If you've ever taken a physics course, you would know that electricity will travel the surface of a metal cylinder instead of going through it. Most EM radation (maybe all) does the same thing.
Now, getting HIT by a lightning bolt should do the same thing, but lightning is so powerful that it can actually melt the metal and go through it...(though for the most part it seems to leave a char mark on two sides of a wing while not actually going through it).
If you want to get an idea of HOW BAD a portable device can emit interferrance, find a cheap TI calculator (you know, the one's kids these days use in the 5th grade).
Turn it on.
Set it next to a cheap radio receiver. Turn on the AM band. Flip around the dial until you hear a wierd regular pattern. Play with the calculator. Notice how the pattern changes as you play with it.
This is a cheap calculator with a "processor" less powerfull than an 8088. Being powered by a watch battery.
Do you honestly think that your laptop -- with it's lithium ion batteries powering a Pentium III/500, hard drive spinning at 7200 rpm, multiple fans, LCD screen with fleurescent backlight -- produces LESS noise than a freek'in calculator? Yeah, they're shielded; but the shielding isn't THAT good, just enough to keep it from interferring too much with your portable phone.
(shoot, if you knew how much noise an electic motor alone made you wouldn't bring up that question...Electric RC cars have severe problems with noise from the motor if a few things arn't done to mitigate the problem [add a few capacitors in spots to eat up the sparks, basically]).
The heatsink on my k7/500 is cool to the touch on my system. The fan being blown out of the power supply is barely above room temperature.
Heat is not a problem.
My system also has 2 hard drives (one spinning at 7200 rpm, one at 5600 rpm), a zip drive, and a dvdrom in it. Several of those devices are power hogs. On top of that I'm using a tnt2/ultra as my video card, also quite a juice eater.
I use a 250watt power supply, and power is not a problem -- my motherboard is an fic sd11, notorious for being ultra picky about power supplies.
The trick to putting together a stable athlon system is to use quality parts. If you are putting together a server, this shouldn't be a problem. Athlon rigs hickup if you use a power supply that doesn't hold the voltage at the right level all the time. They also hickup if the ram used in it doesn't send signals when it's supposed to.
They arn't as forgiving as a bx board, but it is NOT that there are stability problems. The problem is the power supply is not running at spec (when there are power problems), or the problem is that the ram is not running at spec (when there are ram problems).
My system is far more stable than my old one, which I should mention has been up without a reboot for the last 97 days (and 9 hours and 4 minutes, but who's counting?:).
Their proposal merely proposes changes that addresses problems found in the court ruling.
"Hrm, court found that we didn't allow xyz, so we'll allow that now."
It does nothing to prevent abuses from happening in the future, nor does it do anything to address problems which were not determined during the trial.
They will release it in a timely manner. They will release parts of it.
Two very large backdoors.
"Timely" -- "We got it out as fast as we could! It took 3 years of hard work and we've released windows2002 in the meantime but we released it."
"Parts" -- "No, you don't need to know what functions a, b, c, and f are for. Trust us. Office uses it but they shouldn't."
With this deal Microsoft would still be able to wield the same power it has been throwing around with reckless abandon for the last several years. It is a PR attempt; I highly doubt is was made with a good faith intention.
What Metalica is saying is that Napster has no legitimate use, and it's only use is to pirate copywrited music.
I can go to mp3.com and download several thousand mp3's that don't have this problem, and napster can transfer them legally.
Metallica is so full of themselves that they think that the only kind of music that anyone would want to trade is copywrited. As a result they want to sue the makes of the software that allows people to pirate the music.
Why don't they sue the people who make CDR drives? How about the makes of cassettes? What about manufacturers of VCRs and VCR tapes?
Actually, most people who have been able to look at the performance numbers say that the Spitfire matches or exceeds current athlons. It's just cheaper to make a Spitfire than the current athlons (no expensive SRAMs, no plastic case, no pcb, etc etc).
Hell, depending on the type of computer you owned, you had to SOLDER the ram (piggy back style) on top of the existing ram.
My dad upgraded an Atari 520st (with.5mb of ram) to 2.5mb that way. He did a pretty good job too...the damn thing survived power flickers on the order of.25 seconds:).
I'm glad you're happy with your piddly p2/233, because I sure as hell wasn't. I'm now happy with my k7/500, but I bet in about a year I'll get sick of waiting on it too....
