There are many factors in the equation of a system's computational speed.
in this discourse by alpha i mean 21264 and will make distinctions between
p3/p4 and k7 where applicable, i am uncertain on most of the numbers for
sparc (UltraSPARC III) chips.
processer frequency:
x86's strongest point, followed by alpha, then sparc, then g4
(well, that might be a little out of order, and don't put too much stock in
just the frequency anyway, it's simply one component of the system speed)
system bus width:
most processors share this bus with the memory bus but not with the cache
bus. It is usually 64bit wide but at differing frequencies on different archs.
The p3 and the g4 have a 100Mhz bus, the K7 has a 133Mhz DDR(266 effective),
the alpha has a 333Mhz bus, and i can't find relevant literature of the
UltraSPARC III.
to the best of my knowledge all of these chips have a 64bit system bus
the system bus is where disk drive controllers and pci/agp etc reside.
memory bus width:
P3/P4/K7, G4, and alpha share this bus with the system bus, the sparc chips,
i believe, do not. one thing of note about the alpha, it has 4 seperate
memory controllers that talk down the same bus, so even if though it uses
100 MHz SDRAM, it can completely fill the 333Mhz bus.
a lot of crazy stuff comes in to play in the memory bus if you have an
excessively SMP machine, sparcs have on chip memory controllers and can
access the memory easily, and the chips with bigger cache size don't need
to read as often from the main memory. the cache size makes a staggering
difference since it is often at the same frequency as the CPU.
cache bus width:
Everything but the alpha has a 64bit cache bus, the alpha's is 128bit and
error checking to boot!
cache frequency:
Most chips have 2 seperate chip caches, most pc cpus have them on the same
die as the CPU and running at full speed. The 'L1' cache is usually only
about 8k-64k is always is at full speed. The 'L2' cahce is usually much
bigger, although the P4 has a very small (64k) one. The speed of the L2
is as follows:
P3/P4/K7(thunderbird) full speed, G4 200Mhz-350Mhz, Alpha 333Mhz
dunno on the sparc.
the frequency is not only a contributor to the cache bandwith, but also the
cache latency. if your cache is half speed you'll have to wait another cycle
to pull data from it.
cache size:
k7 512kb, p3 256kb, p4 64kb, p3 xeon 512-2048kb, alpha up to 8MB, g4 512kb
memory latency:
memory subsystems are another level of wait on the data you're after in the
cpu. it usually takes a few cycles to get data from memory, how long
is determined by CAS and RAS latencies, usually between 2 and 3 on each.
memory frequency:
RDRAM (some p3 and all p4) has 400-800Mhz.
athlon has 133Mhz ddr (266Mhz effective)
g4 has 100Mhz
alpha has 100Mhz but 4 controllers
memory bandwidth:
64bits, the alphas have 4 simultaneous memory controllers, the HeSL P3 chipset
has 2. i think sparcs have it controlled on a per chip basis. all others
have 1 64bit path.
well folks, there are some numbers that have nothing to do with the way the
cpu works or the benefits of multiple instructions per clock, but the system
architecture surrounding the chip is just as, if not more importanct, to the
system's performance than the operation of the chip itself.
CPU architecture:
ok, here's where my (half-hearted) research breaks down,
branch prediction, pipeline length, concurrent instructions/instructions per
cycle, fetches per cycle, and a bunch of other factors come in to play with
assessing the CPU architecture efficiency.
The g4 really stands out because of its super short pipeline on the 500Mhz
and lower models at like 5(?) stages, the p4 on the otherhand is at a
staggeringly high 20+ pipeline. the shorter the pipeline the shorter cache
and memory delays are, and the smaller the misprediction penalty is. on the
down side, it's usually hard to reach high clock speeds. most chips are in
the 9-15 range for cpu pipeline.
concurrent instruction is the realm of MMX, 3dnow, SSE2, and altivec.
the g4's altivec unit gives the largest improvement, but the use of
concurrent instructions is mostly useful in the context of 3d graphics, and
much of the work is now being offloaded to the graphics chips.
but back to the question, for a laptop, p3 is your only real option, even
though it's only real strong point is its clock frequency, its clock *is* twice as
high any of your options, which is certainly enough to make it the notebook
cpu champ. maybe, just maybe, if your specific applications lend themselves
to optimization for the altivec unit the g4 500 would be dethrown the p3.
if i were you, i would lie to myself and say the g4 was my best bet and then
i would have a great excuse to pick up a titanium powerbook.
