Haven't we already been here? When multi-core processors first became widely available, I recall a study that showed that anything over 8 cores was counterproductive.
This assumes he means equally-powerful cores.
I can easily see having 8 high-speed cores for games and intensive processing, 4 super-low-speed ones for background tasks during idle moments with the screen turned off, and some medium-speed cores for normal use with the screen on.
As far as efficiently using all 48 cores for one task goes -- the programming capable of doing that would be horrendously difficult or embarrassingly easy without much room in between. Amdahl's law shows that even with mythical 99% scalable code, a program would only get a pretty pathetic ~35x speedup when using 48 cores.
The question burning in my mind is: would Android be able to have a smooth UI with such a CPU? Even with the quad-core CPU and their new tripple-buffering on my Nexus 7, Android is not nearly as smooth as an iPhone or gen-1 Windows Phone 7 devices (which use the same single-core hardware as the gen-1 Android launch devices!).
Intent/line breaks/spacing styles that IDEs can do aren't all that matters though. Simply knowing when to put a blank line in can make all the difference in code readability, but i haven't seen any IDEs smart enough to do that.
Modern games render to more than one off-screen buffers already (necessitated by HDR, deferred shading, and other fun things), only blitting and gamma-correcting the final bits to the screen's framebuffer at the very end.
The tiny amount of RAM occupied by the 8-bit framebuffer to accommodate a large screen resolution is dwarfed by these several framebuffers, some which will use 16-bit components.
The amount of GPU needed to draw a solid full-screen quad really is too trivial to care about.
After all, that new beautiful code that you wrote for that last job is now someone else's horrible legacy code.
This. The best thing you can do is to make the code you write amazing. Not amazingly clever, but amazingly clean, robust, and re-usable, and documented as if you were going to show it to the world and suddenly have thousands of people dependent on your ability to do so.
I know one area where they really don't have a choice: Windows Phone. Microsoft standardizes the hardware, and so far Qualcomm has been the only option available.
Many newer smartphones built in the past 2 or so years can already use GPS and GLONASS combined. I don't see why we wouldn't get Galileo and Compass added to that mix.
It's my understanding that many large companies don't host their own call centers. There's one in my building that has some quite large clients who could easily host their own if they wanted, but they still outsource it.
At my high school, class of '04, the best computer class they had was for MS Office. The only mandatory class was for typing -- which I was still forced to take despite doing ~90wpm from programming. Both of these classes were taught by the home ec / career counseling teacher, who was pretty clueless about computers.
I've never thought about it before, but my elementary and middle schools had far better options. Both were taught by true computer enthusiasts -- in elementary (1-5) I got my first taste of coding/logic with HyperCard, and in middle (6-8) my teacher let me teach the class HTML and some Javascript. We made the school's first CD yearbook.
The difference you get when a school is willing to hire a teacher who actually knows and enjoys what they're doing is incredible.
Sounds like Windows' IIS
on
Linux 3.6 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This sounds a bit like they generalized the clever latency-saving behavior of IE which skips the TCP handshake when talking to IIS and leaves connections half-open. Latency could indeed be greatly improved for servers supporting it.
The developers are at http://libav.org/
Well, most of them. FFmpeg had some serious project management issues, and so many of the developers forked it to create Libav a while ago.
I wish them both all the progress in the world, but this just feels like a cheap way to get back many of the users they lost.
I don't know what he said about Mormonism, but I don't think that should matter either in terms of Linux. If Mormons can't see past one dev, can't see that Linus is just one cog in a very large machine, that's their problem and not his. There will always be political things for some people to worry about, but traditionally devs are more about solving problems than massaging peoples' egos. It's not really that surprising that he's blunt and outspoken.
And why is religion special from anything else, in that it becomes poor form to criticize one after it graduates from being a cult?
I do agree with him in this sense: you shouldn't need to censor your personal thoughts just for political correctness. Or even "professionalism", as TFA asks for. Even if you're someone of popularity. It shouldn't reflect at all on the Linux community, in the same way Reiser FS didn't become complete shit after Hans' better judgement slipped away from him.
Could he have used more mature words? Sure. But does anyone really care?
A few years ago a friend got into a wicked car accident and one of her injuries was a badly messed up left hand.
A week or two after coming back from the hospital, she ended up MacGyvering her keyboard with guide rails and attaching a pen to a glove to press the keys.
After a couple weeks of trying to play Quake and Left 4 Dead she concluded her days of twitch shooters were over, but she still managed fairly well with slower paced games.
This is to stop situations like the Pandora console, who's developers lied through their teeth about how ready they were to ship, took thousands of pre-orders, ran out of money, and now only ship 4 year old pre-orders when new ones are placed to cover the costs.
While there are a lot of great ideas, there are an equal number of total morons who don't know how to scale up production when their idea takes off.
