Xen will be able to run XP, etc, when hardware virtualisation is supported - namely by Intel and AMD (Vanderpool and Pacifica respectively). It certainly isn't standing still!
I don't remember seeing mice in 1986 with 4 buttons and what is essentially a trackball integrated.
It is good that the computer can be used with just one mouse button, you might think 'oh, two, three buttons, what's the issue?' but people out there aren't that savvy.
This can act as a one button mouse, it can act as a multibutton mouse.
Instead they had to announce the discovery of a planet they don't even know the diameter of.
Right now it is looking to be bigger than Pluto.
And for my contribution to the inevitable 'Asteroid', 'Minor Planet', 'Planet' argument, I'm tending to the viewpoint that any body in space that is spherical under its own gravity is a planet. Even if it has been flung from its parent solar system into deep space.
Yes, that means the Moon is a Planet.
Planets include Gas Giants, Ice Bodies, Rocky Planets, and so on.
Radeon 9550 should be able to play games reasonably well - it's way better than a FX5200Ultra, which is what the Powerbook 12" uses. It would suck if CoreImage was VRAM limited, I thought it was functionality limited (needs decent shader units).
It's not the amount of memory that is the issue, it is needing a GPU that can handle it.
The new iBooks can with the 32MB Radeon 9550 they have onboard.
I'm not buying a Mac Mini until they have a 64MB Radeon 9600 or similar on-board. Mainly because for an iBook with a 1024x768 display 32MB is adequate, but for a desktop machine you need more for higher resolution displays.
The Godson-2 apparently is a clone of the R10000, customized for Chinese manufacturing plants. They probably shrunk the die and put it in a different box, but it doesn't change the processor.
No, they recreated it from scratch from the instruction set.
You can't just take an existing die and somehow create a processor design from it (well, you could strip each layer off, then reverse engineer each layer, then spend ages working out what bit does what - easier to just design it from scratch), and then shrink it. They probably even have a license for the design and layout software they're using.
Godson 1 was the first implementation from scratch. Godson 2 is clearly the first step towards modernisation and optimisation of that design - 150nm or 180nm instead of what? 350nm? Maybe alternative non-patent infringing implementations of the missing functionality?
It is a different processor, as different as an Opteron is from a Xeon anyway.
The Chinese know that this processor will be used in products abroad. They know it'll be looked at in detail. Their capitalist side will ensure that there won't be any problems in this regard.
On that contrary, a lot of Macs are kept for 5 years, even more. Even if after 3 years new software won't run amazingly on it, the software that was good enough for you before is still going to run on it.
Most people seem to junk their PC after 2 or 3 years, or pass them on to relatives. Part of this is the issue with 'Windows Slowdown'.
Considering that Mac OS X has been getting faster with each revision, and more optimised and efficient too, I reckon that a Mac is a good investment. I know that 10.5 and 10.6 will most likely run great on any Mac that is more than 1GHz, possibly without some GPU effects, but otherwise with all the features. I'm sure that there are people running 10.4 on 500MHz or lower G4 machines.
Try running Longhorn on a 500MHz machine in 2006, or whenever it comes out. Windows XP drags on this 2.66GHz Celeron P4 Dell I'm using at my girlfriend's mother's.
Of course, a lot of external Firewire to IDE devices also incorporate a Firewire hub. I assume the same is true for USB to IDE devices. I know there is a Mac Mini styled enclosure with both a Firewire Hub, USB2 Hub and space for a 3.5" hard drive (Firewire attached).
What I'd prefer was a connector underneath the Mac Mini with Firewire, USB2 and Power pins on it (and SATA too), then any Mac Mini peripheral can go under the Mac Mini, connect seamlessly with the Mini and not have any external wires or power supplies.
In fact, it is the platform, not the hardware, that defines how future proof a bit of hardware is. In this case, Apple and Mac OS X and a lot of supported good software that will be PowerPC enabled for at least 5 years, and even if it ever went Intel-only (for Mac OS X, Applications, etc) the platform is still there.
Sounds pretty future proof to me. If you need a laptop running Mac OS X, then next week's iBooks are a great option regardless of the hardware.
Re:My iBook died two months ago...
on
New Apples Next Week
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Apple's developer tools only allow a compile for PowerPC, or PowerPC+Intel.
I fully expect in 5-10 years time that applications will still be coming in fat binaries with PowerPC and Intel support.
Because Apple's libraries abstract things like SIMD and so on, the PowerPC part will probably still be reasonably optimised.
One thing that will drop quickly is extreme PowerPC optimisation though.
As far as I am concerned, buying one of these new iBooks or Mac Minis will be buying an extremely tried and tested platform that has been proven for years. I certainly wouldn't want to buy an Intel based Mac next year whilst it is at Revision A.
