Pentiums have never had an on-die MMU in the first place, they're actually doing that for the upcoming Nehalem. AMD has used an on-die MMU since the Athlon 64.
There wasn't much in terms of technical specs in TFA. 6 cores, 16MB cache, anything else? Clock speed? 16MB of L2? L3? FSB? DDR(n)? (Though this is probably more up to the MB manufacturer) Why are they moving the memory controller off silicon? That in itself seems like a step backwards.
I think you are confused. This core is NOT based off of the new Intel Core i7 architecture, it is based off of the existing Intel Penryn Core2. This means that it does not have an L3 cache or integrated memory controller. Please note from the linked page: all the i7 processors to be introduced next month are 4-core.
So, specs: 16MB dynamically shared L2 cache Memory: whatever the manufacturers feel like, although it will probably be FBDIMM DDR2. FSB: as high as they can make it. This processor has SIX hungry cores to feed. Id's say 1333 minimum.
Right now, with on-board sound you have an external amplifier + DAC/ADC chip. The CPU does all the controlling/processing.
Anything analog is tough to do on a CPU, so they typically don't integrate it. As mentioned in another post, this is also why the MODEM analog interface is not integrated on the chip, and it only uses the CPU for digital signal processing. Analog components today are as "integrated" as they're ever likely to be.
The things that have been completely integrated on the chip in the last two decades (MMU, FPU, cache, memory controller, SIMD/DSP, multiple cores) have all been fully digital. Further, the integration happened after the devices became "good enough" for most users. This bodes well for the integration of the GPU, for there are already on-board GPUs that are "good enough" (e.g. AMD 790), and DVI/Displayport mean that a completely digital video system is possible in the future.
I believe all engineers have to eventually take and pass this exam in order to advance in their careers.
In the United States, I'd say that's not quite true. PEs are mostly for legal accountability: the PE that signs-off on a document takes legal responsibility for that design. This means that the hottest fields to have your PE are Chemical and Civil Engineering.
MechEs can get by without their PE, although there are some places where they can benefit from it. Electrical and Computer Engineers don't need PE at all; even if you want it, the lack of qualified PEs in the industry makes it almost impossible to get (you have to work with someone who already has a PE for x years).
Also, have you considered something like the National Gaurd as a Commo officer? They pay reasonably well, are very interesting and very different from your day job, and while they do require a time and space commitment, Federal Law will help protect that time from other demands to a degree.
Yeah, real fun and exciting. You do know that we have a shortage of troops, and the fact is "the draft" is a phrase that shall not be spoken. As a result, joining the National Guard today almost guarantees you will do one or more rotations in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Yeah, supposedly they're not involved in combat patrols (mostly guard duty), but that doesn't mean the violence can't find them. The ones I feel the worst for are those who joined well before these wars, and never imagined they'd have to do international tours of duty in combat zones. If you join the "National" Guard today, you'd better know damn good and well that the job description has changed.
That's certainly a good suggestion. I'm not embarrassed about browsing porn or other questionable sites, and my gf and I are actually pretty open about these things...the porn hiding is mostly for random friends/houseguests who use my computer. I wouldn't feel uncomfortable if they saw a porn link in my history, but THEY might feel uncomfortable.
I don't really care if people snoop in my bookmarks. If they look in there, they get what they deserve. But when your bookmarks and all previous browing history can be search results, they might get something unexpected and disconcerting. But I'll tell you, I do trust them not to look at finanaces and such; if they're nosy enough to snoop through finances...damn, I just wouldn't invite them back.
I suppose the only reason I don't create separate accounts is because I am truly lazy:) I just got used to being able to use Firefox without leaving a trail in the recent websites pull-down. But there are MANY things in Firefox that have changed over the years (for example, the default placement of the 'close tab' button), and the good thing about Firefox is you can (mostly) revert to older behaviors. I was simply surprised they made reverting from the Awesombar so difficult.
