Not true at all.... 1: a single CPU has to sit in wait states at some point holding up everything, in a 2 CPU system one CPU can frequently continue (try running windows NT with 2CPU's there's a big difference in smoothness!), you can set the afinity of processes so that one CPU is always left doing the dirty work and the system doesn't get clogged up.
2: a single CPU has a single cache shared by everything, when it page faults it page faults, In theory you should have less problems with page faults and cache misses on a 2 CPU system. a very cut down example, here thread 1 has code with a lot of page faults, thread 2 is compleatly page alighed and doesn't page fault.
Thread 1 CPU 1 page faults causing a slowdown on CPU1 Thread 2 doesn't with no CPU slowdown.
On a 1 CPU system
Thread 1 page faults, swap to Thread 2 no page fault, swap to Thread 1 page faults.
3:You can have seperate databusses &co for each CPU giving you twice the memory bandwidth. etc.......
4: If investement was placed in the area (see cray, or mosix!) 2 CPU's would be a hell of a lot faster than 1, infact 2 CPU's would be a kids toy and home machines might have tens of CPUS/GPU's, with decient process/thread management and all the stuff that PC's should do. Why not max out SMP and parrell processing, there'd be a hell of a lot better AI's and smoother running machines out there if they did.
In 20 years time if my PC? isn't running at least 20,000 threads and at least 1,000 concurrent threads then I'm going to be upset.
BTW. Why are you storing all your data in RAM? you should be using a fast HDD.
Most uses aren't aware that there is choice, give them something and they'll use it, even if it breaks all the time and is crap.
In my experience: 10% of people who buy something from a shop that doesn't work that well just bin it. 40% will use it even though it isn't fully functional 40% will take it back and get a replacement (or alternative if they know there is one) 5% will moan like hell and take the shop to court. and the other 5% will fix it and have a fully functionally product.
If the user doesn't know that something is broken, or doesn't understand what they have there far less lightly to take it back.
If I was going to learn a foreign language I would try to find reading books for Kids, because they start off simply and slowly using common words with few syllables and repeating them over and over again.
I should imagine there are books like this that come with tapes and CD's although tailored to teaching kids to read, I'm sure they'd be helpful in teaching you to hear/recognise speech.
I hate apple and all there evils but, they are SMPing all ther profesional power macs, Hopefully that'll give the PC arena a kick. (better workstation SMP mobos with more that 2 sockets please!)
The point I was getting at is, The amount of data that you can fit into 4gb is so large that people would have to start using 3d data arrays to need any more.
It works like this.... A DOS PC has 640k enough for a text document and some vector graphics and a small personal database. At this point intime Bill probably couldn't imagine computers getting fast enough to need more memory.
A CD(640mb) can hold x books of text (as promoted).
A DVD(4gb) can hold x books of text, but as scaned images and with full audio.
Unless you start holding molecular or biological information on you PC or want pointless resolution on the images it will take a while before you fill 4gb. (you probably wouldn't run that kind of stuff on a mainstream PC anyhow) That amount of data-requirement is probably 5-10 years off and there will have to be major SMP improvements in PC's for it to be pratical.
AMD and Intel should be pumping money into SMP developments instead of GHz and bit wars, that's where the future lies.
My system at home has 512MB and never hits swap-space, even with a load of server application running.
64 bit system might be great for enterprise servers but for the home? There would have to be some major software bloating going on for my home machine to use more than 4gb or so, a typical home user could probably live in 128mb at the moment without any performance problems. the current 4gb limit allows them to have 40times as much bumph hell you can even fit a dvd in 4gb of memory.
Most of the 64-bit pure-ness has already been done. So have the endian-ness. If the code runs on Sun, Mac OS X, x86 and Alpha then theres a good change it will run on Hammer or IA-64 without any significant changes(if any).
My thoughts were the same when 32bit came in, until I relealised. The new insturusction and architecture improvements in 32bit x86 made for a good performance overhead.
The memory bus was twice wide on a 32bit system , so the pointers on the linked list may have been twice the size but becuase of the wider bus there was no performance hit.
One of the create benifits of 32bit was that you could have numbers +-64000 in one register, giving the greatest performance increase.
The extra wide bus is gonig to give some performance gains on 64Bit systems, but I don't see the extra address space or larger numbers being that benifitial.. Well maybe the extra address space will help with threading and process management, and mean that bloatware can be even more bloated.
Ok, I'll probably buy AMD but If Intel wins then Windows is stuffed, Because most of the Linux software is open source so I can recompile for Intel, on the other hand most of the Windows software I use is closed source.
Take a look at crystal space, or black and white for that matter. The number of vertices in the objects are relative to 'your' distance from the object in a kinde of half-way house between object based and polygon based rendering, a bit like mip-mapping with textures.
I run a small home server over ADSL, but I also get 20mb of web space at my ISP that can handle the bandwidth. A sensible self promothing poster would move there content to a high bandwidth site before posting.
