop or mobile versions of the part), but in all the systems I've used you can't even boot with an odd number of DIMMS.

Now you can decide for yourself if a 128-bit wide DDR bus is "dual channel" or not. I'm not going to argue semantics. I am, however, going to do the math and tell you that the Opteron paired with DDR333 provides 128*333/8 = 5328 MB/s of some seriously low-latency bandwidth. Oh yea and it scales with the number of processors too.

DISCLAIMER: I work at AMD but I am not speaking on behalf of the company.

The RIAA better win...

[ZenShadow]

...against those college students. They'll make nothing from it, but the results of them losing could be pretty ugly.

Could you imagine the counter-suit? I'd call a $98 BILLION lawsuit against "poor" college students "malicious prosecution."

--ZS

Faulty reasoning?

[NeoSkandranon]

Is it even safe to encourage strict Creationists (or others with strong anti-scientific beliefs) to become doctors? Would they ignore animal research results, etc?"

How exactly do you make that connection between Creationism and ignoring animal research? I hate to break it to you, but the people who typically believe that animals should not be researched upon are the ones who believe they evolved (and thus, are no differnt from humans and deserve the same treatment). Creationism by its very nature puts humans above and beyond other animals, and thus animals are to be utilized by humans.

Grub Fools and Slashdot Editors

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to take a moment to comment on Grub. In the original story we heard,

"People who choose to download and run the client will assist in building the Web's largest, most accurate database of URLs."

Already I find myself rolling my eyes.

Then I click through to the site. Aha. I will volunteer my machine on a non-profit basis for a for-profit company. This is just like distributed.net and SETI? Give me a break, these guys were bought out by Looksmart, a paid for placement ad company.

Google didn't succeed by getting slashdot editors to post stories saying they are building the most useful search engine out there, they succeeded by actually building it.

I just hope grub keeps the fools who want to regulate google away. Google succeeded because they didn't have to listen to self-important analysts.

Opteron's ECC supports scrubbing!

[Eric Smith]

Most if not all prior x86 chipsets that supported ECC did a fairly half-assed job of it. They didn't report the location of a detected error (whether correctable or not), but instead only the base address of a block of memory which contained the error.

It appears that the Opteron can report the actual address of any detected errors. Plus, it can report details of ECC errors in its caches.

But the coolest feature is that it supports memory scrubbing, a feature I'd previously not seen in a microprocessor or chipset since the iAPX 432 memory controller back in 1983.

When a SEU causes a single-bit error in a word of memory, the ECC is capable of correcting it when the word is read. But if that word doesn't get read again for a long time, it's possible that a second SEU might happen in the same word, which would then be an uncorrectable error. With memory scrubbing, the memory controller uses a small portion of the memory bandwidth to scan the entire memory, correcting any single-bit errors that are found, so that the probability of a two-bit (or more) uncorrectable error is greatly reduced.

My last several computers (including a dual Athlon using the 760MPX chip set, and a DEC Alpha) had ECC, but not scrubbing. I considered writing a Linux program to scrub the memory by direct access to /dev/mem, but this has the disadvantage of thrashing the processor's caches. By implementing scrubbing in hardware, the Opteron avoids that problem.

The Opteron has a Scrub Control Register that is used to enable or disable scrubbing and control the rate. There are independent scrubbing controls for the L1 data cache, L2 cache, and main memory.

Those of us that want high reliability really welcome this feature. Well done, AMD!

By the way, it should be noted that it is typical for a PC with 128 megabytes of memory to get a single bit error several times a week. On my Alpha, I routinely saw corrected error log messages in the syslog, which gave me much more confidence in the system than the way that most PCs simply fail to even detect memory errors, let alone correct them. The log messages are also useful in that you can determine whether you have some memory that is getting marginal. For instance, at one point I started getting a much higher rate of corrected errors on one particular SIMM. There may have been a slight amount of oxidation or corrosion on the contacts, or they may have just worked themselves loose a bit. Cleaning the contacts and reseating the SIMM solved the problem with only a few minutes of down time, instead of what probably would have been hours of down time had the errors gone unnoticed.

The results of an undetected error vary considerably; it may be in memory that is not in use at the time, or it could be in the midst of the operating system, an application, or user data.

Re:No kidding

[t]

First the word "species" is artificial, somewhere some scientist decided that these two groups of animals were different enough to be categorized differntly. If humans were animals I'm sure that Africans and the Swiss would be classified as two different species. Every animal is different from every other animal, the only question is by how much.

Banging on a tree is a good method to get the insect inhabitants out. It works marvelously for termites and ants. Don't believe me? Try it sometime on a bees nest.

I'm sure you've seen videos of monkeys hanging out, they are nearly always doing one thing in particular, picking fleas/ticks off of each other. Humans don't have the same difficulty becuase fleas have a hard time hanging onto hairless beasts.

Why does a giraffe have a long neck? Because thats where the leaves are. There are many reasons for walking upright, most notably it frees your hands up. I've seen videos of monkeys walking around holding something in one hand. It's rather awkward looking. Carry any more and you have to walk upright.

I am not listing this as proof of anything, the fact is that there are many possible reasons for your questions. It doesn't seem like you've looked very hard for answers.

When you say that no one can describe how the evolution of any creature has occured (which is false), I'm sure you really meant to say that no one can describe how even the simplest microbe was created from non-living material. That is a much more difficult question and the theory of evolution does not hinge on this question.

Evolution is not equivalent to random motion. I've also heard this as "tornado hitting a junkyard and making a 747". Evolution has a selection process and you do not start from scratch, you always build on what came before you. If evolution was only random, then it would be like browinian motion, it would never make any progress in any particular direction.

Also the burden of proof probably would not matter to you. If I told you which book to read that would prove evolution to you, would you read it? Have you ever read anything about evolution that was not written by a religous person?

I think it does affect your ability to study or understand because you do not look for "why" since you assume the answer to "why" is because god made it that way. Have you ever honestly tried to research why a woodpecker would begin banging its head on things? You have already assumed that certain aspects of this world are beyond your grasp as a non-god being. That type of attitude clearly shows that you will never have the level of understanding of other people who are going to try, even if it takes them their whole lives to understand the world around them.

See, it used to be that biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and all scientists, were all exploring the beauty, simplicity, and intelligence of this beautiful world built by God himself. It used to be that mathematicians would delve deep into the mind of God, seeking to pierce the veil of His great understanding. It used to be that physicists would study each intricacy of nature, trying to discover the rules that God uses to govern the entire universe. It used to be that biologists were reverse-engineering the most marvelous feats of engineering in existence.

This is still the case, except you have to remove the references to God. People are still exploring the beauty of the world with all its intricacies.

We used to be miniature gods, no, Gods in training, seeking to become like the great God himself by mastering our minds and understanding our univserse. We used to believe that we were literally offspring of God. Now we are lost souls, studying science to erase those panging doubts that creep into our minds, that tell us nothing is worth anything, and all is in vain. We believe that we are nothing, never were anything, and never can become anything more than we are.

Speak for yourself, I do not think I am nothing, I will continue to try to create something that will last forever. If the only people who are affected by what I have done in this world are my future children, then that will have been enough to make it all worthwhile