Except..... when dealing with kids who are speaking incomprehensible language...... you don't give them access to sensitive financial and personal information.... you don't give them control of industrial control systems, oil pipelines, and traffic lights..... and you DEFINITELY don't give them the keys to the car.
[if Intel wants to spend gates, why not put in more accelerators for things like the variants of the DCT used by MPEG, JPEG and MPEG audio? or how about crypto accelerators for things like AES and bignum math?]
They already do... the G965 has decode accleration in the chipset.... what makes you think they wouldn't migrate this into the CPU when they pull in the gfx core?
There's usually a big crowd of people around these venues a few hours before the show starts... Many of whom are happily chatting away on their cell phones. You know they probably haven't run their phone through the system yet. I bet now you'll see people sprinting by yanking phones out of people's hands while they're talking... and then disapearing off into the crowd. Sort of like the purse snatchers you always see in movies.
This actually started becoming a problem in the UK. My girlfriend and I were talking while she was headed towards the underground... and suddenly I hear....
"Heeeeyy!!!"... click.
Of course I laughed my ass off when I learned what had happened... But frankly, I'm surprised this type of theft isn't already on the rise.
Now put an IMMEDIATE $$ value on that phone, since the SMS messages are stored on the phone itself... and these become pretty tempting targets. Even reporting it stolen to the phone company won't save you as SMS messages, once recieved, are stored on the phone itself. You could still get the bar-code to show up and get into the theater.
Hrrrrm.... now that I think about it.... *polts plan to start a SIM card scalping ring...*
I was trying to simplify things... I probably went a bit too far.
The regsiter level contentions are alleivated with Out of order execution (more ore less).
A good example of where hyperthreading helps is the front side bus. Procesors tend to spend over 80% of their time executing out of cache. Thus the front side bus is sitting idle (or performing simple snoops).
If one thread is going to be memory intensive (video streaming for example... or texture manipulation), or even I/O intensive and thus results in a lot of transactions along the FSB... it can occur at the same time as a second thread that's FPU intensive
(asuming the I/O intensive one isn't FPU intensive as well).
Basically what they're doing is simply taking unused processor resources and allocating them to another thread. You can now have multiple _threads_ of excecution simultaneously... truely simultaneously.
Thread X is using register's B and C Thread Y can able to use registers A and D.
These threads can be executed together without a context switch... and the processor will hunt out these relationships in hardware. That's what "the big deal" is.
Until now, when a processor "multitasks", it's simply switching from one thread of execution to the next... it allocates separatetime to two different threads....Now it can allocate the exact same timeslice to multiple threads as long as there isn't a resource dependancy.
If your program can be architechted to take advantage of this (or your OS can schedule tasks like this), you'll get a huge benifit (read: if it works on SMP systems, it'll get some benifit on this as well).
but then again... we're not IT guys... we're embedded apps engineers... yay...
You deal with idiot customers all day... how can you NOT drink?:)
Oh and yeah.. we have stump pulling parties and remodling parties... any excuse to drink really.
It's actually WORSE if the fan fails.
on
AMD And THG update
·
· Score: 1, Informative
A dead fan will trap heat in the space between heatsink fans and effectively turn the heatsink into a heater. It will heat up your chip.
This is actually a specific point of failure that notebook manufacturers try to avoid. Rather than placing a fan ontop of a heatsink, they try to induce airflow across a heatsink. Thus if it fails, at least you aren't heating up your part, you just aren't providing much airflow.
They're used in laptops most often... they rely on convection of liquid. There's water or coolant in sealed tubes that radiate heat off at one end and are attached to the proc at the other.
Very elegant yet expensive designs... at least expensive from an OEM standpoint.
since Pentium II. What's the big deal with that? It's upto the motherboard vendors to impliment the circuitry.. it always has been.
And hardware pre-fetch? Ummm hi welcome to the last year? These aren't major new innovations at all.
Oh wait.. but it's AMD and not Intel in the news.. by default it's gotta be a great-new-better-thing.
AMD's are _that_ much cheaper than Intel proc's
on
Pentium 4 Under Linux
·
· Score: 1
Take a quick look on pricewatch. Does anyone do their research and form their own oppinions anymore or just automagically adopt the high-scored ones on slashdot?
Intel's slashed prices to unprecidented (for them anyway) levels... obviously in response to AMD, but none the less, the _PRICE_ motivation simply isn't as great as it used to be.
Knowing slashdot's userbase and how anti-large-corporation they are, and since transmetta seems to stand for anti-intel almost as much as amd does, I expect this to be viewed as flamebiat, so flame away! But here are my thoughts.
Doing Embedded Engineering professionally I can attest to the various strengths and weaknesses of most embedded platforms out there.
Is crusoe low power? Yes! Is it low heat? Yes! Is it the first processor out there to do "code morphing"? No. Is it the the lowest power consumption and lowest heat processor out there? No again.