IBM can build big-ass proprietary servers and deploy them for customers while still using standard software products. Big deal for IBM since lunix is now a well respected server operating system. Easy to port software to and easy to market.
So, you can see this as yes IBM is scratching an itch, but at the same time making lunix more available in the high-end enterprise environment.
and this is obviously a problem that isn't going away. i predict all americans are going to start driving around 40 year old vans.
jesus christ man, it's pretty fucking clear to me that new cars will gradually replace old cars. it's not a super-complex concept, and you can see it happening throughout the history on cars, and just about everything else for that matter.
LCDs have more disadvantages than you mention. It takes a while for the pixels to switch color, which can leave an unsightly bleed in high contrast animation. while the sharpness on a still picture is obviously sharper than a CRT at the same resolution a good CRT doesn't have as bad of motion blur, which i would classify as a sharpness problem.
so, in a way, the sharpness of an LCD is way better in some ways, and slightly worse in others.
so... i'm guessing i'm just saying you shouldn't come off so harsh on people criticizing the sharpness of LCDs, because they DO have a problem with sharpness.
with XFree86-4 if it supports 1 of the #9 cards it should be able to use 2 of them just as easily. supporting dual head is only difficult if it has to support dual head output from 1 graphics chip. (like the Matrox G400/G450 and Geforce 2 MX.)
one thing to note about the the SGI displays, they aren't actually DVI, but instead are a format called OpenLDI, i don't know if they are compatable.
non-profit development makes good sense to me. non-profit supporting of idiots doesn't seem near as fun or as appealing. in the commercial world programmers don't support the users of user level applications. i don't know why anyone would expect opensource developers to waste their time on the annoyance. for profit? the users don't want to buy a support contract.
the licence can't keep people from breaking the law. and the GPL isn't a 'free for non-commercial use' licence. the behavior described in the troll you linked to is perfectly legal provided they do not distribute the package that has your source code. if they do violate that then they have broken the licence agreement. finding the infraction really has nothing to do with the type of licence it used.
The reason a software writer is not able to use/link with GPL code is not a technical difficulty. The authors of the GPL'd software EXPRESSLY FORBID them from doing it. The people who release GPL only, do so to make the developers who use freer licences reinvent the wheel. There is a certain amount of a 'sticking it to the man' feeling with GPL software, however, they are sticking it to the developers who write free software that is even free to other software writers.
I for one have always thought transferring copyright to the FSF was a bad idea. If someone violates the copyright you are no longer able to sue for damages. Where is the gain for you in having the FSF keep people from using your source? It makes way more sense for you to put yourself in a position to charge people money if they wish to use your source in ways contrary to its public licencing.
gov't websites need to present data in an accessable format..txt pages would do that fine, html would do it fine. flashy garbage wouldn't, it's that simple.
if you honestly believe the k6 series is as good as the p2 or p3 you are seriously misinformed. At first i thought we were a troll, but you probably aren't. most of what you say is correct, but you don't come off all that well when you start out by praising the k6 series chips.
That would be completely pointless. Linux on sparc is stupid, bsd just as stupid. The only reason sun is supportive of linux is for the good karma. That way if sysadmins used to linux need a truly powerful server they can buy a high end sparc, even then they would run solaris on it, solaris was designed to scale.
Sun hardware is really expensive, buying it to run linux on just to be severely outperformed by contemporary PCs isn't a good idea. High end Linux-Alpha machines makes more sense. It's just that sun(solaris on sparc) is extremely reliable and scales well at the high end.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many factors in the equation of a system's computational speed.
in this discourse by alpha i mean 21264 and will make distinctions between
p3/p4 and k7 where applicable, i am uncertain on most of the numbers for
sparc (UltraSPARC III) chips.
processer frequency:
x86's strongest point, followed by alpha, then sparc, then g4
(well, that might be a little out of order, and don't put too much stock in
just the frequency anyway, it's simply one component of the system speed)
system bus width:
most processors share this bus with the memory bus but not with the cache
bus. It is usually 64bit wide but at differing frequencies on different archs.
