How do you stop non-techies from going "Oh, somebody loves me! I'll just read this message... OHNOS MY HARDDRIVE!"?
I'm guessing that in the future Windows virii could be a reason for companies to consider making the switch to Linux, especially in areas such as general office work/internet workstations.
OpenOffice, KDE and Mozilla have evolved to a point where this would be possible.
Unfortunately, this is highly unlikely in engineering/graphics departments and will take slightly more work. To use an example, at AMD, we have a lot of internal custom code based on VC++, MASM, SwiftForth and Topspeed C++/Clarion. Porting these applications over to Linux would take more time than it would be worth, so the engineering department is quite literally stuck with Windows 98/2000.
P4 is still not all it's cracked up to be
on
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
·
· Score: 1
Although the P4 has improved since it's initial release, it still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of real-world performance. Add to this the price/performance factor, and the scale is still tipped well in favour of the AMD Palomino/Thoroughbred chips.
The P4 offerings require at least 50% more clock cycles than their Athlon XP counterparts, which would suggest that either individual floating point operations each take more CPU cycles on P4 chips. The real answer, however, is that the P4 is *still* being throttled by the cache and decoder, a problem which should have been fixed long ago, but, thanks to the poor design of the P4, is a change very difficult to affect.
Unfortunately, to fix a lot of the problems that the P4 currently has, Intel will have to change the actual design of the chip. A perfect example is the new P4's trace cache, which can STILL only handle 1 instruction of micro-code ops per cycle. Add the slow shifts and rotates to this, and you get a chip which really doesn't live up to its considerable hype. What it all means in the end is this: The only way to get reasonable performance out of these chips is to customize the code specifically to take advantage of the P4's extra instructions and peculiarities. Some apps do this, but the consequences on standards-compliant code will be disastrous for Intel.
Think of it. If they threw in a bunch of Easter Eggs that had a built-in Quidditch match or chasing Voldemort down or something? That'd be pretty good.
This is already entirely possible and at least somewhat done by websites with Flash or Java applet front ends... of course, I'm not aware of anyone who's done an entire book this way before....
In the Dot-Com era that actually might have been quite an idea for VCs to invest in.
Web books: Similar to E-books, but leverages 24/7 eyeballs by disintermediating distributed technologies and using best-of-breed adverstising techniques!
Tech section: Umm... haven't really worked it out yet... we'll just put up a box with Apache/SSL on it and add customers who have paid to an.htaccess file using a perl script or something. But that's not important - just give us that VC money and we'll figure out a business plan later!!!
The point is, sometimes companies and individuals try and push technology when suitable technology already exists. E-books are one of these cases. Perhaps in the future the technology could become easier to use, more accessible and cheaper, and it will become widespread. At this time, I don't think it's quite ready for prime-time. (Suitable for the masses). No doubt it'll get there, but given current technology? Unlikely.
Get off your high horse, please. Reading the documentation for 5 minutes is pretty much all it takes to recompile the kernel. If you're using FreeBSD it's even easier since the system is far cleaner and better documented. But assuming you're talking about Linux, what is so difficult about it? As a South African myself (now living in the United States) I think attitudes like yours are quite funny. You say that "They don't use open source stuff", which is true, but no more true than any other country, African or not, 1st world or not. People expect computers to be easy to use. They don't expect cars to be easy to use, they accept that they have to learn about clutch control and gear changing, speed limits, etc, but they expect to just be able to sit down and start using a computer without knowing anything about it - even if they are in the I.T industry. That's where the problem lies. If these people bothered to read the documentation that comes with various systems, they would be able to use them quite comfortably. The only education required to use computers is the ability to read the language in which the documentation is written.
Brain Emulation no longer a hardware challenge.
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The human brain has 10 to the power of 14 synapses. Each synapse will take around one byte of computer memory. Ignoring motor and low-level sensory functions (but including all brain logic and interpretation functions - yes, scientists have discovered what different areas of the brain do and it is possible to isolate them), an entire human brain's contents could be stored on with a Terabyte or so of computer memory. This storage space exists right now, albeit expensively. It doesn't really matter what level of hardware is used to run a brain, a human brain running 100X slower (as estimated in the post above), would still be able to run - the only limiting factor at the moment is the software used to emulate the brain functions. Like any system, this can be emulated, but it will take a massive programming effort and so far hasn't proven very successful. Of course, this won't really matter in the long run - A.I doesn't neccessarily mean that the computer A.I system must be human-like in intelligence - it could have a whole new type of intelligence which would surpass human intelligence as the rate of hardware improvement increases.
