I donno where you've been, but, "back in the day", 3DFX was the only 3d card manufacturer, and the products they produced were light-years ahead of their competition (who WAS their competition? S3? NVidia? Remember how hard nVidia sucked before they bought 3DFX?)
Yeah, NVidia sucked, that's why they had enough money to buy 3dfx. Yup.
3dfx was way ahead of the other 3d accelerators for the first few revisions, but their "who gives a shit about image quality" attitude, and complete lack of innovation killed them long before nVidia purchased them.
Basically 3dfx had a killer product, and spent all their time doing nothing but making it faster, while nVidia and others concentrated on technological advancements, such as T&L engines, and the like. 3dfx died because they couldn't compete technically.
Hrm... I have a feeling you're a troll, but whatever.
Anyway, this is pretty cool. Although we'll have to see how the fueling method works. Some people mentioned a 'cigarett lighter' type thing you could buy, but we'll have to see how much of a 'revineu source' these companies consider it... It would kind of suck if they cost as much as the ink cartrages for most printers:P
Even if the price is down to $2-$3 a cart, I'd still rather go with the practicaly free eletrical power from an outlet then disposable carts.
And finaly, eletrical power is so cheap that most people don't mind if you just plug your stuff in. When I bring my laptop just about anywhere, I can feel confident I'll be able to find an outlet to plug it into. I could even get an adapter for my car (actualy, an 9vdc->120vac to plug my 120vac ->12vdc power brick, but hey it works:P)
With these things, you're SOL. Personaly, I think it would be cool to combine the two into a hybrid solution, a 30min/1hr battery that you can charge while using via a plug or via the fuel cell system. That would really give you the best of both worlds.
Of course, when we can get fuel cell's for $0.20 and fill them up anywhere (say, people put natural gas taps in their kitchen or something:P) I'd be willing to go all fuelcell, save a small battery that would let me change carts without rebooting:P
(oh, btw. I'm tying this in on a server machine, that dosn't happen to have any spell checking software installed. Now you can all see my horrible spelling in it's full glory!!!)
Could you link to any of these? The DMCA SPESIFICALY STATES that does NOT restrict freedom of speech in any way, that you are free to write, and talk about security, and that reverse engineering is legal for security and encryption purposes.
What's really necessary to beat a human master at Go is to be able to make some judgement on the relative value of different positions. Computers can't currently do that properly, so while a chess computer searches for that perfect move that forces checkmate, the computer playing Go has a hard time understanding what it's supposed to be searching for.
Well, this really says a lot more about the people writing the Go playing code then it does about the computers themselves.
Rights and privacy? Jesus. We're talking about the web here.
Are you saying that you don't mind unknown 3rd parties having, essensialy root access to your machine? Well, that's what they'll have if you can install spyware or whatever.
Belive it or not, I actualy do have more personal information then what websites I visit on my desktop and laptop machines, such as AIM chat logs, etc.
Since when is lying illegal? I mean, other then in court and to the police lying is and has always been legal. There can be civil penalties if you disparage someone, like if I said you raped children you could sue me. But you would have to prove that I knew what I was saying was false.
they never made any connection from the woman to the article, they just placed it on the same page and hinted that she was writing it.
And if they had... so what? It still wouldn't be a crime.
That someone might use stock photographs as design elements on a web page!
Sure, the 'testamonial' picture would lead you to belive that the person pictured actualy wrote the artical, but most of those pictures are just headings to pages with lots of links.
Another poster responded to you about your first point (instruction dependancy), so I won't cover that.
The vast, vast majority of CPU benchmarks are small enough (or have been hijacked enough by x86 companies) to not need to hit ram. If you want to do interesting things like video, you'll hit RAM.
Yeah, you'll need to hit RAM, but only for data, not code. Most CPUs (including x86s) have seperate caches for data and code. Hitting ram for each instruction would be absolute murder.
2^16 = 65536 = 64*1024 (64k). The math is pretty simple.
Obviously most 16 bit systems use some scheme to store more then that. I don't know about most 8 bit systems, but the z80 used a pair of registers (h and l) to store addresses, giving them a total of 64k or ram they could access at once.
8 bit direct addressing only gives you 256 bytes of ram, or 1/4th of a k. I think intel's 4004 chip had this limit (the first integrated CPU ever made)
8 CPUs stuck together, 1.33 times faster then a p4. And with only 12.36 times as many transistors! (And just 10 times as many interface pins, and power use!)