CodeMorphing (as transmetta calls it) is nothing amazingly great. Ever since Intel and AMD both had to preserve backwards compatibility with 16bit processors, and have had to register rename, they've been taking in one set of instrunctions and actually executing a different set. They've accomplished this through *gasp* software built into the hardware! *gasp* They call it microcode. If you want to get down to the nitty gritty, the Pentium4's trace cache is pretty much the same thing that Transmetta's CodeMorphing system does. It decodes an instrunction into other instrunctions and stores (or caches) the decoded instrunction fragments. It's not rocket science. It's not revolutionary. But it sure is cool.
That aside, let me get back to the power issue. What most of the readers on slashdot don't seem to know is that both AMD and Intel make mobile versions of their processors. No wait.. everyone knows that but most people don't actually know how different the mobile version is from it's desktop brother.
If you were to compare numbers between Crusoe, Mobile Intel and Mobile AMD processors, you'd find that their power consumption is all actually pretty darned close. The mobile version of the desktop processors actually are different right down to some of the core. Many of the mobile processors can turn off part of their cpu's. They can all regulate their frequency. They're flat out not the same processor other than that they have the same name and the same features from a software standpoint.
All that said, I personally think XScale/StrongARM are the best performance/power processors out there. Too bad you can't run native x86 code on them.
If you know _anything_ about a silicon....you know that it's conductive properties are extremely coupled with temperature.
I'm going to be deliberately dumbed down for the masses...
The thermal diode is nothing more than an extra P-N junction on the actual processor core. As the temperature of the actual silicon die changes, the effective resistance of the diode will change and allow a current to flow through it. The amount of current that flows through the diode is somewhat proportional to the temperature of the actual processor. The current flowing through this diode is compared to the current flowing through a precalibrated circuit (this is what defines your threshhold temperature where throttling will occur). That's how the processor determines if it's getting too hot.
Whoever wrote that article is flat out and simple on crack. It has nothing to do with the power usage on a processor... it has to do with cooling. Provide enough cooling and you wont' have to worry about it and you'll be able to run your processor right up to the full 1.5 GHz(and probably then some).
This is more for the el-cheap-o mom-n-pop shops that can't actually validate their designs and just slap a metal heatsink on their processors and call it good.
Thermal throttling is not a new idea.... the mobile market has been doing it for years. The mobile Pentium II has a thermal sensor on it too (ftp://download.intel.com/design/mobile/applnots/2 4372401.pdf) however back then the throttling mechanism was implimented outside the processors.
Now that they can get small enough, they just migrated it onto the die itself.
Would you rather your machine just turn it self off like everything else when it overheats? Or worse not do anything at all and just toast it self?
This is how language happens. Get over it.
Except..... when dealing with kids who are speaking incomprehensible language...... you don't give them access to sensitive financial and personal information.... you don't give them control of industrial control systems, oil pipelines, and traffic lights..... and you DEFINITELY don't give them the keys to the car.
[if Intel wants to spend gates, why not put in more accelerators for things like the variants of the DCT used by MPEG, JPEG and MPEG audio? or how about crypto accelerators for things like AES and bignum math?]
They already do... the G965 has decode accleration in the chipset.... what makes you think they wouldn't migrate this into the CPU when they pull in the gfx core?
There's usually a big crowd of people around these venues a few hours before the show starts... Many of whom are happily chatting away on their cell phones. You know they probably haven't run their phone through the system yet. I bet now you'll see people sprinting by yanking phones out of people's hands while they're talking... and then disapearing off into the crowd. Sort of like the purse snatchers you always see in movies.
....
... click.
This actually started becoming a problem in the UK. My girlfriend and I were talking while she was headed towards the underground... and suddenly I hear
"Heeeeyy!!!"
Of course I laughed my ass off when I learned what had happened... But frankly, I'm surprised this type of theft isn't already on the rise.
Now put an IMMEDIATE $$ value on that phone, since the SMS messages are stored on the phone itself... and these become pretty tempting targets. Even reporting it stolen to the phone company won't save you as SMS messages, once recieved, are stored on the phone itself. You could still get the bar-code to show up and get into the theater.
Hrrrrm.... now that I think about it.... *polts plan to start a SIM card scalping ring...*
I was trying to simplify things... I probably went a bit too far.
The regsiter level contentions are alleivated with Out of order execution (more ore less).
A good example of where hyperthreading helps is the front side bus. Procesors tend to spend over 80% of their time executing out of cache. Thus the front side bus is sitting idle (or performing simple snoops).
If one thread is going to be memory intensive (video streaming for example... or texture manipulation), or even I/O intensive and thus results in a lot of transactions along the FSB... it can occur at the same time as a second thread that's FPU intensive
(asuming the I/O intensive one isn't FPU intensive as well).
Basically what they're doing is simply taking unused processor resources and allocating them to another thread. You can now have multiple _threads_ of excecution simultaneously... truely simultaneously.
Thread X is using register's B and C
Thread Y can able to use registers A and D.
These threads can be executed together without a context switch... and the processor will hunt out these relationships in hardware. That's what "the big deal" is.
Until now, when a processor "multitasks", it's simply switching from one thread of execution to the next... it allocates separatetime to two different threads....Now it can allocate the exact same timeslice to multiple threads as long as there isn't a resource dependancy.