Ogg vorbis is considered superior by a lot of electronic music pundits. It is also gaining popularity in some circles.... of course, there's a long way to go before MP3 can be reckoned with in terms of pure popularity, but technically, Ogg is already superior. The open nature of the format also makes it a potentially brilliant option for artists and consumers alike. If I were a portable music device manufacturer, I would seriously look at this format as a possible option in future products.
I'm not sure about that. In high school I played chess, but I was also Jumping A's. (Unless showjumping is also for geeks:)). Sure, a lot of people have geeky traits. But I think putting them into chess/computer/tech only boxes is a bit unfair. Geeks can potentially have as varied an amount of interests as non-geeks. Geeks are usually just a lot better at whatever they decide to be interested in.
Now that the Dolphin is here, it needs to have a name.
Dolphins have genders too. They shouldn't be referred to as "it". Who would want a spayed/neutered dolphin representing their database?:-) They don't mention if this is a male or female dolphin. That will have a big impact on the kind of names they'd receive, I would think !
Snowfox makes a very good point here. There are a lot of things that must be considered when testing the performace of CPUs. Apple likes to make out that they have a processor that's blazingly faster than Intel/AMD processors, but in reality, the tests that they tout can't be verified entirely - in other words, the applications used in the testing would need to be audited by independent software engineers to ensure that they are compiled and optimized appropriately for each platform. On purely technical grounds, the fastest processor range in the market is currently the Palomino Athlon XP series. However, all processors, including the G4/PPC series, have their good points. The good thing about this is it encourages competition and allows processor architecture to advance more rapidly.
Yes, but Peter omitted that, and many other important items, from the Saruman scenes, that is what I was complaining about (well, not really complaining, just pointing out... in an otherwise brilliant adaptation, it's hard to fathom why Peter changed that particular part of the story when putting in something more along the lines of the original wouldn't have taken up much more air-time and would have added extra depth to the movie itself)
Oops, looks like you're right... still, though, the whole scene *was* changed quite significantly, especially with regard to the ring Saruman was designing, and his change from the White to Saruman "of all colours" (not even mentioned).
Also, the details of Bill the Pony were almost completely neglected.
Still, though, I am glad that the movie has earned top position on IMDB. The faults that it had were trivial in comparison to the brilliance of the adaptation itself.
We'll just have to see if George Lucas can get his act together and displace LoTR:FoTR with SWep2:AOTC. A lot of people have been hyping that movie, and it'll be interesting to see if George Lucas learns from his mistakes in SWep1:TPM. After that, the ball will be in Peter Jackson's court to make sure that LoTR part 2 can displace SWep2:AOTC, should it rise above LoTR:FoTR. With acting like Sean Bean's, it's no wonder that LoTR:FoTR has been so successful (admittedly, that was not the only factor by far), but LoTR part 2 will not have Sean Bean's acting to rely upon. Luckily, the cast is filled with other talented and well-performing actors. (Ian McKennan was brilliant too). Peter Jackson's directing can't be faulted much either, although his leaving out the details of Bill the Pony and his thing about Saruman "joining forces" and not designing his own ring were kind of questionable.
Overall, it was brilliant. The adaptation was ner-perfect. The scenery was stunning, the characters played their parts well (especially Boromir, Gandalf, Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Galadriel....heck, all of them, really)..... but Sean Bean (Boromir) gets my vote for best supporting actor. His performance was astounding.
There was no part of the movie where I thought: "No no! It shouldn't be like that...it should look totally different..."... the screen adaptation that Peter Jackson did was very, very well thought out, and executed brilliantly. If he isn't considered director of the year, I will be very, very surprised.
Of course, no adaptation could be perfect, and here are some of the things that annoyed me:
They left out quite a bit of it, such as Tom Bombadil, the details of Bill the Pony, and they cut out entire speeches.... Galadriel to Frodo : "Small people can do big things."
Sheeeesh!
Overall, though, I don't think that a better adaptation could have been made... Peter Jackson is a true genius.
Why would Palm buy Be to give it all away for free? What do they get out of doing that? And how is that "the right thing?"
