Intel Israel has been a strong development center for Intel for quite some time now. Traditionally, new chips have been designed in the U.S., and then the designs were sent to the Israel for making them more power-efficient or improving performance. This situation got turned on its head. The American design team came up with the disaster known as the Netburst architecture (the highest clock P4 chips). Meanwhile, the Israel team was optimizing the Pentium-M (P3 and up) architecture and got its performance close to that of the Netburst chips at a lower clock rate and lower power consumption. Now Intel's top of the line chip was getting trounced by AMD's offering in both performance and power consumption, and further, AMD was announcing dual core chips years before Intel had planned to release any. In a way, Intel got lucky. They couldn't extend the Netburst architecture much more, the massively long pipelines on it made it terrible at executing general purpose code, and even hyperthreading didn't help it. It was generating massive amounts of heat at the frequency it was running and needed a huge cache. It was not ready for dual-cores. But the Pentium-M was. AMD's move to dual core saved Intel from competing in the megahertz race, just when the payoff from cranking the clock was starting to run out. They could now move from advertising clock rate to advertising dual cores. The Israel design team delivered the Core-Duo chip, and fast. Noticed how these appeared in laptops first? That's what the Israel team was experienced with.
Expect the Israel team to continue developing this line of processors, with the American developers going back to the drawing boards for the next generation product.
However, how difficult would it be to write an operating system that offloaded floating point operations to the GPU, and everything else to the CPU.
Funny you should mention that. The Intel 386 (and up) architecture has built in support for a floating point coprocessor, so it can offload floating point operations. In the early days, you could buy a 387 math coprocessor to accelerate floating point performance. Then Intel integrated the 387 coprocessor onto the 486 series cpus, and today we just know it as "the floating point unit" (although it's been much revised, parallelized, and super-scaled).
As for offloading to a GPU, well... that's what we do today. It's called Direct3D, or Mesa, or Glide, or your favorite 3D acceleration library. The problem with this approach is that it requires very specialized code. It's not something that can be automatically done for just any code, as the overhead of loading the GPU, setting up the data, and retrieving the results would far exceed the performance gains. In only extereme cases does it pay off: the workload has to be extremely parallelizable, with almost no branching and predictable calculations. Basically what it ends up is that the algorithm has to be extensively tailered to the GPU. Even IBM has had major issues offloading general purpose operations to their special processing units, and those are much more closely coupled to the CPU.
My policy, and I recommend this to anyone, is no computer repair/advise/help of any kind until after we have been having sex on a regular basis (the official stated policy is "only my girlfriend gets tech support"). Sometimes it's hard to resist, but don't give in. She will never go out with you in appreciation for what you've done for her, or realize what a great guy you are or bullshit like that. She will just use you as the guy who's willing to fix her computer anytime she asks, with nothing in return. She will respect you for refusing (even if she is indignant about it when you actually tell her).
It works, try it. No girl is going to like you for your computer fixing / car repairing / math homework helping. She will like you for who you are. If you're relying on these skills to help you out (or even get your foot in the door), you need to reevalute your strategy.
I think you may have missed my point. When you rename resume.html to resume.doc, Windows will open it with Word, and it will display like any other document. No special knowledge on the part of the recruiter required. If fulfills the requirement of having a document readable in MS Word.
I've been doing it for years. Only once have I had a problem, when an HR droid asked me to (in her words) "remove the protection system [I] had on the document". I'm guessing this means their automatic address stripping macros would not work properly with this resume'.
Guess what the reply email that I recieved 3 weeks later said? "I couldn't open your resume, can you send it in word?". Shit!
Take your HTML document. Change the extension to.doc. Congratulations, you now have a resume' in "Word". If you actually have Word available you can also save it as a Word document, so that you can get your very own fat core dump that is the Microsoft Word file format without really working in Word.
I'd like to be able to search for the C programming language. Not C++. C. Note that I've yet to find a search tool capable of handling a search for "C" without a million pages of unrelated crap.