We just transitioned from OS X to Windows in a department at my work, and the software licensing per machine went from about $350/year under the Macs to over $700/year for the PCs
Why?!
IT dept: Look, we saved $500 a machine on the hardware. Shame that that departments costs have gone up $350 a year, i.e., $1000 over three years. Oh, the retraining costs and loss of productivity, and general unhappiness of the staff forced to use a cheap-ass Dell machine...
Stupid article, Socket M2 is the dual-channel DDR consumer socket, it has 940 pins.
Socket 1207 is the next Opteron socket, with PCI Express and possibly 4 HT links on board to enable even greater scaling up to 16 and 32 processor systems.
Socket S1 is the new mobile socket, and it has around 640 pins, and supposedly supports dual channel DDR2, along with a single HT link I imagine.
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My walk to work takes 25 minutes. For most of that time when I'm not looking at pretty girls on bikes, I'm thinking about the days work, what needs to be done. There, and on the way back. I usually work 9am to 7pm in addition, and rarely take a lunch break. So say 10.5 hours a day 5.5 days a week is 58 hours a week of work, even if it isn't all 'producing' work. If I can't spend an hour or two a day to surf, I'd go mad. Even then, I am thinking whilst surfing, or letting problems and designs mull over.
I don't mind being at work so much, I can play music loud, I have a dual 2.3GHz PowerMac with nice monitor, I program and sysadmin and design... it's all good.
That 9W (at 266MHz) includes the power supply (inefficient wall thing) and everything in the box besides the IXP420.
The ARM box has 8MB flash and 32MB RAM, compared with 1MB/16MB on that board.
That board says 1A at 5V, yet the 5V measurements of the ARM box say it uses 0.6A post power-supply. So that's 3W.
The processor on your board uses 2.5W. The IXP420 will use under 1W at load.
You won't be using this box as a render node, so the lack of floating point unit isn't that bad. It does have a unit for some vector operations however.
I think it was rather rude to decide to buy the Dell servers after Sun had donated one (that looks like a $5000 value server too). Spend the $10k on two more Sun servers to show your appreciation guys!
Anyway, if government subsidises a $50 box, then there'll be very little incentive to compete, for price drops on the hardware, for TV makers to even bother installing DTV receivers in the TVs - the government will sort it all out.
In the end it is $50... that ain't a lot, and anybody that can't afford it really should have higher priorities than TV anyway. Think of it as a great chance to get the unwashed lazy out of their couches.
Or a cheap-ass Digital TV reciever box that can receive ATSC.
They're selling for £40 in the UK now, and many TVs come with integrated digital receivers (for terrestrial broadcasts, there's about 30 different channels available for free, no subscription, many don't even have adverts) so I really don't see what the problem is!
You won't have to get rid of your TV, if you are happy with standard definition then just buy the receiver. In 2009 they'll probably be $29 each, you can get one for every TV in the house, and merely upgrade the main TV to a HDTV megabeastomatic if you want.
If you are in the UK, you can do things like search for "Pubs near Mill Road, Cambridge" and you'll get Pubs near Mill Road, Cambridge! Neat (The goods ones are The Live and Let Live, The Cambridge Blue, The Kingston Arms, and the Salisbury Arms). Hmm, how about where I work. Ah! (well, I knew this already, but...)
Were they accessible on the same telephone number and could you hold a conversation with seamless switch from the home connection to the mobile connection?
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Hmm, if Google search was the public demonstration of the Google search appliance, then in GMail the public demonstration of an upcoming Google EMail appliance that will eventually kill off Microsoft Exchange by simply being better? Does Google do calendars and stuff yet?
Couple this with GoogleOS and GoogleBrowser for the ultimate system for the corporate market - fully controllable by the IT department, no local data on machines just a Google Mail box, a Google Search box, a Google File Repository box, and so on.
Data storage, management and search is the most important capability in the current computer market, and whilst Microsoft can't even release Longhorn without a two year delay and cutting most of the features, their competitors are grabbing the real future of the computer industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Xen will be able to run XP, etc, when hardware virtualisation is supported - namely by Intel and AMD (Vanderpool and Pacifica respectively). It certainly isn't standing still!
I don't remember seeing mice in 1986 with 4 buttons and what is essentially a trackball integrated.
It is good that the computer can be used with just one mouse button, you might think 'oh, two, three buttons, what's the issue?' but people out there aren't that savvy.
This can act as a one button mouse, it can act as a multibutton mouse.
But why isn't it wireless?
It'll have a moon called Hercules.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Solar System, the KBOs 'Buffy', 'Angel', 'Willow' and 'Spike' are soon going to clash.
I quite like Xena as a name though. Better than Xanthros or Xerces or Xybots.
