They can get AMD for chump change right now. Fits well with their model of being vertically integrated. They could pump some money into AMD and get them to improve their x86 processors, and then dump Intel. They could get the GPU division of AMD to make a mobile GPU for their mobile products. And AMD's CPU engineers would come in very handy for custom ARM CPU design for mobile.
I beg to differ, this approach really worked for me in grad school. I didn't rely on simply my own recollection, but got together with a friend right after class to go over the class again and make notes. This allowed both of us to not worry about taking notes in the class and really concentrate on what the professor was teaching. The discussion after class also allowed us to remove gaps in our understanding.
The problem is that a tool is being used weirdly. Is a PS3 really a more powerful parallel computer per dollar than the various cards from Nvidia and ATI? Maybe it is, but if it is, then I have a gripe against Nvidia and ATI.
It is not. Plus with CUDA, there is much more scope for expandability with new GPUs coming to the market every so often. Why did they use PS3s?
He should've used something like CUDA instead, for long term gains. This would have shown far better performance than the Xbox's GPU (which is quite dated now), and easy scalability as better GPUs keep coming to the market. His familiarity with Xbox programming might have enabled him to come up to speed with CUDA quickly.
Similar experience here. My Compaq Presario R4000 laptop stopped working abruptly while I was sitting in the university lab. It wasn't even plugged in, was running off the battery, and the display just went blank. The LCD had probably conked off, for I could run an external DFP off it. Anyway, since it was still under warranty, I shipped it off. I got a call from the service center, saying that I had dropped liquid on it, and the hard drive, motherboard, CPU and LCD were all shot and had to be replaced, and gave me a bill of around $700 (original cost of the laptop was $1200). I was livid, but no amount of reasoning/cussing changed anything. "We'll ship it back if you don't want to fix it". Fucking turds, those Compaq folks. Will never buy anything from them every again, and anyone who's heard this story has refused to touch HP/Compaq again. Oh and the best part? I had purchased a $99 user-damage covering on-year warranty from them when I bought the laptop. So they had to replace everything or me, essentially handing me a new laptop. I got lucky.
Yeah, Vista-32 on my laptop with 4GB RAM shows 3.5GB RAM installed. I have an 8600M with a 256 MB framebuffer so all PCIE devices including it fit in that 0.5GB. I use Linux-32 as my primary desktop though, which I think uses HIGHMEM to access memory above 896MB (more knowledgeable kernel hackers correct me if I'm wrong), which isn't too efficient. One of these days I'll install a 64-bit OS, I keep telling myself.
Nope. GPUs stopped mapping the entire video memory into physical memory a long time ago as their video memories increased (except Intel GPUs, maybe, since they still have little). Should be a lot less than 1GB per GPU now IMO. They use hw magic to make the entire memory accessible.
No, Windows can only access 3.5GB of system memory, the remaining 0.5GB will be mapped above 4GB in the physical address space. When you have lots of PCI devices in the system, they take up some space in the physical address space. So if your PCI(E) devices take up 1GB of space, the BIOS will fit less of that 4GB of RAM into the 4GB physcial address space. Your PCI devices would would already be allocating BARs like I said earlier. Like AC said, you can enable PAE to reclaim some of that lost space. I know there is a flag in XP (Run:msconfig, Advanced:) to enable PAE, but I don't know if that has any effect.
No graphics card maps the entire framebuffer into the physical address space, even on 64-bit OSs. I'll just use up a few 10s of MBs for BAR0, a few more for BAR1, and so on. The driver will manage all the framebuffer memory for you, all the client has to do is call the equivalent of malloc().
For those who've no time or inclination to read the article:
1) The attacker should first modify system MTRR register(s) in order to mark the region of system memory where the SMRAM is located as cacheable with type Write-Back (WB).
2) Attacker now generates write accesses to physical addresses corresponding to locations where the SMRAM is located.
3) Finally attacker needs to trigger an SMI, which will transfer execution to the SMM code. The CPU
will start executing the SMM code, but will be fetching the instructions from the cache first.
Take a look at this:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadroplex.html
These things hold graphics cards externally, though they're only for desktops. There are models that hold as many as four external graphics cards. They're not cheap though.
I hate to say it because they do good work, but I think nVidia is ultimately doomed as it is today. Everyone rips Intel's integrated 3d graphics but they just keep getting better every year.