If IBM's 'scalling down' is more then by more then 25%, it'll be slower then intel. If it's by less then 95%, it'll be more expensive:P
Did you know that a P4 takes 20 clock cycles to perform a multiply?
Did you know that you are an idiot? the p4 has a 20 stage pipeline, which means the process of excecuting instructions is seperated into 20 peices, and the hardware used to do each one of those pecies works on part of a diffrent instruction at the same time. So while a multiply might take 20 clock cycles to come out of the other side of the CPU, if all you have is a program with one multiply instruction followed by a hlt or something.
Most programs, of course, have more then one instruction. With a 20 stage pipline one instruction takes 20 cycles to run, but you can also perform 19 other instructions along with it... depending on how many excicution units you have along with it.
The p4 has two ALUs, each running at twice the clock speed of the rest of the CPU. (in contrast, the athlon has 4 regular speed ALUs). So in actualy, you'd be able to run 80 or so instructions in that 20 clock cycles.
Integer multiplies are actualy performed by the floating point system, IIRC, rather then by the ALU, so they won't be as fast as addition and subtraction.
The chip IBM is making is a mips based chip, and takes fewer cycles to perform all its instructions. It also has a _ton_ more registers, which means you can perform significant operations without going to or from memory.
IBM is not making a mips chip, moron. They are making a Power PC chip. the p4 has only 8 general purpose 32 bit registers, but in addition has 8 80 bit floating point registers, 8 64bit integer SIMD registers and 8 128 bit floating point/vector SMID registers.
MIPS only has 32 general purpose registers, and although they can be used however you want, several of them are 'reserved' for the stack, and things like that. Also the first register is always zero, and you can't store anything in it. So in actuality, MIPS chips have fewer registers then Intel chips. PPC chips on the other hand do actually have more registers then Intel chips though, with 32 general-purpose registers, 32 floating (64 bit?) point registers, and 32 128 bit vector SMID registers.
This doesn't really help your argument, though:
Reading or writing a number to memory is about 100 times slower than an arithmatic instruction.
it's true that reading from memory takes a long time, and that's why modern CPUs don't do it very often. They use these things called "caches" you know? The vast, vast majority of memory access doesn't actually need to hit ram.
But to use those coprocessors, you have to go into modes like mmx. And bolted on extra instructions like mmx have restrictions on them, like not being to do mmx and floating point math at the same time.
No, I was talking about using floating point math for integers larger then 32 bits, rather then splitting 64 bit ints up into 32 bit chunks and adding them with carry (which takes more then two instructions). MMX doesn't allow 64bit int math, as far as I know, but rather allows you to sacrifice floating-point math for accelerated 8, 16, and 32 bit math. It's always interesting in that Mac fans seem to think that Intel chips suddenly lost the ability to do integer math and floating point math at the same time when they gained MMX.
Anyway, that's really beside the point due to the fact that, as you can see, MMX no longer uses the floating-point registers.
For the future, 64-bit is the way to go, and x86 is not. I think one of these IBM processors will be the ideal linux machine. (It'll be low power too, so I won't need a hairdrier-loud fan like I do with my athlon:) )
Actualy the limits are 4 gigabytes, and 16 exabytes (2^32, and 2^64) respectively. However, there are ways to get around this limit (after all, there were 16 bit machines with more then 64k of ram, and machines today with more then 4 gigs running on 32 bits)
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I donno where you've been, but, "back in the day", 3DFX was the only 3d card manufacturer, and the products they produced were light-years ahead of their competition (who WAS their competition? S3? NVidia? Remember how hard nVidia sucked before they bought 3DFX?)
Yeah, NVidia sucked, that's why they had enough money to buy 3dfx. Yup.
3dfx was way ahead of the other 3d accelerators for the first few revisions, but their "who gives a shit about image quality" attitude, and complete lack of innovation killed them long before nVidia purchased them.
Basically 3dfx had a killer product, and spent all their time doing nothing but making it faster, while nVidia and others concentrated on technological advancements, such as T&L engines, and the like. 3dfx died because they couldn't compete technically.
Hrm... I have a feeling you're a troll, but whatever.
How can you melt a ball of burning gass?
The problem with gas stations though, is those peksy snipers.
Humor folks, enjoy it! =)
Isn't that humor stuff supposed to be funny? Btw, research shows that humor is likely to be 87.3% less funy if it is labled as such.
That's nice.
