Just to clear something up, the chipset has nothing to do with cache support. The 512k 1/2 speed L2 is on the Athlon itself, but the processor supports up to 8mb full speed (some reports say 16mb, but I've yet to see that verified). You just need AMD to start producing ones with more cache on chip. The Athlon Ultra might very well be released by December which is slated to be a version/w 2mb full speed L2 which should be pretty nice.
While we're on the subject...just what do people want out of chipsets these days anyway? Via's KX-133 Athlon chipset supports ATA-66, 4x AGP, and 133 MHz memory...sure it'd be nicer to have even faster memory, but let's wait until the mem companies actually have a product, no?
This makes sense to me. As a Palm OS developer, at one point someone from MS contacted me asking if I'd do WinCE ports. I told them "Probably not until the development environment is cheap/free". They basically said "ok" and then never talked to me again.
But frankly, this is really what's hampering WinCE . In order to develop apps you have to buy expensive MS tools, whereas on Palm OS, gcc is free.
I know I'll get accused of mixing free beer vs. free speech, but to MS there's no distinction really, so open sourcing the development tools is merely a way to provide them free and try to pick up WinCE ports of popular Palm OS apps to make them more competitive.
Intel didn't release ANY information about the Willamette (P7) at the Microprocessor Forum. Now, as much as people want speed, Intel also has shareholders to appease. If they knew about an impending P7 release, they'd have to make that knowledge public otherwise they'd be misleading shareholders to believe that the Coppermine is the Q4 1999 and Q1 2000 contender.
While we're on that subject. If Intel does paper release the P7 in December, they've pretty much signed the death certificate for the Coppermine and PIII line. Now Intel's a marketing genius (love them/hate them for their technology, but any company that can convince people they need a PIII for the Internet has strong marketing) so there's no way they'll throw away all those ad dollars on the PIII line quite yet.
The Register had been getting better, but this is reverting to their old self...
I'm far from a memory expert, but if I recall their statement is half true. I believe RAMBUS does have low latency after the initial latency. So that once it has started pumping data, it continues to do so fast, but I believe that initial latency is much higher than competing memory technologies.
As a Palm programmer, it's a little annoying that Handspring has not given out any details of the device out to programmers yet. Yes it will run Palm OS v3.1, but a problem that instantly jumps to mind is screen resolution details. Palm OS in theory supports devices with greater than 160x160 displays. No details have been released about the Handspring models and their capabilities...
I have a question. I have a relative with cancer (rather treatable, but requires radiation therapy). Now if I recall correctly, in some states (I don't know which offhand) this makes the use of marijuana legal to fend off the side effects of the radiation (at least this is my understanding).
Now, if I were to create a web page for the relative's benefit (as well as the family's) that linked to various sites about side effects, etc of legal marijuana use, I'd be subject to prosecution?
According to JC's PC News, SMP K7 boards should be available Q1 of 2000 (though I don't know if that'll be the 8-way boards). Also in his archives he has the K7 RC5 score using various cores (as there's no K7 core yet). It seems to get keyrates equivilent to a P6 core when using the P6 optimized code. Presumably the RC5 folks will make a K7 optimized version in the future though.
SMP will be available, but the first MB's probobably won't hit the shelves until the end of the year. With the EV6 bus, the SMP systems should be nice due to a dedicated 200 MHz+ bus between processors. We should see 2, 4, 8, and even 16-way K7's in 2000 (Poseidon Tech makes will be making the 16-way).
Also, Intel's about to disable the line on the Celeron that allows it to be used in SMP configs. Apprently the dual Socket 370 board ticked them off a little too much.
The Spec benchmarks were down with 1/3 speed L2, but the first shipping models will ship with 1/2 speed. Support exists for 1/5 -> full speed L2, it's just a matter of whether AMD will use the whole range.
The K7 will be released in 500, 550, and 600 MHz speed grades initially/w 1/2 speed L2 cache (off-die of course). There is support for slower L2 (1/3) and faster (full), but reportedly these will be the "low end" and "high end" versions of the chips designed to compete with the Celeron and Xeon respectively.
Since it's slashdotted, I'll post some more correct info here.
According to Ace's page a 550 MHz K7/w 512kb L2 cache running at 1/2 speed is compared to a 550 MHz PIII Xeon (not sure the cache size)/w SSE enhancements. Using that, the results are as follows:
SpecFP - 36% faster SpecInt - 6% faster
The 600 MHz K7 is of course faster, turning in something like 43% and 15% respectively, but a fair comparison is of like speeds.
