For the low-power / HTC crowd, you can always run a lower multiplier on A64/Opterons despite the package marking. The 'FX' series is factory tested to the speed on the package but the multiplier lock isn't set, so you can attempt to clock it up.
IMO this is the right, hacker friendly way to allow overclockers to have their fun and also curb illicit remarking.
Good point. Like you mentioned, you are trading some reliability for that power savings. The flash method relies on the fact that IDE (or whatever bus) writes are fairly power-inexpensive, and that the flash at the other end of the bus is nonvolatile and consumes marginally more power than the system RAM but less than the spin-up-and-write-to-disk operation.
On the other hand, modern xDRAM is fairly power efficient at doing refreshes (auto-refresh command vs. old skool mem controller refresh), so I'm surprised that a separate smaller (cellphone type battery) DRAM keepalive battery isn't used in modern PCs. Most laptops will keep the RAM alive in a suspend mode, but this is driven from the main cells. Modern RAID controllers do what I describe here, and can dump unwritten contents of the cache to disk on the next power-up after a power fail. Wouldn't it be nice to have that on laptops or even desktops?
yes and no. Flash has a limited number of writes per cell. However, like a hard disk, most flash has backup blocks that can be enabled and disabled as needed when the good blocks go bad. Also, flash controllers (i.e. the chip that attaches a NAND chip to the USB bus in your flash keychain) implement something called wear leveling, whereby the flash writes occur evenly throughout the memory device even though the host may be overwriting one block more frequently. Think of it as intentional fragmentation.
Also, flash devices don't write the contents presented to the data pins directly to the flash cells. Data to be flashed is copied into an on-chip SRAM buffer (4-128k is common), and a command to write the block is given. The flash chip handles the block write on its own, and signals the host when it's done. Before the buffer is overwritten, a verify command can optionally be given, causing the chip to go off again on its own and compare the data. The compare/verify is not only autonomous, but much faster than the erase/write operation, so verifying that your data got written properly is not a big performance hit. If the verify failed, well, you can mark that block bad and swap in a spare.
All this means that, in the worst case, your flash buffer for your hard disk will slowly shrink over time, but your data will still be safe because it will eventually get to the disk anyway the next time it spins up.
The advantage of this over using a large RAM disk cache (which works well under Linux for me as well) is that when the disk DOES need to be written to by the OS, the flash sees the write instead of having to spin up the disk to do the write, which is a very power-costly operation. Flash can go into a write state and back to sleep almost instantaneously, with no significant ramp-up power requirements.
BTW, in this day and age, RAM is so cheap and plentiful that in a well designed laptop system you should have enough RAM that swapping to disk is unnecessary.
AMD still makes chipsets, but they're pretty much never found in desktop configurations. AMD produces chipsets mainly as a platform to help get the chips on the market before third party chipset manufacturers get a design out. Seems that third parties aren't keen on investing in a chipset design without seeing what the part looks like in real life.
Because, of course, Steve Jobs himself invented the concept of the super-user command, and the rest of the UNIX using world has yet to catch up to this amazing accomplishment.
Degaussing isn't always effective either. A degausser is designed to nuke tape in nonmagnetic, nonconductive casings. Hard disks are not only encased in conductive metal, the media layer sits on top of conductive aluminum disks. Eddy currents formed in both (most degaussers use an AC field) could serve to eat up much of the energy that, in the eraser's intended use, would be dissipated entirely in the media.
Instead, why not insure total magnetic and mechanical destruction with a thermite sammich? In addition to royally gibbering up the innards, thermite should readily heat the platters above the Curie point of the media.
Actually, no. See, the iPod is powered by an ethanol fuel cell that derives its energy from the stein. Unfortunately, the beer is not replaceable, Apple does not warranty the beer, and will charge $99 to replace the beer.
Enterprising folks have already lined up to offer cheaper replacements (called the 'keg') and the necessary tools needed ('tap').
...can someone tell me what this SPEECH thing is? And why should I care? Sheesh, you people think everyone's heard of this terminology, but you're wrong.
Actually, PassMe isn't really any good for copying games. All it does is insert a little code into the cartridge loading scheme that says 'Hey! Look over here!' and branches to the memory on the GBA slot. Unless you can somehow change up the app on the card you're copying to load files out of GBA-space (yes, the DS cart uses a filesystem), you're stuck writing code designed just to run in that environment.
Which is good, since nothing puts bad light on the homebrew scene like people intending only to pirate games.
The PPU (or so it's been nicknamed here) accelerates the simulation of a kinematic model. In motion control systems, you want exactly the opposite: to accelerate processing of an electrical response to real-world events.