Back in the days of Firefox 2, you could surf with no worries. All you had to do was avoid typing the porn site into the address bar, and you left no noticeable traces. This meant that bookmarks and links (think search results) left virtually no traces.
If you screwed-up, you could easily erase your browsing history. If you were really paranoid, you could turn off cookies while you browsed as well.
Then, along came Firefox 3 with the Awfulbar(TM). Suddenly, your entire web access history plus bookmarks were laid bare, and suddenly there was a need for a privacy mode. I've personally managed to get around the whole annoyance by using "show only typed" with Oldbar (behaves like Firefox 2), but for most general users this is far too complicated.
Of course, they could just make us all entirely happy by removing the Awfulbar(TM), but I'm not expecting miracles.
Yeah, when I tried their online quote tool, I omitted my current premium with Progressive. Not surprisingly, I got a quote significantly higher than my Progressive rate. Then I did it again, but filled in my current premium, and got a quote back that was five dollars less than my Progressive rate.
Saddest thing is, even when they KNEW how much I was paying, they didn't even bother to try and beat my Progressive rates by %15. Talk about false advertising.
Yeah, I saw it in the theater too. I spotted another erroneous trivia claim:
Trivia - Star Fox, released in the US in 1993, was the first 3D polygon game to ever appear on a home console.
Not True. EA's F-22 Interceptor (Sega Megadrive) predates Star Fox by two years. It contains no fancy chip; instead, it uses the Megadrive's beefy 68000 main processor to create a fully-polygonal 3D world.
Star Fox's claim to fame is that it has better graphics and a higher framerate than F-22...but it most certainly is not the first polygonal game on a console.
Yeah, something people don't realize is that most of the state is frozen for a good chunk of the year. You try doing businesses in an area that's a block of ice. See here for detailed climatology.
Not only does this make it hard to grow things, it also makes transportation a nightmare. They spend gobs of money every winter just to keep things moving while the state freezes-over.
Without oil money, sure, some areas will remain populated. There is, for example, a sizeable fishing industry based in Alaska that's not going anywhere. But I imagine everything north of Anchorage (except coastal towns) will simply be abandoned when the oil dries-up. At least that will make the conservationists happy.
I think this is the reason for the confusion:
on
Slashdot's Disagree Mail
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Am I the only person that had the sudden urge to register hockeydot.org and have it redirect to Slashdot?
Yeah, I know, slashDOT, hockeyDOT...right. It's a weak connection, but the sender was a weak idiot. I would expect this kind of stupid logic from a person like him.
I have to agree: the ad was way too long to advertise anything concrete, and felt like it had no direction. Seinfeld even looked uncomfortable delivering his usual offbeat remarks, and the build-up to the punchline felt stale. Cheap plastic shoes? Is THAT what technology and our future are all about? Please DON'T sign me up.
The closest analogy I can make is: it was like watching a painful skit on SNL, written by one of the crappier writers. You know it will be over in two minutes, but you just FEEL THE URGE TO SWITCH THE CHANNEL, or maybe EVEN DESTROY YOUR TV WITH A BLUNT OBJECT!
What I find even funnier is my 2008 Scion xB has a drag coeff of just 0.32! That's pretty sad, when you consider it's just a box with a few well-placed curves.
I was surprised at how many older performance cars have higher drag than today's vehicles, actually. Computers finally allow us to do more than just build efficient designs through trial and error. CAD, plus auto-optimization software gets you all the benefits of wind tunnel design without the usual repetitive tests and costs.
I have to agree, the second part of the Kvatch mission is an OBVIOUS example of this. I didn't finish the second part of the mission, because it was tough, and all I had to do was the first part to advance the storyline. I came back ten levels later, and found the enemies ripped through my NPC party, and gave me a helluva time.
Check out Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. It fixes all these balance issues, and caps level scaling, so you can level your characters however you want. They do compensate for this by making the main quest harder than it was (you should start around level 15 or 20), but considering how huge the world is, I have no trouble finding things to do up until then.
Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul fixes everything you listed here, plus makes the NPC interactions more interesting and lush. I don't play Oblivion without it.
I would suggest you try the "lite" verion first (see the instructions after you download), because the full version adds all sorts of mods that you may not want. The "lite" version has all the changes you need to avoid the problems you've listed, without significantly affecting the original gameplay.
What I don't like about the auto-scaling in Oblivion is that the game tends to remain at the same relative difficulty at all times.
I didn't like the auto-scaling because I screwed it up, and got poor levels. You have to get +3 or better on every stat you level-up, or it's not worth the level, because enemies improve every time you level-up. Unfortunately, new players find this confusing, and experienced players find it tedious, because the game becomes a spreadsheet.
Unfortunately, the lazy programmers at Bethesda tied enemy stats purely to level, so if you screwed-up your level-ups, you were deep in a hole in no time.
I actually installed Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul to avoid this. Instead of pure scaling, areas have fixed minimum difficulties. Also, level scaling has a fixed maximum in every area, so even if you screw-up leveling, you can still conquer areas by getting more levels.
The USB 1/2 bus polls devices for data, and it has a half-duplex shared data bus. USB 3.0 will fix both of these problems, with a structure very similar to PCIe: bi-directional serial busses with interrupt-driven transfers.
They can make this change because they bolted an entirely new set of conductors on-top of the old bus. The only thing "old" about USB 3.0 will be the connector housing.
It will still be slower for sustained transfers than Firewire 400.
The most important part, did they finally make it non CPU intensive?
The article says that USB 3.0 is finally bi-directional (dedicated send and receive lines), and finally is interrupt driven instead of polled. Given that, then yes, I do believe it will out-class Firewire, even at faster speed grades (800, 1600, perhaps even 3200).
USB 2.0 is so slow because of the polling, and the half-duplex data transfer. USB 3.0 should be similar to PCIe, with the bi-directional signaling and interrupt-driven interface.
I also really want to know what they are targeting with it. as Portable storage has esata which will kick it's butt, and USB2.0 is fine for everything else except video, and we have that standardized on firewire.
I believe they want to get this out and into the public eye before eSATA catches on. USB has an advantage over eSATA: smaller devices really only have room for one connector, and larger devices like drive enclosures still add cost when you add more interfaces. But that advantage will only buy them so much time.
If the USB group continued dragging ass and didn't upgrade speeds, consumers would eventually switch to eSATA for external storage. But if they get a compatible product out before eSATA gains momentum, they will kill off their competition.
I personally like the idea, because I hate having multiple different cables. USB was supposed to fix this probblem, but in order to do this they have to improve performance continuously.
Yeah, the only way Nvidia could acquire an x86 license is if they purchased Via; I've actually been anticipating this for several years. But Nvidia doesn't want the excess baggage Via is carrying, and the merger of Via and Nvidia would spark a graphics anti-trust storm just like a merger of AMD and Nvidia.
I'm actually not sure how they're going to get an x86 license if they don't buy an existing one. Sure, there's probably nothing preventing Nvidia from negotiating an x86 license (with anti-trust regulators breathing down Intel's back), but I'm sure they won't get a good deal (they have virtually no barganing position).
I do hope that, if this is true, that Nvidia standardizes on Hypertransport and works with AMD to make their chips compatible (drop-in compatibility between Nvidia and AMD would be nice). This is virtually the same path that AMD took versus Intel, until they had the marketshare to branch off on their own. My worry is, if Nvidia creates yet another closed platform, I think the market will reject them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he meant to say:
"Them word game are more funner than the bestest games he be ever playing. It liked fishing ham sandwiches right up the helm of a larger battleship!"
Zeeeeeeeeeeee!
Pentiums have never had an on-die MMU in the first place, they're actually doing that for the upcoming Nehalem. AMD has used an on-die MMU since the Athlon 64.
You are confusing the memory management unit (MMU) with the memory controller.
Intel's first chip with a built-in MMU was the 286, and every AMD-designed x86 chip has one too. Just thought you might like to know.
