What he said is that on some other architectures 32bit is more efficient than 64bit. This is not true for x86, because they fixed some architecture shortcomings while implementing 64bit (more registers for example). Because of this on x86 64bit code is faster than 32bit code.
On architectures like MIPS for example 32bit code is faster than 64bit code. This has to do with pointer sizes, which are bigger in 64bit and use more memory and more cache and take more bandwidth on the bus. So the 64bit code is slower. Usually the kernel is 64bit, but most of the libraries are compiled as both 32bit and 64bit. If you need more memory than 4GB, you compile as 64bit, otherwise you compile as 32bit. The increased memory size you can address is the only advantage of 64bit on systems like this.
"It" being some version of Opera. To put the list into perspective a bit, lets take a look at the versions of Opera that run on some of these systems: QNX: Opera 6.01b (which is a beta release). The last stable version for QNX is Opera 5.2.1. OS/2: Opera 5.12. BeOS: 3.62.
I somehow don't get to see any other releases. The server probably thinks I have one of the above systems (I have BeOS, but I still should be able to download Opera for any system I want to). The BeOS version is unusable on the web today. It was only marginally useful when it was still new. I don't know about the other two, but the story is probably somewhat similar.
Just because you like open better does not mean that infringement of the GPL (or BSD) license is worse.
Perhaps you would like to give some real arguments as to why infringement of an open source license is worse that a closed source license. They are both equally protected by the law.
BeOS died for many more reasons than only Microsoft. While they had large problems competing against Microsoft, they were also making good progress on getting multimedia applications ported, when they completely screwed up and did their stupid focus shift, effectively killing themselves.
As for BeOS being better than Windows. In some ways yes, but there were quite a few big problems with BeOS which hampered adoption. I'll name a few.
Net server sucked. It was slow and had a tendency to die. BFS had a number of very annoying bugs. All the rewrites of the media kit I have seen had serious problems. Most notably audio and video getting out of sync. Creating a GUI was a pain in the ass with its pixel precise layout. No font sensitive layout. No hw accelerated OpenGL. Yes, it was in R4.5, but it was ripped out of R5 again and would come back in release R6, which was never released.
I also find it very hard to believe that seti@home would run twice as fast on BeOS as on Windows. BeOS is efficient but not that much.
Don't get me wrong, I like BeOS. I still program for it. But saying Microsoft caused BeOS's demise or that it was better than Windows is a bit of a stretch.
SGI is moving all their stuff to Itanium/Linux. No new MIPS hardware is coming out anymore and IRIX won't be getting much new features anymore either. The R18000 that was supposed to have come out at the beginning of the year was junked and they burned as many bridges as they could in transitioning to Itanium/Linux.
Don't expect MIPS to stay alive long in the high end.
The MIPS/IRIX systems have VPro graphics, yes. But those are not from NVIDIA. VPro for MIPS/IRIX is the last chipset to be developed inhouse.
The confusion comes from the fact that Sgi marketing thought it would be a good idea to give both the PC and Irix graphics cards the same brand: VPro.
They currently don't have anything newer for their workstations, but their newest Onyx (visualization system) computers use a couple of Ati cards for their graphics.
It's called the UltimateVision.
And how much marketshare do you think Mozilla has ?
Windows and the Office suite still get development, because new versions make them money. Developing IE doesn't bring them anything at all. They only work on it when their competitors starts getting marketshare.
Are you sure about that ? Maybe the papers don't mention what happens at the EU level a lot (mine doesn't at least), but read statewatch a bit and see what we'll get in the EU. It ain't pretty.
I'm not sure how much more there is. The best thing to do is search google with something like "privateer file format". That's what I usually do when I want to find out how much of a particular game is documented.
I wish there was some general place to discuss this kind of stuff. wotsit.org has some file format information, but it is limited for what is known about games.
You mean: "Who cares about this open source project I don't like. How about working on a project I do like ?"
That's the fun with hobby projects. Programmers work in their spare time on what they like and see as worth doing.
I like BeOS and I help out with an open source project for it. Would I work on another project that you think requires more support ? Only if it's fun. It's my free time and I don't get paid for it, after all.
Your history is a bit warped. Be never filed for bankruptcy. The requests for the source of BeOS were made to Palm after Palm had bought Be's IP. Bernd already had contact and some sort of contract with Be before the announcement of the sale.