Instead they had to announce the discovery of a planet they don't even know the diameter of.
Right now it is looking to be bigger than Pluto.
And for my contribution to the inevitable 'Asteroid', 'Minor Planet', 'Planet' argument, I'm tending to the viewpoint that any body in space that is spherical under its own gravity is a planet. Even if it has been flung from its parent solar system into deep space.
Yes, that means the Moon is a Planet.
Planets include Gas Giants, Ice Bodies, Rocky Planets, and so on.
Radeon 9550 should be able to play games reasonably well - it's way better than a FX5200Ultra, which is what the Powerbook 12" uses. It would suck if CoreImage was VRAM limited, I thought it was functionality limited (needs decent shader units).
The Radeon 9550 has the required technology to enable CoreImage entirely on the GPU.
The 32MB VRAM shouldn't be an issue - it might slow it down a bit, but that's all.
It's not the amount of memory that is the issue, it is needing a GPU that can handle it.
The new iBooks can with the 32MB Radeon 9550 they have onboard.
I'm not buying a Mac Mini until they have a 64MB Radeon 9600 or similar on-board. Mainly because for an iBook with a 1024x768 display 32MB is adequate, but for a desktop machine you need more for higher resolution displays.
The Godson-2 apparently is a clone of the R10000, customized for Chinese manufacturing plants. They probably shrunk the die and put it in a different box, but it doesn't change the processor.
No, they recreated it from scratch from the instruction set.
You can't just take an existing die and somehow create a processor design from it (well, you could strip each layer off, then reverse engineer each layer, then spend ages working out what bit does what - easier to just design it from scratch), and then shrink it. They probably even have a license for the design and layout software they're using.
Godson 1 was the first implementation from scratch. Godson 2 is clearly the first step towards modernisation and optimisation of that design - 150nm or 180nm instead of what? 350nm? Maybe alternative non-patent infringing implementations of the missing functionality?
It is a different processor, as different as an Opteron is from a Xeon anyway.
The Chinese know that this processor will be used in products abroad. They know it'll be looked at in detail. Their capitalist side will ensure that there won't be any problems in this regard.
On that contrary, a lot of Macs are kept for 5 years, even more. Even if after 3 years new software won't run amazingly on it, the software that was good enough for you before is still going to run on it.
Most people seem to junk their PC after 2 or 3 years, or pass them on to relatives. Part of this is the issue with 'Windows Slowdown'.
Considering that Mac OS X has been getting faster with each revision, and more optimised and efficient too, I reckon that a Mac is a good investment. I know that 10.5 and 10.6 will most likely run great on any Mac that is more than 1GHz, possibly without some GPU effects, but otherwise with all the features. I'm sure that there are people running 10.4 on 500MHz or lower G4 machines.
Try running Longhorn on a 500MHz machine in 2006, or whenever it comes out. Windows XP drags on this 2.66GHz Celeron P4 Dell I'm using at my girlfriend's mother's.
It would be a very nice addition.
Of course, a lot of external Firewire to IDE devices also incorporate a Firewire hub. I assume the same is true for USB to IDE devices. I know there is a Mac Mini styled enclosure with both a Firewire Hub, USB2 Hub and space for a 3.5" hard drive (Firewire attached).
What I'd prefer was a connector underneath the Mac Mini with Firewire, USB2 and Power pins on it (and SATA too), then any Mac Mini peripheral can go under the Mac Mini, connect seamlessly with the Mini and not have any external wires or power supplies.
No consumer computer hardware is 'future proof'.
In fact, it is the platform, not the hardware, that defines how future proof a bit of hardware is. In this case, Apple and Mac OS X and a lot of supported good software that will be PowerPC enabled for at least 5 years, and even if it ever went Intel-only (for Mac OS X, Applications, etc) the platform is still there.
Sounds pretty future proof to me. If you need a laptop running Mac OS X, then next week's iBooks are a great option regardless of the hardware.
Apple's developer tools only allow a compile for PowerPC, or PowerPC+Intel.
I fully expect in 5-10 years time that applications will still be coming in fat binaries with PowerPC and Intel support.
Because Apple's libraries abstract things like SIMD and so on, the PowerPC part will probably still be reasonably optimised.
One thing that will drop quickly is extreme PowerPC optimisation though.
As far as I am concerned, buying one of these new iBooks or Mac Minis will be buying an extremely tried and tested platform that has been proven for years. I certainly wouldn't want to buy an Intel based Mac next year whilst it is at Revision A.
We just transitioned from OS X to Windows in a department at my work, and the software licensing per machine went from about $350/year under the Macs to over $700/year for the PCs
Why?!
