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Research Reveals Mislaid Microprocessor Megahertz
SlashRating©
6*10^23
slashdottit! tm
ransom1982 noted a new article on The Register that says "Not only are chip companies regularly releasing ever-faster microprocessors, but new research has revealed that modern CPUs actually lose megahertz over time." This makes it even more complicated to compare the performance of Intel and AMD CPUs since you have differing architecture, clockspeeds AND the year of manufacture to consider. Buyer beware!
This one wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be true, because sometimes I certainly feel like my processor is degrading...
I'm too dumb to figure out if this is an April fools joke or not.
I have an ATT 3B2 that has a bit of a problem maintaining its system clock. It keeps defaulting to 1970.
What I have noticed is that since the machine thinks that it has been around that long, the MHZ drops down to almost nothing - This has a bonus of making this machine have an uptime of around 38 years!
Does a pink pony degrade over time, or does it just become less and less funny?
Ever notice how the slashdottit number is 1 mole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_(unit) ? 6 * 10^23 thats great
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Just look at the references to Einstein's work on relativity as an explanation (!?!).
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
To me the giveaway was El Reg posting new articles at the weekend :)
Ah please, give me some karma... Nice mods ;-)
Whoo! Man I just can't get enough of these April Fools jokes! I'm just holding my sides here. No. Really. Honest.
I love how Slashdot is entirely useless for a whole day. JESUS BUT THIS IS FUNNY.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Please, no matter what you do - please don't stop. I can't get enough. There's nothing like having Fark be more useful than Slashdot. Holy crap but I'm in stitches here. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
No, really. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Pink ponies have a specific lifespan, which can be abruptly shortened by overworking them. The solution, as discovered by ancient greeks when they realized that slaves were dying from the extremely poor conditions of the mines, is to get as much productivity as you can in the resulting short lifespan.
You might need to bring along much more pink ponies as well.
har har another made up story on /. on 4/1 ... wow it's so lame it's just fukin hilarious /. is completely fukin useless on 4/1
/. on 4/1
And so begins my first annual boycott of
RE: people's "eight year old gay boys"-like obsession with ponies...attention: the pony has long been beaten to death.
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1. Download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/217 5
2. Tools > Add-ons > Slashdotter > Options.
3. Click on styles tab, than change 'Default style'.
4. ???
5. OMG!!! Ponies!!!
So if your lose megahertz's wouldn't that screw up the RTC calculations?
Don't bitch about somebody bitching.
(Oh, am I being a bitch?)
I know the whole Kibibits, Mebibytes thing must have started off many many years ago as a Slashdot April 1st story which then grew into a life of its own, but why don't people use "MegaCycles" anymore...it's a good term... you can make bicycle puns with it and it doesn't have that annoying German Heinrich Rudolf Hertz and his heirs to contend with.
I should be modded insightful for no reason.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I saw this years ago (1990-4?) happen on early SPARC processors. I think I remember 2 or 3 Sparcstations (1,1+, 2's) out of 40 or so we had, suddenly getting pokey. And in about a week or two becoming unusable. This would have been 20-50 Mhz CPUs droping to 5-10 Mhz (or effectivly feeling like that) - I remember them being replaced by SUN for free...Not thats this has any bearing on this story....
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Political discussion for a new world
;)
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know. - M. King Hubbert
Oh, that made my Sunday much funnier. I was all thinking hard about the significance of reduced clock speed implying a reduction in quartz crystal frequency, and what sort of component degradation could lead to oscillator problems, and so on and so forth. That went on for about three minutes before I got it.
on science !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Jullianne doesn't have single mole on her beautiful body.
> Ever notice how the slashdottit number is 1 mole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_(unit) ? 6 * 10^23 thats great
I guess that makes you the biggest nerd around here.
I'm glad to see that you still don't get April Fools day. Maybe next year you'll understand and just post one or two fake stories. I might even crack a smile then.
I think this was my shortest daily visit to Slashdot.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Processors are getting fast, so, it looks like the processors which do not, relatively are getting slower over the time.
http://id3as.livejournal.com/
Like OMG! I'm beating a dead pink pony all day. I'm like so Commander Taco!