And nVidia's graphics aren't getting any better? A GPU and a CPU stuffed together into the same chip will always be a low-cost/low-power/low-end solution, can never come close to the capability of a GPU that has the whole die to itself. If Intel/AMD has ~2B transistors in a chip that are divided between a general-purpose CPU and a GPU, can that ever match a 2B transistor discrete GPU + a discrete CPU? Unlikely. Plus, CUDA has put forth interesting possibilities for putting the GPU to other uses.
Although AMD should have bought nVidia instead of ATI, they do own ATI, and so have a pretty good graphics system on their own.
And they should have taken nVidia down with them, instead of ATI, like their doing now. They did nVidia a favour by going for ATI instead.
Eventually, both AMD and Intel are going to wind up with 3d calculations on the die in some fashion, and that's going to leave nVidia for what?
Unfortunately for you, Indians aren't exactly flocking to the US for treatment. It's actually the other way round, since quality medical care is available for a fraction of the US price here (for those above the poverty line), which has spawned a whole "medical tourism" industry. The doctors here are as good as anywhere else in the world, and make very good money.
Most successful doctors I have known have been very compassionate people. Good luck to you, kid.
Learn to discriminate your pancreatic cancers. Adenocarcinoma has a 5% survival rate. Steve had a islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which has a 50 to 75% 5 year survival.
Unfortunately, someone has to make up the other 25%.
Offtopic, but I looked at the trends, and the #1 was "india time". Expats looking up the time to wish their friends in India a new year.
Oh and Happy New Year
That's not surprising. It happens with regularity in my company. QA often reports errors by taking snapshots of the error screen/kernel panic with a reasonably high megapixel camera, since the errors are often screen corruption and kernel panics. IMHO it's a perfectly legit thing to do, taking camera shots, they just need to have enough details so that us devs don't go blind trying to spot the details.
I agree. I took Prof. Yale Patt's architecture courses in the University, and there are few people who teach better. I just hope he finally takes time out to finish that senior-level computer architecture book.
Slashdot Mirror
http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/2013/conf/fermilab-conf-13-035-cd.pdf
They're using M2070 (Fermi) GPUs. Kepler would perform even better, the latest one has > 6GB of memory.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this more generic solution that's already in production:
NVIDIA's GeForce Grid
They can get AMD for chump change right now. Fits well with their model of being vertically integrated. They could pump some money into AMD and get them to improve their x86 processors, and then dump Intel. They could get the GPU division of AMD to make a mobile GPU for their mobile products. And AMD's CPU engineers would come in very handy for custom ARM CPU design for mobile.
I beg to differ, this approach really worked for me in grad school.
I didn't rely on simply my own recollection, but got together with a friend right after class to go over the class again and make notes. This allowed both of us to not worry about taking notes in the class and really concentrate on what the professor was teaching.
The discussion after class also allowed us to remove gaps in our understanding.
The problem is that a tool is being used weirdly. Is a PS3 really a more powerful parallel computer per dollar than the various cards from Nvidia and ATI? Maybe it is, but if it is, then I have a gripe against Nvidia and ATI.
It is not. Plus with CUDA, there is much more scope for expandability with new GPUs coming to the market every so often. Why did they use PS3s?
Then you would be happy to know that Nvidia's new Fermi chip supports ECC throughout the architecture.
He should've used something like CUDA instead, for long term gains. This would have shown far better performance than the Xbox's GPU (which is quite dated now), and easy scalability as better GPUs keep coming to the market. His familiarity with Xbox programming might have enabled him to come up to speed with CUDA quickly.
Isn't this the OS X version which has OpenCL integrated into it? If yes, is that not considered a big enough improvement?
Similar experience here. My Compaq Presario R4000 laptop stopped working abruptly while I was sitting in the university lab. It wasn't even plugged in, was running off the battery, and the display just went blank. The LCD had probably conked off, for I could run an external DFP off it. Anyway, since it was still under warranty, I shipped it off. I got a call from the service center, saying that I had dropped liquid on it, and the hard drive, motherboard, CPU and LCD were all shot and had to be replaced, and gave me a bill of around $700 (original cost of the laptop was $1200). I was livid, but no amount of reasoning/cussing changed anything. "We'll ship it back if you don't want to fix it". Fucking turds, those Compaq folks. Will never buy anything from them every again, and anyone who's heard this story has refused to touch HP/Compaq again.
Oh and the best part? I had purchased a $99 user-damage covering on-year warranty from them when I bought the laptop. So they had to replace everything or me, essentially handing me a new laptop. I got lucky.
