The "pc architecture" has been overhauled, by everyone who doesn't make PCs. Workstation vendors addressed all these problems in the 80's. The problem is one of the free market. People want what's cheap and cheerful. The PC fulfils most of their needs at the right price, and is very successful. It undergoes many evolutionary changes, rather than revolutionary ones. If you really need the benefits that aren't there in the PC architecture, there's nothing (apart from cost) stopping you from buying one of the alternative platforms. That's why AMD Hammer is such a good idea. You get a 64-bit almost-RISC with 32-bit CISC built in. You can't have your cake and eat it.
They would say that there's no hurry to the 64-bit desktop beacause they are not in a position to provide one. They have the expensive, specialised itanic for the high-end and HP have told them to be quiet about Yamhill, their Hammer equivalent. Apple and AMD are on to a winner. Personally, I can't wait to get a 64-bit home machine. That's why I haven't upgraded for over 3 years. Intel is advocating hacks to get around the 4GB limit just like the old LIM (Lotus intel Microsoft) Expanded Memory boards for the old IBM PCs of yore : basically segmentation and paging. Anyone who can remember those days will concur. I'm afraid intel will need to pull a rabbit out of its hat very soon. Expect to see Yamhill processors announced later this year (Pentiums, Xeons?, with "64-bit extensions").
I think it's really sad that in this day and age scientists still have to waste time and money to defend themselves (and the rest of us) against the misguided and plain wrong superstitions and ignorance of previous centuries. Why is this phenomenon so prevalent in the USA? It's practically unheard of in Western Europe. Why is the USA so backward?
If you have something like gv (or ghostview) that'll read postscript documents, a2ps does a wonderful job of pagenating and formatting text of all kinds ready for printing to a Postscript printer or viewer. However, that doesn't solve your bookmarking problems. It should relieve some of the eye-strain, though.
Yes, I agree, the rotary isn't revolutionary any more (no pun intended;-> ) but it's way ahead of the Victorian reciprocating piston engines in every car in their list. Mazda, virtually on its own, over the last 30-40 years has done so much good work improving the rotary. It is truly an awesome machine. The best car I ever had was my humble old 1983 RX7:-) Apart from its smoothness and power to weight ratio, it's light and compact too. There are so many applications that can benefit from it. Have a look at the Skycar for starters. I think a hybrid Wankel/electric sports car would be cool too.
Yes, and it would have been good if they'd have got hold of some early Power Macs to compare the old 66MHz PowerPC with the 66MHz Pentium. A nice Alpha running at 166MHz in there too would have opened some eyes.
It's funny how they can post two stories about a comparison of old processors and yet there's been nothing about IBM's dropping of itanium which hit the press last week.
It's only high performance on 4 gigabytes of RAM or less. Then you're back into segmentation and other hackery, just like in the "good old days" of MS-DOS. You young 'uns, don't know how good you have it. In my day, your code had to fit inside 64k segements, and so did your data. No arrays bigger than 65533 bytes, and you had to do "far" jumps to code in other segments. Yes, addresses were 20 bits, but you had to make them up with two 16-bit chunks. So, you needed 32 bits of storage to address 1 megabyte of RAM. Don't get me started on TSRs...
Look in linux/arch/sparc64/kernel/cpu.c.That's just detection of the CPU. If you look in that directory you will see code to do all kinds of low-level stuff on ALL the UltraSPARC processors, so get back under your bridge, troll. I tried to post some of the code but hit the damned lamness filter.
Oh yeah, try getting docs on the UltraSparc 3 Give me a break! The stuff's in the Linux kernel source. Let me guess, you've never looked at the kernel source?
Your 3D graphics card has a vector processor on it. That's why it can perform the 3D to 2D transformations, lighting calculations etc. orders of magnitude faster that the main CPU in your computer at a much lower clock frequency. SIMD instructions on the main CPU go some way towards vector processing (3DNow!, SSE, AltiVec).
Yes, I realise it's impractical, just pointing out that the root cause it the disproportionately high population density in south east England compared to the rest of the UK.
The root cause of the problem is that the southeast of England is over crowded. Businesses need to be moved out of the M25 area to redistribute the load.
It would be worth it to me if I were in the market for a new machine. I have a K6-2/500. It would probably be about a factor of 10 faster. However, I'm waiting for Hammer. 32-bit is so 15-years-ago.
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The "pc architecture" has been overhauled, by everyone who doesn't make PCs. Workstation vendors addressed all these problems in the 80's. The problem is one of the free market. People want what's cheap and cheerful. The PC fulfils most of their needs at the right price, and is very successful. It undergoes many evolutionary changes, rather than revolutionary ones. If you really need the benefits that aren't there in the PC architecture, there's nothing (apart from cost) stopping you from buying one of the alternative platforms. That's why AMD Hammer is such a good idea. You get a 64-bit almost-RISC with 32-bit CISC built in. You can't have your cake and eat it.
