Sadly the future is not as exponential as going from 64 bit to 128 bit, most kids do not seem to get what those magnitudes are.
Besides there is really not much of a benefit for a 128 bit long datapath, at some point you can do much faster processors that are 32 bit for example than 64 bit, to the point that you can have technology very pipelined technology that can run at more than double the equivalent 64 bit datapath, therefore performing a 64 bit operation using 2x cycles of the faster 32 bit datapath is actually done faster than the 1x cycle of the 64bit datapath. However they are not as glamurous as the 64 bit native datapaths:).
Also people need to understand that complex structures like multipliers grow polynomially not linearly, this is a 128 bit multiplier is not twice as big as a 64 bit multiplier but much much larger (simpler terms would be squared increase).
Not really, most processors include more FP units than Integer units. That is why some machines may get better FP numbers, never mind that the spec FP and spec Int are 2 different magnitudes that are not 1 to 1 relative.
Most Intel machines have much better integer performing units, and are relatively weak with respect to other RISC competitors.
"They made the same mistake as DEC: a radical switch to the Alpha RISC chip from its heavy VAX CISC processors."
No they didn't actually DEC did not make any mistake, the AXP had this concept of architectural extention via the PAL mechanism that allowed to execute CISC instructions found in the VAX by issuing Alpha instructions as translated VAX microcode. Therefore AXP machines could emulate certain operations found in VAX, this was only for legacy VMS apps. The MIPS line of DECStations ran Ultrix which was EOLd when DEC moved to OSF/1.
Alpha could execute x86 code pretty well by translating using the FX!32 framework, some early precursor to the code morphing approach found in transmeta chips.
DEC offered a very good upgrade path for its VAX customers, to the point of being almost painless. Anything that ran in VMS under VAX was guaranteed to run under VMS on AXP with a worst case scenario of a recompile. And every code got a performance boost. This is not the same scenario found in the Itanium move, where Intel did not offer a "painless" move from x86 to Itanic. DEC had a better environment because they controlled the OS, the Chip and the system. Intel only produces the chips and it has to pray for OS and system vendors to get it righ, which obviously they didn't.
The price you have to pay for a 128+ bit bus. You did not see many AMD SMP boards because there were no SMP capable AMD chipsets for a long time, not because of the routing overhead being that bad. Also at the time of the Athlon's introduction AMD was not going for the mid/semi high end workstation market. Very few big brands built SMP systems around it, since it was perceived as a low cost solution wrt the P3 at that time that had take over the high end x86 market.
No they didn't the alpha got a LOT of stuff done per cycle compared to the contemporary intel offerings. Alpha was fully superscalar AND superpipelined, not like the timid superscalar pentium and the superpipelined only MIPS R4x00. The 21164 increased the issue width very aggresively, and the 21264 is as braniac as it can get.
Alpha had managed to be 2/3 yrs ahead of anyone else, that is why its demise was sad.
Well since ADA had not been developed then, I pretty much doubt the 432 was even remotelly targeted towards it. It was targeted toward object oriented languages, and offered support for OO in hardware. I
Are you nuts? The i960 is one of the best selling micros of all time. The i860 is the one you may be thinking of, two different beasts. Did you at least check your own link?
"Yes I realize that at least part of this is that apps are targetted for Linux, so of course it isn't Sun's fault when shit doesn't compile. "
That is the understatement of the year. Us BSD users have feel the pain of shitty code for years, as well as most other non Linux/GNU userland dependant Nixes out there.
I guess you have to take the good with the bad of OSS, the bad being the amount of shitty coders outthere that do not have a clue. And I have had my love/hate relationship with gcc for over a decade, sometimes I wonder why they still try to pretend to be a C-compiler:) and at least be honest enough and call it "new and improved C" or whatever but not C. And yes even with the strict ansi c flags I have had trouble with gcc. But I do not complain too much because I have gotten good things out of gcc too.
Well, when you can get a 100+ processor single image x86 machine let me know. Solaris/Sun still makes sense for some scenarios. If you want to run linux I agree that a sparc box is not the way to go, if you have a legacy box maybe. But with the 2.9 release solaris has beem quite responsive for ultra based desktops.
If you want to run your linux desktop, probably you may be better off with an x86 machine.