There wasn't a pipelined fpu in any consumer grade processors. The PPro was intel's server chip. It was expensive, fit in a proprietry slot, and had on-die L2 cache. I don't believe that this was AMD's target at the time;).
The k6 was meant to be a cheap, well performing alternative to the Pentium MMX chips -- which it was. What it wasn't meant to do was compete against the PII, which came out a few months after the K6 was actually available (after AMD fixed their production flubs).
Re:I speak for myself when I say...
on
Athlons Sold Out
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· Score: 1
Get rid of the generic memory and put in ram from a company not afraid to put their name on the stick.
I personally use Corsair, have heard of other people using Micron, Crucial, and a few other of the "big names" without problems. The cost is usually only $15-$30 more on a 128mb stick over the non-generic stuff (less than some places charge for shipping...rofl), so it's not that big of a deal. As a note (and a wierd one), pc133 ram doesn't seem to like some of the old Irongate boards, so keep that in mind. The place I bought my ram from claimed that Corsair pc133 wouldn't work in the fic sd-11...
If you still have problems, try and make sure everything is seated solidly. Sometimes you can think you've got the cpu in the slot pretty good but it can "just barely" be in there.
I would suggest checking the power supply, but I've never heard of a lockup occuring during the ram check. If you have your hard drives plugged in to the power supply, disconnect them and see if it still locks (only thing I can think of would be that the drives start drawing more power as they come up to speed).
About the only things I can think of to try -- good luck.
Re:Bad wording, and benchmark link
on
Athlons Sold Out
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· Score: 1
I would like to point out (as it has been stated on other hardware sites on the net) that those benchmarks were either faked or run on a crippled processor. When compared to benchmarks of a normal 750mhz Athlon these "thunderbird" benchmarks only equalled or fell below the parts currently out there.
Re:I speak for myself when I say...
on
Athlons Sold Out
·
· Score: 1
I'm currently using an FIC SD-11 (ie: one of the motherboards notorious for "instability") with a unrecommended 250 watt power supply. I've got a 128mb stick of cas2 Corsair ram was well.
I rarely have problems, but when I do it usually happens a bunch of times in a row which makes me suspect my wall outlet...
If it happens frequently, see if you can trace it to a particular activity (or just after you do something). It may be that you have a wierd hardware conflict going on. (I once had a problem on an old computer where the sound card, video card, and nic were all sharing IRQs, which caused wierd stuff to happen).
I would suspect that the station is still small enough to vaporize in the atmosphere if it came to that. Much smaller than the size it would have to be to still be solid when if it were to reach the ground.
Not only that, but due to Intels inability to actually supply their own product in the numbers they claim to be able to, companies are turning to AMD to fill the void.
AMD projected that they would sell over 2 million athlons in the 2nd Quarter (not sure...that number might be low). This is up from what they wanted to sell in the first quarter. They've still got 2 months left before the quarter is over and they've already "sold" the chips. Something picked up somewhere, that's for sure.
Re:I speak for myself when I say...
on
Athlons Sold Out
·
· Score: 1
If you buy quality ram you won't have problems on the old irongate boards. All of the Geforce issues have been addressed (in some fashion). The only other thing you need to be concerned about is getting a quality power supply. It doesn't have to be a beefy one (I use a 250watter), just one that supplies good solid current (ie: the 3.3v line stays at 3.3v and doesn't wobble between 3.0v and 3.6v).
Most of the real problems I've read about having to do with problems in the system are due to the enduser not configuring the system right, not installing the *correct* or (in some cases) uptodate drivers, or could be fixed using the latest mobo bios.
Give me some code that was optimized for a non-pipelined fpu and run that comparison again. You'll find the k6 would have been the p6.
The reason why it's still a moot point is that all of the code was optimized for a pipelined fpu -- a feature in the intel chip that didn't exist when the k6 was being designed.
I actually went through this process about a week ago.
I eventually decided on getting a Nikon Coolpix 800. I also bought a 32mb compact flash card, usb cf reader, and a set of 4 NiMH rechargable batteries to go with it. Total cost: $600 (Camera: $425 -- 32mb CF: $75 -- Batteries: $33 -- CF Reader: $30).
The camera came with an 8mb card. That's enough to take about 24 pictures at normal quality. The 32mb card usually ends up taking between 60-80 pictures at that setting; the normal quality setting is more than adequite for good pictures. In the lowest res/quality mode, an excess of 300 pictures can be taken.
I don't think it'd be practicle to take a digital camera on a 2 week vacation yet unless you have a number of compact flash cards to bring with you. But for a one or two day event, or for a holiday gathering it should be more than adequate.
