The hardware component is a very simple, high-performance, low-power VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) engine with an instruction set that bears no resemblance to that of x86 processors.
Perhaps they want protection due to the VLIW part. Since Itanium is also VLIW and perhaps Intel has some patents related to it.
As for whether it's an emulator or not (it's definitely not a clone) I'd say it's a hardware emulator. And I agree, its better to play it safe than be sorry and lose millions or even billions of $$$.
Should victims of a gunshot murder sue the inventor of the gun powder? Or the one that actually commited the crime?
TCP/IP was not invented to commit crimes over the net. Sure it made those crimes possible, just like gunpowder makes killing people with a gun possible.
Yes I agree that this is all good for the distribution of rare files. But now that I thought about it, there is a potential problem.
Say that you are the originator of the rare file. Once the first user downloaded that file from you, the number of sources of this rare file immediately doubles, and your potential profits immediately cut in half. There would be a need to enforce who gets to sell and who can only buy...
I would only use this service under these circumstances: 1. The file I am looking for is rare 2. I am guaranteed that I will receive that file in high quality format (or as high as I am willing to pay for...) 3. Fast and reliable connection Just another thought... this service could possibly be used to transfer illegal documents, say... U.S. nuclear secret. A discontent U.S. scientist could transfer this secret to... say a Iraq spy and make a few bucks while doing it...
Isn't this worse (from the industry's point of view) than Napster? Now regular netizens like me can charge others $$$ for mp3s and other files downloaded from me. Now I can make money off my mp3 collection. I should rush to put all my MP3s online.
Soon we will have devices that we can hook up to our brain, which will connect us to the 'net. The 'net by then would become the collective conscious of the human race. And more than just the conscious... all info ever accumulated by the human race would also be available.
No more GUIs or human-computer interfaces... all will be available and accessable with just a thought. 8^D
I know that ebay makes a small fraction on each of the transactions made through them. That's how they make money, blah blah...
Anyway, I don't see why the search engine would hurt them. In fact, I would think that buyers would spend less time looking for what they're searching for and therefore decrease the amount of time between each transaction == higher number of transactions per given period of time == higher profit for eBay.
In fact, since buyers spend less time wading through unwanted info, less resources would be consumed on eBay's side.
This should be a win-win situation for eBay. I don't see how it hurts them at all.
Hahaha... seems like the V5 is just 4 Voodoo2s on one board. What have 3dfx been doing since Voodoo2 was released?
This is sad. Is nVidia going to be the dominant graphix board maker now like Intel is the dominant CPU maker. Is this what it will become? A world dominated by nVidia, Intel, and Microsoft products?
You mentioned threads... yes, this cpu can process two threads at the same time... so can SMP machines...
A thread is a concept of the operating system... by definition, a thread shares the same memory space as other threads of the same task, etc. The CPU has no idea what you want to do, it only crunch numbers/streams of instructions.
The OS schedules the instructions into the CPU. Therefore, in order to crunch vertices 1-1000 and 1001-2000 simultaneously, it is up to the OS to tell the processor to do that, i.e., set the two pc's to correct locations. Assuming this machine does run an OS (most if not all machines does these days) the OS will need to schedule other processes/threads which means overhead... as much as SMP machines.
Your message also contradicts the your previous. If the CPU is two complete cores, the execution units cannot be shared since the issue buffers are not shared. You cannot issue one instruction that resides in one core into the other core, there are no paths connecting those two. The article only mentioned that the L2 can be shared, not other buffers lower down the abstraction.
The architecture they described from the article seems to me like SMP on a single chip, which is different from multithreading. Go read about these two, and learn the differences...
It's funny how a message that is totally wrong still get a score of 2... just shows that the majority of slashdot readers, even the moderators, do not know much about internals of computers... not that I expect them to know though... but it's just funny.
You missed my point.... (not like anyone will read this since this thread/topic is pretty old...)
The utilization of this CPU (percentage wise) would be the same as the utilization of just one of the cores. Since it is two cores, and not just one with two register file. One core cannot dump extra instructions into the other core since the internal issue buffers are separate and probably not shared.
Unfortunately, the CPU has no concept of processes or threads. It just processes streams of instructions like a fatass with a stream of hamburgers. It won't care whether the burgers are from Burger King or MacDonalds or Wendy's.
This means that in order to utilize this dual core, single die chip, we still need an OS, which means overhead... I would think the overhead is as much as SMP machines.
Number of man-years per chip stays relatively constant simply because we are not redesigning everything from scratch. Usually new chips are just a slight modification of the old architecture, i.e. elimination of bottlenecks, addition of newer advanced microarchitectural techniques, etc.
Of course there comes a time when everything needs to be redesigned, and that usually take a lot longer, for example, the Intel Willamette chip... how long has that chip been in development? The last chip that Willamette team designed was the original Pentiums... that was almost 5-6 years ago! (if not longer...)