Also believe it or not, GNU is not the "defacto" for everyone using UNIX you know:). Whenever I need a gnu pakage I can just get to the solarisfreeware site, or use the pkg-get script and get it, install it, and be ready to run it within seconds. That sounds pretty simple to me. For the most part I like to keep some of the machines I use as GNU free as possible due to the dependency and bloat hell that it sometimes generates, I have to use commercial tools for part of my research.
As far as Sparc goes, they are only supporting UltraSparc II and up machines. Seems that their sparc kernel will only be 64bits.
Some people were running newer kernels, with old drivers from the 2.6 days, these drivers were 32bit so i don't know how this will play out. (drivers for sparc/sbus stuff not intel stuff).
Sun tends to support their OS and HW for a loooong time, heck they are still supporting 2.6. So for most people 2.9 will be OK.
Not really, actually I have had the opposite experience with Solaris running much better on desktop sparc machines than linux.
Also most of the software out there that can be compiled in linux can also be ported over Solaris with minimal grief.
And I do not particularly feel like spending 2 days compiling in order to have a stable machine. A solaris install with the extra software CD provides most of the functionality than a linux install. But if you like linux by all means go and use it. Saying that linux is somehow better or makes more sense than solaris just because is just plain dumb.
But hey, as long as other countries feel sorry for your own kids and send money and food to feed them why would they need to have their priorities straight.
Actually Chevy never sold a single car in Spain, as they were not exported to Europe -for the most part-, this was a Mexican market fiasco. They did have to change the Nova name for the mexican market.
The Spanish market story was with the Mitsubishi Pajero, Pajero in Spain is the most common slang for "Wanker" or someone with cronical masturbatory tendencies. To this day European tourists driving their "Pajeros" are still laughed at.
A lot of the pseudo-latin car names in the past 2 decades tend to translate poorly into Spanish.
The key word is not "better" but "cheaper", it happened with manufacturing jobs in the past 2 decades... it started happening with other jobs now. As long as executive positions are not being outsourced Corporate America could care less about who is doing the job, and the quality of it.
In some sense it is economic suicide, sure you produce cheaper goods, but those who are in this country to buy them are out of jobs. I.e. they have no money to buy those cheap goods, and the people who produced the goods are too underpayed to afford those goods. This is why MBA schools should be shut down once and for all, they have been produced miserable failures for the past 2 decades, a ton of greedy idiot savants who are unable to see the whole picture.
I could care less if Indian companies can do the same job better, or cheaper. If that was the case Indian corporations would rule the market, if there was indeed a perfect free economic system as the article sort of tried to hint.
Actually the PC was not "open" at all, IBM was not too happy when the clones started appearing.
It was copied, that is for sure, but it was far from "open." A plagiarized design doesn't make it "open" in the same fashion that a blown up safe lock box is also an "open" box.
And most of the games you mention have more in common with the machines you dissed than the actual original PC. I.e. most of the Doom engine was actually developed in NextStep, a lot of the 3DS software that game designers adopted in the 90s come from an Atari ST design program, most of the multi channel audio we know assume as standard was inspired by the Amiga (.mod's were the.mp3's of the 80s!:)), and on and on.... the PC ended up becoming more like the mac, the amiga, and the ST, not the other way around... to the point where current PCs have far more in common with those platforms in "spirit" than the original PC.
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Sadly the future is not as exponential as going from 64 bit to 128 bit, most kids do not seem to get what those magnitudes are.
:).
Besides there is really not much of a benefit for a 128 bit long datapath, at some point you can do much faster processors that are 32 bit for example than 64 bit, to the point that you can have technology very pipelined technology that can run at more than double the equivalent 64 bit datapath, therefore performing a 64 bit operation using 2x cycles of the faster 32 bit datapath is actually done faster than the 1x cycle of the 64bit datapath. However they are not as glamurous as the 64 bit native datapaths
Also people need to understand that complex structures like multipliers grow polynomially not linearly, this is a 128 bit multiplier is not twice as big as a 64 bit multiplier but much much larger (simpler terms would be squared increase).
Not really, most processors include more FP units than Integer units. That is why some machines may get better FP numbers, never mind that the spec FP and spec Int are 2 different magnitudes that are not 1 to 1 relative.
