That's a bit oversimplified, though. As clocksped increases to modern numbers, like 1.5GHz, other factors come into play in a large way besides just CPU speed. What if the memory bandwidth is great for an 800MHz Clawhammer but is a huge bottleneck with a 1600MHz Clawhammer?
For a good example, compare an AthlonXP 2100+ in a KT333 board and then in any 133MHz SDRAM board. There will be as much as a whopping 30% overall performance difference, and that's with the exact same CPU!
Life will be very interestng for Intel if the Clawhammer/Opteron scale that well, though.;-)
A) How difficult was it to port the software? What was the most difficult? The least? Why?
B) How fast does it compile compared to an AthlonXP?
C) Does it look like GCC will be reasonably good at optimizing for the Athlon64 such that the actual performance increase is reasonably close to the theoretical (whatever the theoretical might be)?
As was said earlier, a new architecture is nice, but hardware geeks were hoping for one that was better than current high-tech architectures like Alpha, or at least an architecture that is not worse. So far, the IA64 looks pretty pathetic, runs as hot as an active volcano, and hasn't managed to eclipse the architectures that it was meant to obliterate.
Besides, alot of the old x86 design lemons are popping up as lemonade. The x86's variable instruction width, widely considered a horrible idea, makes code for the Opteron about 5% larger rather than nearly twice the size.
There once was a troll found on slashdot Whose posts made him seem like a crackpot Something's wrong with his head Screaming BSD's dead Thanks to Darwin it's just hit the jackpot
Speaking of poor quality electronics, just an "FYI" for anyone considering getting a Panasonic Gigarange telephone. I have had one, a former roomate had a different model with answering machine, and my uncle had one. ALL have died within a year, mine within 5 months. These are extremely expensive phones with great range and sound quality but a very short lifespan. If you get one, be sure to pick it up from a place like Best Buy and get the extended warranty! You have been warned!
I ran a BBS called "Alternate Reality" in Idaho, USA> It had a whole two nodes which were busy 24/7. I really liked the more personal feel of BBS systems--when someone logged on, chances are they weren't in a different hemisphere and that you could actually meet them in real life(tm), if you hadn't already. Few people posted trolls or space filler messages on the boards because their names were know, their numbers could be traced, and my BBS required phone call verification of accounts. The online games were nice because most of the players were probably friends that you could call without spending huge amounts on long distance. You could gloat over killing somebody's LORD character or firing a Gooie Kablooie (sp?) at their empire in Barren Realms Elite.
What is the story of some of the BBSs that other slashdotters have run? It would be interesting to see someone on Slashdot that ran a BBS I logged into many years ago.
I haven't used an Intel chip since a Pentium MMX 200MHz. Not that I have anything against Intel chips, they are engineered very well (with a few exceptions), but AMDs are generally faster. At the moment, other than in very FPU oriented code, the Athlon is not the fastest, though I am sure AMD will leapfrog Intel only to be leapfrogged themselves a few weeks/months later. With that out of the way, there are many individuals and companies and even Anandtech, possibly the most respected hardware site on the web, running Athlons with no problems. There have indeed been problems in the past, mostly due to a certain company whose name starts with 'V' and ends with 'A' and their chipsets, but even those problems have been worked out. Anyway, AMD does make chipsets for their platforms, and they are consistantly outstanding in stability. My 1st generation Tyan TigerMP based on the AMD 760MP chipset has never once crashed, at all, even in Windows 2000. I have run it to the ground with three video cards, games, 3D modelling software, compiling big projects (like FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, KDE3, etc.) and have run two copies of SETI@Home in the background at all times. AMD chips do not have incompatibility issued. AMD chips do not crash. Nor do Intels. Yes, there have been very obscure problems in the past with both, such as Intel's 1.13GHz P3 and AMD's very old K6's that didn't like a system to have >40MB of RAM, but those are past. The secret is to use good components. There are many opinions and recommendations out there, most of which are bullshit. Find some sites and friends that you trust, and verify their claims. I have found that most people, including myself, are full of shit and that most websites, even the most respected such as Tom's Hardware, are completely full of BS. Make it a hobby--keeping up with hardware. It helps. For the record, I use Antec and PC Power & Cooling power supplies, Antec cases, Plextor SCSI CD-ROMs, Adaptec low-end controllers and Mylex higher end ones, MSI-ASUS-and Tyan motherboards (though you must go with the specific model, all companies have duds), Corsair memory, Matrox and ELSA video cards (Gainward Geforce cards for gaming systems), Samsung & Maxtor IDE hard drives, Maxtor and Seagate SCSI hard drives, and I have yet to find a soundcard that does not suck. (if you have any suggestions, let me know!) Do not take my word on ANY of these parts, though. As I said, I am probably full of shit, so you should verify anything under consideration on your own. Just how you verify it is where you need to get creative.:-)
(disclaimer: I'm not saying you do not know what you are doing, but obviously a mistake was made at some point building your system that caused instability. Be it hardware or software, I do not know)
Searches take entirely too long (about ten seconds. May not seem like alot, but it adds up) and the main page is Flash galore. You are also redirected immediately when you enter, so you have to hit "back" *realfast* to get back to Slashdot. The idea of presenting results as a web is kinda neat, but it ends at "kinda neat." The results are confusing and look disturbingly similar to the area of the computer tables behind my three computers--everything interconnected and difficult to follow.