Nucleus is really more of a fancy scheduler than an OS. Don't get me wrong, it's very good at what it does, but it won't give you things like, oh, drivers, memory protection, separate processes (all threads run at the same level as Nucleus and share memory with it). For people looking at Linux and CE, that's a bit bare. BTW, Nucleus Plus (scheduler) may be very good, but Nucleus File (their FAT filesystem extension), is pretty fucking bad. It is slow, buggy, and extremely lacking (silly things like assuming filenames are all ASCII).
"The current Intel core, the Pentium, is on its way out and is to be replaced by a new chip called 'Core'. These new Core chips come in two flavours. Solo Core is a single core processor, and Duo Core is a dual core processor."
How the hell did this make the front page? "Core Solo|Duo" is just what Intel calls their single, dual core processors now (remember, generic names are not worth anything to them, they must have a brand name). But is it news for nerds? Hardly.
OpenSSH just keeps getting better. Not just a great shell client and server, but support for multiple streams, secure tunnels, SCP, SFTP, every authentication method you could want, and finally VPN (the next logical extension). OpenSSH ships with every Linux distribution I can name (well, except embedded ones), the BSDs, and MacOS, and is available for Windows (under Cygwin) and every other major UNIX and UNIX-like OS out there. The code is all available to anyone for any purpose with no real restrictions (other than giving some credit to the developers), so you could include it in any app you make, regardless of license (GPL included). Thanks, everyone who works on this valuable tool. I think I'll go buy a T-shirt
What nonsense! I need a comment us old folks would understand, something that doesn't assume dependence on fads like TCP.
Remember how back in the olden days you'd buy a game and take the floppies to school to trade with your friends? In exchange for your copy of Wing Commander, you'd be allowed to copy everyone else's floppy disks for your 286. Now, imagine if your friend was an Amiga user, and was always bragging about how he had fancy midi sound and better than CGA graphics. So one day, you go over to his house and when he's not looking you shove a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his floppy drive, and tell him his little brother did it. Where was I going with this story? You damn kids get off my lawn.
ECMA standards are worthless. Intel took UWB to ECMA because they knew they would easily pass it regardless of any outstanding issues. ECMA is hardly experienced in network standards as it is, as compared to IEEE which does nearly all telecom standards. If they had been a real standards body, why would they have not started there?
The ECMA is a rubber stamp factory for its members, and can hardly be considered a respectable standards body these days. For example, one of its most well known standards is Microsoft's ECMA script (nee Jscript, MS's version of Javascript). This was passed without the involvement of the creator of Javascript (Netscape), any community or interested party feedback, and with numerous incompatibilities with existing implementations.
You have it wrong. The Reg is a very Open Source friendly publication. They often post about the evils of Microsoft and others. This is just their way of balancing out. Instead of posting an anti-open source article every so often, they just post one huge flaming pile of crap to get it all to balance out in the end. It's like when you help a dozen old ladies across the street, you get to murder one bum and your karma breaks even.
Other Intel chips and chipset names can give you an indication of where they were developed. Most parts are designed in Oregon. But, for example, most of Intel's low power parts have names of Israeli geographical features (Banias, Dothan, Merom, Gilo, Jonah, Dimona), and this probably means they were developed at Intel Israel. Expect to see some Indian rivers show up on the list as soon as that development site is up to speed. See the huge list of code names for a geography lesson of the Pacific Northwest.
The math is simple and the handwriting is on the wall. No, Netcraft does not confirm this, but Bob figured out that hard drives double in size about every two years. A base Redhat install doubles in size every 9 months. It will be less than 6 years before a Redhat desktop install requires 512 gigs, and shortly after that, the requirements will surpass the largest drives available on the market. He's escaped, and will slowly sell off his stock, take the money and walk way.
Okay, I'm going to do it. I'm going to be one of those people that complains about Slashdot. I'm going to hate myself in the morning.
The parent poster brings up good points, and I hope the Slashdot ops will take a look. If you're going to be lazy about it, at least implement this technical solution: put a "submitter is on crack" button on each article. If that button gets pushed by a million people, for fuck's sake at least go back and review the story. Or article moderation, but that's much more work.
