That "heinous act" it told you must have been "inaccessible boot device".
For W2k and XP (not sure about NT) there are basically 2 drivers which it absolutely needs to be able to boot. One is the graphic driver, which has fortunately a fallback to generic VGA. The other is the disk driver, so if you change your board to one with a different hd controller (for typical setups that means different chipset, though you might get lucky if it's a different chipset but which can use the same driver, dunno) then it will not boot. There are documented ways around this (for instance in the MS knowledgebase), though yes if you ask me it's really lame that there is no generic ide fallback. Apart from that board swaps seem to work pretty well with W2k (even though not recommended by MS), of course you might need to change hal (uniprocessor to multiprocessor and such things) and other drivers later.
(Actually IME hd cloning / swapping is more problematic due to recognition of drives with some unique identifiers)
No, you can't do "128-bits FP math" with SSE. Not if you're talking about precision. The registers are indeed 128-bits wide (*), but all math operations operate on either 2x64 bits or 4x32 bits (that's why it's called SIMD after all, "single instruction multiple data". (SSE could only work with simple precision floats (4x32) whereas SSE2 introduced double precision.)
(*) This is actually an oversimplification. At the hardware level, the registers may actually not be 128-bit wide. In fact, both intel p4 and amd a64 only have internal 64-bit datapaths and will decompose a 128bit instruction into 2 64bit instructions. But this is of course hidden from the programmer.
Unfortunately, neither of these cards have any sort of open-source driver. The unichrome driver does not support anything newer than, well, various forms of unichrome (which basically all are more or less a savage 4 from 1999). Newest generation from ati (Radeon X1xx cards) are not supported in any way (not even 2d) with an open-source driver (other than vesa fb). Older ATI cards certainly are (up to X850, though the 3d side on the r300-based chips is reverse-engeneered and possibly not quite well optimized). You may get 2d support for newest nvidia cards with the open source driver (I'm not sure about that however), but no 3d, reverse engeneering project exists but it's in a very early stage (and I'm not sure if it covers the latest generation).
I got some of these messages late last night, and I didn't even know what bluesecurity is (the spam got past mozilla's filter, and for some reason it took my attention, so I looked it up). Thus I quickly decided it's a spammer who is just lying (you're not surprised spammers are lying aren't you...). What happens is that probably some spammer just sends this out using its usual address db it has, and people which don't use bluesecurity will just ignore/delete it, whereas the actual users of bluesecurity will (or so the spammer hopes) think they really get this spam because they use it.
No longer true unfortunately. ATI's R300-based cards have a reverse-engeneered driver (for 3d) and it gets worse from there, ati is apparently unwilling to release _any_ documentation for the X1xxx cards, so not even a 2d driver will be available anytime soon (the modesetting etc. is supposed to be much different with that generation (avivo) so good luck with reverse-engeneering that). (Not to mention ATI's binary linux driver doesn't support them neither currently, stating in some interview support for them is a "couple of driver releases" away).
You're right about intel (though "for some time" seems a bit exaggerated if you only count shipping products - something like a month). intel really is ahead 6 month. However, IBM is not using 65nm tech with any of its shipping products (that I'm aware of). In fact, their power5 only transitioned to 90nm very recently, though the powerpc g5 transitioned to 90nm somewhat earlier than AMD transitioned their chips to 90nm I believe. Some time ago rumours said the first dual-core g5 chip would be 65nm (the powerpc 976) but obviously this was just that - an unsubstantiated rumour, the powerpc g5 dual-core materialized as a 90nm chip (970mp).
What does that mean to companies that sell stuff like USB flash drives or CF cards? They'll obviously have to pay royalties, of course,
Yep, they will pricing has been set to 25c per unit.
I'm not sure that's true for all preformatted media. If you read MS licensing page, it says "These manufacturers can pre-format the media to the Microsoft FAT file system format, such as with compact flash memory cards, and then preload data onto the pre-formatted media using the Microsoft FAT file system format." So it appears as long as you don't put data on it you may not need to pay anything.
After all, the patents only cover the long filename extensions. You could just format the media with FAT, and put no data on it (or put only data on it with 8.3 names, just make sure the OS you use to put it on there doesn't generate the second directory entry). IIRC there is zero difference in formatting a drive for use with long filenames or not. Though the FAT32 extension may also be covered by "valid" patents - and this would still be a problem (at least for large drives).