The rings from the oak may not be that good on there own, but when you take rings from different types of trees you can tell a lot about the weather for that year. Some trees grow better when it's hot Some when it's cold Some when it's dry etc.....
unfortunatly or not so as the case may be, you were on the 'winning' side.
This will probably get slamed by all and sundry but hell someones got to put the very minority point accross.
Hitler or at least fachisim was embraced by a huge populas, he had his own views and methods be then right or wrong but people stood by him.
Today large corperations opperate in a very simila manner, governments think there great, look at all the jobs etc... but it's the things they take away from you, you freedomes and rights that are getting undermined.
How many people die of anarexia and suffer in pain because of an image portraied in the media.
How many people suffer in the greed that up until a few hundred years ago they never knew.
hitler all but wiped out the gypsies, today 'democracy' and 'WIPO' etc.. are in the process of wiping out all kinds of freedomes and cultures.
The winning side always writes the histroy books, just think about what they might say about Microsoft and the RIAA in a hundred years time?
ok i probably can't spell Dendracronology but There have been studies of tree rings (Dendracronology) thousands of years old, the width of the tree ring tells you about the climate at the time it was growing. So we have measured global tempretures back a few thousand years at least. Then there's the ICE cores that can also tell you about global climate, they too go back thousands of years.
So you can say that in the past 50-100 years the climate has changed a stastically signifacant amount when compaired to the past 3-4 thousand years
failing that.... Rock strata can tell you somthing about climate going back 10's or hundreds of thousands of years.
Lets think.... Bio reasearch started to go nuts ohh 50/60 odd years ago maybe a little longer, The adverage age of a newbee bio researcher say 20-25. so thet put there age at arround 70-85 take into account of all the nasty shit they deal with and... odds are there dropping like flies.
This might be quite a handy tool, You could debug programms at closer to full speed and listen to the changes as your code jumps in and out of loops and functions.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true at all....
1: a single CPU has to sit in wait states at some point holding up everything, in a 2 CPU system one CPU can frequently continue (try running windows NT with 2CPU's there's a big difference in smoothness!), you can set the afinity of processes so that one CPU is always left doing the dirty work and the system doesn't get clogged up.
2: a single CPU has a single cache shared by everything, when it page faults it page faults,
In theory you should have less problems with page faults and cache misses on a 2 CPU system.
a very cut down example, here thread 1 has code with a lot of page faults, thread 2 is compleatly page alighed and doesn't page fault.
Thread 1 CPU 1 page faults causing a slowdown on CPU1
Thread 2 doesn't with no CPU slowdown.
On a 1 CPU system
Thread 1 page faults, swap to Thread 2 no page fault, swap to Thread 1 page faults.
3:You can have seperate databusses &co for each CPU giving you twice the memory bandwidth. etc.......
4: If investement was placed in the area (see cray, or mosix!) 2 CPU's would be a hell of a lot faster than 1, infact 2 CPU's would be a kids toy and home machines might have tens of CPUS/GPU's, with decient process/thread management and all the stuff that PC's should do. Why not max out SMP and parrell processing, there'd be a hell of a lot better AI's and smoother running machines out there if they did.
In 20 years time if my PC? isn't running at least 20,000 threads and at least 1,000 concurrent threads then I'm going to be upset.
BTW.
Why are you storing all your data in RAM? you should be using a fast HDD.
Most uses aren't aware that there is choice, give them something and they'll use it, even if it breaks all the time and is crap.
:
In my experience
10% of people who buy something from a shop that doesn't work that well just bin it.
40% will use it even though it isn't fully functional
40% will take it back and get a replacement (or alternative if they know there is one)
5% will moan like hell and take the shop to court.
and the other 5% will fix it and have a fully functionally product.
If the user doesn't know that something is broken, or doesn't understand what they have there far less lightly to take it back.
If I was going to learn a foreign language I would try to find reading books for Kids, because they start off simply and slowly using common words with few syllables and repeating them over and over again.
I should imagine there are books like this that come with tapes and CD's although tailored to teaching kids to read, I'm sure they'd be helpful in teaching you to hear/recognise speech.
Yeh having to use a crappy PC or Mac workstation instead of the high-end machine they should be using, poor buggers.
I hate apple and all there evils but,
they are SMPing all ther profesional power macs,
Hopefully that'll give the PC arena a kick. (better workstation SMP mobos with more that 2 sockets please!)
The point I was getting at is,
The amount of data that you can fit into 4gb is so large that people would have to start using 3d data arrays to need any more.
It works like this....
A DOS PC has 640k enough for a text document and some vector graphics and a small personal database. At this point intime Bill probably couldn't imagine computers getting fast enough to need more memory.
A CD(640mb) can hold x books of text (as promoted).
A DVD(4gb) can hold x books of text, but as scaned images and with full audio.