Their main reason for buying Be wasn't its software, it was its engineers - Palm has been going through a rough patch with PalmOS, and in fact laid off most of its software developers. This wasn't an economic move, it was a political and technical move. A few months later they go ahead and buy out Be, and the Be engineers get reassigned to Palm projects.
I'm not a big Intel fan, but I just have to respond to this. The fact that the Intel compiler is unable to compile the Linux kernel is absolutely not the compiler's fault... if the code is written against a bunch of weird gcc-specific extensions, that's hardly the compiler's fault.
I am currently working on the firmware-level compiler team at AMD, converting the legacy firmware compiler to a newer firmware base to match the new core. (64-bit, VLIW, etc... The upcoming Unicorn chip, will be released in 2003).
I can tell you this much: While I admire the gcc team, the gcc compiler is quite bloated and has a lot of exotic features which do not work well with standard compilers. If the gcc team ever tried to fit gcc into firmware runspace, it would be literally impossible without a complete rewrite.
The P4 architecture is not brilliant, pushing up the clock speed won't help the fundamentally stunted technology. There are major problems with the architecture, the worst of which is probably their decoder implementation.
The new architecture implements the U-V pairing and 4-1-1 in a nonsensical way. Multiple decoders have been eliminated and only one functioning decoder operates... the result of this is that just one instruction can be processed per clock cycle. Intel's theory was that the trace cache would eliminate the need to decode an instruction every clock cycle.
However, this falls apart when a set of instructions is put forward that does not go into the trace cache.... the processor must call upon the L2 cache or put all that code into memory to pull in another 64 bytes of memory for each instruction - and then decode the 64 bytes of code each time! The end result is that the P4 takes a lot more cycles to decode these instructions. Compared to the AMD Palomino XP processor (the fastest Athlon chip at the moment, in fact, the fastest X86 chip at the moment!), the P4 performance is a bit underwhelming.
The new Thoroughbred line of processors will introduce even better performance and completely blow Intel's offerings out of the water.
Only for Java programmers. There are plently of other languages out there that have the same functionality and are generally easier to work with. Python, PHP, Perl (ok, maybe not PERL, but some people prefer it), Zope, CFML, and I'm sure there are tons more that I've missed.
The point is, why are you championing Java by saying that Apache is ONLY useful with Tomcat ? Sure, it might be useful to you if you're a Java-head, but unless you'd like to point out some actual documented facts that prove Java to be better than any of these other languages, then I suggest you take back that rather biased statement:) !!
On the other hand, if I did have to write something in Java, I'm sure it would be great. If it was indeed a terrible program, I would blame my own programming technique, not the language or platform I was using - the mantra of: "A bad workman blames his tools", is extremely apt in the world of modern programming languages.
There are several advantages to a setup as described in this story... a dual-processor Xeon can have benefits on the desktop. Of course, I'd never push a Xeon processor in this enviroment as I honestly don't think it will be the overall best solution in the near future. With dual-Athlons and Durons on the horizon, I'd take a closer look at them before considering a dual Xeon system, if only for the price aspect. However, I will attempt to explain why the Xeon architecture is superior to a standard Pentium III and why it potentially matters on the desktop.
Intel produces a version of the Pentium II and III called the "Xeon", which contains up to 2 megabytes of L2 cache. The Xeon is used frequently in servers as it supports 8-way multi-processing, but on the desktop the Xeon does offer considerable speed advantages over the standard Pentium III when large amounts of data are involved.
Basically, the larger the working set of an application, that is, the amount of code and data in use at any given time, the larger the L2 cache needs to be. To keep costs low, Intel and AMD have both actually DECREASED the sizes of their L2 caches in newer versions of the Pentium III and Athlon, which I believe is a mistake. (AMD is working on this in the new chips - new technology will be used to increase the size of the L2 cache while retaining the full data-shuttle flexibility).
The top level cache, the L1 cache, is the most crucial, since it is accessed first for any memory operation. The L1 cache uses extremely high speed memory (which has to keep up with the internal speed of the processor), so it is very expensive to put on chip and tends to be relatively small. Again, from 8K in the 486 to 128K in the Athlon.
The next step is the decoder, and this is one of the two major flaws of the P6 family. The 4-1-1 rule prevents more than one "complex" instruction from being decoded each clock cycle. Much like the U-V pairing rules for the original Pentium, Intel's documents contain tables showing how many micro-ops are required by every machine language instructions and they give guidelines on how to group instructions.