The p3 and the g4 have a 100Mhz bus, the K7 has a 133Mhz DDR(266 effective),
the alpha has a 333Mhz bus, and i can't find relevant literature of the
UltraSPARC III.
to the best of my knowledge all of these chips have a 64bit system bus
the system bus is where disk drive controllers and pci/agp etc reside.
memory bus width:
P3/P4/K7, G4, and alpha share this bus with the system bus, the sparc chips,
i believe, do not. one thing of note about the alpha, it has 4 seperate
memory controllers that talk down the same bus, so even if though it uses
100 MHz SDRAM, it can completely fill the 333Mhz bus.
a lot of crazy stuff comes in to play in the memory bus if you have an
excessively SMP machine, sparcs have on chip memory controllers and can
access the memory easily, and the chips with bigger cache size don't need
to read as often from the main memory. the cache size makes a staggering
difference since it is often at the same frequency as the CPU.
cache bus width:
Everything but the alpha has a 64bit cache bus, the alpha's is 128bit and
error checking to boot!
cache frequency:
Most chips have 2 seperate chip caches, most pc cpus have them on the same
die as the CPU and running at full speed. The 'L1' cache is usually only
about 8k-64k is always is at full speed. The 'L2' cahce is usually much
bigger, although the P4 has a very small (64k) one. The speed of the L2
is as follows:
P3/P4/K7(thunderbird) full speed, G4 200Mhz-350Mhz, Alpha 333Mhz
dunno on the sparc.
the frequency is not only a contributor to the cache bandwith, but also the
cache latency. if your cache is half speed you'll have to wait another cycle
to pull data from it.
cache size:
k7 512kb, p3 256kb, p4 64kb, p3 xeon 512-2048kb, alpha up to 8MB, g4 512kb
memory latency:
memory subsystems are another level of wait on the data you're after in the
cpu. it usually takes a few cycles to get data from memory, how long
is determined by CAS and RAS latencies, usually between 2 and 3 on each.
memory frequency:
RDRAM (some p3 and all p4) has 400-800Mhz.
athlon has 133Mhz ddr (266Mhz effective)
g4 has 100Mhz
alpha has 100Mhz but 4 controllers
memory bandwidth:
64bits, the alphas have 4 simultaneous memory controllers, the HeSL P3 chipset
has 2. i think sparcs have it controlled on a per chip basis. all others
have 1 64bit path.
well folks, there are some numbers that have nothing to do with the way the
cpu works or the benefits of multiple instructions per clock, but the system
architecture surrounding the chip is just as, if not more importanct, to the
system's performance than the operation of the chip itself.
CPU architecture:
ok, here's where my (half-hearted) research breaks down,
branch prediction, pipeline length, concurrent instructions/instructions per
cycle, fetches per cycle, and a bunch of other factors come in to play with
assessing the CPU architecture efficiency.
The g4 really stands out because of its super short pipeline on the 500Mhz
and lower models at like 5(?) stages, the p4 on the otherhand is at a
staggeringly high 20+ pipeline. the shorter the pipeline the shorter cache
and memory delays are, and the smaller the misprediction penalty is. on the
down side, it's usually hard to reach high clock speeds. most chips are in
the 9-15 range for cpu pipeline.
concurrent instruction is the realm of MMX, 3dnow, SSE2, and altivec.
the g4's altivec unit gives the largest improvement, but the use of
concurrent instructions is mostly useful in the context of 3d graphics, and
much of the work is now being offloaded to the graphics chips.
but back to the question, for a laptop, p3 is your only real option, even
though it's only real strong point is its clock frequency, its clock *is* twice as
high any of your options, which is certainly enough to make it the notebook
cpu champ. maybe, just maybe, if your specific applications lend themselves
to optimization for the altivec unit the g4 500 would be dethrown the p3.
if i were you, i would lie to myself and say the g4 was my best bet and then
i would have a great excuse to pick up a titanium powerbook.
good flame, now you just need to fix your sig so you can be taken seriously.
is if you would read the article before replying and see how the topic is explicitly covered.
i was referencing some Jeff K stuff.
i suppose the moderators are gone by now, here's the link ;)
USAR FREINDLEY
and this strip in particular
IBM can build big-ass proprietary servers and deploy them for customers while still using standard software products. Big deal for IBM since lunix is now a well respected server operating system. Easy to port software to and easy to market.