I've seen a lot of discussion about the possibility of fingerprinting/watermarking a CD and or the MP3, but doesn't this allow only a single system to later play this MP3? This would mean you couldn't upgrade PC's, use it on your roomate's PC, or even transfer the file to the latest/greatest portable you just got if I'm understanding it correctly.
I tried 6.0 on a system. runsocks compiles, then segfaults consistenetly. Netscape dies upon meeting up with some complex Java....all this works fine on RH 5.2 and SuSE 6.0. It seems to be a library problem. Until it's straightened out, no RH 6.0 here.
I'm curious to hear if these are known issues/are there workarounds?
In actuallality, we're only capable of detecting radio transmissions of equal power to our own a few lightyears away (on the order of 20ly if I recall correctly) which is nothing in comparison to the size of the galaxy (100 million ly across).
I'll probably make the.prc (as well as the Perl script that it interfaces too on the Linux side) available once it actually does something more useful than what it does now, but unfortunately my time is split between quite a few things lately so it's not progressing as fast as I would have hoped.
To answer the other reply here, this is not a plugin to Winamp, though I suppose such a thing would be possible (I've experimented a little with using IBM's Viavoice to control Winamp via a program that takes advantage of Winamp's published API). I've found it's much much easier to do this in Linux because you really don't need a monitor, whereas with Windows it's nearly impossible to check up on what's going on w/o a monitor. On the Linux side you can throw a net card in the box and telenet in (if you're doing development) or even port the console to the serial port (perhaps the one you're not using to control MP3s with) and use your Pilot to check up on what's happening.
I've done something similar, but I use my PalmPilot (via a serial link to the Linux box) to act as the controller. The principle is that most of the time you're not changing what's playing, so it's not too much of a pain to use the Pilot as needed. Right now I just have stop/pause/skip, etc, and it plays the whole disk randomly otherwise. However, I plan to add the ability to select albums (each dir can be an album for instance).
I brought this to a party and connected it to a stereo and we had music for the whole night off 1 CD...it truely is cool.
What did come out of that test was that it is challenging for a big corporation to find all the necessary Linux tuning info. Whether they actually tried to or not is up for debate.
The questions that come up are: 1) Is there a good source for Linux tuning info in one consolidated place (even if it's just links elsewhere)? 2) If not, who's working to make one?
I'm sure this isn't a popular opinion here, but the fact is the Linux community should be banding together to address the problems that do exist rather than writing yet another piece on why the tests were invalid (which I agree they were).
Not only that, but take a look at the filesizes. The MS Audio format at equivilent bitrate is larger (albeit not by much).
I listened to the samples (all at the same bitrate) as well as the original.wav and he's dead on right, the MP3 does sound crisper and reproduces the stereo effect better.
Listening to the MS Audio 64k rate (which is indeed 1/2 the size of a MP3 at 128k) is literally painful.
What about more channels? I know it'll bug the audiophile purists, but what about a 5.1 encoding on audio discs? This alone almost makes the extra space all used up on a DVD if you add higher audio quality as well.
I agree to some extent, but I think there's a third possibility. I went to a state school that's very good in CS (it's in the top 10). Although on average the courses were useful from a pure intellectual perspective and on the whole interesting (the CS courses anyway, not the core requirements), they were not relevant to the real world and had very little practical applications associated with them. This is fine if you want to do CS research or something similar, but not all that great if you're looking for a professional career outside the educational system.
It's just a personal gripe. I do have a job in the CS field and it's fine, but I believe I got it mostly on the merit of what I did as "hobbies" not as course work. The piece of paper with the official degree on it was useful to the HR dept. of where I work, but that's about it.
A terrabyte for portable MP3 players? Does anyone have that much music? Doing some quick math and assuming 1 minute = 1 meg (although you'd probably use something better if you had this capacity).
You'd be able to store 1048576 minutes of music, or 17476.26666667 hours, which is 728.1777777778 days or (assuming 365 days per year), 1.99500761035 years of music on a single disk.
I don't think that's the most pratical application of this technology:-)
I refrained from commenting here until I saw a few articles posted under the new system. I must say that somethings I've seen rated high (3 or 4) today are clearly not worth it and make good content in the 1 range much harder to find. The old moderation system seemed to work pretty well and I actually enjoyed the comments posted these days, but now it's pretty much back to the old pre-moderation days (albeit with a little less noise).
Slashdot Mirror
Just to clear something up, the chipset has nothing to do with cache support. The 512k 1/2 speed L2 is on the Athlon itself, but the processor supports up to 8mb full speed (some reports say 16mb, but I've yet to see that verified). You just need AMD to start producing ones with more cache on chip. The Athlon Ultra might very well be released by December which is slated to be a version /w 2mb full speed L2 which should be pretty nice.