There wasn't much in terms of technical specs in TFA. 6 cores, 16MB cache, anything else? Clock speed? 16MB of L2? L3? FSB? DDR(n)? (Though this is probably more up to the MB manufacturer) Why are they moving the memory controller off silicon? That in itself seems like a step backwards.
I think you are confused. This core is NOT based off of the new Intel Core i7 architecture, it is based off of the existing Intel Penryn Core2. This means that it does not have an L3 cache or integrated memory controller. Please note from the linked page: all the i7 processors to be introduced next month are 4-core.
So, specs:
16MB dynamically shared L2 cache
Memory: whatever the manufacturers feel like, although it will probably be FBDIMM DDR2.
FSB: as high as they can make it. This processor has SIX hungry cores to feed. Id's say 1333 minimum.
Right now, with on-board sound you have an external amplifier + DAC/ADC chip. The CPU does all the controlling/processing.
Anything analog is tough to do on a CPU, so they typically don't integrate it. As mentioned in another post, this is also why the MODEM analog interface is not integrated on the chip, and it only uses the CPU for digital signal processing. Analog components today are as "integrated" as they're ever likely to be.
The things that have been completely integrated on the chip in the last two decades (MMU, FPU, cache, memory controller, SIMD/DSP, multiple cores) have all been fully digital. Further, the integration happened after the devices became "good enough" for most users. This bodes well for the integration of the GPU, for there are already on-board GPUs that are "good enough" (e.g. AMD 790), and DVI/Displayport mean that a completely digital video system is possible in the future.
I believe all engineers have to eventually take and pass this exam in order to advance in their careers.
In the United States, I'd say that's not quite true. PEs are mostly for legal accountability: the PE that signs-off on a document takes legal responsibility for that design. This means that the hottest fields to have your PE are Chemical and Civil Engineering.
MechEs can get by without their PE, although there are some places where they can benefit from it. Electrical and Computer Engineers don't need PE at all; even if you want it, the lack of qualified PEs in the industry makes it almost impossible to get (you have to work with someone who already has a PE for x years).
My link above got obliterated for some reason. Here it is.
Also, have you considered something like the National Gaurd as a Commo officer? They pay reasonably well, are very interesting and very different from your day job, and while they do require a time and space commitment, Federal Law will help protect that time from other demands to a degree.
Yeah, real fun and exciting. You do know that we have a shortage of troops, and the fact is "the draft" is a phrase that shall not be spoken. As a result, joining the National Guard today almost guarantees you will do one or more rotations in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Yeah, supposedly they're not involved in combat patrols (mostly guard duty), but that doesn't mean the violence can't find them. The ones I feel the worst for are those who joined well before these wars, and never imagined they'd have to do international tours of duty in combat zones. If you join the "National" Guard today, you'd better know damn good and well that the job description has changed.
That's certainly a good suggestion. I'm not embarrassed about browsing porn or other questionable sites, and my gf and I are actually pretty open about these things...the porn hiding is mostly for random friends/houseguests who use my computer. I wouldn't feel uncomfortable if they saw a porn link in my history, but THEY might feel uncomfortable.
I don't really care if people snoop in my bookmarks. If they look in there, they get what they deserve. But when your bookmarks and all previous browing history can be search results, they might get something unexpected and disconcerting. But I'll tell you, I do trust them not to look at finanaces and such; if they're nosy enough to snoop through finances...damn, I just wouldn't invite them back.
I suppose the only reason I don't create separate accounts is because I am truly lazy :) I just got used to being able to use Firefox without leaving a trail in the recent websites pull-down. But there are MANY things in Firefox that have changed over the years (for example, the default placement of the 'close tab' button), and the good thing about Firefox is you can (mostly) revert to older behaviors. I was simply surprised they made reverting from the Awesombar so difficult.
Back in the days of Firefox 2, you could surf with no worries. All you had to do was avoid typing the porn site into the address bar, and you left no noticeable traces. This meant that bookmarks and links (think search results) left virtually no traces.
