... as 2GHz clock speed, how much could overall power consumption be reduced by underclocking it by 50%?
If ARM isn't selling wolf tickets, that would still yield 250% of the Atom's processing power in that circumstance.
Probably not much. Keep in mind that with aggressive power management, most of those cores will be sitting unpowered, so your consumption is likely under a watt.
If you downclock them, then maybe it only uses 500mw per core, but now you need more cores running. That's a big jump in power consumption. Also, everything feels slower.
There's a reason a C2D @ 4.0ghz feels faster than a C2Q @ 2.0ghz.;)
I agree. I don't know why no company is designing an ultimate traveller's netbook.
The closest I've found is the Touchbook, which gets about 10 hours battery life while in use with screen brightness ramped up. The Pandora apparently gets between 9 and 15 hours depending on what you're doing, and whether you're willing to lower screen brightness at all.
Both of these are OMAP3 devices. Couldn't they just stick the same SoC in a netbook frame with a huge battery for awesome battery life?
I guess for now the only option is a Pandora with a bunch of extra $20 batteries.
It sounds like you haven't used Fusion io; when you saturate the card the driver uses an entire CPU core.
I haven't, and I was aware of that.
Perhaps I would've been more correct in saying "makes efficient use of CPU time"?
Most of us have quad-core CPUs with multiple cores sitting idle while we game or work on stuff. Using one core to give other cores and programs access to data much faster is a good tradeoff.
And HDD access for a relatively small number of drives(12?) will saturate a core too, unless you have a decent controller card. It's all that RAID parity checking and stuff. But 12 HDDs won't come close in performance, and has pretty high power usage too.
The solution to your problem is to not have a chipset in the way - like with FusionIO ioDrives. PCIe based SSD, direct connection to the CPU! Doesn't even use much CPU time, because it's so damn fast that unlike HDDs, it doesn't spend much time waiting.
Coincidentally, those ioDrives are also faster. I'd love the 1.4/1.5 GB/sec write/read variety, but I have a feeling I'd have to sell my car, and maybe my house. Even their low end model "for Desktop PCs" costs $900 for 80GB. If these guys can keep the price below $500/80GB, they'll be competitive with FusionIO.
Netbooks (sometimes referred to as mini notebooks or subnotebooks) are a rapidly evolving[1] category of small, light and inexpensive laptop computers suited for general computing and accessing web-based applications;
I don't normally call people retards. I'm just pissed that the summary writers on my favourite sites, like slashdot, and hackaday, completely fail at summaries or fact checking anything. A few weeks back some Titanium article showed up, but the linked article was from 2007! Frak that. Hackaday mentioned an AVR(uzebox) movie player that "just came out"... a half year ago?
Bah, I've had a bad day. I'm getting off here before I flame a commenter.:P
Firefox is more secure, but it seems to be some sort of social thing rather than a code thing.
Mac exploits are usually IM client exploits, or browser exploits. (Safari) Whenever I hear about pwn2own contests and stuff, it's Safari that gets punched wide open. Safari is arguably very secure, but it's still heavily attacked and constantly has vulnerabilities.
IE8, same thing. However, in the case of Windows, there are many attack vectors, so if IE8 (or its sandbox) gets too tough to crack, go at it some other way.
Firefox, however, actually has unpatched vulnerabilities listed on bugzilla for months, and they don't show up on common attack sites, so I think the community is quite split. There's the group looking to infect computers, build botnets, and grab creditcard numbers, all for financial gain. I'll call this the criminal or mob mindset and group. Then there's the group that enjoys causing havoc, but doesn't doesn't do stuff for money. This other group is probably motivated by personal reasons: revenge, proving how great you are, taking down an enemy's site, etc. For whatever reason, this second group doesn't seem to target Firefox much. The first group targets it more, since they want lots of infected machines for more $$$. Someone building a botnet from either group will probably target every browser they can. But if someone wants to DDOS Microsoft.com, naturally they'll hit it with 150,000 machines running Windows Vista SP2 with IE8 installed. It just delights the ego.
The only browser that actually has a valid claim to tight security is Opera. All the rest have to build up a good name for a few years before I'll bite. That said... I use Firefox. I couldn't live without my addons.
The joke about IE being insecure is going to become as obsolete as the BSOD jokes, although I expect it to still be trotted out at Slashdot for years to come.