Take for instance the Segway. Its control system basically mirrors the classical inverse kinematics example of an inverted pendulum (i.e. balancing a stick on your finger, but in 2d). Its input really boils down to a measurement of inclination at the top of the handlebar and its outputs are the current to both motors. When 'standing still', the Segway is trying to complete an equation with its input being the inclinometer and its output being the amount of power to apply to the motors for a certain amount of time. Reality is not being modeled here, rather it is set up to respond accordingly to a change in reality.
In a more complex system (ex. a bipedal robot) there are more equations to manage (more outputs) and there are far more inputs, including some that are internally abstracted from sensors (i.e. making a list of motion bounds to check against based on map and sensor data, so you don't hit stuff). Still, being able to model the appearance or reaction of external objects would not make it easier to make a device that moves in that environment.
"Sorta" on both counts. Modern digital (GSM / CDMA / etc) phones change the game somewhat from the old analog cell days. First, even when you're busy talking on the phone the transmitter is not spewing constant power. The radio is only keyed up when there is enough buffered audio data to send (which happens fairly frequently though).
When the phone is idle, it still occasionally talks back to the tower to exchange info about its location (the network needs to know what area you're in for it to ring you when you receive a call) and other bits of data like SMS, message alerts, and even the local time. The majority of the traffic is directed to your phone and not to the network, so these exchanges radiate very little power over time.
As for the effect on your guts, well, I have doubts that the average phone at an average 100mW can penetrate far into tissue. Radio at microwave frequencies tends to stay on the surface of a conductor (skin effect) and beneath the outer layers of skin we're fairly conductive. Combined with the fact that cellphones have omnidirectional antennas, and therefore follow the inverse square law pretty closely, I'd say that the inch or so that your cellphone case puts between you and the phone makes any possible danger to your cajones (or otherwise) minimal.
Slashdot Mirror
For the low-power / HTC crowd, you can always run a lower multiplier on A64/Opterons despite the package marking. The 'FX' series is factory tested to the speed on the package but the multiplier lock isn't set, so you can attempt to clock it up.
IMO this is the right, hacker friendly way to allow overclockers to have their fun and also curb illicit remarking.
Good point. Like you mentioned, you are trading some reliability for that power savings. The flash method relies on the fact that IDE (or whatever bus) writes are fairly power-inexpensive, and that the flash at the other end of the bus is nonvolatile and consumes marginally more power than the system RAM but less than the spin-up-and-write-to-disk operation.
On the other hand, modern xDRAM is fairly power efficient at doing refreshes (auto-refresh command vs. old skool mem controller refresh), so I'm surprised that a separate smaller (cellphone type battery) DRAM keepalive battery isn't used in modern PCs. Most laptops will keep the RAM alive in a suspend mode, but this is driven from the main cells. Modern RAID controllers do what I describe here, and can dump unwritten contents of the cache to disk on the next power-up after a power fail. Wouldn't it be nice to have that on laptops or even desktops?
yes and no. Flash has a limited number of writes per cell. However, like a hard disk, most flash has backup blocks that can be enabled and disabled as needed when the good blocks go bad. Also, flash controllers (i.e. the chip that attaches a NAND chip to the USB bus in your flash keychain) implement something called wear leveling, whereby the flash writes occur evenly throughout the memory device even though the host may be overwriting one block more frequently. Think of it as intentional fragmentation.
Also, flash devices don't write the contents presented to the data pins directly to the flash cells. Data to be flashed is copied into an on-chip SRAM buffer (4-128k is common), and a command to write the block is given. The flash chip handles the block write on its own, and signals the host when it's done. Before the buffer is overwritten, a verify command can optionally be given, causing the chip to go off again on its own and compare the data. The compare/verify is not only autonomous, but much faster than the erase/write operation, so verifying that your data got written properly is not a big performance hit. If the verify failed, well, you can mark that block bad and swap in a spare.
All this means that, in the worst case, your flash buffer for your hard disk will slowly shrink over time, but your data will still be safe because it will eventually get to the disk anyway the next time it spins up.
The advantage of this over using a large RAM disk cache (which works well under Linux for me as well) is that when the disk DOES need to be written to by the OS, the flash sees the write instead of having to spin up the disk to do the write, which is a very power-costly operation. Flash can go into a write state and back to sleep almost instantaneously, with no significant ramp-up power requirements.
BTW, in this day and age, RAM is so cheap and plentiful that in a well designed laptop system you should have enough RAM that swapping to disk is unnecessary.
http://theinquirer.net/?article=22920
As dispensed by the Film-o-mat after a thorough analysis of your movie tastes. Another fine product from Sirius Cybernetics. Share and Enjoy!