For just playing around with cameras, it's great. I've already taken over 700 pictures with mine in under a week; the thing has practically payed for itself when you think about how much money I would have spent on film/developing -- just so I could play with an idea or something.
Note on quality settings: the camera has a number of different quality settings. You have the normal mode which takes pictures at 1600x1200. In this mode you can save the pics as an uncompressed tiff (~5.5mb), has a high quality jpeg (~800k), as a normal quality jpeg (~400k), and as a low quality jpeg (~200k). You can also tell the camera to save the pictures at a resolution of 640x480 at the high, normal, and low quality settings (no tiff option).
Features: Has a 2x optical zoom. Takes pictures at a res of 1600x1200 (and it's SHARP too). You can screw on filters/attatchments to the lense. The LCD screen has several different modes to suit your "style" (ie: always on and focusing, always on, only show the picture you just took, never on). The thing has shudder speeds between 1/750s to 8s. It has 3 different metering options (all which are very useful). You can manually adjust the focus (has about 50 different steps). You can also adjust the exposure slightly.
End result: I love it. The camera's featureset sits on the border between an amateur camera and a profesional one. You can set it to automatic or set many of the features yourself. It takes AWESOME mixed light pictures, and the CCD doesn't bleed out (ie: you don't see a farking verticle line in the picture like you with with a cheap digital camera) if you point it at a bright object.
Name brand memory conforms to the spec. Noname ram is alot "slopier" and deviates from the spec a bit.
Athlon mobos depend on stuff being more to spec than alot of intel/k6 boards (ie: the intel boards are more forgiving of faults than the athlon boards). The end result here is that you bought crappy ram that really shouldn't be called pc100 but is close enough for them to be able to sell it as such.
Actually, the FPU performance in the k6 was quite good for a non-pipelined fpu. I believe it took two cycles to perform most operations.
The reason the pII had such an advantage was that it used a pipelined fpu -- this increased the instruction latency by quite a bit, but throughput became an effective 1 instruction/cycle for heavy duty stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've ever taken a physics course, you would know that electricity will travel the surface of a metal cylinder instead of going through it. Most EM radation (maybe all) does the same thing.
Now, getting HIT by a lightning bolt should do the same thing, but lightning is so powerful that it can actually melt the metal and go through it...(though for the most part it seems to leave a char mark on two sides of a wing while not actually going through it).
If you want to get an idea of HOW BAD a portable device can emit interferrance, find a cheap TI calculator (you know, the one's kids these days use in the 5th grade).
Turn it on.
Set it next to a cheap radio receiver. Turn on the AM band. Flip around the dial until you hear a wierd regular pattern. Play with the calculator. Notice how the pattern changes as you play with it.
This is a cheap calculator with a "processor" less powerfull than an 8088. Being powered by a watch battery.
Do you honestly think that your laptop -- with it's lithium ion batteries powering a Pentium III/500, hard drive spinning at 7200 rpm, multiple fans, LCD screen with fleurescent backlight -- produces LESS noise than a freek'in calculator? Yeah, they're shielded; but the shielding isn't THAT good, just enough to keep it from interferring too much with your portable phone.
(shoot, if you knew how much noise an electic motor alone made you wouldn't bring up that question...Electric RC cars have severe problems with noise from the motor if a few things arn't done to mitigate the problem [add a few capacitors in spots to eat up the sparks, basically]).
Thunderbirds will only be available in Socket form to the DIY market. Slotted processors will, supposedly, only be available to OEMs.
The heatsink on my k7/500 is cool to the touch on my system. The fan being blown out of the power supply is barely above room temperature.
:).
Heat is not a problem.
My system also has 2 hard drives (one spinning at 7200 rpm, one at 5600 rpm), a zip drive, and a dvdrom in it. Several of those devices are power hogs. On top of that I'm using a tnt2/ultra as my video card, also quite a juice eater.
I use a 250watt power supply, and power is not a problem -- my motherboard is an fic sd11, notorious for being ultra picky about power supplies.
The trick to putting together a stable athlon system is to use quality parts. If you are putting together a server, this shouldn't be a problem. Athlon rigs hickup if you use a power supply that doesn't hold the voltage at the right level all the time. They also hickup if the ram used in it doesn't send signals when it's supposed to.
They arn't as forgiving as a bx board, but it is NOT that there are stability problems. The problem is the power supply is not running at spec (when there are power problems), or the problem is that the ram is not running at spec (when there are ram problems).