I commend them on creating an original and refreshingly different idea in search engines, but I doubt Google has anything to worry about.
I do not use RDRAM. Not that I do not like its performance, thought that advantage is reduced when you use many modules because of its serialization, but because Rambus--the company--is nearly as evil as Microsoft. I'm not one to require all companies that I purchase from are ethical, else I would have to be a hermit, but Rambus has gone too far too many times. What gall a company must have to participate in open meetings of industry to discuss what to put inthe next few memory standards, without contributing, and then PATENT other peoples' ideas! Then to charge those same companies royalties to use their own innovations! Sickening! Here is a good, short article. I'm too lazy right now to write the html code. Sorry.:) http://www.theregus.com/content/archive/18849. html
Sim Standing Guard in the Rain will be a downloadable photograph with instructions that read: "Watch this photo for four hours and/DO NOT/ fall asleep!"
Any one of these markets could collapse at any time and many look like those who hold the jobs command such high salaries becasue they are fairly obscure. Make a note of what happened to those who started their CS education when programming was the "hot job" in '98 and '99.
"Is this the first post about Wolfram on a topic not about Wolfram... and is this going to continue. That reminds me: How about a Beowulf Cluster of these things.:)"
Yes, imagine that. A cluster of transistors. Get a "cluster" of several hundred nodes and you might even have a full adder!
I read the article. Several times. Perhaps I am just not very observant today, but what was the exact quote in which a Microsoft exec stated more or less that its code is so flawed that it could result in nat'l security compromises?
I read the following quotes in the article:
"It is no exaggeration to say that the national security is also implicated by the efforts of hackers to break into computing networks,"
"Computers, including many running Windows operating systems, are used throughout the United States Department of Defense and by the armed forces of the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere."
"Microsoft has invested substantial time and resources in providing great interoperability between.Net and older technologies"
"The fact that I even mentioned the Message Queuing thing bothers me"
Perhaps Techweb is offering a creative interpretation for the purpose of getting hits? Anyway, if anyone can find a source for such a quote, please let me and everyone else know as I could add it to my "Why Microsoft sucks" archive of data.:)
Nintendo has been in business longer than Sony and Microsoft combined, started in 1889
Nintendo has two painfully profitable cards in it's hand, Poke'mon and the Game Boy series. The gameboy, by the way, is the best selling console in history, and the GBA's compatibility with the Gamecube along with it's excellent hardware and large set of successful games from the SNES ready to be ported in addition to new games isn't going to hurt it any.
Then consider their other franchises. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc. These are some of the most profitable franchises of ANY company, and for good reason. Anyone who contests the creative genius that has gone into any in those series is a bitter, blind fan of mindless action games. Even if you didn't like, say, Mario64, you have to admit that it had easily some of the most creative web design ever to exist, even today.
It was said during the peak of the Sega Genesis that Sega would take over the market and Nintendo would die. Now Sega is Nintendo's bitch making games for their former competitor's consoles.
Even the Playstation, Sony's ultra successful system, was a spawn of Nintendo as it is based on the SNES CD-ROM drive that Nintendo never released after they saw how useless it was for Sega.
Don't count them out because of their lack of hype. Hype costs money, and while Sony and MS are quietly spending millions in a war, Nintendo is in the background raking in the dough.