Most Intel machines have much better integer performing units, and are relatively weak with respect to other RISC competitors.
Why do people that computing == microprocessors?
There have been 64 bit processors found in minis, supers in mainframes since the 70's.
Heck there were 60 bit machines all the way back in the 60's.
So 64 bit computing has been around for more than 12 years. You could access 64 bit native data types on a CRAY 30 years ago.
I guess computer architecture is the only field that keeps reinventing the wheel over, and over, and over, and over....
"They made the same mistake as DEC: a radical switch to the Alpha RISC chip from its heavy VAX CISC processors."
No they didn't actually DEC did not make any mistake, the AXP had this concept of architectural extention via the PAL mechanism that allowed to execute CISC instructions found in the VAX by issuing Alpha instructions as translated VAX microcode. Therefore AXP machines could emulate certain operations found in VAX, this was only for legacy VMS apps. The MIPS line of DECStations ran Ultrix which was EOLd when DEC moved to OSF/1.
Alpha could execute x86 code pretty well by translating using the FX!32 framework, some early precursor to the code morphing approach found in transmeta chips.
DEC offered a very good upgrade path for its VAX customers, to the point of being almost painless. Anything that ran in VMS under VAX was guaranteed to run under VMS on AXP with a worst case scenario of a recompile. And every code got a performance boost. This is not the same scenario found in the Itanium move, where Intel did not offer a "painless" move from x86 to Itanic. DEC had a better environment because they controlled the OS, the Chip and the system. Intel only produces the chips and it has to pray for OS and system vendors to get it righ, which obviously they didn't.
The price you have to pay for a 128+ bit bus. You did not see many AMD SMP boards because there were no SMP capable AMD chipsets for a long time, not because of the routing overhead being that bad. Also at the time of the Athlon's introduction AMD was not going for the mid/semi high end workstation market. Very few big brands built SMP systems around it, since it was perceived as a low cost solution wrt the P3 at that time that had take over the high end x86 market.
No they didn't the alpha got a LOT of stuff done per cycle compared to the contemporary intel offerings. Alpha was fully superscalar AND superpipelined, not like the timid superscalar pentium and the superpipelined only MIPS R4x00. The 21164 increased the issue width very aggresively, and the 21264 is as braniac as it can get.
Alpha had managed to be 2/3 yrs ahead of anyone else, that is why its demise was sad.
Well since ADA had not been developed then, I pretty much doubt the 432 was even remotelly targeted towards it. It was targeted toward object oriented languages, and offered support for OO in hardware. I
Are you nuts? The i960 is one of the best selling micros of all time. The i860 is the one you may be thinking of, two different beasts. Did you at least check your own link?
Tzzzz wrong, not even close.
Europe has been electing Communist party members to office for decades. Same in other parts of the world, this is hardly an "Indian only" phenomenom.
Chavez is not even close to communism.
Yup 3 million jobs lost in the past 3 years, your "trickle down" politics are working wonderfully!
Congrtulations keep up the good job!
"Yes I realize that at least part of this is that apps are targetted for Linux, so of course it isn't Sun's fault when shit doesn't compile. "
:) and at least be honest enough and call it "new and improved C" or whatever but not C. And yes even with the strict ansi c flags I have had trouble with gcc. But I do not complain too much because I have gotten good things out of gcc too.
:(.
That is the understatement of the year. Us BSD users have feel the pain of shitty code for years, as well as most other non Linux/GNU userland dependant Nixes out there.
I guess you have to take the good with the bad of OSS, the bad being the amount of shitty coders outthere that do not have a clue. And I have had my love/hate relationship with gcc for over a decade, sometimes I wonder why they still try to pretend to be a C-compiler
I just wish portability was real sometimes
Well, when you can get a 100+ processor single image x86 machine let me know. Solaris/Sun still makes sense for some scenarios. If you want to run linux I agree that a sparc box is not the way to go, if you have a legacy box maybe. But with the 2.9 release solaris has beem quite responsive for ultra based desktops.
:). Whenever I need a gnu pakage I can just get to the solarisfreeware site, or use the pkg-get script and get it, install it, and be ready to run it within seconds. That sounds pretty simple to me. For the most part I like to keep some of the machines I use as GNU free as possible due to the dependency and bloat hell that it sometimes generates, I have to use commercial tools for part of my research.