Unlike main memory, the decoder is always in use. Every clock cycle, it decodes 1, 2, or 3 instructions of machine language code. This limits the throughput of the processor to at most 3 times the clock speed. For example, a 1 GHz Pentium III can execute at most 3 billion instructions per second, or 3000 MIPS. In reality, most programmers and most compilers write code that is less than optimal, and which is usually grouped for the complex-simple-complex-simple pairing rules of the original Pentium. As a result, the typical throughput of a P6 family processor is more like double the clock speed. For example, 2000 MIPS for a 1 GHz processor. You'll notice that the Athlon outperfoms the P3 family in this regard by a large margin.
A bit of a naive statement on your part.
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1
You're assuming here that these (American) companies are confined to a talent pool located within the United States. I can assure you, as an individual raised and educated in South Africa and now working for one of these (American) companies, that this is not the case at all.
American companies != American people only
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1
I work for one of the largest producers of Microprocessors in the world, based in the United States, but I was born, raised and educated in South Africa.
If he was writting in C and using asm for the most preformance intensive functions as is now standard practice for the non lazy (who know their target platform and optimize for it)it would not be such a chore. Perhaps if he used an Intel compiler plugin that optimizes for the P4 he would not be complaining. Should he have to do so? Nope, but it seems to be the way everything is heading whether you look at AMD or Intel.
While I agree that as technology moves forward the traditional ways of X86 programming will have to expand along with the technology, and in some areas change completely, I'd just like to share something about upcoming AMD technology in this regard.
The next-generation chips from AMD are being designed with programming optimizations done at the firmware level. For example, a FORTH interpreter is being ingrained into the preprocessing area on the chip die itself. This makes it easier not only to add firmware-level software like BIOS, bootloaders, etc more easily, without resorting to running the code through a compiler into X86 instructions and machine code, but it will also make it much easier to write more optimized C compilers (and other compilers for that matter). If you combine this with the improved instruction technology that AMD will be incorporating, it makes for a very powerful new platform for all programmers.
The replies I've read so far are correct in that there is no VLIW offering in our current line up. However, the next generation chip that we are working on at the moment will indeed be based on VLIW instruction technology.
Intel's announcement is a bit misleading, while this chip is certainly nothing to sneeze at (looking comparitively at their other offerings) in the power-saving department, it lacks pure power due to the new core.
At AMD, the latest generation of chips are currently being designed with flow-through core transistors, so it'll really be more like a "smart capacitor" than a integrated circuit, like most CPUs. I have been tasked with writing the VLIW compiler for the new chips, and I can tell you that they really do fly, and use less power than teh traditional Athlon/Duron series, while retaining the power and in fact doing a lot of optimisation thanks to the new VLIW instructions that are being ingrained into the core.
All I can say is, folks, look out for this one. It will be hot. (but not because of excessive power consumption:))
Slashdot Mirror
How do you stop non-techies from going "Oh, somebody loves me! I'll just read this message... OHNOS MY HARDDRIVE!"?
I'm guessing that in the future Windows virii could be a reason for companies to consider making the switch to Linux, especially in areas such as general office work/internet workstations. OpenOffice, KDE and Mozilla have evolved to a point where this would be possible.
Unfortunately, this is highly unlikely in engineering/graphics departments and will take slightly more work. To use an example, at AMD, we have a lot of internal custom code based on VC++, MASM, SwiftForth and Topspeed C++/Clarion. Porting these applications over to Linux would take more time than it would be worth, so the engineering department is quite literally stuck with Windows 98/2000.
Although the P4 has improved since it's initial release, it still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of real-world performance. Add to this the price/performance factor, and the scale is still tipped well in favour of the AMD Palomino/Thoroughbred chips.
The P4 offerings require at least 50% more clock cycles than their Athlon XP counterparts, which would suggest that either individual floating point operations each take more CPU cycles on P4 chips. The real answer, however, is that the P4 is *still* being throttled by the cache and decoder, a problem which should have been fixed long ago, but, thanks to the poor design of the P4, is a change very difficult to affect.Unfortunately, to fix a lot of the problems that the P4 currently has, Intel will have to change the actual design of the chip. A perfect example is the new P4's trace cache, which can STILL only handle 1 instruction of micro-code ops per cycle. Add the slow shifts and rotates to this, and you get a chip which really doesn't live up to its considerable hype. What it all means in the end is this: The only way to get reasonable performance out of these chips is to customize the code specifically to take advantage of the P4's extra instructions and peculiarities. Some apps do this, but the consequences on standards-compliant code will be disastrous for Intel.