Yeah, Vista-32 on my laptop with 4GB RAM shows 3.5GB RAM installed. I have an 8600M with a 256 MB framebuffer so all PCIE devices including it fit in that 0.5GB. I use Linux-32 as my primary desktop though, which I think uses HIGHMEM to access memory above 896MB (more knowledgeable kernel hackers correct me if I'm wrong), which isn't too efficient. One of these days I'll install a 64-bit OS, I keep telling myself.
Nope. GPUs stopped mapping the entire video memory into physical memory a long time ago as their video memories increased (except Intel GPUs, maybe, since they still have little). Should be a lot less than 1GB per GPU now IMO. They use hw magic to make the entire memory accessible.
No, Windows can only access 3.5GB of system memory, the remaining 0.5GB will be mapped above 4GB in the physical address space. When you have lots of PCI devices in the system, they take up some space in the physical address space. So if your PCI(E) devices take up 1GB of space, the BIOS will fit less of that 4GB of RAM into the 4GB physcial address space. Your PCI devices would would already be allocating BARs like I said earlier. Like AC said, you can enable PAE to reclaim some of that lost space. I know there is a flag in XP (Run:msconfig, Advanced:) to enable PAE, but I don't know if that has any effect.
No graphics card maps the entire framebuffer into the physical address space, even on 64-bit OSs. I'll just use up a few 10s of MBs for BAR0, a few more for BAR1, and so on. The driver will manage all the framebuffer memory for you, all the client has to do is call the equivalent of malloc().
For those who've no time or inclination to read the article:
1) The attacker should first modify system MTRR
register(s) in order to mark the region of system
memory where the SMRAM is located as
cacheable with type Write-Back (WB).
2) Attacker now generates write accesses to
physical addresses corresponding to locations
where the SMRAM is located.
3) Finally attacker needs to trigger an SMI, which
will transfer execution to the SMM code. The CPU
will start executing the SMM code, but will be
fetching the instructions from the cache first.
Take a look at this: http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadroplex.html These things hold graphics cards externally, though they're only for desktops. There are models that hold as many as four external graphics cards. They're not cheap though.
I hate to say it because they do good work, but I think nVidia is ultimately doomed as it is today. Everyone rips Intel's integrated 3d graphics but they just keep getting better every year.
And nVidia's graphics aren't getting any better? A GPU and a CPU stuffed together into the same chip will always be a low-cost/low-power/low-end solution, can never come close to the capability of a GPU that has the whole die to itself. If Intel/AMD has ~2B transistors in a chip that are divided between a general-purpose CPU and a GPU, can that ever match a 2B transistor discrete GPU + a discrete CPU? Unlikely. Plus, CUDA has put forth interesting possibilities for putting the GPU to other uses.
Although AMD should have bought nVidia instead of ATI, they do own ATI, and so have a pretty good graphics system on their own.
And they should have taken nVidia down with them, instead of ATI, like their doing now. They did nVidia a favour by going for ATI instead.
Eventually, both AMD and Intel are going to wind up with 3d calculations on the die in some fashion, and that's going to leave nVidia for what?
See above. Keyword: Discrete GPUs.
Unfortunately for you, Indians aren't exactly flocking to the US for treatment. It's actually the other way round, since quality medical care is available for a fraction of the US price here (for those above the poverty line), which has spawned a whole "medical tourism" industry. The doctors here are as good as anywhere else in the world, and make very good money. Most successful doctors I have known have been very compassionate people. Good luck to you, kid.
Learn to discriminate your pancreatic cancers. Adenocarcinoma has a 5% survival rate. Steve had a islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which has a 50 to 75% 5 year survival.
Unfortunately, someone has to make up the other 25%.
whoosh?
Offtopic, but I looked at the trends, and the #1 was "india time". Expats looking up the time to wish their friends in India a new year. Oh and Happy New Year
That's not surprising. It happens with regularity in my company. QA often reports errors by taking snapshots of the error screen/kernel panic with a reasonably high megapixel camera, since the errors are often screen corruption and kernel panics. IMHO it's a perfectly legit thing to do, taking camera shots, they just need to have enough details so that us devs don't go blind trying to spot the details.
I agree. I took Prof. Yale Patt's architecture courses in the University, and there are few people who teach better. I just hope he finally takes time out to finish that senior-level computer architecture book.
Here's my favourite: SAM's Teach Yourself Bash Programming in 24 hours. Took a lot more than 24 hours, though, yet very useful to get started.
My school (Texas) has a course where were build up this OS, step by step. Right from the bootloader to it's full multitasking glory. By far the most useful/fun course I have ever taken in my life. Link: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-828Fall-2006/Assignments/index.htm