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Memory Activity LEDs
Azert writes "Since a few months almost every popular memory maker includes heatspreaders with their fastest memory modules. Probably Corsair is setting a new fashion with their new line of memory with memory activity LEDs
XMS ProSeries modules feature a row of LED's on the top edge that display real-time memory activity level. Each memory bank has a row of nine dedicated activity LED's that alight as the level of memory activity increases. 512 Mbyte XMS ProSeries modules, with two banks, have a total of 18 activity LED's in green, yellow and red."
...is that what they mean by 'flash memory'..?
This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment.
Fingergrabbing and pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is
allowed for die experts only! So all the "lefthanders" stay away
and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working
intelligencies. Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked
anderswhere! Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished
the blinkenlights.
Now I can finally tell whether or not my memory is bad!
With enough banks of this RAM will the resolution be enough to play Pong?
Omnis amans amens
Cool! More blinkenlights! :-) Can we have one on the PCI bus too? What about the IDE bus? The USB cable. We alredy have one for the ethernet. Soon we'll be able to have our very own home discos.
Stick Men
Pretty soon it will be odd to not have a modded computer. It seems many companies are adding whiz-bang lights and windows on the computers so that people don't even have to pull out a Dremel any more.
At first thought, these seem to be little more than the typical "type-r" enhancements like neon lights in the case, ect. How many users have a transparent case anyway? But this could actually be useful for diagnostics.
I might as well just build my computer case from a 1997 Honda Civic hatchback with an 8-inch exhaust, 2-foot wing spoiler, blue turn signals and green neons under the car.
What is wrong with people who buy this crap? It's so gaudy. Oh my god, LEDs! That's so cool!
Case modders have the attention spans of 3-year-olds who hit every button in the elevator.
512 Mbyte XMS ProSeries modules
I want a 512 Mbyte LIM ProSeries module goddamit!
Now, will case modders with transparent cases have to face a new optical tempest problem (beware, PDF link!)? (People being able to sniff potentially critical data through analyzing LED blinking, that is...)
I know there was talk a year or so ago about some routers/modems which flashed their LEDs not just on receipt of a packet, but flashed them in accordance with the data contained in the packets, and reading that flashing would enable someone away from the machine without physical access to read the contents of data transferred
Is this the same? Would it be possible to read the contents of what's written to memory as it's written? I'm sure even when a password is encrypted it is, at some stage, moved into RAM as a plaintext piece of information. Could this be read? Are LEDs fast enough to transmit this information?
The site actually links most of its information from [H]ard|OCP. Search for "[H]ardNews 8th Edition" to find the relevent article with pictures.
Mirror Below
I have just received some more information about Corsair his new line of memory. The XMS ProSeries memory is basically the same as their XMS series memory, with a better heatsink and an integrated memory activity meter.
Corsair Memory, today announced the ProSeries, a new series of ultra-performance modules in their highly awarded XMS module family. XMS ProSeries modules offer the same extreme performance XMS modules are known for, but also incorporate two essential new features: an all-new heatsink designed for optimum thermal efficiency, and memory activity LED's.
Corsair's new high-efficiency heatsink was custom designed especially for the XMS ProSeries. It is crafted from cast aluminum to offer excellent thermal qualities. Its mini fins maximize air surface contact area to draw heat away from the memory chips and dissipate it more quickly. The heatsink, which is bonded to the memory chips with a unique thermal adhesive, is embossed with bold "XMS" lettering on both sides of the module. On the top edge of the heatsink are windows to the activity LED's.
XMS ProSeries modules feature a row of LED's on the top edge that display real-time memory activity level. Corsair is the first company to ever offer an activity meter on the module itself. Corsair invented this feature for the growing legions of enthusiasts and gamers who use windowed chassis, so they can tell at a glance the current level of memory activity. Each memory bank has a row of nine dedicated activity LED's that alight as the level of memory activity increases. 512 Mbyte XMS ProSeries modules, with two banks, have a total of 18 activity LED's in green, yellow and red.
According to Corsair President Andy Paul, "The XMS ProSeries further extends Corsair's leadership in high performance module design. We combined the most efficient and stylish heatsink in the industry with never-before-seen activity monitoring features and XMS's legendary performance to deliver what will soon become the de facto standard memory module for gamers and enthusiasts."
The following XMS Pro Series modules and module pairs are available immediately from resellers worldwide: - TwinX1024-4000PRO - matched pair of 512MB, DDR500 modules - TwinX1024-3200C2PRO - matched pair of 512MB, DDR400 modules - CMX512-4000PRO - 512MB, DDR500 module - CMX512-3200C2PRO - 512MB, DDR400 module
Looks pretty cool I think, but on the other side I do not really think that many users will really have any benefit from memory acitivity LEDs on their memory modules. But it sure looks cool..