This is already entirely possible and at least somewhat done by websites with Flash or Java applet front ends... of course, I'm not aware of anyone who's done an entire book this way before....
In the Dot-Com era that actually might have been quite an idea for VCs to invest in.The point is, sometimes companies and individuals try and push technology when suitable technology already exists. E-books are one of these cases. Perhaps in the future the technology could become easier to use, more accessible and cheaper, and it will become widespread. At this time, I don't think it's quite ready for prime-time. (Suitable for the masses). No doubt it'll get there, but given current technology? Unlikely.
Get off your high horse, please. Reading the documentation for 5 minutes is pretty much all it takes to recompile the kernel. If you're using FreeBSD it's even easier since the system is far cleaner and better documented. But assuming you're talking about Linux, what is so difficult about it? As a South African myself (now living in the United States) I think attitudes like yours are quite funny. You say that "They don't use open source stuff", which is true, but no more true than any other country, African or not, 1st world or not. People expect computers to be easy to use. They don't expect cars to be easy to use, they accept that they have to learn about clutch control and gear changing, speed limits, etc, but they expect to just be able to sit down and start using a computer without knowing anything about it - even if they are in the I.T industry. That's where the problem lies. If these people bothered to read the documentation that comes with various systems, they would be able to use them quite comfortably. The only education required to use computers is the ability to read the language in which the documentation is written.
The human brain has 10 to the power of 14 synapses. Each synapse will take around one byte of computer memory. Ignoring motor and low-level sensory functions (but including all brain logic and interpretation functions - yes, scientists have discovered what different areas of the brain do and it is possible to isolate them), an entire human brain's contents could be stored on with a Terabyte or so of computer memory. This storage space exists right now, albeit expensively. It doesn't really matter what level of hardware is used to run a brain, a human brain running 100X slower (as estimated in the post above), would still be able to run - the only limiting factor at the moment is the software used to emulate the brain functions. Like any system, this can be emulated, but it will take a massive programming effort and so far hasn't proven very successful. Of course, this won't really matter in the long run - A.I doesn't neccessarily mean that the computer A.I system must be human-like in intelligence - it could have a whole new type of intelligence which would surpass human intelligence as the rate of hardware improvement increases.
Ogg vorbis is considered superior by a lot of electronic music pundits. It is also gaining popularity in some circles.... of course, there's a long way to go before MP3 can be reckoned with in terms of pure popularity, but technically, Ogg is already superior. The open nature of the format also makes it a potentially brilliant option for artists and consumers alike. If I were a portable music device manufacturer, I would seriously look at this format as a possible option in future products.
I'm not sure about that. In high school I played chess, but I was also Jumping A's. (Unless showjumping is also for geeks:)). Sure, a lot of people have geeky traits. But I think putting them into chess/computer/tech only boxes is a bit unfair. Geeks can potentially have as varied an amount of interests as non-geeks. Geeks are usually just a lot better at whatever they decide to be interested in.
Dolphins have genders too. They shouldn't be referred to as "it". Who would want a spayed/neutered dolphin representing their database?
Snowfox makes a very good point here. There are a lot of things that must be considered when testing the performace of CPUs. Apple likes to make out that they have a processor that's blazingly faster than Intel/AMD processors, but in reality, the tests that they tout can't be verified entirely - in other words, the applications used in the testing would need to be audited by independent software engineers to ensure that they are compiled and optimized appropriately for each platform. On purely technical grounds, the fastest processor range in the market is currently the Palomino Athlon XP series. However, all processors, including the G4/PPC series, have their good points. The good thing about this is it encourages competition and allows processor architecture to advance more rapidly.
Yes, but Peter omitted that, and many other important items, from the Saruman scenes, that is what I was complaining about (well, not really complaining, just pointing out... in an otherwise brilliant adaptation, it's hard to fathom why Peter changed that particular part of the story when putting in something more along the lines of the original wouldn't have taken up much more air-time and would have added extra depth to the movie itself)
Oops, looks like you're right... still, though, the whole scene *was* changed quite significantly, especially with regard to the ring Saruman was designing, and his change from the White to Saruman "of all colours" (not even mentioned).