If you screwed-up, you could easily erase your browsing history. If you were really paranoid, you could turn off cookies while you browsed as well.
Then, along came Firefox 3 with the Awfulbar(TM). Suddenly, your entire web access history plus bookmarks were laid bare, and suddenly there was a need for a privacy mode. I've personally managed to get around the whole annoyance by using "show only typed" with Oldbar (behaves like Firefox 2), but for most general users this is far too complicated.
Of course, they could just make us all entirely happy by removing the Awfulbar(TM), but I'm not expecting miracles.
Yeah, when I tried their online quote tool, I omitted my current premium with Progressive. Not surprisingly, I got a quote significantly higher than my Progressive rate. Then I did it again, but filled in my current premium, and got a quote back that was five dollars less than my Progressive rate.
Saddest thing is, even when they KNEW how much I was paying, they didn't even bother to try and beat my Progressive rates by %15. Talk about false advertising.
I dunno...
My sig meshes a Stranger in a Strange Land quote with my own stupidity, and I havn't changed it in five years :)
I guess in Korea, only old people quote Heinlien.
Yeah, I saw it in the theater too. I spotted another erroneous trivia claim:
Trivia - Star Fox, released in the US in 1993, was the first 3D polygon game to ever appear on a home console.
Not True. EA's F-22 Interceptor (Sega Megadrive) predates Star Fox by two years. It contains no fancy chip; instead, it uses the Megadrive's beefy 68000 main processor to create a fully-polygonal 3D world.
Star Fox's claim to fame is that it has better graphics and a higher framerate than F-22...but it most certainly is not the first polygonal game on a console.
Yeah, something people don't realize is that most of the state is frozen for a good chunk of the year. You try doing businesses in an area that's a block of ice. See here for detailed climatology.
Not only does this make it hard to grow things, it also makes transportation a nightmare. They spend gobs of money every winter just to keep things moving while the state freezes-over.
Without oil money, sure, some areas will remain populated. There is, for example, a sizeable fishing industry based in Alaska that's not going anywhere. But I imagine everything north of Anchorage (except coastal towns) will simply be abandoned when the oil dries-up. At least that will make the conservationists happy.
Am I the only person that had the sudden urge to register hockeydot.org and have it redirect to Slashdot?
Check this out: Hockeydot.net.
Yeah, I know, slashDOT, hockeyDOT...right. It's a weak connection, but the sender was a weak idiot. I would expect this kind of stupid logic from a person like him.
I have to agree: the ad was way too long to advertise anything concrete, and felt like it had no direction. Seinfeld even looked uncomfortable delivering his usual offbeat remarks, and the build-up to the punchline felt stale. Cheap plastic shoes? Is THAT what technology and our future are all about? Please DON'T sign me up.
The closest analogy I can make is: it was like watching a painful skit on SNL, written by one of the crappier writers. You know it will be over in two minutes, but you just FEEL THE URGE TO SWITCH THE CHANNEL, or maybe EVEN DESTROY YOUR TV WITH A BLUNT OBJECT!
What I find even funnier is my 2008 Scion xB has a drag coeff of just 0.32! That's pretty sad, when you consider it's just a box with a few well-placed curves.
I was surprised at how many older performance cars have higher drag than today's vehicles, actually. Computers finally allow us to do more than just build efficient designs through trial and error. CAD, plus auto-optimization software gets you all the benefits of wind tunnel design without the usual repetitive tests and costs.
I always beat it to get it out of the way early, but won't you know it, twenty minutes later, there it is again.
You should get out more. You can really wow the ladies with that kind of stamina :)
Just for fun, I went to nVidia's website to look up the drivers for an old GeForce 3 I have laying round. I believe I got that card in 1999.
You are mistaken. The release date for the GeForce 3 was May 2001.
The most recent drivers are 2006. 5 years of support.
Fixed for you.