:P
:P)
:P) I'd be willing to go all fuelcell, save a small battery that would let me change carts without rebooting :P
Anyway, this is pretty cool. Although we'll have to see how the fueling method works. Some people mentioned a 'cigarett lighter' type thing you could buy, but we'll have to see how much of a 'revineu source' these companies consider it... It would kind of suck if they cost as much as the ink cartrages for most printers
Even if the price is down to $2-$3 a cart, I'd still rather go with the practicaly free eletrical power from an outlet then disposable carts.
And finaly, eletrical power is so cheap that most people don't mind if you just plug your stuff in. When I bring my laptop just about anywhere, I can feel confident I'll be able to find an outlet to plug it into. I could even get an adapter for my car (actualy, an 9vdc->120vac to plug my 120vac ->12vdc power brick, but hey it works
With these things, you're SOL. Personaly, I think it would be cool to combine the two into a hybrid solution, a 30min/1hr battery that you can charge while using via a plug or via the fuel cell system. That would really give you the best of both worlds.
Of course, when we can get fuel cell's for $0.20 and fill them up anywhere (say, people put natural gas taps in their kitchen or something
(oh, btw. I'm tying this in on a server machine, that dosn't happen to have any spell checking software installed. Now you can all see my horrible spelling in it's full glory!!!)
Could you link to any of these? The DMCA SPESIFICALY STATES that does NOT restrict freedom of speech in any way, that you are free to write, and talk about security, and that reverse engineering is legal for security and encryption purposes.
What's really necessary to beat a human master at Go is to be able to make some judgement on the relative value of different positions. Computers can't currently do that properly, so while a chess computer searches for that perfect move that forces checkmate, the computer playing Go has a hard time understanding what it's supposed to be searching for.
Well, this really says a lot more about the people writing the Go playing code then it does about the computers themselves.
TCP in the CPU!? what crack are these guys smoking? The correct thing to do would be to include hardware in the NIC to accelerate TCP/IP stuff.
For the sake of us outside the US, just how big is a quarter, anyway?
They are about half the size of a dataplay disk, actualy.
Rights and privacy? Jesus. We're talking about the web here.
Are you saying that you don't mind unknown 3rd parties having, essensialy root access to your machine? Well, that's what they'll have if you can install spyware or whatever.
Belive it or not, I actualy do have more personal information then what websites I visit on my desktop and laptop machines, such as AIM chat logs, etc.
There are a lot more specs then that on those page: recording capablity:
zen: yes, ipod no
radio
zen: yes, ipod no
S/N ratio:
zen: 98db, ipod: dosn't say
Since when is lying illegal? I mean, other then in court and to the police lying is and has always been legal. There can be civil penalties if you disparage someone, like if I said you raped children you could sue me. But you would have to prove that I knew what I was saying was false.
they never made any connection from the woman to the article, they just placed it on the same page and hinted that she was writing it.
And if they had... so what? It still wouldn't be a crime.
Hrm, the AP says that they found the writer's personal website. Anyone out there have the URL?
That someone might use stock photographs as design elements on a web page!
Sure, the 'testamonial' picture would lead you to belive that the person pictured actualy wrote the artical, but most of those pictures are just headings to pages with lots of links.
Another poster responded to you about your first point (instruction dependancy), so I won't cover that.
The vast, vast majority of CPU benchmarks are small enough (or have been hijacked enough by x86 companies) to not need to hit ram. If you want to do interesting things like video, you'll hit RAM.
Yeah, you'll need to hit RAM, but only for data, not code. Most CPUs (including x86s) have seperate caches for data and code. Hitting ram for each instruction would be absolute murder.
I can tell the diffrence between then and than, when I am paying attention.
Thank you for making a relevant comment on the content of my post though.
Hrm, my Computer archetecture class never covered the MIPS FP... well... Actualy it probably did, I didn't really attend all that often :P
fascinating in fact.
Are you saying super-exhuast riceboy cars have engies that rev to 13.2k RPM? Even a civic SiR only goes up to 7.3k :P
Sure, clock on a computer dosn't mean everything, but it does mean something.
not direct 16 bit addressing.
2^16 = 65536 = 64*1024 (64k). The math is pretty simple.
Obviously most 16 bit systems use some scheme to store more then that. I don't know about most 8 bit systems, but the z80 used a pair of registers (h and l) to store addresses, giving them a total of 64k or ram they could access at once.
8 bit direct addressing only gives you 256 bytes of ram, or 1/4th of a k. I think intel's 4004 chip had this limit (the first integrated CPU ever made)
2^16 = 65536 = 64k. Do the math yourself.