A large company spending large sums of cash to actually improve their product? Their service? Kudos to them for doing this rather than spending the money on more marketing BS.
We don't necessarily have to reduce transistor size to improve ICs. We can, at least as an interim technology, use a better semiconductor than the dirt cheap but fairly mediocre "Silicon" that has been in use for decades.
What about gallium arsenide? Crays used to use this, as did many other supercomputers. Sure, it would make your processor poisonous but it's a small price to pay. Who licks their CPU more than a few times a week anyway?
What about Germanium? Germanium is an excellent... though fairly expensive semiconductor.
IBM has made incredible progress actually creating a hybrid semiconductor of silicon and germanium, which can be read about briefly here
Has there ever really been a time in which electronics engineers have been stuck such that computer technology could not advance? No, but there have been many, many times in which there were predictions about how the limits of a technology would stop everything up X years downthe road. While this is a good thing, because R&D firms start trying to find the next big thing before it is already needed, does anyone really believe that in ten years we will have no means to increase the number of transistors (or whatever is used then) to improve what they are used in?
If this isn't a great example of how the OSS model of security (many eyes find many bugs) works, even outside of software development, I don't know what is.
I think that the discovery of an alien life form on another planet, even so simple as bacteria, is far more interesting and important than being overly cautious about the slim possibility that bacteria that have a slim chance of existing might be able to somehow make it back to earth and, along with all of that, be able to infect or damage life on earth in some way. Most of even Earth's native bacteria are innocuous. This is just being paranoid.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, AMD have *not* "left behind ancient software and hardware". DOS will still run fast on Hammer :-).
"Nobody will ever need more than 18,446,744,073,709,551K of memory!"
That's a bit oversimplified, though. As clocksped increases to modern numbers, like 1.5GHz, other factors come into play in a large way besides just CPU speed. What if the memory bandwidth is great for an 800MHz Clawhammer but is a huge bottleneck with a 1600MHz Clawhammer?
;-)
For a good example, compare an AthlonXP 2100+ in a KT333 board and then in any 133MHz SDRAM board. There will be as much as a whopping 30% overall performance difference, and that's with the exact same CPU!
Life will be very interestng for Intel if the Clawhammer/Opteron scale that well, though.
Sure, sounds great:
;-)
A) How difficult was it to port the software? What was the most difficult? The least? Why?
B) How fast does it compile compared to an AthlonXP?
C) Does it look like GCC will be reasonably good at optimizing for the Athlon64 such that the actual performance increase is reasonably close to the theoretical (whatever the theoretical might be)?
D) Need any help?
Please, do a little more research, or read messages which explain this several times, before criticizing.
The Clawhammer is NOT designed for the server market, but for the consumer market (where the majority of income is derived from)
Were this a comparison of a quad Opteron system, then a comparison with the Itanium would be a good idea.
Also note that Intel markets the Xeon, which is a Pentium IV, as a server chip--and it outperforms the Itanium in nearly every benchmark.
You might be interested in checking out www.faceintel.com
Right, after all nobody will ever need more than 640K of memory....
As was said earlier, a new architecture is nice, but hardware geeks were hoping for one that was better than current high-tech architectures like Alpha, or at least an architecture that is not worse. So far, the IA64 looks pretty pathetic, runs as hot as an active volcano, and hasn't managed to eclipse the architectures that it was meant to obliterate.
Besides, alot of the old x86 design lemons are popping up as lemonade. The x86's variable instruction width, widely considered a horrible idea, makes code for the Opteron about 5% larger rather than nearly twice the size.
The following is by !me:
There once was a troll found on slashdot
Whose posts made him seem like a crackpot
Something's wrong with his head
Screaming BSD's dead
Thanks to Darwin it's just hit the jackpot
Speaking of poor quality electronics, just an "FYI" for anyone considering getting a Panasonic Gigarange telephone. I have had one, a former roomate had a different model with answering machine, and my uncle had one. ALL have died within a year, mine within 5 months. These are extremely expensive phones with great range and sound quality but a very short lifespan.
If you get one, be sure to pick it up from a place like Best Buy and get the extended warranty! You have been warned!