Actually, the limit for single link dvi is 1920x1200 with somewhat "standard" timing (reduced blanking but still 60Hz). It's possible to drive much larger resolutions if you're willing to sacrifice refresh rate, though the problem is a lot of monitors (and possibly graphic drivers as well) won't support it.
The radeon x1800 series also have dual dual link dvi, not exactly cheap but a lot cheaper than those workstation cards.
this is basically what btx is about. It doesn't seem to catch on though, not sure exactly why. Maybe the manufacturers think this is primarily a bug-fix for the heat problems of the prescott p4, and otherwise unneded and thus don't want the transition from atx to btx at all (quite some components are different, new cases, new boards, new cpu coolers). Though, from a technical point of view, btx imho has quite some merit.
A couple of good points in the article, but he says you shouldn't install a service pack as it just "adds bloat". Now, I don't know about you, but I'd never run W2k (or WXP for that matter) without the latest service pack (and for w2k the rollup pack that just was published recently).
And, Windows 2000 on "8 year old hardware" doesn't sound that impressive - after all Windows 2000 is almost as old...
Additionally, I can easily beat that, Windows XP on 9-year old hardware! (though it's no longer my pc, I had "only" Windows 2000 installed on it)
(ok I admit 9 year old is cheated a bit. CPU is newer, a K6-III 400, and ram has been upgraded 6 years ago or so to 128MB from the initial 32MB. But motherboard (asus t2p4) and most other components (3.2GB hd, 2MB matrox mystique graphic card, sound card etc. are all 1996).)
For the slowdown in Doom III, it doesn't matter if you have one or two cards (all textures are in the local memory of both cards).
Beyond3d tested Doom III with the 512MB ATI card, and didn't find any difference to the 256MB version. Turns out there is more or less exactly one level where it indeed does make a difference when you have ultra quality enabled (not that you'd be able to see a difference), somewhere in the alpha labs 1 is the maximum texture usage where you get at least a bit of a performance improvement. Seems really silly to buy a card just for that...
That's called overcommit. You can switch this off or on with linux (it's usually on, but there might be cases this is not desired behaviour and you absolutely have to guarantee that enough memory is actually available). I'm not sure what windows does, it would surprise me if it wouldn't overcommit memory.
Well I'm happy if they support position:fixed as a start. There are lots of web pages which are emulating that through a javascript which moves the element which is really meant to stay at the same position around. But of course you can see it scroll around a bit, and it causes high cpu load too. Every time I see that I'll instantly think "gah that stupid IE workaround on that site too..."
I suspect the parent poster is refering to the IOMMU of the Athlon64/Opteron chips, which intels EMT64 chips lack. This might have consequences for some PCI (or other I/O) devices, the OS might need to use copy buffers if those devices want to do dma transfers to/from address space above 4GB.
Re:Anti-aliased fonts
on
KDE 3.4 goes Beta
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, if you have a supported graphic card, AA fonts can be quite fast. The dri supported radeons (meaning everything from original radeon 7000 up to 9250 and all radeon igp except the brand-new of the xpress 200 chipset) for instance have render acceleration, which can speed up aa font rendering up by a factor of 10 or more.
This particular driver doesn't support (accelerated) subpixel hinting, though.
The driver certainly could enable faster agp modes and fastwrites on its own. The problem is that fastwrites are very problematic on some chipsets, and the same is true for faster agp modes (that one is only a rare problem afaik). Since AGP 1x and no fastwrites is a safe default which always works, the driver just uses that. Fastwrites don't help performance anyway usually, and faster AGP modes won't do that much for these old cards neither.
If you had tried it, you would discover that it is not possible, since the part of the disc that holds the CSS keys is not writable.
Actually, that's only mostly true. DVD-R "for General Use" have their lead-in area where the CSS keys are stored already overwritten when you buy them - so you cannot store CSS keys. However DVD-R "for Authoring Use" CAN store CSS keys. They are VERY expensive, I don't think I've ever seen a normal shop which sells them... Also consumer DVD recorders are incompatible to them, I'm not sure if a hacked firmware could solve that problem.
DVD+R OTOH is different. There are no technical measures on the media itself which would prevent writing the CSS keys to them. However, recorders are designed to only write dummy information to those sectors in the lead-in area - a hacked firmware probably would allow to circumvent that. I don't think I have seen such a hacked firmware though, most likely because the interest in such a firmware is probably too small (as opposed to hacked firmwares which circumvent region codes).