Please, let's stop the misleading, sensationalist headlines ("Modified Prius Gets 250 MPG"), as well as poorly worded, often factually inaccurate summaries (see this story for reference). They demean us all.
Say what you will, the Japanese have picked up the gauntlet to the biggest nerd challenge of all, getting a girlfriend. They're going to build her, they have the technology. She will be stronger, faster, better! Like an Aibo, she will always be happy to see you. She will be soft and smooth and react to touch due to this skin. She will walk upright like a QRIO or Asimo, be able to perform complex pre-programmed moves. She will have a mute button.
The future is here. Domestic girlfriends are fuel efficient and reliable...in Japan!
I think you are over estimating the cost by far. In SMT manufacturing, the single most expensive point is the time it takes to calibrate the machines to a new board layout (ie, time the assembly line is offline). Once the machines are set, putting surface mount parts on a board, with automatic testing of hundreds of testpoints, can cost nearly nothing (pennies or fraction thereof per board). In all my years as an embedded systems engineer, I've never heard anyone want to remove or consolidate parts due to assembly line savings (and trust me, they'll fight you for every penny when you plan to manufacture millions of units). Bigger savings might be realized in the removal of inline resistors, pullups, zener diodes, power regulators, and other glue parts between the ICs since it is all in one chip now. And by big, I mean several cents.
The article is not clear on this, so I can see where you would be confused. What you're talking about has been done years ago. The most common nokia phone chip is the TI OMAP, which couples an ARM 9 processor core with a TI 5000 series DSP core. This is already in your phone today.
What the article is talking about is incorporating RAM, the RF circuitry, probably flash, and power management (usually done by an external microcontroller). That is, bringing all the other chips on the board into the die. Mind you, they are talking about a 20$ bill of materials (BOM) cost for the phone, this is NOT the price that you would pay. An OMAP sells for about 10-12USD in massive quantities. The price of this new part would probably be similar, but it would eliminate the need for many peripheral chips (thereby reducing the total board cost). What we're talking here is probably a reduction from 25 USD to 20 USD in the BOM. If they were sold through normal retail channels, expect to pay 2x to 4x the BOM cost.
The CNET reported does not seem to be clued in on what this really means. This in no way means 20 dollar phones for anyone. It just means that phones are going to get just a little bit cheaper to manufacture, and that TI is going to take away some business from other part suppliers. Good news for TI, pretty much meaningless for everyone else.
I consider myself a liberal, and I agree with the parent post. Can we *please* stop the idiotic editorializing, especially when it comes to political stories such as this? We don't have to end every single story about government action with an open ended thought about how this can be taken to extremes and destroy your civil liberties. Really, we can think for ourselves. Let's cut the kneejerk reactions and behave like adults. Editors, do your job!
Oh god, I've turned into one of those people that complain about Slashdot. Someone shoot me.
My parents have one of these in their kitchen. Works very well, actually, and the light is very white and pleasant. This is much better than a skylight for several reasons. The first is that the light is not directional, but very diffuse, giving good light all over. Second, you don't really have to clean the dome. Third, it goes through your insulation, and is sealed at both ends, keeping a decent separation of you from the hot/cold. Finally, it's pretty small and easy to install yourself if you're handy with a caulk gun. I'd definitely get one of these if I had a house.