The rest looks ok to me.:)
Re:Threat to Athlon64: Prescott (not Pentium 4)
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Athlon 64 Debuts
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· Score: 5, Insightful
While it's likely that Intel has some form of 64 bit instructions built into Prescott, it is highly unlikely that they will enable it. They would have to lose much ground to the Athlon64 and Opteron systems to do that. Remember that they are betting on the Itanium as their 64 bit processor. Enabling the 64 bit instructions on Prescott will almost instantly kill the Itanium and I doubt Intel wants to do that.
As for 64 bit Prescott killing Sun. I don't see any reason for that. It seems to be fashionable to predict the death of Sun these days, but they are not in that much problems. The Itanium already crushes UltraSparc for performance, but Sun is still doing fine. A 64 bit Prescott will not change that. The software base difference doesn't really matter here either as there is simply stuff that runs on UltraSparc but not on x86 systems. Also, a processor is not the only part of a computer. While UltraSparc's performance may be lagging at the moment, Sun's systems are very well designed and no x86 system can compete with their high end systems.
Hell, Sgi is in much more trouble than Sun and they still design their own processors (MIPS).
You're conveniently forgetting some facts, here. You used to have to write in assembler to get any decent speed. Now you can use a decent compiler. You used to have to write the code to access several different sound cards. Now you can use a single api. You also used to have to write your own 3D engine or write code to access several different 3D cards. Now you can use OpenGL.
I bet these big firms have lots of code lying around they don't do anything with anymore. That's not to say you can easily compete with the big boys, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
"I just hope some of this becomes clear before the Euro Parliament vote on the software patents directive (I heard that the vote is pushed back again, to september 22)"
Where did you hear that ? Any URL ? The closest I've found is this URL: http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?sid=9&aid=12 455
It states this: "This report, which was supposed to be debated in Strasbourg next week, is being met with increasing pressure from political groups within the European Parliament, who want this report to be deferred to another session."
Keeping your customers from going to the competition perhaps ? Tell them you've got something that is much better than what the competition has and that it is almost ready.
Intel for example, is really good at that stuff. Pentium and Itanium development time and performance.
What's with the arrested stuff. Being blacklisted by SPEWS is nothing like being arrested. Being blacklisted by SPEWS is being denied the service of having your mail delivered reliably, because some spammers use the same ISP as you do. SPEWS doesn't just blacklist whole blocks immediately and first complaints are sent to the ISP's abuse desk. If that doesn't help, the IP is blocked. If that doesn't help, a whole block is blocked.
What I think is a better analogy (and feel free to shoot holes in it) is a taxi company not picking up passengers in your town anymore, because some people from your town who want a ride keep wrecking the taxi.
We don't need a new protocol. We need some real action by ISP's to stop the spamming. They can check the received headers if they're checking for viruses anyway and they can also blacklist other ISP's that don't do anything about spam originating from their networks. Doing that will take care of most of the spam I get.
First off they are no longer Silicon Graphics... their name is officially SGI.
Yeah, I know. Another of their stupid mistakes.;) They are trying to bring back the cube and the Silicon Graphics name though. Look at the picture of the Tezro.:)
I am not completely familiar with IR or the exact ATI chip used in these boexes, but the FireGL X1 (based on Radeon 9700) can do 24bit(floating point)/channel, althoght the DAC is (iirc) only 10bit/channel. Is the 48bit color you speak of 12bit/channel fixed point?
I believe it is 12bit/channel integer all the way to the DAC, but I could be wrong.
What extensions are available on the IR that you can't get on a ATI?
I don't have a handy list available, but you can look here for more information: http://www.sgi.com/visualization/onyx/3000/ir/ir4. html For example, I don't think the Ati cards have Image Based Rendering.
I'm not sure what is still left of the talent that they once had. A lot of them left, indeed.
As to the Sgi workstation with NVidia graphics, that was the VW 330, which was basically a standard PC. You may be confused with the VW 320, which had an architecture like the O2 and had graphics designed by Sgi themselves.
Yeah, and that has worked so well, hasn't it ? Sgi has been bleeding money for years now and there is still no end in sight to their problems and money is running out.
Sgi should drop their arrogant attitude and start caring about anyone who wants to buy their stuff.
Having a web store is quite normal these days and I don't understand why Sgi doesn't have one.
Not so good reason imho. The new Onyx graphics have less texture memory than InfiniteReality, no 48 bit color and lacks all the extensions of IR. Sure, it's faster, but couldn't they have tried to speed up IR instead of going with Ati ?
This is Silicon Graphics we're talking about. They used to be the only option.
Slashdot Mirror
What he said is that on some other architectures 32bit is more efficient than 64bit. This is not true for x86, because they fixed some architecture shortcomings while implementing 64bit (more registers for example). Because of this on x86 64bit code is faster than 32bit code.