AMD still makes chipsets, but they're pretty much never found in desktop configurations. AMD produces chipsets mainly as a platform to help get the chips on the market before third party chipset manufacturers get a design out. Seems that third parties aren't keen on investing in a chipset design without seeing what the part looks like in real life.
Because, of course, Steve Jobs himself invented the concept of the super-user command, and the rest of the UNIX using world has yet to catch up to this amazing accomplishment.
Degaussing isn't always effective either. A degausser is designed to nuke tape in nonmagnetic, nonconductive casings. Hard disks are not only encased in conductive metal, the media layer sits on top of conductive aluminum disks. Eddy currents formed in both (most degaussers use an AC field) could serve to eat up much of the energy that, in the eraser's intended use, would be dissipated entirely in the media.
Instead, why not insure total magnetic and mechanical destruction with a thermite sammich? In addition to royally gibbering up the innards, thermite should readily heat the platters above the Curie point of the media.
No The Who reference in the From * Dept. line? Timmy, Taco will beat you with lead pipes when he finds out.
"He put his human penis in my mother's robot shark vagina."
Actually, no. See, the iPod is powered by an ethanol fuel cell that derives its energy from the stein. Unfortunately, the beer is not replaceable, Apple does not warranty the beer, and will charge $99 to replace the beer.
Enterprising folks have already lined up to offer cheaper replacements (called the 'keg') and the necessary tools needed ('tap').
The only iPod + duct tape permutation that might be desireable would be the iPod + beer stein.
...can someone tell me what this SPEECH thing is? And why should I care? Sheesh, you people think everyone's heard of this terminology, but you're wrong.
Don't forget all five-billion iterations of Pokemon, or the piles of movie franchise games with as much entertainment value as E.T. for the Atari.
Seriously, ten minutes with Lumines can convince even the most thick-headed brand bigot that Sony's developer lineup is solid.
You mean like this?
(albeit only for series 1 with a network adapter)
ISP Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Server?
I wonder if the members of MENSA refer to themselves as menses.
Besides, the most popular PVR out there runs on top of OSS.
In a different context, that comment would have been far more amusing.
Heard 'im speak at the Princess Mononoke US version premiere in Austin. He pronounced it Gay-min too.
You show 'em! Besides, everyone knows the plural of "Eggo" is "Egon".
Actually, PassMe isn't really any good for copying games. All it does is insert a little code into the cartridge loading scheme that says 'Hey! Look over here!' and branches to the memory on the GBA slot. Unless you can somehow change up the app on the card you're copying to load files out of GBA-space (yes, the DS cart uses a filesystem), you're stuck writing code designed just to run in that environment.
Which is good, since nothing puts bad light on the homebrew scene like people intending only to pirate games.
The PPU (or so it's been nicknamed here) accelerates the simulation of a kinematic model. In motion control systems, you want exactly the opposite: to accelerate processing of an electrical response to real-world events.
Take for instance the Segway. Its control system basically mirrors the classical inverse kinematics example of an inverted pendulum (i.e. balancing a stick on your finger, but in 2d). Its input really boils down to a measurement of inclination at the top of the handlebar and its outputs are the current to both motors. When 'standing still', the Segway is trying to complete an equation with its input being the inclinometer and its output being the amount of power to apply to the motors for a certain amount of time. Reality is not being modeled here, rather it is set up to respond accordingly to a change in reality.
In a more complex system (ex. a bipedal robot) there are more equations to manage (more outputs) and there are far more inputs, including some that are internally abstracted from sensors (i.e. making a list of motion bounds to check against based on map and sensor data, so you don't hit stuff). Still, being able to model the appearance or reaction of external objects would not make it easier to make a device that moves in that environment.
"Sorta" on both counts. Modern digital (GSM / CDMA / etc) phones change the game somewhat from the old analog cell days. First, even when you're busy talking on the phone the transmitter is not spewing constant power. The radio is only keyed up when there is enough buffered audio data to send (which happens fairly frequently though).
When the phone is idle, it still occasionally talks back to the tower to exchange info about its location (the network needs to know what area you're in for it to ring you when you receive a call) and other bits of data like SMS, message alerts, and even the local time. The majority of the traffic is directed to your phone and not to the network, so these exchanges radiate very little power over time.
As for the effect on your guts, well, I have doubts that the average phone at an average 100mW can penetrate far into tissue. Radio at microwave frequencies tends to stay on the surface of a conductor (skin effect) and beneath the outer layers of skin we're fairly conductive. Combined with the fact that cellphones have omnidirectional antennas, and therefore follow the inverse square law pretty closely, I'd say that the inch or so that your cellphone case puts between you and the phone makes any possible danger to your cajones (or otherwise) minimal.
"Hello, my name is Teddy and I pronounce Linux as 'Linux'"