I've seen the Mori Building solar collectors (on TV). The idea was that they could transport natural light into areas of the building that are not near windows, and that sunlight seems to make people happier. And they didn't need GPS to do it because the sun is, y'know, fairly predicable.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel Israel has been a strong development center for Intel for quite some time now. Traditionally, new chips have been designed in the U.S., and then the designs were sent to the Israel for making them more power-efficient or improving performance. This situation got turned on its head. The American design team came up with the disaster known as the Netburst architecture (the highest clock P4 chips). Meanwhile, the Israel team was optimizing the Pentium-M (P3 and up) architecture and got its performance close to that of the Netburst chips at a lower clock rate and lower power consumption. Now Intel's top of the line chip was getting trounced by AMD's offering in both performance and power consumption, and further, AMD was announcing dual core chips years before Intel had planned to release any. In a way, Intel got lucky. They couldn't extend the Netburst architecture much more, the massively long pipelines on it made it terrible at executing general purpose code, and even hyperthreading didn't help it. It was generating massive amounts of heat at the frequency it was running and needed a huge cache. It was not ready for dual-cores. But the Pentium-M was. AMD's move to dual core saved Intel from competing in the megahertz race, just when the payoff from cranking the clock was starting to run out. They could now move from advertising clock rate to advertising dual cores. The Israel design team delivered the Core-Duo chip, and fast. Noticed how these appeared in laptops first? That's what the Israel team was experienced with.
Expect the Israel team to continue developing this line of processors, with the American developers going back to the drawing boards for the next generation product.
However, how difficult would it be to write an operating system that offloaded floating point operations to the GPU, and everything else to the CPU.
Funny you should mention that. The Intel 386 (and up) architecture has built in support for a floating point coprocessor, so it can offload floating point operations. In the early days, you could buy a 387 math coprocessor to accelerate floating point performance. Then Intel integrated the 387 coprocessor onto the 486 series cpus, and today we just know it as "the floating point unit" (although it's been much revised, parallelized, and super-scaled).
As for offloading to a GPU, well... that's what we do today. It's called Direct3D, or Mesa, or Glide, or your favorite 3D acceleration library. The problem with this approach is that it requires very specialized code. It's not something that can be automatically done for just any code, as the overhead of loading the GPU, setting up the data, and retrieving the results would far exceed the performance gains. In only extereme cases does it pay off: the workload has to be extremely parallelizable, with almost no branching and predictable calculations. Basically what it ends up is that the algorithm has to be extensively tailered to the GPU. Even IBM has had major issues offloading general purpose operations to their special processing units, and those are much more closely coupled to the CPU.
My policy, and I recommend this to anyone, is no computer repair/advise/help of any kind until after we have been having sex on a regular basis (the official stated policy is "only my girlfriend gets tech support"). Sometimes it's hard to resist, but don't give in. She will never go out with you in appreciation for what you've done for her, or realize what a great guy you are or bullshit like that. She will just use you as the guy who's willing to fix her computer anytime she asks, with nothing in return. She will respect you for refusing (even if she is indignant about it when you actually tell her).
It works, try it. No girl is going to like you for your computer fixing / car repairing / math homework helping. She will like you for who you are. If you're relying on these skills to help you out (or even get your foot in the door), you need to reevalute your strategy.
I think you may have missed my point. When you rename resume.html to resume.doc, Windows will open it with Word, and it will display like any other document. No special knowledge on the part of the recruiter required. If fulfills the requirement of having a document readable in MS Word.
I've been doing it for years. Only once have I had a problem, when an HR droid asked me to (in her words) "remove the protection system [I] had on the document". I'm guessing this means their automatic address stripping macros would not work properly with this resume'.
Guess what the reply email that I recieved 3 weeks later said? "I couldn't open your resume, can you send it in word?". Shit!
.doc. Congratulations, you now have a resume' in "Word". If you actually have Word available you can also save it as a Word document, so that you can get your very own fat core dump that is the Microsoft Word file format without really working in Word.
Take your HTML document. Change the extension to
I'd like to be able to search for the C programming language. Not C++. C. Note that I've yet to find a search tool capable of handling a search for "C" without a million pages of unrelated crap.
Call me crazy, but why bother coding it then? Isn't the trusted stability and consistency of glibc malloc() worth more than a minor speed increase?
Obviously, because malloc() doesn't start with a G. And to think, they could have easily sped up their allocator years ago just by doing:
#define gWhateverTheirAllocatorIsCalled malloc
Nucleus is really more of a fancy scheduler than an OS. Don't get me wrong, it's very good at what it does, but it won't give you things like, oh, drivers, memory protection, separate processes (all threads run at the same level as Nucleus and share memory with it). For people looking at Linux and CE, that's a bit bare.