They would say that there's no hurry to the 64-bit desktop beacause they are not in a position to provide one. They have the expensive, specialised itanic for the high-end and HP have told them to be quiet about Yamhill, their Hammer equivalent. Apple and AMD are on to a winner. Personally, I can't wait to get a 64-bit home machine. That's why I haven't upgraded for over 3 years. Intel is advocating hacks to get around the 4GB limit just like the old LIM (Lotus intel Microsoft) Expanded Memory boards for the old IBM PCs of yore : basically segmentation and paging. Anyone who can remember those days will concur. I'm afraid intel will need to pull a rabbit out of its hat very soon. Expect to see Yamhill processors announced later this year (Pentiums, Xeons?, with "64-bit extensions").
I think it's really sad that in this day and age scientists still have to waste time and money to defend themselves (and the rest of us) against the misguided and plain wrong superstitions and ignorance of previous centuries. Why is this phenomenon so prevalent in the USA? It's practically unheard of in Western Europe. Why is the USA so backward?
If you have something like gv (or ghostview) that'll read postscript documents, a2ps does a wonderful job of pagenating and formatting text of all kinds ready for printing to a Postscript printer or viewer. However, that doesn't solve your bookmarking problems. It should relieve some of the eye-strain, though.
Yes, I agree, the rotary isn't revolutionary any more (no pun intended ;-> ) but it's way ahead of the Victorian reciprocating piston engines in every car in their list. Mazda, virtually on its own, over the last 30-40 years has done so much good work improving the rotary. It is truly an awesome machine. The best car I ever had was my humble old 1983 RX7 :-) Apart from its smoothness and power to weight ratio, it's light and compact too. There are so many applications that can benefit from it. Have a look at the Skycar for starters. I think a hybrid Wankel/electric sports car would be cool too.
Yes, and it would have been good if they'd have got hold of some early Power Macs to compare the old 66MHz PowerPC with the 66MHz Pentium. A nice Alpha running at 166MHz in there too would have opened some eyes.
...call my comet a poof? Oh wait, I thought you said pint...
here
...but they keep getting modded down as flamebait or offtopic. *sigh*
here
and
here
It's funny how they can post two stories about a comparison of old processors and yet there's been nothing about IBM's dropping of itanium which hit the press last week.
Aw shucks, surely your mum and dad love you all the same.
*fingers in ears* La la la la la la la la la la... etc.
It's only high performance on 4 gigabytes of RAM or less. Then you're back into segmentation and other hackery, just like in the "good old days" of MS-DOS. You young 'uns, don't know how good you have it. In my day, your code had to fit inside 64k segements, and so did your data. No arrays bigger than 65533 bytes, and you had to do "far" jumps to code in other segments. Yes, addresses were 20 bits, but you had to make them up with two 16-bit chunks. So, you needed 32 bits of storage to address 1 megabyte of RAM. Don't get me started on TSRs...
Look in linux/arch/sparc64/kernel/cpu.c .That's just detection of the CPU. If you look in that directory you will see code to do all kinds of low-level stuff on ALL the UltraSPARC processors, so get back under your bridge, troll. I tried to post some of the code but hit the damned lamness filter.
Thank you for putting me right! :-)
Oh yeah, try getting docs on the UltraSparc 3
Give me a break! The stuff's in the Linux kernel source. Let me guess, you've never looked at the kernel source?
...and why don't YOU look up the meaning of proprietary in a dictionary. SPARC is an open standard. x86 is not.
You can make a science out of the "back" buttons on web browsers? What next, leisure and sport science?
Your 3D graphics card has a vector processor on it. That's why it can perform the 3D to 2D transformations, lighting calculations etc. orders of magnitude faster that the main CPU in your computer at a much lower clock frequency. SIMD instructions on the main CPU go some way towards vector processing (3DNow!, SSE, AltiVec).
Or Aberdeen or Inverness :-)
Yes, I realise it's impractical, just pointing out that the root cause it the disproportionately high population density in south east England compared to the rest of the UK.
Nice theory, so why haven't we seen it working in practice?
The root cause of the problem is that the southeast of England is over crowded. Businesses need to be moved out of the M25 area to redistribute the load.
No, that would be sensible, rational and expensive. These are British politicians we're talking about.
IBM has now all but withdrawn support for Linux on itanic: http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/02/10/HNitaniu m_1.html
It would be worth it to me if I were in the market for a new machine. I have a K6-2/500. It would probably be about a factor of 10 faster. However, I'm waiting for Hammer. 32-bit is so 15-years-ago.