The trend will reverse (thank God!), and having a tasteful, plain computer-- one that doesn't look like it would have been driven by a pimp in the 70's if it were a car-- will be in vogue again.
/me looks fondly at the dead-plain, black, monolithic PC case under his desk, adorned with nothing but a small case badge that bears a photo of an F-117.
:-)
People who rice up their PCs should be locked in a large cage with people who rice up their cars, and the two groups should be made to fight to the death. Then when the winners emerge victorious from the cage, they'll be cut down by a couple well-positioned Gatling guns.
Don't worry, somebody will come up with a method to read what's in your RAM from those little puppies!
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
ooh, all the pretty lights....
What in the hell is a "heatspreader"?
An Eskimo hooker.
Trolling is a art,
What is meant by 'activity?' Size of memory usage, bandwidth usage, amount of power it's drawing?
To the 1950's, 1960's, and early '70s where computers had rows and rows of blinking lights and switches Anywbody remember the PDP 11's? Or the early Altairs?
Now we just need an excuse to add dozens of little toggle switches to the side of the case.
My rights don't need management.
I dont know but I do know that if my PC looked like those machines I'd be irresistable to women!
A piece of metal which attaches to memory sticks and passively dissapates heat.
eg: http://www.gibtek.co.uk/hardware/nexus.php
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
What good are LED's unless you've got a clear case mod ... or no case?
Who doesn't like free music?
With all the case modding going on, I wonder how much though has been put into the interferance being generated by all the clear cases that are around today? There's a reason computer cases normally come as a solid sheet of metal. It's called a "faraday cage", (sp?) and is used to keep the nasty interferance generated by today's high speed systems inside the case.
/. ran across any studies or sampling done on computer-generated interferance?
Most stock case systems come complete with rows of metal "fingers" along the edges where sheets meet, and where the ports mesh against the back of the case, etc., to keep emi/rfi from leaking out. I'm assuming all of this bother is to keep the case within FCC regulations for generating interferance.
I wonder just how much interferance a typical "clear case" system generates to the surrounding area? Has anyone here at
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
EMS/XMS memory thats one nightmare I did n't want to be reminded off.. expanded and extended memory I'd almost forgotten.
Nightmare? Can't you remember the pure joy of upgrading your emm386.exe to Quarterdecks ultra-super-space-saving QEMM386, watching "Optimize" do its trick (three reboots, right?) and having saved another forty kilobytes of precious low memory, raising your fist to the sky screaming yeeeaaaaaahhh! ?
Well, I can! I can remember my jaw dropping and drool gushing out when the same Quarterdeck QEMM386 (May God be merciful upon its memory) rebooted my lovely DOS in less than 5 seconds, thanks to the awesome Quarterdeck Quickboot!
What next? An LED that displays hard drive activity?
Forget LEDs, I want high performance memory in ECC (unbuffered). That way, I can over clock the memory untill bit errors are detected, then back up on the over clocking. It would sure beat the hell out of tweaking untill you BSOD.
Life is not for the lazy.
I tell ya thems were the days sonny. It was always good to see my CPU usage back then... it helped relieve some of the stress of having to walk to school, uphill both ways, every day of the week, too, none of this "weekday" crap. That's how it was and WE LIKED IT, WE LOVED IT!
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
We've been trying to figure out for months how to make our data center more impressive when we take PHB's there on tours. This sounds like just the ticket!
Everyone knows that you can tell the speed and worth of a server based on the number of blinking lights on the front of the display. Moving our switches up higher in the rack so that they were more visible did us a ton of good. Sounds like this whole memory lights thing may be the killer app that lets us charge for data center tours now!
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Seriously, is this aimed at professional people who can use it for system diagnostics? Or is it aimed at the happy 12 year old $random_famous_brand_name fanatics who think that a prefab window, along with prefab water cooling with prefab fanguards and of course the hideously bright blue LEDs?*
*) With proper respect to true case modders, as featured on Slashdot before.
Hate me!
Mostly address and data bits, miscellaneous mode bits, and so on. Generally, if everything stopped flickering it was a bad sign.
/75 was a handmade guard of some sort over the LAMP TEST button.
... all of which brings to mind the S/360 model 69, which had quite a few instruction opcodes not found on other models. One was BBI, "Branch on Blinking Indicator."
Most machines monitored so many lines that a bank of lights could be switched to display different things to keep the panel from growing really large - although there were some exceptions, like the 360/75, which I'm told had so many lamps that pressing the "lamp test" button would pop a circuit breaker -- for a while a standard feature of every
There were options to display all sorts of obscure control lines and flip-flops within the machine; they were mostly used by CEs when diagnosing the hardware. They could step a program one clock cycle at a time and look at data going through the machine as it decoded and executed a single instruction. Or they could monitor the internal workings of, say, the multiplexer channel to see whether a flip-flop was sticking or data wasn't showing up.