I don't know how they can claim it's discontinued if it never existed in the first place...
the P2 switched to 100Mhz FSB at 350Mhz, thus a P2 366 and 466 never existed. Since those are for embedded, they might be talking about mobile P2 - 366 mobile P2 indeed exists, but a mobile P2 466 does not (fastest P2 ever was 450Mhz, fastest mobile 400 Mhz).
And btw, the register gets it wrong: that it is available so long has nothing to do with power consumption and the like, it's simply because certain industry applications require that a chip is available for a long time - embedded chips are still in use after 20 years or so, and it's good if you can still get replacement parts.
The GPU of the Nforce motherboards is integerated into the northbridge. It doesn't tie up the CPU any more that a gforce 2 does, Except that it doesn't have its own memory.
That's true for the nforce2. Note though that any other integrated graphic chip up to now does NOT have T&L (or the "modern version" of it, vertex shaders). That's true for intel's graphic core, Via (unichrome), it's true for ATI's old igp320,340, their newer igp9100, and also this one, the rs480 (some reviews think it has hw vertex shaders, others do not. Based on the vertex-heavy benchmarks I've seen I'd say it has no hardware vertex shaders).
So it will use more cpu power. Not that it really matters, since the cpus which are typically used together with integrated graphics are far more powerful comparatively than those used with a high-end graphic card (since integrated graphic chips are about 10 times slower than high-end graphic cards, but you have trouble finding cpus which are more than 40% slower than the fastest available...)
You can get those via cpus as "normal" cpus, (via C3), they fit into socket 370 boards. Standalone via cpus are not very popular, but the VIA mini-itx boards which have them soldered directly to the board surely are (via calls them "Eden" cpus, but it's just the same cpu in a different package). Not all VIA C3 (or Eden) cpus have padlock, only C5P "Nehemiah" have - via did not change the "public" name for newer cpu cores, and it's possible you can still get older ones. Good for small, quiet, cheap home-grown server boxes or HTPC (not suitable for software encoding due to lackluster fpu performance though).
AFAIK, the VIA's *only* do AES, as they're designed to make good VPN endpoints. This is cos some hefty AES subroutines are built into the hardware (with software drivers doing the rest).
True. VIA padlock (as they call it) can currently only do AES in hardware (and it can also generate true random numbers).
The next VIA chip called C7 (C5J Esther) however should be able to also do SHA-1, SHA-256 and parts of RSA in hardware (I think it should be available first half of 2005). That's of course still a limited set of encryption algorithms, but it's certainly an improvement.
huh? Region codes have nothing to do at all with copy protection. The sole purpose of region coding is the ability to sell dvds at different prices to different markets (and to sell them not at the same time).
You seem to confuse region codes with CSS...
Here's their official numbers:
2.4 GHz A64- 89 W
3.4 GHz P4(Northwood)- 89 W
3.4 GHz P4(Prescott)- 103 W
Careful. TDP numbers between AMD and intel are not directly comparable, as intels numbers are lower than the actual maximum. This is clearly stated in the datasheet, so you might hit instruction sequences which exceed TDP (by how much is unclear, voltage/amperage/wattage numbers compared with AMD would suggest by about 20%). So if you have a marginal cooling solution just good enough to get rid of these 103W without exceeding the cpu temperature, the cpu might still throttle down in some cases.
Best guess on the 2.5 GHz G5 is around 65 W.
Compared to the 2.2Ghz 90nm A64, which has a listed TDP of 67W, this isn't that impressive. Especially since it's expected that future 90nm A64 will have the same 67W listed (just as all A64 130nm have the same 89W power draw in the data sheet, from the 2800+ to the 4000+). It is however much better than the high-end prescott P4 (if that 65W is the real maximum unlike intel's numbers that would be only half the power draw of a high-end prescott).
you misinterpreted that power consumption graphs. This is total system power consumption, not only the cpu!
So if it says 100W, that is 100W measured at AC! Since psus are only 65-80% efficient, that means the system (without including psu loss) is only using 75W. If you keep in mind this includes hd, graphic card, mem, chipset,..., this doesn't leave that much for the cpu actually. Measuring system power also makes the differences in cpu power consumption look much smaller than it is in reality obviously.
And others have mentioned it already, ALL power is transformed to heat.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes that's true. But the point is that the generic ide fallback really should be automatic (as is the case with the vga driver).
That "heinous act" it told you must have been "inaccessible boot device".