While we're on the subject...just what do people want out of chipsets these days anyway? Via's KX-133 Athlon chipset supports ATA-66, 4x AGP, and 133 MHz memory...sure it'd be nicer to have even faster memory, but let's wait until the mem companies actually have a product, no?
This makes sense to me. As a Palm OS developer, at one point someone from MS contacted me asking if I'd do WinCE ports. I told them "Probably not until the development environment is cheap/free". They basically said "ok" and then never talked to me again.
But frankly, this is really what's hampering WinCE . In order to develop apps you have to buy expensive MS tools, whereas on Palm OS, gcc is free.
I know I'll get accused of mixing free beer vs. free speech, but to MS there's no distinction really, so open sourcing the development tools is merely a way to provide them free and try to pick up WinCE ports of popular Palm OS apps to make them more competitive.
Intel didn't release ANY information about the Willamette (P7) at the Microprocessor Forum. Now, as much as people want speed, Intel also has shareholders to appease. If they knew about an impending P7 release, they'd have to make that knowledge public otherwise they'd be misleading shareholders to believe that the Coppermine is the Q4 1999 and Q1 2000 contender.
While we're on that subject. If Intel does paper release the P7 in December, they've pretty much signed the death certificate for the Coppermine and PIII line. Now Intel's a marketing genius (love them/hate them for their technology, but any company that can convince people they need a PIII for the Internet has strong marketing) so there's no way they'll throw away all those ad dollars on the PIII line quite yet.
The Register had been getting better, but this is reverting to their old self...
I'm far from a memory expert, but if I recall their statement is half true. I believe RAMBUS does have low latency after the initial latency. So that once it has started pumping data, it continues to do so fast, but I believe that initial latency is much higher than competing memory technologies.
As a Palm programmer, it's a little annoying that Handspring has not given out any details of the device out to programmers yet. Yes it will run Palm OS v3.1, but a problem that instantly jumps to mind is screen resolution details. Palm OS in theory supports devices with greater than 160x160 displays. No details have been released about the Handspring models and their capabilities...
I have a question. I have a relative with cancer (rather treatable, but requires radiation therapy). Now if I recall correctly, in some states (I don't know which offhand) this makes the use of marijuana legal to fend off the side effects of the radiation (at least this is my understanding).
Now, if I were to create a web page for the relative's benefit (as well as the family's) that linked to various sites about side effects, etc of legal marijuana use, I'd be subject to prosecution?
Does this make sense to anyone?
According to JC's PC News, SMP K7 boards should be available Q1 of 2000 (though I don't know if that'll be the 8-way boards). Also in his archives he has the K7 RC5 score using various cores (as there's no K7 core yet). It seems to get keyrates equivilent to a P6 core when using the P6 optimized code. Presumably the RC5 folks will make a K7 optimized version in the future though.
SMP will be available, but the first MB's probobably won't hit the shelves until the end of the year. With the EV6 bus, the SMP systems should be nice due to a dedicated 200 MHz+ bus between processors. We should see 2, 4, 8, and even 16-way K7's in 2000 (Poseidon Tech makes will be making the 16-way).
Also, Intel's about to disable the line on the Celeron that allows it to be used in SMP configs. Apprently the dual Socket 370 board ticked them off a little too much.
The Spec benchmarks were down with 1/3 speed L2, but the first shipping models will ship with 1/2 speed. Support exists for 1/5 -> full speed L2, it's just a matter of whether AMD will use the whole range.
There's some people complaining that they can't see the actual #'s, so here they are:
/w 1/3 speed (183 Mhz) L2 cache:
AMD K7 @ 550 MHz
SPECint_95 = 25.7
SPECfp_95 = 22.5
I haven't found a good list of x86 chips vs. #'s to compare, but if someone has them, feel free to post.
The K7 will be released in 500, 550, and 600 MHz speed grades initially /w 1/2 speed L2 cache (off-die of course). There is support for slower L2 (1/3) and faster (full), but reportedly these will be the "low end" and "high end" versions of the chips designed to compete with the Celeron and Xeon respectively.
Since it's slashdotted, I'll post some more correct info here.
/w 512kb L2 cache running at 1/2 speed is compared to a 550 MHz PIII Xeon (not sure the cache size) /w SSE enhancements. Using that, the results are as follows:
According to Ace's page a 550 MHz K7
SpecFP - 36% faster
SpecInt - 6% faster
The 600 MHz K7 is of course faster, turning in something like 43% and 15% respectively, but a fair comparison is of like speeds.