What BSOD jokes? The first thing I noticed when trying Vista and Win7 was games crash to desktop a lot. No BSOD, but still annoying.:P
Sorry if that came off as an angry rant. It's just really hard to work with some FOSS groups. (all that I've been exposed to!:P )
And apparently the people below agree:
I am a UI designer, and the couple of occasions when I've tried to offer UI design improvements for FOSS projects have been pretty depressing. Both times I tried, it seemed that one of the coders on the project doubled as a UI designer and resented anyone who would challenge their ideas. Their contribution of code to the project meant that others then close ranks around them, so that any real discussion of UI improvements is killed off and anyone not a coder was frozen out. You could see why Alan Cooper wrote The Lunatics.
Secondly, the documentation is typically better on commercial software than FOSS (there are some expections, mostly badly documented commercial software rather than well documented FOSS). Again, writers, proofreaders and editors want to get paid for their work.
I really noticed this when I was working with LWJGL. There's no comparison to the official javadocs. For one thing, some of the classes and packages don't even exist. Method names are incorrect and have to be guessed, and there's no description, or the description is completely incorrect for what a method does.
In short, no docs would almost be better.
I've submitted corrections, but they never made it in. When I submitted corrections to Sun, the javadocs got fixed, evidenced when I re-downloaded a few months later.
I've found many FOSS projects have poor communication with users. It seems to be the rule, actually. Deluge, a semi popular torrent client for linux, has swaths of bugs. I submitted no less than 15 reproducible ones, that plagued me after a week of use. Unfortunately, none got fixed. Plenty of new releases, though... introducing new bugs.
I also submitted bugs for Transmission. Gave up on that one after 3 months of no fixes.
Closed source really doesn't matter if the program has all the features required and has a good UI. A perfect example is uTorrent. I prefer the slightly older, more simplistic UI, but it still basically has a minimalistic UI. It's snappy(responsive), doesn't really hog CPU, and doesn't make logic errors because some coder is a newbie.
The best linux torrent client I found is qBittorrent. However, the version in the Ubuntu repository has the strange bug of removing torrents that are being downloaded, if it crosses the ratio. So if I set it to remove at 1.5, and it downloads horribly slow by freak chance, then it'll remove the torrent part way into downloading. Brilliant.
My overall impression of FOSS isn't very good right now. It was better back before I had tried Ubuntu.:P
Firefox really is the shining light in the FOSS world. Most FOSS software lacks essential UI elements, or has other bugs, and there's no easy way to add or fix something. To help with a FOSS project, you have to have some serious devotion. Figuring out how to submit a patch for the first time is a nightmare, and for most of us, not worth our time. Many people seem happier with extensible, stable frameworks, so you can completely go around everyone in your way, and deliver a solution in a few short hours without any learning or big obstacles. Firefox extensions are the perfect example - other programs going this route have also been very successful. Now, if only Mozilla would fix the bookmarks.
Many people that have been burned by a shitty game will pirate before buying. As piracy increases, so do sales.
I recall reading a blog post from one of those indy devs, trying to figure out how much a "pirated copy" is really worth. I believe the final guesstimate was about 5% of the price. (which is to say, 1/20 pirates may buy your game if it's good)
However, you also have to factor in evangelism. Most pirates are very vocal about being pirates, and can offer unbiased opinions on whether a game is shit or not. I know some pirates that downloaded Fallout 3, and they've tried to get me to download it. I prefer to buy my games, so I'm waiting patiently for it to show up on Steam for $10. Ultimately this is an extra sale.
Those same pirates told me to avoid UT3, and go with Section 8 instead.
I'd rather have one of those 5120x3200 monitors to avoid the distracting plastic monitor frames. 3200p sure beats 1600p, but I don't know if DisplayPort can provide that much bandwidth.
Huh? ARM processors are always built into SoCs - System on a Chip.
An example is the TI OMAP3530. The chip uses slightly under a watt when going full throttle, with CPU, GPU, and DSP.
It features a Cortex A8 @ 600 or 720mhz (rivals a Pentium 3 at the same speed), which can be overclocked to between 800-900mhz.
It has an SGX 530 GPU (Basically a DX10 GPU with GF6200LE speeds - but it has immature closed-source drivers that only support OGL ES 2.0 and 1.1. No DirectX at all, despite the capabilities of the hardware.