So, you can see this as yes IBM is scratching an itch, but at the same time making lunix more available in the high-end enterprise environment.
and this is obviously a problem that isn't going away. i predict all americans are going to start driving around 40 year old vans.
jesus christ man, it's pretty fucking clear to me that new cars will gradually replace old cars. it's not a super-complex concept, and you can see it happening throughout the history on cars, and just about everything else for that matter.
what the hell ever gave you the idea that you were the copyright holder?
LCDs have more disadvantages than you mention. It takes a while for the pixels to switch color, which can leave an unsightly bleed in high contrast animation. while the sharpness on a still picture is obviously sharper than a CRT at the same resolution a good CRT doesn't have as bad of motion blur, which i would classify as a sharpness problem.
so, in a way, the sharpness of an LCD is way better in some ways, and slightly worse in others.
so... i'm guessing i'm just saying you shouldn't come off so harsh on people criticizing the sharpness of LCDs, because they DO have a problem with sharpness.
with XFree86-4 if it supports 1 of the #9 cards it should be able to use 2 of them just as easily. supporting dual head is only difficult if it has to support dual head output from 1 graphics chip. (like the Matrox G400/G450 and Geforce 2 MX.)
one thing to note about the the SGI displays, they aren't actually DVI, but instead are a format called OpenLDI, i don't know if they are compatable.
You can buy them in a package with a PCI Number 9 revolution IV and the whole kit can be found for less than $1400(US).
Almost all computer have a couple PCI ports open, and unless you're doing fast texture writes it's really not much slower than AGP.
We're really thinking about rolling these out as the standard dual-head setup at my workplace to cut down on eye strain and electricity costs.
wang made monitors as well, i have a 12 inch wang here.
only 4 color black and white, but it works ok.
non-profit development makes good sense to me. non-profit supporting of idiots doesn't seem near as fun or as appealing. in the commercial world programmers don't support the users of user level applications. i don't know why anyone would expect opensource developers to waste their time on the annoyance. for profit? the users don't want to buy a support contract.
cry me a fucking river.
supporting morons is so fun, i can't see why developers wouldn't want to do LOTS of it.
the licence can't keep people from breaking the law. and the GPL isn't a 'free for non-commercial use' licence. the behavior described in the troll you linked to is perfectly legal provided they do not distribute the package that has your source code. if they do violate that then they have broken the licence agreement. finding the infraction really has nothing to do with the type of licence it used.
they only have to distribute thier code if they modify the code and redistribute the software.
this question is so pooryl imformed it sounds like a troll... maybe do a little bit of research and reading if you want your questions answered.
The reason a software writer is not able to use/link with GPL code is not a technical difficulty. The authors of the GPL'd software EXPRESSLY FORBID them from doing it. The people who release GPL only, do so to make the developers who use freer licences reinvent the wheel. There is a certain amount of a 'sticking it to the man' feeling with GPL software, however, they are sticking it to the developers who write free software that is even free to other software writers.
I for one have always thought transferring copyright to the FSF was a bad idea. If someone violates the copyright you are no longer able to sue for damages. Where is the gain for you in having the FSF keep people from using your source? It makes way more sense for you to put yourself in a position to charge people money if they wish to use your source in ways contrary to its public licencing.
...I will buy you a beer.
Lot's of people feel this way, but it's not popular, so it will just stay repressed. oh well, slapdash is by the sheep, for the sheep, anyway.
try altavista text mode, it loads a little faster for me actually.
http://www.altavista.com/query?text=on
are you really that stupid?
.txt pages would do that fine, html would do it fine. flashy garbage wouldn't, it's that simple.
gov't websites need to present data in an accessable format.
an offtopic post in an open forum! oh the humanity! what ever shall we do?
thank you, i was about to do a post with random bolds myself :)
if you honestly believe the k6 series is as good as the p2 or p3 you are seriously misinformed. At first i thought we were a troll, but you probably aren't. most of what you say is correct, but you don't come off all that well when you start out by praising the k6 series chips.
i'm guessing you can do that yourself, it runs linux.
That would be completely pointless. Linux on sparc is stupid, bsd just as stupid. The only reason sun is supportive of linux is for the good karma. That way if sysadmins used to linux need a truly powerful server they can buy a high end sparc, even then they would run solaris on it, solaris was designed to scale.
Sun hardware is really expensive, buying it to run linux on just to be severely outperformed by contemporary PCs isn't a good idea. High end Linux-Alpha machines makes more sense. It's just that sun(solaris on sparc) is extremely reliable and scales well at the high end.