I ran a BBS called "Alternate Reality" in Idaho, USA> It had a whole two nodes which were busy 24/7. I really liked the more personal feel of BBS systems--when someone logged on, chances are they weren't in a different hemisphere and that you could actually meet them in real life(tm), if you hadn't already.
Few people posted trolls or space filler messages on the boards because their names were know, their numbers could be traced, and my BBS required phone call verification of accounts.
The online games were nice because most of the players were probably friends that you could call without spending huge amounts on long distance. You could gloat over killing somebody's LORD character or firing a Gooie Kablooie (sp?) at their empire in Barren Realms Elite.
What is the story of some of the BBSs that other slashdotters have run? It would be interesting to see someone on Slashdot that ran a BBS I logged into many years ago.
I haven't used an Intel chip since a Pentium MMX 200MHz. Not that I have anything against Intel chips, they are engineered very well (with a few exceptions), but AMDs are generally faster. At the moment, other than in very FPU oriented code, the Athlon is not the fastest, though I am sure AMD will leapfrog Intel only to be leapfrogged themselves a few weeks/months later. :-)
With that out of the way, there are many individuals and companies and even Anandtech, possibly the most respected hardware site on the web, running Athlons with no problems. There have indeed been problems in the past, mostly due to a certain company whose name starts with 'V' and ends with 'A' and their chipsets, but even those problems have been worked out.
Anyway, AMD does make chipsets for their platforms, and they are consistantly outstanding in stability. My 1st generation Tyan TigerMP based on the AMD 760MP chipset has never once crashed, at all, even in Windows 2000. I have run it to the ground with three video cards, games, 3D modelling software, compiling big projects (like FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, KDE3, etc.) and have run two copies of SETI@Home in the background at all times.
AMD chips do not have incompatibility issued. AMD chips do not crash. Nor do Intels. Yes, there have been very obscure problems in the past with both, such as Intel's 1.13GHz P3 and AMD's very old K6's that didn't like a system to have >40MB of RAM, but those are past.
The secret is to use good components. There are many opinions and recommendations out there, most of which are bullshit. Find some sites and friends that you trust, and verify their claims. I have found that most people, including myself, are full of shit and that most websites, even the most respected such as Tom's Hardware, are completely full of BS. Make it a hobby--keeping up with hardware. It helps. For the record, I use Antec and PC Power & Cooling power supplies, Antec cases, Plextor SCSI CD-ROMs, Adaptec low-end controllers and Mylex higher end ones, MSI-ASUS-and Tyan motherboards (though you must go with the specific model, all companies have duds), Corsair memory, Matrox and ELSA video cards (Gainward Geforce cards for gaming systems), Samsung & Maxtor IDE hard drives, Maxtor and Seagate SCSI hard drives, and I have yet to find a soundcard that does not suck. (if you have any suggestions, let me know!)
Do not take my word on ANY of these parts, though. As I said, I am probably full of shit, so you should verify anything under consideration on your own. Just how you verify it is where you need to get creative.
(disclaimer: I'm not saying you do not know what you are doing, but obviously a mistake was made at some point building your system that caused instability. Be it hardware or software, I do not know)
Searches take entirely too long (about ten seconds. May not seem like alot, but it adds up) and the main page is Flash galore. You are also redirected immediately when you enter, so you have to hit "back" *realfast* to get back to Slashdot. The idea of presenting results as a web is kinda neat, but it ends at "kinda neat." The results are confusing and look disturbingly similar to the area of the computer tables behind my three computers--everything interconnected and difficult to follow.
I commend them on creating an original and refreshingly different idea in search engines, but I doubt Google has anything to worry about.
At least they run Linux
"You can't trademark real words."
Like "Windows"? "Word"?
I do not use RDRAM. Not that I do not like its performance, thought that advantage is reduced when you use many modules because of its serialization, but because Rambus--the company--is nearly as evil as Microsoft. :). html
I'm not one to require all companies that I purchase from are ethical, else I would have to be a hermit, but Rambus has gone too far too many times.
What gall a company must have to participate in open meetings of industry to discuss what to put inthe next few memory standards, without contributing, and then PATENT other peoples' ideas! Then to charge those same companies royalties to use their own innovations! Sickening!
Here is a good, short article. I'm too lazy right now to write the html code. Sorry.
http://www.theregus.com/content/archive/18849
Sim Standing Guard in the Rain will be a downloadable photograph with instructions that read: "Watch this photo for four hours and /DO NOT/ fall asleep!"