I've seen a lot of discussion about the possibility of fingerprinting/watermarking a CD and or the MP3, but doesn't this allow only a single system to later play this MP3? This would mean you couldn't upgrade PC's, use it on your roomate's PC, or even transfer the file to the latest/greatest portable you just got if I'm understanding it correctly.
In actuallity, Mission Valley might be one of the best. While they have several small theateres, they have a HUGE one as well.
With NCSU having graduated this past weekend, it might be clear too? (prolly not, but who knows)
You're of course correct. And thanks for the kind way of pointing it out.
I tried 6.0 on a system. runsocks compiles, then segfaults consistenetly. Netscape dies upon meeting up with some complex Java....all this works fine on RH 5.2 and SuSE 6.0. It seems to be a library problem. Until it's straightened out, no RH 6.0 here.
I'm curious to hear if these are known issues/are there workarounds?
In actuallality, we're only capable of detecting radio transmissions of equal power to our own a few lightyears away (on the order of 20ly if I recall correctly) which is nothing in comparison to the size of the galaxy (100 million ly across).
I'll probably make the .prc (as well as the Perl script that it interfaces too on the Linux side) available once it actually does something more useful than what it does now, but unfortunately my time is split between quite a few things lately so it's not progressing as fast as I would have hoped.
To answer the other reply here, this is not a plugin to Winamp, though I suppose such a thing would be possible (I've experimented a little with using IBM's Viavoice to control Winamp via a program that takes advantage of Winamp's published API). I've found it's much much easier to do this in Linux because you really don't need a monitor, whereas with Windows it's nearly impossible to check up on what's going on w/o a monitor. On the Linux side you can throw a net card in the box and telenet in (if you're doing development) or even port the console to the serial port (perhaps the one you're not using to control MP3s with) and use your Pilot to check up on what's happening.
I've done something similar, but I use my PalmPilot (via a serial link to the Linux box) to act as the controller. The principle is that most of the time you're not changing what's playing, so it's not too much of a pain to use the Pilot as needed. Right now I just have stop/pause/skip, etc, and it plays the whole disk randomly otherwise. However, I plan to add the ability to select albums (each dir can be an album for instance).
I brought this to a party and connected it to a stereo and we had music for the whole night off 1 CD...it truely is cool.
What did come out of that test was that it is challenging for a big corporation to find all the necessary Linux tuning info. Whether they actually tried to or not is up for debate.
The questions that come up are:
1) Is there a good source for Linux tuning info in one consolidated place (even if it's just links elsewhere)?
2) If not, who's working to make one?
I'm sure this isn't a popular opinion here, but the fact is the Linux community should be banding together to address the problems that do exist rather than writing yet another piece on why the tests were invalid (which I agree they were).
Not only that, but take a look at the filesizes. The MS Audio format at equivilent bitrate is larger (albeit not by much).
.wav and he's dead on right, the MP3 does sound crisper and reproduces the stereo effect better.
I listened to the samples (all at the same bitrate) as well as the original
Listening to the MS Audio 64k rate (which is indeed 1/2 the size of a MP3 at 128k) is literally painful.
What about more channels? I know it'll bug the audiophile purists, but what about a 5.1 encoding on audio discs? This alone almost makes the extra space all used up on a DVD if you add higher audio quality as well.
I agree to some extent, but I think there's a third possibility. I went to a state school that's very good in CS (it's in the top 10). Although on average the courses were useful from a pure intellectual perspective and on the whole interesting (the CS courses anyway, not the core requirements), they were not relevant to the real world and had very little practical applications associated with them. This is fine if you want to do CS research or something similar, but not all that great if you're looking for a professional career outside the educational system.
It's just a personal gripe. I do have a job in the CS field and it's fine, but I believe I got it mostly on the merit of what I did as "hobbies" not as course work. The piece of paper with the official degree on it was useful to the HR dept. of where I work, but that's about it.
A terrabyte for portable MP3 players? Does anyone have that much music? Doing some quick math and assuming 1 minute = 1 meg (although you'd probably use something better if you had this capacity).
:-)
You'd be able to store 1048576 minutes of music, or 17476.26666667 hours, which is 728.1777777778 days or (assuming 365 days per year), 1.99500761035 years of music on a single disk.
I don't think that's the most pratical application of this technology
I refrained from commenting here until I saw a few articles posted under the new system. I must say that somethings I've seen rated high (3 or 4) today are clearly not worth it and make good content in the 1 range much harder to find. The old moderation system seemed to work pretty well and I actually enjoyed the comments posted these days, but now it's pretty much back to the old pre-moderation days (albeit with a little less noise).