If your program can be architechted to take advantage of this (or your OS can schedule tasks like this), you'll get a huge benifit (read: if it works on SMP systems, it'll get some benifit on this as well).
I'm sure the airport fee was just raised for that particular airport.
but then again... we're not IT guys... we're embedded apps engineers... yay...
:)
You deal with idiot customers all day... how can you NOT drink?
Oh and yeah.. we have stump pulling parties and remodling parties... any excuse to drink really.
A dead fan will trap heat in the space between heatsink fans and effectively turn the heatsink into a heater. It will heat up your chip.
This is actually a specific point of failure that notebook manufacturers try to avoid. Rather than placing a fan ontop of a heatsink, they try to induce airflow across a heatsink. Thus if it fails, at least you aren't heating up your part, you just aren't providing much airflow.
It says the equilant of "It has SDRAM, so it must suck"
I can't personally forsee a P4/SDRAM chipset working circles around P4/Rambus or an Athlon system, but they don't suck.
They're used in laptops most often ... they rely on convection of liquid. There's water or coolant in sealed tubes that radiate heat off at one end and are attached to the proc at the other.
Very elegant yet expensive designs... at least expensive from an OEM standpoint.
since Pentium II. What's the big deal with that? It's upto the motherboard vendors to impliment the circuitry.. it always has been.
And hardware pre-fetch? Ummm hi welcome to the last year? These aren't major new innovations at all.
Oh wait.. but it's AMD and not Intel in the news.. by default it's gotta be a great-new-better-thing.
Take a quick look on pricewatch. Does anyone do their research and form their own oppinions anymore or just automagically adopt the high-scored ones on slashdot? Intel's slashed prices to unprecidented (for them anyway) levels... obviously in response to AMD, but none the less, the _PRICE_ motivation simply isn't as great as it used to be.
Knowing slashdot's userbase and how anti-large-corporation they are, and since transmetta seems to stand for anti-intel almost as much as amd does, I expect this to be viewed as flamebiat, so flame away! But here are my thoughts. Doing Embedded Engineering professionally I can attest to the various strengths and weaknesses of most embedded platforms out there. Is crusoe low power? Yes! Is it low heat? Yes! Is it the first processor out there to do "code morphing"? No. Is it the the lowest power consumption and lowest heat processor out there? No again. CodeMorphing (as transmetta calls it) is nothing amazingly great. Ever since Intel and AMD both had to preserve backwards compatibility with 16bit processors, and have had to register rename, they've been taking in one set of instrunctions and actually executing a different set. They've accomplished this through *gasp* software built into the hardware! *gasp* They call it microcode. If you want to get down to the nitty gritty, the Pentium4's trace cache is pretty much the same thing that Transmetta's CodeMorphing system does. It decodes an instrunction into other instrunctions and stores (or caches) the decoded instrunction fragments. It's not rocket science. It's not revolutionary. But it sure is cool. That aside, let me get back to the power issue. What most of the readers on slashdot don't seem to know is that both AMD and Intel make mobile versions of their processors. No wait.. everyone knows that but most people don't actually know how different the mobile version is from it's desktop brother. If you were to compare numbers between Crusoe, Mobile Intel and Mobile AMD processors, you'd find that their power consumption is all actually pretty darned close. The mobile version of the desktop processors actually are different right down to some of the core. Many of the mobile processors can turn off part of their cpu's. They can all regulate their frequency. They're flat out not the same processor other than that they have the same name and the same features from a software standpoint. All that said, I personally think XScale/StrongARM are the best performance/power processors out there. Too bad you can't run native x86 code on them.
If you know _anything_ about a silicon....you know that it's conductive properties are extremely coupled with temperature. I'm going to be deliberately dumbed down for the masses... The thermal diode is nothing more than an extra P-N junction on the actual processor core. As the temperature of the actual silicon die changes, the effective resistance of the diode will change and allow a current to flow through it. The amount of current that flows through the diode is somewhat proportional to the temperature of the actual processor. The current flowing through this diode is compared to the current flowing through a precalibrated circuit (this is what defines your threshhold temperature where throttling will occur). That's how the processor determines if it's getting too hot. Whoever wrote that article is flat out and simple on crack. It has nothing to do with the power usage on a processor... it has to do with cooling. Provide enough cooling and you wont' have to worry about it and you'll be able to run your processor right up to the full 1.5 GHz(and probably then some). This is more for the el-cheap-o mom-n-pop shops that can't actually validate their designs and just slap a metal heatsink on their processors and call it good. Thermal throttling is not a new idea .... the mobile market has been doing it for years. The mobile Pentium II has a thermal sensor on it too (ftp://download.intel.com/design/mobile/applnots/2 4372401.pdf) however back then the throttling mechanism was implimented outside the processors.
Now that they can get small enough, they just migrated it onto the die itself.
Would you rather your machine just turn it self off like everything else when it overheats? Or worse not do anything at all and just toast it self?
Can you just imagine a bunch of IT people walking around with signal strenght monitors trying to triangulate where the server was? :)