One cute display I discovered on the 90/30 was the length of the current seek being made by a disk drive attached to the Integrated Disk Adapter (as most of them were). This wasn't an absolute cylinder number but the actual difference between the current cylinder number and the one to which it was going. Consistently high readings on this display meant that the system was thrashing badly; moving the file in question to a different drive could dramatically improve performance. (This is still true nowadays, although few people realize it because few personal computers have more than one drive.) This was a timely display, because the newer disk drives on the 90/30 had an opaque cover and you couldn't see whether the heads were moving excessively anymore.
The Univac 9300 on which I cut my teeth would by default display the first 16 bits of the currently-executing instruction while it was running. If this display suddenly froze in some random pattern, it was a pretty good indication that your program had gone into a loop. The simplest example, a branch to itself, would display 0100 0111 1111 0000 (47f0), the opcode and mask bits of an unconditional branch. Generally, though, if your program went into a loop, it was executing enough instructions each time around that all the lights would come on.
With the processor halted, you could step through your program one machine instruction at a time, and display and alter memory locations (both data and instructions) as well, and even jump to a different spot in your program. Early but effective interactive debugging! Modifying instructions or data on the fly was possible and scary.
On a card-based 9300, I could tell whether my program was CPU- or I/O-bound from the lights. Although it used DMA for all I/O, there would come a time when a program would have to wait for a device, and it would block by busy-waiting in a two-instruction loop:
TIO something,device-addr
BC 8,*-4
The TIO instruction had an opcode of a5, followed by an 8-bit device address, while the branch instruction was 4780. So if the machine was spending most of its time waiting for the card reader (device address 01), the two instructions a501 and 4780 would blur together to produce an apparent display of e781. If it was waiting for the printer (device address 03), the display would be e783.
If a program was CPU bound, it would be executing a random assortment of instructions so all of the lights would come on. If the program was only slightly I/O-bound, the patterns I described above would be discernible as brightly-lit bulbs, while the others would be dimly lit, and probably flickering in time with the device on which the program was waiting.
Some machines had "sense lights" or similar indicators which programs could turn on and off at will.
Great-- I will now have a gigantic machine with rows and rows of blinking lights. Why the hell do we need this again?
here's the ram from the top down, showing the LEDs
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Yeah, damn, sucks for you, everyone else is going to be sponging up loads of useful info from these lights. Oh well, maybe some enterprising fellow will discover this untapped market for color-blind case modders and debut a line of RAM sticks with little speakers on them.
Being a visual-spatial person I'd have to say this is a pretty good idea. As far as we've come we pretty much still like to look at the 'pretty lights', yano? Some kind of indicator that what we've built is actually doing something. Helps to bridge the gap between our fascination with machinery and the circutry that we build, which inherantly doesn't inspire the awe of say..an industrial sized crane, because of its lack of moving parts.
..I think an interesting application of this would be to attach a bank of lights that could vary in intensity depending on power usage to the banks. One could test various in-case heat levels and actually observe the usage levels of electricity inside different parts of the ram as temperature rose. I dunno, I'm grasping here.. ...Pretty lights!!..
People like to 'see' an indicator that what they've built is actually working..Its comforting in a Man-machine sort of way. You could easily see if a bank was out (as someone mentioned before), but then again you'd know that when you tried to boot the machine.
Whilst QEMM386 was good you could still get some extra goodness out of emm386.exe. I used to work in a pc repair/upgrade shop, you could sometimes see a customers tears of joy when I used to knock out my "signature" EMM386 line in the config.sys after spending they spent the whole pervious evening trying to get the required 614k to get some game working. The trick was (if I remember correctly) adding /I=B000-B7FFF to 32K more "upper" memory since that memory area was only used for monochrome video cards.. that was nearly 9 years ago, man I cant believe I remember all this crap.
i'm waiting till my 512MB chip has 536,870,912 lights on it...not gonna buy it any sooner...
That's because your stories involved the UK. Nobody outside the UK cares what goes on in the UK. LEDs in memory chips and silly putty are much more interesting than the UK.
Whaddya mean, "pretty soon"? People are already removing Windows in droves!
You're saying that the Pope's scrotum comes equipped with blinkenlights?
Is it fascism yet?
Well I think that was one of the versions that had something similar, but for CPU usage. A row of about 5 or 6 LED's used to swish left and right ala Knight Rider at a bit of speed, and as the machine got bogged down with CPU heavy jobs the pattern used to slow right down..
:)
Or was it the other way round.. I can't remeber. Cool none the less - wouldn't mind something similar to stick into a floppy drive blanking plate
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Puerile joke: Always funny.