If you want to run your linux desktop, probably you may be better off with an x86 machine.
Also believe it or not, GNU is not the "defacto" for everyone using UNIX you know
I dunno about the x86 version.
As far as Sparc goes, they are only supporting UltraSparc II and up machines. Seems that their sparc kernel will only be 64bits.
Some people were running newer kernels, with old drivers from the 2.6 days, these drivers were 32bit so i don't know how this will play out. (drivers for sparc/sbus stuff not intel stuff).
Sun tends to support their OS and HW for a loooong time, heck they are still supporting 2.6. So for most people 2.9 will be OK.
Not really, actually I have had the opposite experience with Solaris running much better on desktop sparc machines than linux.
Also most of the software out there that can be compiled in linux can also be ported over Solaris with minimal grief.
And I do not particularly feel like spending 2 days compiling in order to have a stable machine. A solaris install with the extra software CD provides most of the functionality than a linux install. But if you like linux by all means go and use it. Saying that linux is somehow better or makes more sense than solaris just because is just plain dumb.
No, only 64bit kernels are provided now. So that means Ultra 2 and up type of machines are supported, Ultra 1 and the Sun4c/m/et al are now dropped.
Therefore Solaris 9 is the last stop for the sun4m machines.
Well.... hostile for non well connected rich males, which are the ones with multiple divorces on their backs making the "family values laws"
As long as it is old rich white men making the laws ruling women's bodies will never get it right.
And BTW, when you talk about male-hostile laws, I am going to remind you that your perception does not equal in any case the reality.
3DSMax!!!!LOL, I think we are not in the mid 90's boy!
Maya, XSI or Extreme, and Houdini, but 3DSMax tells me that you have not done any serious 3D modelling work. LOL!
Well only you said it, so go and scream at your own stupidity, *sigh*
...or space programs, or nuclear programs.
But hey, as long as other countries feel sorry for your own kids and send money and food to feed them why would they need to have their priorities straight.
"Laser Beams" you frikin' idiot....
SILENCE!!! Your insolence will not be tolerated!
Actually Chevy never sold a single car in Spain, as they were not exported to Europe -for the most part-, this was a Mexican market fiasco. They did have to change the Nova name for the mexican market.
The Spanish market story was with the Mitsubishi Pajero, Pajero in Spain is the most common slang for "Wanker" or someone with cronical masturbatory tendencies. To this day European tourists driving their "Pajeros" are still laughed at.
A lot of the pseudo-latin car names in the past 2 decades tend to translate poorly into Spanish.
Errr no, the dB scale starts at 0, thre is no negative axis, hence no possibility of negative infinity. As such, 0dB is perfectly silent.
The key word is not "better" but "cheaper", it happened with manufacturing jobs in the past 2 decades... it started happening with other jobs now. As long as executive positions are not being outsourced Corporate America could care less about who is doing the job, and the quality of it.
In some sense it is economic suicide, sure you produce cheaper goods, but those who are in this country to buy them are out of jobs. I.e. they have no money to buy those cheap goods, and the people who produced the goods are too underpayed to afford those goods. This is why MBA schools should be shut down once and for all, they have been produced miserable failures for the past 2 decades, a ton of greedy idiot savants who are unable to see the whole picture.
I could care less if Indian companies can do the same job better, or cheaper. If that was the case Indian corporations would rule the market, if there was indeed a perfect free economic system as the article sort of tried to hint.
Actually the PC was not "open" at all, IBM was not too happy when the clones started appearing.
.mp3's of the 80s! :)), and on and on.... the PC ended up becoming more like the mac, the amiga, and the ST, not the other way around... to the point where current PCs have far more in common with those platforms in "spirit" than the original PC.
It was copied, that is for sure, but it was far from "open." A plagiarized design doesn't make it "open" in the same fashion that a blown up safe lock box is also an "open" box.
And most of the games you mention have more in common with the machines you dissed than the actual original PC. I.e. most of the Doom engine was actually developed in NextStep, a lot of the 3DS software that game designers adopted in the 90s come from an Atari ST design program, most of the multi channel audio we know assume as standard was inspired by the Amiga (.mod's were the