IT dept: Look, we saved $500 a machine on the hardware. Shame that that departments costs have gone up $350 a year, i.e., $1000 over three years. Oh, the retraining costs and loss of productivity, and general unhappiness of the staff forced to use a cheap-ass Dell machine...
I meant M2 is the dual-channel DDR2 consumer socket, bah.
S1 - One HT Link?
M2 - Two HT Links?
1207 might use FB-DIMMs for memory instead of DDR2.
Stupid article, Socket M2 is the dual-channel DDR consumer socket, it has 940 pins.
Socket 1207 is the next Opteron socket, with PCI Express and possibly 4 HT links on board to enable even greater scaling up to 16 and 32 processor systems.
Socket S1 is the new mobile socket, and it has around 640 pins, and supposedly supports dual channel DDR2, along with a single HT link I imagine.
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 8 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
My walk to work takes 25 minutes. For most of that time when I'm not looking at pretty girls on bikes, I'm thinking about the days work, what needs to be done. There, and on the way back. I usually work 9am to 7pm in addition, and rarely take a lunch break. So say 10.5 hours a day 5.5 days a week is 58 hours a week of work, even if it isn't all 'producing' work. If I can't spend an hour or two a day to surf, I'd go mad. Even then, I am thinking whilst surfing, or letting problems and designs mull over.
... it's all good.
I don't mind being at work so much, I can play music loud, I have a dual 2.3GHz PowerMac with nice monitor, I program and sysadmin and design
That 9W (at 266MHz) includes the power supply (inefficient wall thing) and everything in the box besides the IXP420.
The ARM box has 8MB flash and 32MB RAM, compared with 1MB/16MB on that board.
That board says 1A at 5V, yet the 5V measurements of the ARM box say it uses 0.6A post power-supply. So that's 3W.
The processor on your board uses 2.5W. The IXP420 will use under 1W at load.
You won't be using this box as a render node, so the lack of floating point unit isn't that bad. It does have a unit for some vector operations however.
I think it was rather rude to decide to buy the Dell servers after Sun had donated one (that looks like a $5000 value server too). Spend the $10k on two more Sun servers to show your appreciation guys!
I agree totally.
... that ain't a lot, and anybody that can't afford it really should have higher priorities than TV anyway. Think of it as a great chance to get the unwashed lazy out of their couches.
Anyway, if government subsidises a $50 box, then there'll be very little incentive to compete, for price drops on the hardware, for TV makers to even bother installing DTV receivers in the TVs - the government will sort it all out.
In the end it is $50
Or a cheap-ass Digital TV reciever box that can receive ATSC.
They're selling for £40 in the UK now, and many TVs come with integrated digital receivers (for terrestrial broadcasts, there's about 30 different channels available for free, no subscription, many don't even have adverts) so I really don't see what the problem is!
You won't have to get rid of your TV, if you are happy with standard definition then just buy the receiver. In 2009 they'll probably be $29 each, you can get one for every TV in the house, and merely upgrade the main TV to a HDTV megabeastomatic if you want.
If you are in the UK, you can do things like search for "Pubs near Mill Road, Cambridge" and you'll get Pubs near Mill Road, Cambridge! Neat (The goods ones are The Live and Let Live, The Cambridge Blue, The Kingston Arms, and the Salisbury Arms). Hmm, how about where I work. Ah! (well, I knew this already, but ...)
The spacecraft has merely exercised its typical 'omg my parents aren't here' response and gone to the moon to drink cheap alcohol.
*artificial wait time because slash has been changed to fuck up most fast typists*
Fuck! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
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OMFG Slash is fucked up beyond all recognition!
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FUCKING RETARDED ASSMONKEYS!
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fuck you slashdot, i can't even make a light hearted jokey post because you can't code for shit. stupid cunts
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For fuck's sake, man, come on!
*closes browser, restarts Firefox, sees if the problem continues*
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*changes to IE*
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How would it work if you had uber-freckly arms?
:p *
*bloody annoying being a red-haired thin-skinned freckly person*
*otoh I've got a girlfriend, so that puts me above 33% of the Slashdot readership
Were they accessible on the same telephone number and could you hold a conversation with seamless switch from the home connection to the mobile connection?
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Hmm, if Google search was the public demonstration of the Google search appliance, then in GMail the public demonstration of an upcoming Google EMail appliance that will eventually kill off Microsoft Exchange by simply being better? Does Google do calendars and stuff yet?
Couple this with GoogleOS and GoogleBrowser for the ultimate system for the corporate market - fully controllable by the IT department, no local data on machines just a Google Mail box, a Google Search box, a Google File Repository box, and so on.
Data storage, management and search is the most important capability in the current computer market, and whilst Microsoft can't even release Longhorn without a two year delay and cutting most of the features, their competitors are grabbing the real future of the computer industry.