For W2k and XP (not sure about NT) there are basically 2 drivers which it absolutely needs to be able to boot. One is the graphic driver, which has fortunately a fallback to generic VGA. The other is the disk driver, so if you change your board to one with a different hd controller (for typical setups that means different chipset, though you might get lucky if it's a different chipset but which can use the same driver, dunno) then it will not boot. There are documented ways around this (for instance in the MS knowledgebase), though yes if you ask me it's really lame that there is no generic ide fallback. Apart from that board swaps seem to work pretty well with W2k (even though not recommended by MS), of course you might need to change hal (uniprocessor to multiprocessor and such things) and other drivers later.
(Actually IME hd cloning / swapping is more problematic due to recognition of drives with some unique identifiers)
No, you can't do "128-bits FP math" with SSE. Not if you're talking about precision. The registers are indeed 128-bits wide (*), but all math operations operate on either 2x64 bits or 4x32 bits (that's why it's called SIMD after all, "single instruction multiple data". (SSE could only work with simple precision floats (4x32) whereas SSE2 introduced double precision.)
(*) This is actually an oversimplification. At the hardware level, the registers may actually not be 128-bit wide. In fact, both intel p4 and amd a64 only have internal 64-bit datapaths and will decompose a 128bit instruction into 2 64bit instructions. But this is of course hidden from the programmer.
Unfortunately, neither of these cards have any sort of open-source driver. The unichrome driver does not support anything newer than, well, various forms of unichrome (which basically all are more or less a savage 4 from 1999).
Newest generation from ati (Radeon X1xx cards) are not supported in any way (not even 2d) with an open-source driver (other than vesa fb). Older ATI cards certainly are (up to X850, though the 3d side on the r300-based chips is reverse-engeneered and possibly not quite well optimized).
You may get 2d support for newest nvidia cards with the open source driver (I'm not sure about that however), but no 3d, reverse engeneering project exists but it's in a very early stage (and I'm not sure if it covers the latest generation).
I got some of these messages late last night, and I didn't even know what bluesecurity is (the spam got past mozilla's filter, and for some reason it took my attention, so I looked it up). Thus I quickly decided it's a spammer who is just lying (you're not surprised spammers are lying aren't you...). What happens is that probably some spammer just sends this out using its usual address db it has, and people which don't use bluesecurity will just ignore/delete it, whereas the actual users of bluesecurity will (or so the spammer hopes) think they really get this spam because they use it.
No longer true unfortunately. ATI's R300-based cards have a reverse-engeneered driver (for 3d) and it gets worse from there, ati is apparently unwilling to release _any_ documentation for the X1xxx cards, so not even a 2d driver will be available anytime soon (the modesetting etc. is supposed to be much different with that generation (avivo) so good luck with reverse-engeneering that). (Not to mention ATI's binary linux driver doesn't support them neither currently, stating in some interview support for them is a "couple of driver releases" away).
After all, the patents only cover the long filename extensions. You could just format the media with FAT, and put no data on it (or put only data on it with 8.3 names, just make sure the OS you use to put it on there doesn't generate the second directory entry). IIRC there is zero difference in formatting a drive for use with long filenames or not. Though the FAT32 extension may also be covered by "valid" patents - and this would still be a problem (at least for large drives).
Actually, the limit for single link dvi is 1920x1200 with somewhat "standard" timing (reduced blanking but still 60Hz). It's possible to drive much larger resolutions if you're willing to sacrifice refresh rate, though the problem is a lot of monitors (and possibly graphic drivers as well) won't support it.
The radeon x1800 series also have dual dual link dvi, not exactly cheap but a lot cheaper than those workstation cards.
this is basically what btx is about. It doesn't seem to catch on though, not sure exactly why. Maybe the manufacturers think this is primarily a bug-fix for the heat problems of the prescott p4, and otherwise unneded and thus don't want the transition from atx to btx at all (quite some components are different, new cases, new boards, new cpu coolers). Though, from a technical point of view, btx imho has quite some merit.
A couple of good points in the article, but he says you shouldn't install a service pack as it just "adds bloat". Now, I don't know about you, but I'd never run W2k (or WXP for that matter) without the latest service pack (and for w2k the rollup pack that just was published recently).
And, Windows 2000 on "8 year old hardware" doesn't sound that impressive - after all Windows 2000 is almost as old...