We are seeing many chips coming out in short periods of time because both Intel and AMD have multiple development teams that leapfrog each other to release new CPUs. Intel, for example, has at least 3 teams, the Itanium team, the Willamette team, and the Pentium {II, III} team.
Last time I heard, is that the Power4 chip supports multithreading by having two separate register files on chip (not two separate complete cores.) Perhaps the number of execution units in the core is also increased, but I am not to sure about that.
But IBM could have changed the architecture since then...
I think the whole point was to keep CPU utilization (and execution core unit utilization) high. Seems to me that slapping two complete cores together is kind of dumb because both chips will still be underutilized... half the silicon will be sitting there unused...
Things like this will take away jobs from hardware designers, and undermine the computer industry... free software can drive the hardware industry, but if they're both free, what then? Time to flip burgers...
> I don't think that things would get more complicated through specialized distros.
I agree! Just think of this as a mutation, and just like life forms, the strongest will survive. More variations will not hurt. If this distro is faster, I am going to use it! I think right now the bottleneck of my system is in I/O, and especially disk access. Upgrading to ATA66 certainly would improve things. I already have ATA66 hard drives anyway, and also a BP6 motherboard.
You guys are assuming that there is such a thing as an OS that runs on any platform without any tweaking.
Remember that OSes *ARE* written/tweaked to run on specific hardwares. You can't run an OS without the hardware.
Although Linux can run on many different platforms, someone had to get down to the nitty grittys and change/tweak the code so that it would work on that particular platform.
This distribution is the same... although I think it would probably be better to just provide a module for the ATA66 controller instead of an entire distribution. But ABIT is a kickass company, this just shows that they would go to extreme lengths to make their customers happy. I might consider this distribution though, since I have a ABIT BP6.
If the universe wraps around in all directions, and there is only one star (Sol), then we will be seeing tons of stars in the sky, all Sol at different times.:)
You are assuming that the big bang originated from our current position in the universe. Assuming we are on the edge of the universe ourselves (maybe, maybe not), the farthest object would be 30 billion light years away. Who knows, maybe the Universe wraps around, so an edge would never be detected.
Slashdot Mirror
The hardware component is a very simple, high-performance, low-power VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) engine with an instruction set that bears no resemblance to that of x86 processors.
Perhaps they want protection due to the VLIW part. Since Itanium is also VLIW and perhaps Intel has some patents related to it.
As for whether it's an emulator or not (it's definitely not a clone) I'd say it's a hardware emulator. And I agree, its better to play it safe than be sorry and lose millions or even billions of $$$.
Your argument is flawed.
Should victims of a gunshot murder sue the inventor of the gun powder? Or the one that actually commited the crime?
TCP/IP was not invented to commit crimes over the net. Sure it made those crimes possible, just like gunpowder makes killing people with a gun possible.
Yes I agree that this is all good for the distribution of rare files. But now that I thought about it, there is a potential problem.
Say that you are the originator of the rare file. Once the first user downloaded that file from you, the number of sources of this rare file immediately doubles, and your potential profits immediately cut in half. There would be a need to enforce who gets to sell and who can only buy...
I would only use this service under these circumstances: 1. The file I am looking for is rare 2. I am guaranteed that I will receive that file in high quality format (or as high as I am willing to pay for...) 3. Fast and reliable connection Just another thought... this service could possibly be used to transfer illegal documents, say... U.S. nuclear secret. A discontent U.S. scientist could transfer this secret to... say a Iraq spy and make a few bucks while doing it...
Isn't this worse (from the industry's point of view) than Napster? Now regular netizens like me can charge others $$$ for mp3s and other files downloaded from me. Now I can make money off my mp3 collection. I should rush to put all my MP3s online.
Soon we will have devices that we can hook up to our brain, which will connect us to the 'net. The 'net by then would become the collective conscious of the human race. And more than just the conscious... all info ever accumulated by the human race would also be available.
No more GUIs or human-computer interfaces... all will be available and accessable with just a thought. 8^D
I know that ebay makes a small fraction on each of the transactions made through them. That's how they make money, blah blah...
Anyway, I don't see why the search engine would hurt them. In fact, I would think that buyers would spend less time looking for what they're searching for and therefore decrease the amount of time between each transaction == higher number of transactions per given period of time == higher profit for eBay.
In fact, since buyers spend less time wading through unwanted info, less resources would be consumed on eBay's side.
This should be a win-win situation for eBay. I don't see how it hurts them at all.
Hahaha... seems like the V5 is just 4 Voodoo2s on one board. What have 3dfx been doing since Voodoo2 was released?
This is sad. Is nVidia going to be the dominant graphix board maker now like Intel is the dominant CPU maker. Is this what it will become? A world dominated by nVidia, Intel, and Microsoft products?
Don't worry dude, good things are worth the wait. :)
Although I'll probably end up buying two coppermines anyway, for my BP-6. (with converters)
:)
I guess dual Athlons would be my project for next year.
"Celeron" stayed... and it sounded pretty stupid to me when I first heard it... :)
What matters is performance/cost... names don't really matter.