Also, the details of Bill the Pony were almost completely neglected.
Still, though, I am glad that the movie has earned top position on IMDB. The faults that it had were trivial in comparison to the brilliance of the adaptation itself.
We'll just have to see if George Lucas can get his act together and displace LoTR:FoTR with SWep2:AOTC. A lot of people have been hyping that movie, and it'll be interesting to see if George Lucas learns from his mistakes in SWep1:TPM. After that, the ball will be in Peter Jackson's court to make sure that LoTR part 2 can displace SWep2:AOTC, should it rise above LoTR:FoTR. With acting like Sean Bean's, it's no wonder that LoTR:FoTR has been so successful (admittedly, that was not the only factor by far), but LoTR part 2 will not have Sean Bean's acting to rely upon. Luckily, the cast is filled with other talented and well-performing actors. (Ian McKennan was brilliant too). Peter Jackson's directing can't be faulted much either, although his leaving out the details of Bill the Pony and his thing about Saruman "joining forces" and not designing his own ring were kind of questionable.
Overall, it was brilliant. The adaptation was ner-perfect. The scenery was stunning, the characters played their parts well (especially Boromir, Gandalf, Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Galadriel....heck, all of them, really)..... but Sean Bean (Boromir) gets my vote for best supporting actor. His performance was astounding.
There was no part of the movie where I thought: "No no! It shouldn't be like that...it should look totally different
Of course, no adaptation could be perfect, and here are some of the things that annoyed me:
They left out quite a bit of it, such as Tom Bombadil, the details of Bill the Pony, and they cut out entire speeches
Sheeeesh!
Overall, though, I don't think that a better adaptation could have been made... Peter Jackson is a true genius.
First off, communication is possible with most animals. Just because it might not be verbal communication, doesn't make it any less communication.
Their main reason for buying Be wasn't its software, it was its engineers - Palm has been going through a rough patch with PalmOS, and in fact laid off most of its software developers. This wasn't an economic move, it was a political and technical move. A few months later they go ahead and buy out Be, and the Be engineers get reassigned to Palm projects.
I'm not a big Intel fan, but I just have to respond to this. The fact that the Intel compiler is unable to compile the Linux kernel is absolutely not the compiler's fault ... if the code is written against a bunch of weird gcc-specific extensions, that's hardly the compiler's fault.
I am currently working on the firmware-level compiler team at AMD, converting the legacy firmware compiler to a newer firmware base to match the new core. (64-bit, VLIW, etc... The upcoming Unicorn chip, will be released in 2003). I can tell you this much: While I admire the gcc team, the gcc compiler is quite bloated and has a lot of exotic features which do not work well with standard compilers. If the gcc team ever tried to fit gcc into firmware runspace, it would be literally impossible without a complete rewrite.The P4 architecture is not brilliant, pushing up the clock speed won't help the fundamentally stunted technology. There are major problems with the architecture, the worst of which is probably their decoder implementation.
The new architecture implements the U-V pairing and 4-1-1 in a nonsensical way. Multiple decoders have been eliminated and only one functioning decoder operates... the result of this is that just one instruction can be processed per clock cycle. Intel's theory was that the trace cache would eliminate the need to decode an instruction every clock cycle.
However, this falls apart when a set of instructions is put forward that does not go into the trace cache.... the processor must call upon the L2 cache or put all that code into memory to pull in another 64 bytes of memory for each instruction - and then decode the 64 bytes of code each time! The end result is that the P4 takes a lot more cycles to decode these instructions. Compared to the AMD Palomino XP processor (the fastest Athlon chip at the moment, in fact, the fastest X86 chip at the moment!), the P4 performance is a bit underwhelming.
The new Thoroughbred line of processors will introduce even better performance and completely blow Intel's offerings out of the water.
Only for Java programmers. There are plently of other languages out there that have the same functionality and are generally easier to work with. Python, PHP, Perl (ok, maybe not PERL, but some people prefer it), Zope, CFML, and I'm sure there are tons more that I've missed.