Unless you start holding molecular or biological information on you PC or want pointless resolution on the images it will take a while before you fill 4gb. (you probably wouldn't run that kind of stuff on a mainstream PC anyhow)
That amount of data-requirement is probably 5-10 years off and there will have to be major SMP improvements in PC's for it to be pratical.
AMD and Intel should be pumping money into SMP developments instead of GHz and bit wars, that's where the future lies.
Would i rather have 64bits or
8 way SMP with decient
thread and process management
and reasonable security in the CPU instruction set.
mainstream SMP systems will change the world, mainstream 64bits won't(unless they add all of the above).
My system at home has 512MB and never hits swap-space, even with a load of server application running.
64 bit system might be great for enterprise servers but for the home? There would have to be some major software bloating going on for my home machine to use more than 4gb or so, a typical home user could probably live in 128mb at the moment without any performance problems. the current 4gb limit allows them to have 40times as much bumph hell you can even fit a dvd in 4gb of memory.
Most of the 64-bit pure-ness has already been done. So have the endian-ness.
If the code runs on Sun, Mac OS X, x86 and Alpha then theres a good change it will run on Hammer or IA-64 without any significant changes(if any).
My thoughts were the same when 32bit came in, until I relealised.
The new insturusction and architecture improvements in 32bit x86 made for a good performance overhead.
The memory bus was twice wide on a 32bit system , so the pointers on the linked list may have been twice the size but becuase of the wider bus there was no performance hit.
One of the create benifits of 32bit was that you could have numbers +-64000 in one register, giving the greatest performance increase.
The extra wide bus is gonig to give some performance gains on 64Bit systems, but I don't see the extra address space or larger numbers being that benifitial.. Well maybe the extra address space will help with threading and process management, and mean that bloatware can be even more bloated.
Ok, I'll probably buy AMD but
If Intel wins then Windows is stuffed,
Because most of the Linux software is open source so I can recompile for Intel, on the other hand most of the Windows software I use is closed source.
well it looks like windows will never get installed then.
Take a look at crystal space, or black and white for that matter.
The number of vertices in the objects are relative to 'your' distance from the object in a kinde of half-way house between object based and polygon based rendering, a bit like mip-mapping with textures.
I got that tooo
here's the link for those of you who don't believe us
Try mutant_flies for some freeky flies.
then there's this story(not that great but interesting).
Or a video
or what your looking for?
I run a small home server over ADSL, but I also get 20mb of web space at my ISP that can handle the bandwidth.
A sensible self promothing poster would move there content to a high bandwidth site before posting.
The rings from the oak may not be that good on there own, but when you take rings from different types of trees you can tell a lot about the weather for that year.
Some trees grow better when it's hot
Some when it's cold
Some when it's dry
etc.....
unfortunatly or not so as the case may be, you were on the 'winning' side.
This will probably get slamed by all and sundry but hell someones got to put the very minority point accross.
Hitler or at least fachisim was embraced by a huge populas, he had his own views and methods be then right or wrong but people stood by him.
Today large corperations opperate in a very simila manner, governments think there great, look at all the jobs etc... but it's the things they take away from you, you freedomes and rights that are getting undermined.
How many people die of anarexia and suffer in pain because of an image portraied in the media.
How many people suffer in the greed that up until a few hundred years ago they never knew.
hitler all but wiped out the gypsies, today 'democracy' and 'WIPO' etc.. are in the process of wiping out all kinds of freedomes and cultures.
The winning side always writes the histroy books, just think about what they might say about Microsoft and the RIAA in a hundred years time?
Not only could you DIVX the latest movies,
but you could have the CGI chariters on you PC acting them out!!!.
ok i probably can't spell Dendracronology but
There have been studies of tree rings (Dendracronology) thousands of years old, the width of the tree ring tells you about the climate at the time it was growing.
So we have measured global tempretures back a few thousand years at least.
Then there's the ICE cores that can also tell you about global climate, they too go back thousands of years.
So you can say that in the past 50-100 years the climate has changed a stastically signifacant amount when compaired to the past 3-4 thousand years
failing that....
Rock strata can tell you somthing about climate going back 10's or hundreds of thousands of years.
99% of people would milk it, get rich rule the world or whatever until someone noticed, then your discovery would be out
Lets think....
Bio reasearch started to go nuts ohh 50/60 odd years ago maybe a little longer,
The adverage age of a newbee bio researcher say 20-25.
so thet put there age at arround 70-85
take into account of all the nasty shit they deal with and...
odds are there dropping like flies.
Well isn't that wat a monopoly is.
The ability yo dictate 'your' price on the market regardless of what people 'want' to pay.
This might be quite a handy tool,
You could debug programms at closer to full speed and listen to the changes as your code jumps in and out of loops and functions.
Well could an anonymous coward take the interview instead? since an anonymous coward is not a representitive of a company.
I'm sure a few answers scattered arround the place wouldn't get noiticed.