It has a C64x DSP, which is a highly parallel and limited processor with massive throughput. Apparently it can decode 1080p H.264 - TI has licensed evaluation codecs proving this - but there are no free or open source DSP codecs available at the moment.
It has an ISP(Image Signal Processor) providing free S-Video out and upscaling.
And like I said, all with under a watt of power consumption. You can stick as much RAM as you want on it, in 128MiB blocks soldered directly to it. Most OMAP3530 devices opt for 256MiB because of the cost.
Perfect use scenarios are phones, consoles, and hacker toys. But with P3 performance, some will also make it into low end cheap Netbooks, paving the way for A9's.
This is why I insist Google's search engine is superior to all the others. It hardly ever makes mistakes. I can't remember the last time it fed me a broken link, and it always takes me to where I want to go.
Market share statistics are usually based on quarterly sales. So when AMD is up or down, between 15 and 25%, that's sales for that quarter.
Nobody knows how many millions or billions of AMD and Intel CPUs are out there, still functioning.
I would put more merit on the Steam Survey than this. Steam says 1 in 3 CPUs are AMD. That's a subset of the general populace - people that use steam and play games - but it reflects that heavy push a few years back as the Gamer's CPU of choice.
Slashdot Mirror
... as 2GHz clock speed, how much could overall power consumption be reduced by underclocking it by 50%?
If ARM isn't selling wolf tickets, that would still yield 250% of the Atom's processing power in that circumstance.
Probably not much. Keep in mind that with aggressive power management, most of those cores will be sitting unpowered, so your consumption is likely under a watt.
If you downclock them, then maybe it only uses 500mw per core, but now you need more cores running. That's a big jump in power consumption. Also, everything feels slower.
There's a reason a C2D @ 4.0ghz feels faster than a C2Q @ 2.0ghz. ;)
Well, it sort of does. Battery life and CPU power are actually somewhat convertible.
Not at all.
Keep in mind that Cortex A8 CPUs @ 600mhz consume as little as 400mw when under full load.
Even adding in the SGX(GPU) and DSP won't bump it up much. Things like LCD brightness, or presence of an HDD, have a far bigger impact.
I agree. I don't know why no company is designing an ultimate traveller's netbook.
The closest I've found is the Touchbook, which gets about 10 hours battery life while in use with screen brightness ramped up. The Pandora apparently gets between 9 and 15 hours depending on what you're doing, and whether you're willing to lower screen brightness at all.
Both of these are OMAP3 devices. Couldn't they just stick the same SoC in a netbook frame with a huge battery for awesome battery life?
I guess for now the only option is a Pandora with a bunch of extra $20 batteries.
In the last decade x86 code got a lot more complicated too, though.
So... no different than Intel? ;)
Atom Z-series. Frak!
It sounds like you haven't used Fusion io; when you saturate the card the driver uses an entire CPU core.
I haven't, and I was aware of that.
Perhaps I would've been more correct in saying "makes efficient use of CPU time"?
Most of us have quad-core CPUs with multiple cores sitting idle while we game or work on stuff. Using one core to give other cores and programs access to data much faster is a good tradeoff.
And HDD access for a relatively small number of drives(12?) will saturate a core too, unless you have a decent controller card. It's all that RAID parity checking and stuff. But 12 HDDs won't come close in performance, and has pretty high power usage too.
The solution to your problem is to not have a chipset in the way - like with FusionIO ioDrives. PCIe based SSD, direct connection to the CPU! Doesn't even use much CPU time, because it's so damn fast that unlike HDDs, it doesn't spend much time waiting.
Coincidentally, those ioDrives are also faster. I'd love the 1.4/1.5 GB/sec write/read variety, but I have a feeling I'd have to sell my car, and maybe my house. Even their low end model "for Desktop PCs" costs $900 for 80GB. If these guys can keep the price below $500/80GB, they'll be competitive with FusionIO.
Slashdot loads way quicker on my 3.5ghz Athlon II, than it does on my 2ghz Athlon XP.
But for most stuff, like OpenOffice, email, etc., there is no difference.