My system is far more stable than my old one, which I should mention has been up without a reboot for the last 97 days (and 9 hours and 4 minutes, but who's counting?
Their proposal merely proposes changes that addresses problems found in the court ruling.
"Hrm, court found that we didn't allow xyz, so we'll allow that now."
It does nothing to prevent abuses from happening in the future, nor does it do anything to address problems which were not determined during the trial.
The language of the offer is the bad thing.
They will release it in a timely manner.
They will release parts of it.
Two very large backdoors.
"Timely" -- "We got it out as fast as we could! It took 3 years of hard work and we've released windows2002 in the meantime but we released it."
"Parts" -- "No, you don't need to know what functions a, b, c, and f are for. Trust us. Office uses it but they shouldn't."
With this deal Microsoft would still be able to wield the same power it has been throwing around with reckless abandon for the last several years. It is a PR attempt; I highly doubt is was made with a good faith intention.
What Metalica is saying is that Napster has no legitimate use, and it's only use is to pirate copywrited music.
I can go to mp3.com and download several thousand mp3's that don't have this problem, and napster can transfer them legally.
Metallica is so full of themselves that they think that the only kind of music that anyone would want to trade is copywrited. As a result they want to sue the makes of the software that allows people to pirate the music.
Why don't they sue the people who make CDR drives? How about the makes of cassettes? What about manufacturers of VCRs and VCR tapes?
*nt*
Actually, most people who have been able to look at the performance numbers say that the Spitfire matches or exceeds current athlons. It's just cheaper to make a Spitfire than the current athlons (no expensive SRAMs, no plastic case, no pcb, etc etc).
Hell, depending on the type of computer you owned, you had to SOLDER the ram (piggy back style) on top of the existing ram.
.5mb of ram) to 2.5mb that way. He did a pretty good job too...the damn thing survived power flickers on the order of .25 seconds :).
My dad upgraded an Atari 520st (with
I'm glad you're happy with your piddly p2/233, because I sure as hell wasn't. I'm now happy with my k7/500, but I bet in about a year I'll get sick of waiting on it too....
Point taken...I'll rephrase my statement a bit ;).
;).
There wasn't a pipelined fpu in any consumer grade processors. The PPro was intel's server chip. It was expensive, fit in a proprietry slot, and had on-die L2 cache. I don't believe that this was AMD's target at the time
The k6 was meant to be a cheap, well performing alternative to the Pentium MMX chips -- which it was. What it wasn't meant to do was compete against the PII, which came out a few months after the K6 was actually available (after AMD fixed their production flubs).
Cheap opengl cad workstation?
Get rid of the generic memory and put in ram from a company not afraid to put their name on the stick.
I personally use Corsair, have heard of other people using Micron, Crucial, and a few other of the "big names" without problems. The cost is usually only $15-$30 more on a 128mb stick over the non-generic stuff (less than some places charge for shipping...rofl), so it's not that big of a deal. As a note (and a wierd one), pc133 ram doesn't seem to like some of the old Irongate boards, so keep that in mind. The place I bought my ram from claimed that Corsair pc133 wouldn't work in the fic sd-11...
If you still have problems, try and make sure everything is seated solidly. Sometimes you can think you've got the cpu in the slot pretty good but it can "just barely" be in there.
I would suggest checking the power supply, but I've never heard of a lockup occuring during the ram check. If you have your hard drives plugged in to the power supply, disconnect them and see if it still locks (only thing I can think of would be that the drives start drawing more power as they come up to speed).
About the only things I can think of to try -- good luck.
I would like to point out (as it has been stated on other hardware sites on the net) that those benchmarks were either faked or run on a crippled processor. When compared to benchmarks of a normal 750mhz Athlon these "thunderbird" benchmarks only equalled or fell below the parts currently out there.
I'm currently using an FIC SD-11 (ie: one of the motherboards notorious for "instability") with a unrecommended 250 watt power supply. I've got a 128mb stick of cas2 Corsair ram was well.
I rarely have problems, but when I do it usually happens a bunch of times in a row which makes me suspect my wall outlet...
If it happens frequently, see if you can trace it to a particular activity (or just after you do something). It may be that you have a wierd hardware conflict going on. (I once had a problem on an old computer where the sound card, video card, and nic were all sharing IRQs, which caused wierd stuff to happen).