Everything about IBM's Power4 processor is amazing. Amazing technology, amazing size (680 million transistors), amazing power requirements, amazing performance. And it's amazing that anything so complex can work at all. This beast has 5,200 pins on the package and consumes 500 watts (that's right, half a kilowatt) of power. Actually, Power4 is more than a processor, it's an entire neighborhood of processors. It's sold as a module comprising two processor cores per die, and four die per module, making eight 64-bit processors and 680 million transistors in one unit. Each individual die contains 174 millions transistors and measures a sun-blocking 400 mm2 in IBM's 0.18-micron 7-layer copper process.
:P
8 CPUs stuck together, 1.33 times faster then a p4. And with only 12.36 times as many transistors! (And just 10 times as many interface pins, and power use!)
If IBM's 'scalling down' is more then by more then 25%, it'll be slower then intel. If it's by less then 95%, it'll be more expensive
Did you know that a P4 takes 20 clock cycles to perform a multiply?
:) )
Did you know that you are an idiot? the p4 has a 20 stage pipeline, which means the process of excecuting instructions is seperated into 20 peices, and the hardware used to do each one of those pecies works on part of a diffrent instruction at the same time. So while a multiply might take 20 clock cycles to come out of the other side of the CPU, if all you have is a program with one multiply instruction followed by a hlt or something.
Most programs, of course, have more then one instruction. With a 20 stage pipline one instruction takes 20 cycles to run, but you can also perform 19 other instructions along with it... depending on how many excicution units you have along with it.
The p4 has two ALUs, each running at twice the clock speed of the rest of the CPU. (in contrast, the athlon has 4 regular speed ALUs). So in actualy, you'd be able to run 80 or so instructions in that 20 clock cycles.
Integer multiplies are actualy performed by the floating point system, IIRC, rather then by the ALU, so they won't be as fast as addition and subtraction.
The chip IBM is making is a mips based chip, and takes fewer cycles to perform all its instructions. It also has a _ton_ more registers, which means you can perform significant operations without going to or from memory.
IBM is not making a mips chip, moron. They are making a Power PC chip. the p4 has only 8 general purpose 32 bit registers, but in addition has 8 80 bit floating point registers, 8 64bit integer SIMD registers and 8 128 bit floating point/vector SMID registers.
MIPS only has 32 general purpose registers, and although they can be used however you want, several of them are 'reserved' for the stack, and things like that. Also the first register is always zero, and you can't store anything in it. So in actuality, MIPS chips have fewer registers then Intel chips. PPC chips on the other hand do actually have more registers then Intel chips though, with 32 general-purpose registers, 32 floating (64 bit?) point registers, and 32 128 bit vector SMID registers.
This doesn't really help your argument, though: Reading or writing a number to memory is about 100 times slower than an arithmatic instruction.
it's true that reading from memory takes a long time, and that's why modern CPUs don't do it very often. They use these things called "caches" you know? The vast, vast majority of memory access doesn't actually need to hit ram.
But to use those coprocessors, you have to go into modes like mmx. And bolted on extra instructions like mmx have restrictions on them, like not being to do mmx and floating point math at the same time.
No, I was talking about using floating point math for integers larger then 32 bits, rather then splitting 64 bit ints up into 32 bit chunks and adding them with carry (which takes more then two instructions). MMX doesn't allow 64bit int math, as far as I know, but rather allows you to sacrifice floating-point math for accelerated 8, 16, and 32 bit math. It's always interesting in that Mac fans seem to think that Intel chips suddenly lost the ability to do integer math and floating point math at the same time when they gained MMX.
Anyway, that's really beside the point due to the fact that, as you can see, MMX no longer uses the floating-point registers.
For the future, 64-bit is the way to go, and x86 is not. I think one of these IBM processors will be the ideal linux machine. (It'll be low power too, so I won't need a hairdrier-loud fan like I do with my athlon
since when are those separate things?
Might not hurt to learn a thing or two about how computers work before opening your mouth.
Checking pricewatch I see that 2 gig pc100 dimms are less than $500 each.
:P
Or you could get four 512 meg sims for $25 each
Actualy the limits are 4 gigabytes, and 16 exabytes (2^32, and 2^64) respectively. However, there are ways to get around this limit (after all, there were 16 bit machines with more then 64k of ram, and machines today with more then 4 gigs running on 32 bits)