BTW, Nucleus Plus (scheduler) may be very good, but Nucleus File (their FAT filesystem extension), is pretty fucking bad. It is slow, buggy, and extremely lacking (silly things like assuming filenames are all ASCII).
"The current Intel core, the Pentium, is on its way out and is to be replaced by a new chip called 'Core'. These new Core chips come in two flavours. Solo Core is a single core processor, and Duo Core is a dual core processor."
How the hell did this make the front page? "Core Solo|Duo" is just what Intel calls their single, dual core processors now (remember, generic names are not worth anything to them, they must have a brand name). But is it news for nerds? Hardly.
The article is indeed a troll, as well as a dupe. Thanks, Zonk, for being on the ball yet again.
OpenSSH just keeps getting better. Not just a great shell client and server, but support for multiple streams, secure tunnels, SCP, SFTP, every authentication method you could want, and finally VPN (the next logical extension). OpenSSH ships with every Linux distribution I can name (well, except embedded ones), the BSDs, and MacOS, and is available for Windows (under Cygwin) and every other major UNIX and UNIX-like OS out there. The code is all available to anyone for any purpose with no real restrictions (other than giving some credit to the developers), so you could include it in any app you make, regardless of license (GPL included). Thanks, everyone who works on this valuable tool. I think I'll go buy a T-shirt
What nonsense! I need a comment us old folks would understand, something that doesn't assume dependence on fads like TCP.
Remember how back in the olden days you'd buy a game and take the floppies to school to trade with your friends? In exchange for your copy of Wing Commander, you'd be allowed to copy everyone else's floppy disks for your 286. Now, imagine if your friend was an Amiga user, and was always bragging about how he had fancy midi sound and better than CGA graphics. So one day, you go over to his house and when he's not looking you shove a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his floppy drive, and tell him his little brother did it. Where was I going with this story? You damn kids get off my lawn.
ECMA standards are worthless. Intel took UWB to ECMA because they knew they would easily pass it regardless of any outstanding issues. ECMA is hardly experienced in network standards as it is, as compared to IEEE which does nearly all telecom standards. If they had been a real standards body, why would they have not started there?
The ECMA is a rubber stamp factory for its members, and can hardly be considered a respectable standards body these days. For example, one of its most well known standards is Microsoft's ECMA script (nee Jscript, MS's version of Javascript). This was passed without the involvement of the creator of Javascript (Netscape), any community or interested party feedback, and with numerous incompatibilities with existing implementations.
You have it wrong. The Reg is a very Open Source friendly publication. They often post about the evils of Microsoft and others. This is just their way of balancing out. Instead of posting an anti-open source article every so often, they just post one huge flaming pile of crap to get it all to balance out in the end. It's like when you help a dozen old ladies across the street, you get to murder one bum and your karma breaks even.
'But the trains are really too noisy (underground) to have an intelligent conversation.'
Uhh.... what makes him think that most of the people talking on cell phones are having an intelligent conversation?
The submitter obviously meant an intelligible conversation. Or that is what he would have meant had he been more intelligent.
Other Intel chips and chipset names can give you an indication of where they were developed. Most parts are designed in Oregon. But, for example, most of Intel's low power parts have names of Israeli geographical features (Banias, Dothan, Merom, Gilo, Jonah, Dimona), and this probably means they were developed at Intel Israel. Expect to see some Indian rivers show up on the list as soon as that development site is up to speed. See the huge list of code names for a geography lesson of the Pacific Northwest.
The math is simple and the handwriting is on the wall. No, Netcraft does not confirm this, but Bob figured out that hard drives double in size about every two years. A base Redhat install doubles in size every 9 months. It will be less than 6 years before a Redhat desktop install requires 512 gigs, and shortly after that, the requirements will surpass the largest drives available on the market. He's escaped, and will slowly sell off his stock, take the money and walk way.
Also, I hear he runs Slackware now.
Outlander! We have your woman Outlander! She still lives!