Clearly the summary writer is a retard that doesn't understand a netbook is a small laptop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook
Netbooks (sometimes referred to as mini notebooks or subnotebooks) are a rapidly evolving[1] category of small, light and inexpensive laptop computers suited for general computing and accessing web-based applications;
I don't normally call people retards. I'm just pissed that the summary writers on my favourite sites, like slashdot, and hackaday, completely fail at summaries or fact checking anything. A few weeks back some Titanium article showed up, but the linked article was from 2007! Frak that. Hackaday mentioned an AVR(uzebox) movie player that "just came out"... a half year ago?
Bah, I've had a bad day. I'm getting off here before I flame a commenter. :P
Firefox is more secure, but it seems to be some sort of social thing rather than a code thing.
Mac exploits are usually IM client exploits, or browser exploits. (Safari) Whenever I hear about pwn2own contests and stuff, it's Safari that gets punched wide open. Safari is arguably very secure, but it's still heavily attacked and constantly has vulnerabilities.
IE8, same thing. However, in the case of Windows, there are many attack vectors, so if IE8 (or its sandbox) gets too tough to crack, go at it some other way.
Firefox, however, actually has unpatched vulnerabilities listed on bugzilla for months, and they don't show up on common attack sites, so I think the community is quite split. There's the group looking to infect computers, build botnets, and grab creditcard numbers, all for financial gain. I'll call this the criminal or mob mindset and group. Then there's the group that enjoys causing havoc, but doesn't doesn't do stuff for money. This other group is probably motivated by personal reasons: revenge, proving how great you are, taking down an enemy's site, etc. For whatever reason, this second group doesn't seem to target Firefox much. The first group targets it more, since they want lots of infected machines for more $$$. Someone building a botnet from either group will probably target every browser they can. But if someone wants to DDOS Microsoft.com, naturally they'll hit it with 150,000 machines running Windows Vista SP2 with IE8 installed. It just delights the ego.
The only browser that actually has a valid claim to tight security is Opera. All the rest have to build up a good name for a few years before I'll bite. That said... I use Firefox. I couldn't live without my addons.
The joke about IE being insecure is going to become as obsolete as the BSOD jokes, although I expect it to still be trotted out at Slashdot for years to come.
What BSOD jokes? The first thing I noticed when trying Vista and Win7 was games crash to desktop a lot. No BSOD, but still annoying. :P
You should use your favourite browser, because you'll be more productive in it.
Teach yourself to read or write 10% faster, and that'll dwarf the savings a different browser provides.
Oh man, I'm definitely not hiring you. Haha!
By "eBay", I assume you mean "Paypal"?
Well, you could very well be correct.
Sorry if that came off as an angry rant. It's just really hard to work with some FOSS groups. (all that I've been exposed to! :P )
And apparently the people below agree:
I am a UI designer, and the couple of occasions when I've tried to offer UI design improvements for FOSS projects have been pretty depressing. Both times I tried, it seemed that one of the coders on the project doubled as a UI designer and resented anyone who would challenge their ideas. Their contribution of code to the project meant that others then close ranks around them, so that any real discussion of UI improvements is killed off and anyone not a coder was frozen out. You could see why Alan Cooper wrote The Lunatics.
Secondly, the documentation is typically better on commercial software than FOSS (there are some expections, mostly badly documented commercial software rather than well documented FOSS). Again, writers, proofreaders and editors want to get paid for their work.
I really noticed this when I was working with LWJGL. There's no comparison to the official javadocs. For one thing, some of the classes and packages don't even exist. Method names are incorrect and have to be guessed, and there's no description, or the description is completely incorrect for what a method does.
In short, no docs would almost be better.
I've submitted corrections, but they never made it in. When I submitted corrections to Sun, the javadocs got fixed, evidenced when I re-downloaded a few months later.
I've found many FOSS projects have poor communication with users. It seems to be the rule, actually. Deluge, a semi popular torrent client for linux, has swaths of bugs. I submitted no less than 15 reproducible ones, that plagued me after a week of use. Unfortunately, none got fixed. Plenty of new releases, though... introducing new bugs.
I also submitted bugs for Transmission. Gave up on that one after 3 months of no fixes.
Closed source really doesn't matter if the program has all the features required and has a good UI. A perfect example is uTorrent. I prefer the slightly older, more simplistic UI, but it still basically has a minimalistic UI. It's snappy(responsive), doesn't really hog CPU, and doesn't make logic errors because some coder is a newbie.