Funny and ontopic reference: Never funny.
Understand now?
Hehe, the only thing on MY case is a compiler construction textbook, the remote control for my industrial fan, and a pizza sauce encrusted plate. And the only thing PERMENANTLY on my case...is the pizza plate, sadly. I shoudln't have let the cheese set ;)
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
The PDP8/e had a rotary switch on the front panel that allowed you to use das blinkenlights for various purposes.
From The PDP8/e & PDP8/m Small Computer Handbook (Digital Equipment Corporation, 1972), Table 2-1, pp 2-3 to 2-4:
(Well, you did ask :-)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
- Case with a window on it, with a Quake applique on it.
- Boards with different, clashing colors.
- Cables with different, clashing colors (preferrably glow-in-the-dark).
- LEDs on the fans.
- LEDs on the memory.
- Purple flourescent tube.
- Fan guards shaped like the biohazard symbol.
You, too can have the tackiest case ever!Seriously, I had a hard time finding a case without a window on it. No, I don't need a window; I know it's all in there.
Eeek all CGA, EGA, and VGA+ adapters use B800-BFFF for text mode. The only problem I had was with TSENG (remember them?) graphics cards in Windows, they would enable that extra 32K for a larger 128K that meant less bank switching. The only thing I can think of is that your laptop had some kind of ROM mapped into that area.
A little tweaking and we can have case mods that are just like the WOPR from WarGames!
yay.
....move along....nothing to see here....
So this is what those things in Mr. Data's head are?
Try here.
~Berj
Activity lights are nothing. Relatively useless in the grand scheme of things (except they'd make a wonderful addition to a good case mod)... The new Intel Blade Servers (sorry, no link, they're not released until Tuesday - you might try searching for the IBM ones, since they're pretty much the same hardware) have an LED next to each RAM slot that lights up when the stick dies (there's a capacitor on the board that keeps 30-40 seconds worth of electricity, so the LED's will stay lit up when you remove the blades from the chassis).
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Cause we all know that the more obnoxious lights and blinking crap you have visible makes your computer run faster. Kinda like placing a Type-R logo on you Honda Civic.
STOP the Madness!
It seems to me that there are two kind of people who go in for case modding. On the one hand, you have your causual modders. They like pre-fab windows. Might add a cold cathode light and some round cables. These represent perhaps the majority.
However, then you have the real "hard core" modders. The kind of people who build their computers in to old radios. The kind of people who want to do some special cooling project, or who want to have a unique case. My personal favorites are the concept cases, and mods that have some practical purpose (like better temperature monitoring for servers etc). They want to be creative. It's not just about pimpage.
This memory seems to be for members for the first catagory.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Seriously case prices have done nothing but go up in the last year or so with many of the vanilla boxes not being stocked anymore. Though I've had my eye on a prefab'd watercooled case for awhile due to the noise levels I still have not seen the prices of it go down where I'd consider it acceptable.
:)
If you consider the case which retails for maybe 100 dollars and a pump that runs 30 dollars and another 30 for hoses and such I still dont see the point of paying 300 for a case for that amount of silence. And there's still the amount of heat that's being output into the house to deal with. I'm considering installing a duct from the office room to a window or through the wall to pipe all the excess heat out of the house.
I'm sure I'd make it back on the 300 dollar case by pumping all that hot air back outside except in the winter when I wouldnt mind it being put into the house
1024x768 display with shared memory. Hah!
People who rice up their PCs should be locked in a large cage with people who rice up their cars
No way! The last time that happended 2 Fast 2 Furious was created. Think of the consequences, man!
Call me a little paranoid but this reminds me of the data leakage problems of some communication devices (Modems, DSU's, etc). Have to 'nix the plexiglass case mod now 8->. Here is the article: Information Leakage from Optical Emissions or Google HTML here
The original mainframes and minis had lights which were wired into the CPU registers. You could see what each register was doing by looking at the banks of blinking lights.
Computer teaching boxen had LED's which were wired into memory locations (you could choose which location via DIP switches). You could tell what each memory location held by looking at the banks of blinking lights.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
It's not off topic, moron. Corsair making memory with blinking lights on it requires a reference to the classic "blinkenlights" warning.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I released that thing as shareware (There's even one site that Google knows about that still has VID_HOLE.ZIP [for their subscribers], which actually works under Win9x for Real Mode drivers) but nobody ever sent me the $5 registration. I wonder if anyone (other than I) ever found a use for the thing?
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
My inner casemodder wonders why things like this include LEDs, rather than sockets/jumpers onto which you could put your own LEDs. I mean, motherboards use jumpers for you to attach LEDs for drive activity, power, etc., so why not network cards, usb and pci buses, keyboard and mouse channels, memory, etc. Then you could REALLY have a disco on the side of your case.
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