L2 doesn't really matter if you have a L1 just as big as celeron's L2.
Completely missed my point again.
You mentioned threads... yes, this cpu can process two threads at the same time... so can SMP machines...
A thread is a concept of the operating system... by definition, a thread shares the same memory space as other threads of the same task, etc. The CPU has no idea what you want to do, it only crunch numbers/streams of instructions.
The OS schedules the instructions into the CPU. Therefore, in order to crunch vertices 1-1000 and 1001-2000 simultaneously, it is up to the OS to tell the processor to do that, i.e., set the two pc's to correct locations. Assuming this machine does run an OS (most if not all machines does these days) the OS will need to schedule other processes/threads which means overhead... as much as SMP machines.
Your message also contradicts the your previous. If the CPU is two complete cores, the execution units cannot be shared since the issue buffers are not shared. You cannot issue one instruction that resides in one core into the other core, there are no paths connecting those two. The article only mentioned that the L2 can be shared, not other buffers lower down the abstraction.
The architecture they described from the article seems to me like SMP on a single chip, which is different from multithreading. Go read about these two, and learn the differences...
It's funny how a message that is totally wrong still get a score of 2... just shows that the majority of slashdot readers, even the moderators, do not know much about internals of computers... not that I expect them to know though... but it's just funny.
You missed my point.... (not like anyone will read this since this thread/topic is pretty old...)
The utilization of this CPU (percentage wise) would be the same as the utilization of just one of the cores. Since it is two cores, and not just one with two register file. One core cannot dump extra instructions into the other core since the internal issue buffers are separate and probably not shared.
One benefit of this dual core chip is of course, as mentioned in the article, the bandwidth between the two cores, and the ability to share L2 caches.
This would improve raw performance and will be much better than SMP setups, although I think the overhead _percentage_ would be about the same.
Unfortunately, the CPU has no concept of processes or threads. It just processes streams of instructions like a fatass with a stream of hamburgers. It won't care whether the burgers are from Burger King or MacDonalds or Wendy's.
This means that in order to utilize this dual core, single die chip, we still need an OS, which means overhead... I would think the overhead is as much as SMP machines.
Number of man-years per chip stays relatively constant simply because we are not redesigning everything from scratch. Usually new chips are just a slight modification of the old architecture, i.e. elimination of bottlenecks, addition of newer advanced microarchitectural techniques, etc.
Of course there comes a time when everything needs to be redesigned, and that usually take a lot longer, for example, the Intel Willamette chip... how long has that chip been in development? The last chip that Willamette team designed was the original Pentiums... that was almost 5-6 years ago! (if not longer...)
We are seeing many chips coming out in short periods of time because both Intel and AMD have multiple development teams that leapfrog each other to release new CPUs. Intel, for example, has at least 3 teams, the Itanium team, the Willamette team, and the Pentium {II, III} team.
Last time I heard, is that the Power4 chip supports multithreading by having two separate register files on chip (not two separate complete cores.) Perhaps the number of execution units in the core is also increased, but I am not to sure about that.
But IBM could have changed the architecture since then...
I think the whole point was to keep CPU utilization (and execution core unit utilization) high. Seems to me that slapping two complete cores together is kind of dumb because both chips will still be underutilized... half the silicon will be sitting there unused...
Things like this will take away jobs from hardware designers, and undermine the computer industry... free software can drive the hardware industry, but if they're both free, what then? Time to flip burgers...
You're an AMD guy, but you buy your friends Cyrix? That is soooooo evil!!!
Most of the technology has plateaued? Don't be so pessimistic dude!
> I don't think that things would get more complicated through specialized distros.
I agree! Just think of this as a mutation, and just like life forms, the strongest will survive. More variations will not hurt. If this distro is faster, I am going to use it! I think right now the bottleneck of my system is in I/O, and especially disk access. Upgrading to ATA66 certainly would improve things. I already have ATA66 hard drives anyway, and also a BP6 motherboard.
You guys are assuming that there is such a thing as an OS that runs on any platform without any tweaking.
Remember that OSes *ARE* written/tweaked to run on specific hardwares. You can't run an OS without the hardware.
Although Linux can run on many different platforms, someone had to get down to the nitty grittys and change/tweak the code so that it would work on that particular platform.
This distribution is the same... although I think it would probably be better to just provide a module for the ATA66 controller instead of an entire distribution. But ABIT is a kickass company, this just shows that they would go to extreme lengths to make their customers happy. I might consider this distribution though, since I have a ABIT BP6.
We are traveling at any and all speeds possible in this universe. It just depends on which frame of reference you use. :)
If the universe wraps around in all directions, and there is only one star (Sol), then we will be seeing tons of stars in the sky, all Sol at different times. :)
You are assuming that the big bang originated from our current position in the universe. Assuming we are on the edge of the universe ourselves (maybe, maybe not), the farthest object would be 30 billion light years away. Who knows, maybe the Universe wraps around, so an edge would never be detected.