It would be great if Kickstarter had a middle ground. People without any prototypes should be able to get support, but it needs to be made very clear to the supporters that any promises of product are very weak ones.
GPUs can have completely open drivers while remaining quite closed on the hardware side. The one thing they're worried about, their precious shader compilers -- aren't even really needed. Give us an instruction reference to target and we'll make our own damned compiler, and after a while it'll be even better than the proprietary one.
It's difficult to believe that it's taking so long to get documentation for something so basic.
Can anyone explain how they accurately measure time spans this small? Or did they not measure at all, and instead calculate what it should be from other parameters?
GPUs can definitely excel at many forms of video processing. Encoding, thus far, hasn't proved to be one of them. Currently, CPU-based encoders are faster and of significantly higher quality. I'm sure someone smart will make a fantastic GPU-based encoder eventually, but so far nobody has come close. A few companies have lied and/or used faulty benchmarking to help people believe they have, though!
I think AMD's work here will provide some great evolutionary speedups that will be significant to many people. Unfortunately for them, at the same time AMD is bringing out these small "free lunch" general improvements, Intel will be bringing out Haswell -- which in addition to such evolutionary improvements has some really fantastic, significant new features that'll provide remarkable performance boosts.
Integer AVX-256. For apps that can take advantage of it, this'll be a massive speed-up. Things like x264 and other video processing will take huge advantage of this.
SIMD LUTs. One of the major optimization tricks programmers have been using for ages, look up tables, have been thus far out of reach to SIMD code without complex shuffle operations that usually aren't worth it.
Transactional memory. This is not quite the easy BEGIN/COMMIT utopia people are hoping transactional memory will eventually get us, but it's a building block that'll enable some advanced concurrent algorithms that either aren't realistic now or are so complex that they're out of reach to most coders.
These are all pretty specialized features, yes, but they service some very high-profile benchmark areas: video processing and concurrency are always on the list, and AMD will get absolutely crushed when apps start taking advantage of it.
I'm a developer, a major optimization geek both micro- and macro-. I thrive playing with instruction latencies, execution units, and cache usage until my code eeks out as much performance as possible. Of course we'll never know until the CPUs are released for everyone to play with, but right now my money is on Intel.
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How about 4K standard desktop resolution for 22" monitors? All this DPI fighting needs to leak over into desktops eventually.
Haven't we already been here? When multi-core processors first became widely available, I recall a study that showed that anything over 8 cores was counterproductive.
This assumes he means equally-powerful cores.
I can easily see having 8 high-speed cores for games and intensive processing, 4 super-low-speed ones for background tasks during idle moments with the screen turned off, and some medium-speed cores for normal use with the screen on.
As far as efficiently using all 48 cores for one task goes -- the programming capable of doing that would be horrendously difficult or embarrassingly easy without much room in between. Amdahl's law shows that even with mythical 99% scalable code, a program would only get a pretty pathetic ~35x speedup when using 48 cores.
The question burning in my mind is: would Android be able to have a smooth UI with such a CPU? Even with the quad-core CPU and their new tripple-buffering on my Nexus 7, Android is not nearly as smooth as an iPhone or gen-1 Windows Phone 7 devices (which use the same single-core hardware as the gen-1 Android launch devices!).
Intent/line breaks/spacing styles that IDEs can do aren't all that matters though. Simply knowing when to put a blank line in can make all the difference in code readability, but i haven't seen any IDEs smart enough to do that.
Exceedingly little, though.
Modern games render to more than one off-screen buffers already (necessitated by HDR, deferred shading, and other fun things), only blitting and gamma-correcting the final bits to the screen's framebuffer at the very end.
The tiny amount of RAM occupied by the 8-bit framebuffer to accommodate a large screen resolution is dwarfed by these several framebuffers, some which will use 16-bit components.
The amount of GPU needed to draw a solid full-screen quad really is too trivial to care about.
After all, that new beautiful code that you wrote for that last job is now someone else's horrible legacy code.
This. The best thing you can do is to make the code you write amazing. Not amazingly clever, but amazingly clean, robust, and re-usable, and documented as if you were going to show it to the world and suddenly have thousands of people dependent on your ability to do so.
I know one area where they really don't have a choice: Windows Phone. Microsoft standardizes the hardware, and so far Qualcomm has been the only option available.
Many newer smartphones built in the past 2 or so years can already use GPS and GLONASS combined. I don't see why we wouldn't get Galileo and Compass added to that mix.
It's my understanding that many large companies don't host their own call centers. There's one in my building that has some quite large clients who could easily host their own if they wanted, but they still outsource it.
Wow, you lucked out.