I would suspect that the station is still small enough to vaporize in the atmosphere if it came to that. Much smaller than the size it would have to be to still be solid when if it were to reach the ground.
Not only that, but due to Intels inability to actually supply their own product in the numbers they claim to be able to, companies are turning to AMD to fill the void.
AMD projected that they would sell over 2 million athlons in the 2nd Quarter (not sure...that number might be low). This is up from what they wanted to sell in the first quarter. They've still got 2 months left before the quarter is over and they've already "sold" the chips. Something picked up somewhere, that's for sure.
If you buy quality ram you won't have problems on the old irongate boards. All of the Geforce issues have been addressed (in some fashion). The only other thing you need to be concerned about is getting a quality power supply. It doesn't have to be a beefy one (I use a 250watter), just one that supplies good solid current (ie: the 3.3v line stays at 3.3v and doesn't wobble between 3.0v and 3.6v).
Most of the real problems I've read about having to do with problems in the system are due to the enduser not configuring the system right, not installing the *correct* or (in some cases) uptodate drivers, or could be fixed using the latest mobo bios.
Give me some code that was optimized for a non-pipelined fpu and run that comparison again. You'll find the k6 would have been the p6.
The reason why it's still a moot point is that all of the code was optimized for a pipelined fpu -- a feature in the intel chip that didn't exist when the k6 was being designed.
I actually went through this process about a week ago.
I eventually decided on getting a Nikon Coolpix 800. I also bought a 32mb compact flash card, usb cf reader, and a set of 4 NiMH rechargable batteries to go with it. Total cost: $600 (Camera: $425 -- 32mb CF: $75 -- Batteries: $33 -- CF Reader: $30).
The camera came with an 8mb card. That's enough to take about 24 pictures at normal quality. The 32mb card usually ends up taking between 60-80 pictures at that setting; the normal quality setting is more than adequite for good pictures. In the lowest res/quality mode, an excess of 300 pictures can be taken.
I don't think it'd be practicle to take a digital camera on a 2 week vacation yet unless you have a number of compact flash cards to bring with you. But for a one or two day event, or for a holiday gathering it should be more than adequate.
For just playing around with cameras, it's great. I've already taken over 700 pictures with mine in under a week; the thing has practically payed for itself when you think about how much money I would have spent on film/developing -- just so I could play with an idea or something.
Note on quality settings: the camera has a number of different quality settings. You have the normal mode which takes pictures at 1600x1200. In this mode you can save the pics as an uncompressed tiff (~5.5mb), has a high quality jpeg (~800k), as a normal quality jpeg (~400k), and as a low quality jpeg (~200k). You can also tell the camera to save the pictures at a resolution of 640x480 at the high, normal, and low quality settings (no tiff option).
Features: Has a 2x optical zoom. Takes pictures at a res of 1600x1200 (and it's SHARP too). You can screw on filters/attatchments to the lense. The LCD screen has several different modes to suit your "style" (ie: always on and focusing, always on, only show the picture you just took, never on). The thing has shudder speeds between 1/750s to 8s. It has 3 different metering options (all which are very useful). You can manually adjust the focus (has about 50 different steps). You can also adjust the exposure slightly.
End result: I love it. The camera's featureset sits on the border between an amateur camera and a profesional one. You can set it to automatic or set many of the features yourself. It takes AWESOME mixed light pictures, and the CCD doesn't bleed out (ie: you don't see a farking verticle line in the picture like you with with a cheap digital camera) if you point it at a bright object.
Official word is Q4. I wouldn't be surprised it they came out in late Q3 though.
Ok, things to do:
Did you install the right busmaster drivers, or any at all? Make sure you put the right ones on or you'll get wierd BSOD's.
Did you put crappy ram in? Get rid of it.
Did you use a 150watt power supply? Get a real power supply.
Did you install the proper agp miniport driver? Install it.
Name brand memory conforms to the spec. Noname ram is alot "slopier" and deviates from the spec a bit.
Athlon mobos depend on stuff being more to spec than alot of intel/k6 boards (ie: the intel boards are more forgiving of faults than the athlon boards). The end result here is that you bought crappy ram that really shouldn't be called pc100 but is close enough for them to be able to sell it as such.
Actually, the FPU performance in the k6 was quite good for a non-pipelined fpu. I believe it took two cycles to perform most operations.
The reason the pII had such an advantage was that it used a pipelined fpu -- this increased the instruction latency by quite a bit, but throughput became an effective 1 instruction/cycle for heavy duty stuff.