Okay, I'm going to do it. I'm going to be one of those people that complains about Slashdot. I'm going to hate myself in the morning.
The parent poster brings up good points, and I hope the Slashdot ops will take a look. If you're going to be lazy about it, at least implement this technical solution: put a "submitter is on crack" button on each article. If that button gets pushed by a million people, for fuck's sake at least go back and review the story. Or article moderation, but that's much more work.
Please, let's stop the misleading, sensationalist headlines ("Modified Prius Gets 250 MPG"), as well as poorly worded, often factually inaccurate summaries (see this story for reference). They demean us all.
Thanks for your time.
Say what you will, the Japanese have picked up the gauntlet to the biggest nerd challenge of all, getting a girlfriend. They're going to build her, they have the technology. She will be stronger, faster, better! Like an Aibo, she will always be happy to see you. She will be soft and smooth and react to touch due to this skin. She will walk upright like a QRIO or Asimo, be able to perform complex pre-programmed moves. She will have a mute button.
...in Japan!
The future is here. Domestic girlfriends are fuel efficient and reliable
Finally, I get to use my natural smoothing and antialiasing feature. A game that looks better with my glasses off than with me wearing them.
I think you are over estimating the cost by far. In SMT manufacturing, the single most expensive point is the time it takes to calibrate the machines to a new board layout (ie, time the assembly line is offline). Once the machines are set, putting surface mount parts on a board, with automatic testing of hundreds of testpoints, can cost nearly nothing (pennies or fraction thereof per board). In all my years as an embedded systems engineer, I've never heard anyone want to remove or consolidate parts due to assembly line savings (and trust me, they'll fight you for every penny when you plan to manufacture millions of units). Bigger savings might be realized in the removal of inline resistors, pullups, zener diodes, power regulators, and other glue parts between the ICs since it is all in one chip now. And by big, I mean several cents.
The article is not clear on this, so I can see where you would be confused. What you're talking about has been done years ago. The most common nokia phone chip is the TI OMAP, which couples an ARM 9 processor core with a TI 5000 series DSP core. This is already in your phone today.
What the article is talking about is incorporating RAM, the RF circuitry, probably flash, and power management (usually done by an external microcontroller). That is, bringing all the other chips on the board into the die. Mind you, they are talking about a 20$ bill of materials (BOM) cost for the phone, this is NOT the price that you would pay. An OMAP sells for about 10-12USD in massive quantities. The price of this new part would probably be similar, but it would eliminate the need for many peripheral chips (thereby reducing the total board cost). What we're talking here is probably a reduction from 25 USD to 20 USD in the BOM. If they were sold through normal retail channels, expect to pay 2x to 4x the BOM cost.
The CNET reported does not seem to be clued in on what this really means. This in no way means 20 dollar phones for anyone. It just means that phones are going to get just a little bit cheaper to manufacture, and that TI is going to take away some business from other part suppliers. Good news for TI, pretty much meaningless for everyone else.
I consider myself a liberal, and I agree with the parent post. Can we *please* stop the idiotic editorializing, especially when it comes to political stories such as this? We don't have to end every single story about government action with an open ended thought about how this can be taken to extremes and destroy your civil liberties. Really, we can think for ourselves. Let's cut the kneejerk reactions and behave like adults. Editors, do your job!
Oh god, I've turned into one of those people that complain about Slashdot. Someone shoot me.
My parents have one of these in their kitchen. Works very well, actually, and the light is very white and pleasant. This is much better than a skylight for several reasons. The first is that the light is not directional, but very diffuse, giving good light all over. Second, you don't really have to clean the dome. Third, it goes through your insulation, and is sealed at both ends, keeping a decent separation of you from the hot/cold. Finally, it's pretty small and easy to install yourself if you're handy with a caulk gun. I'd definitely get one of these if I had a house.
I've seen the Mori Building solar collectors (on TV). The idea was that they could transport natural light into areas of the building that are not near windows, and that sunlight seems to make people happier. And they didn't need GPS to do it because the sun is, y'know, fairly predicable.