At my high school, class of '04, the best computer class they had was for MS Office. The only mandatory class was for typing -- which I was still forced to take despite doing ~90wpm from programming. Both of these classes were taught by the home ec / career counseling teacher, who was pretty clueless about computers.
I've never thought about it before, but my elementary and middle schools had far better options. Both were taught by true computer enthusiasts -- in elementary (1-5) I got my first taste of coding/logic with HyperCard, and in middle (6-8) my teacher let me teach the class HTML and some Javascript. We made the school's first CD yearbook.
The difference you get when a school is willing to hire a teacher who actually knows and enjoys what they're doing is incredible.
This sounds a bit like they generalized the clever latency-saving behavior of IE which skips the TCP handshake when talking to IIS and leaves connections half-open. Latency could indeed be greatly improved for servers supporting it.
Don't just stifle innovation, but make it outright illegal.
I can see the new /. article now: Linus Begrudgingly Admits Romney Isn't Biggest Idiot After All.
The developers are at http://libav.org/ Well, most of them. FFmpeg had some serious project management issues, and so many of the developers forked it to create Libav a while ago. I wish them both all the progress in the world, but this just feels like a cheap way to get back many of the users they lost.
I don't know what he said about Mormonism, but I don't think that should matter either in terms of Linux. If Mormons can't see past one dev, can't see that Linus is just one cog in a very large machine, that's their problem and not his. There will always be political things for some people to worry about, but traditionally devs are more about solving problems than massaging peoples' egos. It's not really that surprising that he's blunt and outspoken.
And why is religion special from anything else, in that it becomes poor form to criticize one after it graduates from being a cult?
I do agree with him in this sense: you shouldn't need to censor your personal thoughts just for political correctness. Or even "professionalism", as TFA asks for. Even if you're someone of popularity. It shouldn't reflect at all on the Linux community, in the same way Reiser FS didn't become complete shit after Hans' better judgement slipped away from him.
Could he have used more mature words? Sure. But does anyone really care?
A few years ago a friend got into a wicked car accident and one of her injuries was a badly messed up left hand.
A week or two after coming back from the hospital, she ended up MacGyvering her keyboard with guide rails and attaching a pen to a glove to press the keys.
After a couple weeks of trying to play Quake and Left 4 Dead she concluded her days of twitch shooters were over, but she still managed fairly well with slower paced games.
Good luck!
This is to stop situations like the Pandora console, who's developers lied through their teeth about how ready they were to ship, took thousands of pre-orders, ran out of money, and now only ship 4 year old pre-orders when new ones are placed to cover the costs.
While there are a lot of great ideas, there are an equal number of total morons who don't know how to scale up production when their idea takes off.
It would be great if Kickstarter had a middle ground. People without any prototypes should be able to get support, but it needs to be made very clear to the supporters that any promises of product are very weak ones.
GPUs can have completely open drivers while remaining quite closed on the hardware side. The one thing they're worried about, their precious shader compilers -- aren't even really needed. Give us an instruction reference to target and we'll make our own damned compiler, and after a while it'll be even better than the proprietary one. It's difficult to believe that it's taking so long to get documentation for something so basic.
You create a biodome. Which we haven't done successfully on Earth, let alone in space.
Intel's top Atom chips have a 10W TDP. Of course the chipset/RAM also play a large factor, but still -- this is an amazingly frugal CPU
Can anyone explain how they accurately measure time spans this small? Or did they not measure at all, and instead calculate what it should be from other parameters?
I don't recall an episode with the name, but the score has an excellent track called "Diaspora Oratorio".
Your question is a bit... difficult.
GPUs can definitely excel at many forms of video processing. Encoding, thus far, hasn't proved to be one of them. Currently, CPU-based encoders are faster and of significantly higher quality. I'm sure someone smart will make a fantastic GPU-based encoder eventually, but so far nobody has come close. A few companies have lied and/or used faulty benchmarking to help people believe they have, though!
I think AMD's work here will provide some great evolutionary speedups that will be significant to many people. Unfortunately for them, at the same time AMD is bringing out these small "free lunch" general improvements, Intel will be bringing out Haswell -- which in addition to such evolutionary improvements has some really fantastic, significant new features that'll provide remarkable performance boosts.
These are all pretty specialized features, yes, but they service some very high-profile benchmark areas: video processing and concurrency are always on the list, and AMD will get absolutely crushed when apps start taking advantage of it.
I'm a developer, a major optimization geek both micro- and macro-. I thrive playing with instruction latencies, execution units, and cache usage until my code eeks out as much performance as possible. Of course we'll never know until the CPUs are released for everyone to play with, but right now my money is on Intel.
AMD is in serious trouble here. I hope I'm wrong.
From being greedy anti-competitive asshats. That's the whole idea.
Indexing rocks on a different planet from 50-400 million km away. NASA has the greatest rock collection ever.