Additionally, I can easily beat that, Windows XP on 9-year old hardware! (though it's no longer my pc, I had "only" Windows 2000 installed on it)
(ok I admit 9 year old is cheated a bit. CPU is newer, a K6-III 400, and ram has been upgraded 6 years ago or so to 128MB from the initial 32MB. But motherboard (asus t2p4) and most other components (3.2GB hd, 2MB matrox mystique graphic card, sound card etc. are all 1996).)
For the slowdown in Doom III, it doesn't matter if you have one or two cards (all textures are in the local memory of both cards).
Beyond3d tested Doom III with the 512MB ATI card, and didn't find any difference to the 256MB version. Turns out there is more or less exactly one level where it indeed does make a difference when you have ultra quality enabled (not that you'd be able to see a difference), somewhere in the alpha labs 1 is the maximum texture usage where you get at least a bit of a performance improvement.
Seems really silly to buy a card just for that...
That's called overcommit. You can switch this off or on with linux (it's usually on, but there might be cases this is not desired behaviour and you absolutely have to guarantee that enough memory is actually available). I'm not sure what windows does, it would surprise me if it wouldn't overcommit memory.
Well I'm happy if they support position:fixed as a start. There are lots of web pages which are emulating that through a javascript which moves the element which is really meant to stay at the same position around. But of course you can see it scroll around a bit, and it causes high cpu load too. Every time I see that I'll instantly think "gah that stupid IE workaround on that site too..."
Actually, if you have a supported graphic card, AA fonts can be quite fast. The dri supported radeons (meaning everything from original radeon 7000 up to 9250 and all radeon igp except the brand-new of the xpress 200 chipset) for instance have render acceleration, which can speed up aa font rendering up by a factor of 10 or more.
This particular driver doesn't support (accelerated) subpixel hinting, though.
The driver certainly could enable faster agp modes and fastwrites on its own. The problem is that fastwrites are very problematic on some chipsets, and the same is true for faster agp modes (that one is only a rare problem afaik). Since AGP 1x and no fastwrites is a safe default which always works, the driver just uses that. Fastwrites don't help performance anyway usually, and faster AGP modes won't do that much for these old cards neither.
DVD+R OTOH is different. There are no technical measures on the media itself which would prevent writing the CSS keys to them. However, recorders are designed to only write dummy information to those sectors in the lead-in area - a hacked firmware probably would allow to circumvent that. I don't think I have seen such a hacked firmware though, most likely because the interest in such a firmware is probably too small (as opposed to hacked firmwares which circumvent region codes).
I don't know how they can claim it's discontinued if it never existed in the first place...
the P2 switched to 100Mhz FSB at 350Mhz, thus a P2 366 and 466 never existed. Since those are for embedded, they might be talking about mobile P2 - 366 mobile P2 indeed exists, but a mobile P2 466 does not (fastest P2 ever was 450Mhz, fastest mobile 400 Mhz).
And btw, the register gets it wrong: that it is available so long has nothing to do with power consumption and the like, it's simply because certain industry applications require that a chip is available for a long time - embedded chips are still in use after 20 years or so, and it's good if you can still get replacement parts.
So it will use more cpu power. Not that it really matters, since the cpus which are typically used together with integrated graphics are far more powerful comparatively than those used with a high-end graphic card (since integrated graphic chips are about 10 times slower than high-end graphic cards, but you have trouble finding cpus which are more than 40% slower than the fastest available...)
You can get those via cpus as "normal" cpus, (via C3), they fit into socket 370 boards. Standalone via cpus are not very popular, but the VIA mini-itx boards which have them soldered directly to the board surely are (via calls them "Eden" cpus, but it's just the same cpu in a different package). Not all VIA C3 (or Eden) cpus have padlock, only C5P "Nehemiah" have - via did not change the "public" name for newer cpu cores, and it's possible you can still get older ones. Good for small, quiet, cheap home-grown server boxes or HTPC (not suitable for software encoding due to lackluster fpu performance though).
You seem to confuse region codes with CSS...
you misinterpreted that power consumption graphs. This is total system power consumption, not only the cpu!
So if it says 100W, that is 100W measured at AC! Since psus are only 65-80% efficient, that means the system (without including psu loss) is only using 75W. If you keep in mind this includes hd, graphic card, mem, chipset,..., this doesn't leave that much for the cpu actually. Measuring system power also makes the differences in cpu power consumption look much smaller than it is in reality obviously.
And others have mentioned it already, ALL power is transformed to heat.