I have to agree, the second part of the Kvatch mission is an OBVIOUS example of this. I didn't finish the second part of the mission, because it was tough, and all I had to do was the first part to advance the storyline. I came back ten levels later, and found the enemies ripped through my NPC party, and gave me a helluva time.
Check out Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. It fixes all these balance issues, and caps level scaling, so you can level your characters however you want. They do compensate for this by making the main quest harder than it was (you should start around level 15 or 20), but considering how huge the world is, I have no trouble finding things to do up until then.
Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul fixes everything you listed here, plus makes the NPC interactions more interesting and lush. I don't play Oblivion without it.
I would suggest you try the "lite" verion first (see the instructions after you download), because the full version adds all sorts of mods that you may not want. The "lite" version has all the changes you need to avoid the problems you've listed, without significantly affecting the original gameplay.
What I don't like about the auto-scaling in Oblivion is that the game tends to remain at the same relative difficulty at all times.
I didn't like the auto-scaling because I screwed it up, and got poor levels. You have to get +3 or better on every stat you level-up, or it's not worth the level, because enemies improve every time you level-up. Unfortunately, new players find this confusing, and experienced players find it tedious, because the game becomes a spreadsheet.
Unfortunately, the lazy programmers at Bethesda tied enemy stats purely to level, so if you screwed-up your level-ups, you were deep in a hole in no time.
I actually installed Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul to avoid this. Instead of pure scaling, areas have fixed minimum difficulties. Also, level scaling has a fixed maximum in every area, so even if you screw-up leveling, you can still conquer areas by getting more levels.
Why don't you people read the article?
The USB 1/2 bus polls devices for data, and it has a half-duplex shared data bus. USB 3.0 will fix both of these problems, with a structure very similar to PCIe: bi-directional serial busses with interrupt-driven transfers.
They can make this change because they bolted an entirely new set of conductors on-top of the old bus. The only thing "old" about USB 3.0 will be the connector housing.
It will still be slower for sustained transfers than Firewire 400.
The most important part, did they finally make it non CPU intensive?
The article says that USB 3.0 is finally bi-directional (dedicated send and receive lines), and finally is interrupt driven instead of polled. Given that, then yes, I do believe it will out-class Firewire, even at faster speed grades (800, 1600, perhaps even 3200).
USB 2.0 is so slow because of the polling, and the half-duplex data transfer. USB 3.0 should be similar to PCIe, with the bi-directional signaling and interrupt-driven interface.
I also really want to know what they are targeting with it. as Portable storage has esata which will kick it's butt, and USB2.0 is fine for everything else except video, and we have that standardized on firewire.
I believe they want to get this out and into the public eye before eSATA catches on. USB has an advantage over eSATA: smaller devices really only have room for one connector, and larger devices like drive enclosures still add cost when you add more interfaces. But that advantage will only buy them so much time.
If the USB group continued dragging ass and didn't upgrade speeds, consumers would eventually switch to eSATA for external storage. But if they get a compatible product out before eSATA gains momentum, they will kill off their competition.
I personally like the idea, because I hate having multiple different cables. USB was supposed to fix this probblem, but in order to do this they have to improve performance continuously.
Yeah, the only way Nvidia could acquire an x86 license is if they purchased Via; I've actually been anticipating this for several years. But Nvidia doesn't want the excess baggage Via is carrying, and the merger of Via and Nvidia would spark a graphics anti-trust storm just like a merger of AMD and Nvidia.
I'm actually not sure how they're going to get an x86 license if they don't buy an existing one. Sure, there's probably nothing preventing Nvidia from negotiating an x86 license (with anti-trust regulators breathing down Intel's back), but I'm sure they won't get a good deal (they have virtually no barganing position).
I do hope that, if this is true, that Nvidia standardizes on Hypertransport and works with AMD to make their chips compatible (drop-in compatibility between Nvidia and AMD would be nice). This is virtually the same path that AMD took versus Intel, until they had the marketshare to branch off on their own. My worry is, if Nvidia creates yet another closed platform, I think the market will reject them.