News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
Any one of these markets could collapse at any time and many look like those who hold the jobs command such high salaries becasue they are fairly obscure.
Make a note of what happened to those who started their CS education when programming was the "hot job" in '98 and '99.
Soesn't seem quite so hot?
"Is this the first post about Wolfram on a topic not about Wolfram... and is this going to continue. That reminds me: How about a Beowulf Cluster of these things. :)"
Yes, imagine that. A cluster of transistors.
Get a "cluster" of several hundred nodes and you might even have a full adder!
I read the article. Several times. Perhaps I am just not very observant today, but what was the exact quote in which a Microsoft exec stated more or less that its code is so flawed that it could result in nat'l security compromises?
.Net and older technologies"
:)
I read the following quotes in the article:
"It is no exaggeration to say that the national security is also implicated by the efforts of hackers to break into computing networks,"
"Computers, including many running Windows operating systems, are used throughout the United States Department of Defense and by the armed forces of the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere."
"Microsoft has invested substantial time and resources in providing great interoperability between
"Sun's strategy of promoting '100 percent pure' Java applications discourages interoperability."
(Ha! Whatever)
"The fact that I even mentioned the Message Queuing thing bothers me"
Perhaps Techweb is offering a creative interpretation for the purpose of getting hits?
Anyway, if anyone can find a source for such a quote, please let me and everyone else know as I could add it to my "Why Microsoft sucks" archive of data.
That is a foolish statement if I ever heard one.
Nintendo has been in business longer than Sony and Microsoft combined, started in 1889
Nintendo has two painfully profitable cards in it's hand, Poke'mon and the Game Boy series. The gameboy, by the way, is the best selling console in history, and the GBA's compatibility with the Gamecube along with it's excellent hardware and large set of successful games from the SNES ready to be ported in addition to new games isn't going to hurt it any.
Then consider their other franchises. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc. These are some of the most profitable franchises of ANY company, and for good reason. Anyone who contests the creative genius that has gone into any in those series is a bitter, blind fan of mindless action games. Even if you didn't like, say, Mario64, you have to admit that it had easily some of the most creative web design ever to exist, even today.
It was said during the peak of the Sega Genesis that Sega would take over the market and Nintendo would die. Now Sega is Nintendo's bitch making games for their former competitor's consoles.
Even the Playstation, Sony's ultra successful system, was a spawn of Nintendo as it is based on the SNES CD-ROM drive that Nintendo never released after they saw how useless it was for Sega.
Don't count them out because of their lack of hype. Hype costs money, and while Sony and MS are quietly spending millions in a war, Nintendo is in the background raking in the dough.
Obsolete
t e
Date: 1579
1 a : no longer in use or no longer useful
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=obsole
That doesn't seem to apply to the Playstation.
A large company spending large sums of cash to actually improve their product? Their service? Kudos to them for doing this rather than spending the money on more marketing BS.
We don't necessarily have to reduce transistor size to improve ICs. We can, at least as an interim technology, use a better semiconductor than the dirt cheap but fairly mediocre "Silicon" that has been in use for decades.
... though fairly expensive semiconductor.
What about gallium arsenide? Crays used to use this, as did many other supercomputers. Sure, it would make your processor poisonous but it's a small price to pay. Who licks their CPU more than a few times a week anyway?
What about Germanium? Germanium is an excellent
IBM has made incredible progress actually creating a hybrid semiconductor of silicon and germanium, which can be read about briefly here
Has there ever really been a time in which electronics engineers have been stuck such that computer technology could not advance? No, but there have been many, many times in which there were predictions about how the limits of a technology would stop everything up X years downthe road. While this is a good thing, because R&D firms start trying to find the next big thing before it is already needed, does anyone really believe that in ten years we will have no means to increase the number of transistors (or whatever is used then) to improve what they are used in?
If this isn't a great example of how the OSS model of security (many eyes find many bugs) works, even outside of software development, I don't know what is.
I think that the discovery of an alien life form on another planet, even so simple as bacteria, is far more interesting and important than being overly cautious about the slim possibility that bacteria that have a slim chance of existing might be able to somehow make it back to earth and, along with all of that, be able to infect or damage life on earth in some way.
Most of even Earth's native bacteria are innocuous. This is just being paranoid.