The point is, why are you championing Java by saying that Apache is ONLY useful with Tomcat ? Sure, it might be useful to you if you're a Java-head, but unless you'd like to point out some actual documented facts that prove Java to be better than any of these other languages, then I suggest you take back that rather biased statementOn the other hand, if I did have to write something in Java, I'm sure it would be great. If it was indeed a terrible program, I would blame my own programming technique, not the language or platform I was using - the mantra of: "A bad workman blames his tools", is extremely apt in the world of modern programming languages.
There are several advantages to a setup as described in this story ... a dual-processor Xeon can have benefits on the desktop. Of course, I'd never push a Xeon processor in this enviroment as I honestly don't think it will be the overall best solution in the near future. With dual-Athlons and Durons on the horizon, I'd take a closer look at them before considering a dual Xeon system, if only for the price aspect. However, I will attempt to explain why the Xeon architecture is superior to a standard Pentium III and why it potentially matters on the desktop.
Intel produces a version of the Pentium II and III called the "Xeon", which contains up to 2 megabytes of L2 cache. The Xeon is used frequently in servers as it supports 8-way multi-processing, but on the desktop the Xeon does offer considerable speed advantages over the standard Pentium III when large amounts of data are involved.Basically, the larger the working set of an application, that is, the amount of code and data in use at any given time, the larger the L2 cache needs to be. To keep costs low, Intel and AMD have both actually DECREASED the sizes of their L2 caches in newer versions of the Pentium III and Athlon, which I believe is a mistake. (AMD is working on this in the new chips - new technology will be used to increase the size of the L2 cache while retaining the full data-shuttle flexibility).
The top level cache, the L1 cache, is the most crucial, since it is accessed first for any memory operation. The L1 cache uses extremely high speed memory (which has to keep up with the internal speed of the processor), so it is very expensive to put on chip and tends to be relatively small. Again, from 8K in the 486 to 128K in the Athlon.The next step is the decoder, and this is one of the two major flaws of the P6 family. The 4-1-1 rule prevents more than one "complex" instruction from being decoded each clock cycle. Much like the U-V pairing rules for the original Pentium, Intel's documents contain tables showing how many micro-ops are required by every machine language instructions and they give guidelines on how to group instructions.
Unlike main memory, the decoder is always in use. Every clock cycle, it decodes 1, 2, or 3 instructions of machine language code. This limits the throughput of the processor to at most 3 times the clock speed. For example, a 1 GHz Pentium III can execute at most 3 billion instructions per second, or 3000 MIPS. In reality, most programmers and most compilers write code that is less than optimal, and which is usually grouped for the complex-simple-complex-simple pairing rules of the original Pentium. As a result, the typical throughput of a P6 family processor is more like double the clock speed. For example, 2000 MIPS for a 1 GHz processor. You'll notice that the Athlon outperfoms the P3 family in this regard by a large margin.You're assuming here that these (American) companies are confined to a talent pool located within the United States. I can assure you, as an individual raised and educated in South Africa and now working for one of these (American) companies, that this is not the case at all.
I work for one of the largest producers of Microprocessors in the world, based in the United States, but I was born, raised and educated in South Africa.
While I agree that as technology moves forward the traditional ways of X86 programming will have to expand along with the technology, and in some areas change completely, I'd just like to share something about upcoming AMD technology in this regard.
The next-generation chips from AMD are being designed with programming optimizations done at the firmware level. For example, a FORTH interpreter is being ingrained into the preprocessing area on the chip die itself. This makes it easier not only to add firmware-level software like BIOS, bootloaders, etc more easily, without resorting to running the code through a compiler into X86 instructions and machine code, but it will also make it much easier to write more optimized C compilers (and other compilers for that matter). If you combine this with the improved instruction technology that AMD will be incorporating, it makes for a very powerful new platform for all programmers.Dwain Snyders
Research and Development, AMD
Cheers
Dwain SnydersResearch and Development, AMD
At AMD, the latest generation of chips are currently being designed with flow-through core transistors, so it'll really be more like a "smart capacitor" than a integrated circuit, like most CPUs. I have been tasked with writing the VLIW compiler for the new chips, and I can tell you that they really do fly, and use less power than teh traditional Athlon/Duron series, while retaining the power and in fact doing a lot of optimisation thanks to the new VLIW instructions that are being ingrained into the core.
All I can say is, folks, look out for this one. It will be hot. (but not because of excessive power consumptionDwain Snyders
Research and Development, AMDhttp://dec.bournemouth.ac.uk/forth/forth.html