The best linux torrent client I found is qBittorrent. However, the version in the Ubuntu repository has the strange bug of removing torrents that are being downloaded, if it crosses the ratio. So if I set it to remove at 1.5, and it downloads horribly slow by freak chance, then it'll remove the torrent part way into downloading. Brilliant.
My overall impression of FOSS isn't very good right now. It was better back before I had tried Ubuntu. :P
Firefox really is the shining light in the FOSS world. Most FOSS software lacks essential UI elements, or has other bugs, and there's no easy way to add or fix something. To help with a FOSS project, you have to have some serious devotion. Figuring out how to submit a patch for the first time is a nightmare, and for most of us, not worth our time. Many people seem happier with extensible, stable frameworks, so you can completely go around everyone in your way, and deliver a solution in a few short hours without any learning or big obstacles. Firefox extensions are the perfect example - other programs going this route have also been very successful. Now, if only Mozilla would fix the bookmarks.
Many people that have been burned by a shitty game will pirate before buying. As piracy increases, so do sales.
I recall reading a blog post from one of those indy devs, trying to figure out how much a "pirated copy" is really worth. I believe the final guesstimate was about 5% of the price. (which is to say, 1/20 pirates may buy your game if it's good)
However, you also have to factor in evangelism. Most pirates are very vocal about being pirates, and can offer unbiased opinions on whether a game is shit or not. I know some pirates that downloaded Fallout 3, and they've tried to get me to download it. I prefer to buy my games, so I'm waiting patiently for it to show up on Steam for $10. Ultimately this is an extra sale.
Those same pirates told me to avoid UT3, and go with Section 8 instead.
But it could be fast enough that it doesn't matter. Perhaps someone that read the brief could chime in?
Probably far too GPU intense on high settings. Maybe multi-GPU would work.
My initial thought was maybe Crysis didn't support multi-mon spanning, but it appears to work with the TripleHead2Go.
Ahh, but that graphics card isn't supported under Windows either. ;)
I recall many angry posts from people trying to play Kotor on one of those.
My Via C7 NAS doesn't need a manually configured xorg.conf either!
Oh yuck. Too few pixels.
I'd rather have one of those 5120x3200 monitors to avoid the distracting plastic monitor frames. 3200p sure beats 1600p, but I don't know if DisplayPort can provide that much bandwidth.
Huh? ARM processors are always built into SoCs - System on a Chip.
An example is the TI OMAP3530. The chip uses slightly under a watt when going full throttle, with CPU, GPU, and DSP.
It features a Cortex A8 @ 600 or 720mhz (rivals a Pentium 3 at the same speed), which can be overclocked to between 800-900mhz.
It has an SGX 530 GPU (Basically a DX10 GPU with GF6200LE speeds - but it has immature closed-source drivers that only support OGL ES 2.0 and 1.1. No DirectX at all, despite the capabilities of the hardware.
It has a C64x DSP, which is a highly parallel and limited processor with massive throughput. Apparently it can decode 1080p H.264 - TI has licensed evaluation codecs proving this - but there are no free or open source DSP codecs available at the moment.
It has an ISP(Image Signal Processor) providing free S-Video out and upscaling.
And like I said, all with under a watt of power consumption. You can stick as much RAM as you want on it, in 128MiB blocks soldered directly to it. Most OMAP3530 devices opt for 256MiB because of the cost.
Perfect use scenarios are phones, consoles, and hacker toys. But with P3 performance, some will also make it into low end cheap Netbooks, paving the way for A9's.
This is why I insist Google's search engine is superior to all the others. It hardly ever makes mistakes. I can't remember the last time it fed me a broken link, and it always takes me to where I want to go.
I'm pretty sure you can invoke a GPLv2 binary from a closed source program without violating the license.
GPLv2 was primarily focused on keeping the source + all modifications open. No modifications and you're good to go?
Market share statistics are usually based on quarterly sales. So when AMD is up or down, between 15 and 25%, that's sales for that quarter.
Nobody knows how many millions or billions of AMD and Intel CPUs are out there, still functioning.
I would put more merit on the Steam Survey than this. Steam says 1 in 3 CPUs are AMD. That's a subset of the general populace - people that use steam and play games - but it reflects that heavy push a few years back as the Gamer's CPU of choice.