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
This explains why my C=1541 drive is so damned slow.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Well who would have expected it... Windows BSODs much faster than it used to!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I have Google to show the main news, etc and the Slashdot story was linked there, so good job with the jokes...
now the only thing we miss is saying office, or the whole windows vista is opensource. -.- ...
:)
can you do this today at 23:59, so the ones reading it tomorrow won't think of a april joke?
I have seen this effect three different ways, in real life:
1. The new laptops and even some desktops have heat pipes. If the heat pipes loose coolant, or become unbonded, then the processor automatically throttles back to avoid overheating. The result is that processors "slow down" or loose MHz.
2. On some older designs, the crystals have been known to go, and the computers really do loose MHz.
3. The "Anti-Virus" effect. Some antivirus packages are extremely slow. They use lots of CPU power. After each generation, the antivirus software gets sequentially slower, and the result is the PC really does slow down. If you remove the anti-virus software (not recommended), the PC gets immediately quicker.
Introduction to Quartz Frequency Standards - Aging http://www.oscilent.com/esupport/TechSupport/Revie wPapers/IntroQuartz/vigaging.htm
"Aging can be positive or negative [17]. Occasionally, a reversal in aging direction is observed."
Except this is his site, so we like him.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Old jokes never die
They just ... get old ...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
As we all know part of the reason why we want a new machine every few years (or sooner) is obviously because we see our friends with newer machines and we desire to have something better... Furthermore it is apparent that software tends to get more complex from newer versions of a given piece of software. Today's desktops and laptops are getting so quick, that well, there really isn't any delay with loading any sort of basic business software, especially if you have a fast storage system for your computer (FLASH hard drive anyone?). So, then the improvements of getting quicker and quicker computers kind of diminish, because, who needs 16 cores to load OpenOffice 2.2? I know that I would run seti@home on it, but still, I think computer hardware is really coming ahead of the increased complexities of software. Of course video editing, and running compression algorithms and other intensive tasks will obviously be noticeably faster with a new 8-core system, even if the software doesn't take advantage of multiple processors, because each core will be faster. Bottom line is that we will always find a reason of how and/or why we can take advantage of increased processing power, even if the return is diminishing more and more, by having web pages load .1 seconds faster than before..., or having Openoffice 2.2 load .5 seconds faster, from a load time of 1.5 seconds...
In the year 2015, do you think the average consumer would even think about buying a new PC!? -- provided they have a system built in 2012?
What happens if Chuck Norris punches you?
Megahertz!
This is a well known fact, no research needed. Everyone know as example Core2Duo have less clock speed but better performance..
Intel was unavailable for comment. AMD, however, claimed to be well aware of the problem and to be already designing processors capable of working beyond the limits of Einsteinian mathematics - with a negative temporal displacement facility built in.
Come on I really want 1 april to end so you stop all the crap. Come on einstenian math or WTF? Btw I would not surprise if the quartz in the clock oscillates at a lower rate as time passes. But that is another thing.
because they totally suck. That is why geniuses buy Intel and fucktards buy AMD.
but no one wants you to know about it. Some guys at Ars dipped a mobo in that Tahitian Noni Fruity Juice stuff, and it totally cured the problem. it even increased the mhz 20-30, and thats no lie. Run your system in a bath of that Noni stuff, and Windows won't even crash. I swear.
They're testing US made CPUs in the EU. They're measuring in metric seconds, while the CPUs were designed to run on English seconds. The difference is very slight, but it accumulates. This is why we have to adjust for it periodically, by having a leap second. You'll notice these leap seconds are announced in the US by the Naval Observatory, and not at Europe's equivalent, the Greenwich observatory, which runs on the more constant metric time and serves as the background against which we measure the drift*. Hence the GMT in time stamp: Greenwich Metric Time. Since it stays constant, whereas the English time drifts, it is also sometimes considered to be an average of time, so is also called Greenwich Mean Time.
* Just a technical term. The time doesn't actually speed up and slow down. It just has different numbers of microseconds in a second, and that number varies, just like the number of days in a month.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B