On architectures like MIPS for example 32bit code is faster than 64bit code. This has to do with pointer sizes, which are bigger in 64bit and use more memory and more cache and take more bandwidth on the bus. So the 64bit code is slower.
Usually the kernel is 64bit, but most of the libraries are compiled as both 32bit and 64bit. If you need more memory than 4GB, you compile as 64bit, otherwise you compile as 32bit. The increased memory size you can address is the only advantage of 64bit on systems like this.
"It" being some version of Opera.
To put the list into perspective a bit, lets take a look at the versions of Opera that run on some of these systems:
QNX: Opera 6.01b (which is a beta release). The last stable version for QNX is Opera 5.2.1.
OS/2: Opera 5.12.
BeOS: 3.62.
I somehow don't get to see any other releases. The server probably thinks I have one of the above systems (I have BeOS, but I still should be able to download Opera for any system I want to).
The BeOS version is unusable on the web today. It was only marginally useful when it was still new.
I don't know about the other two, but the story is probably somewhat similar.
Just because you like open better does not mean that infringement of the GPL (or BSD) license is worse.
Perhaps you would like to give some real arguments as to why infringement of an open source license is worse that a closed source license.
They are both equally protected by the law.
BeOS died for many more reasons than only Microsoft.
While they had large problems competing against Microsoft, they were also making good progress on getting multimedia applications ported, when they completely screwed up and did their stupid focus shift, effectively killing themselves.
As for BeOS being better than Windows. In some ways yes, but there were quite a few big problems with BeOS which hampered adoption. I'll name a few.
Net server sucked. It was slow and had a tendency to die.
BFS had a number of very annoying bugs.
All the rewrites of the media kit I have seen had serious problems. Most notably audio and video getting out of sync.
Creating a GUI was a pain in the ass with its pixel precise layout. No font sensitive layout.
No hw accelerated OpenGL. Yes, it was in R4.5, but it was ripped out of R5 again and would come back in release R6, which was never released.
I also find it very hard to believe that seti@home would run twice as fast on BeOS as on Windows. BeOS is efficient but not that much.
Don't get me wrong, I like BeOS. I still program for it.
But saying Microsoft caused BeOS's demise or that it was better than Windows is a bit of a stretch.
Legacy stuff.
SGI is moving all their stuff to Itanium/Linux.
No new MIPS hardware is coming out anymore and IRIX won't be getting much new features anymore either.
The R18000 that was supposed to have come out at the beginning of the year was junked and they burned as many bridges as they could in transitioning to Itanium/Linux.
Don't expect MIPS to stay alive long in the high end.
The MIPS/IRIX systems have VPro graphics, yes. But those are not from NVIDIA. VPro for MIPS/IRIX is the last chipset to be developed inhouse.
The confusion comes from the fact that Sgi marketing thought it would be a good idea to give both the PC and Irix graphics cards the same brand: VPro.
They currently don't have anything newer for their workstations, but their newest Onyx (visualization system) computers use a couple of Ati cards for their graphics. It's called the UltimateVision.
And how much marketshare do you think Mozilla has ?
Windows and the Office suite still get development, because new versions make them money.
Developing IE doesn't bring them anything at all. They only work on it when their competitors starts getting marketshare.
Are you sure about that ?
Maybe the papers don't mention what happens at the EU level a lot (mine doesn't at least), but read statewatch a bit and see what we'll get in the EU. It ain't pretty.
Have a look at: http://www.wcrevival.de/hcl/information/
I'm not sure how much more there is. The best thing to do is search google with something like "privateer file format". That's what I usually do when I want to find out how much of a particular game is documented.
I wish there was some general place to discuss this kind of stuff. wotsit.org has some file format information, but it is limited for what is known about games.
You mean: "Who cares about this open source project I don't like. How about working on a project I do like ?"
That's the fun with hobby projects. Programmers work in their spare time on what they like and see as worth doing.
I like BeOS and I help out with an open source project for it. Would I work on another project that you think requires more support ? Only if it's fun. It's my free time and I don't get paid for it, after all.
Merge OpenGL into DX ?A PI
Ooh, ooh, I know that one. Wasn't it called Fahrenheit ?
Here's a nice explanation of what happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_graphics_
Sgi really got screwed on that one.
Microsoft doesn't seem to like open standards.
It's called running things twice. Look at the bottom of this article.
If you're going to ask random strangers on a website who to vote for, you're not nearly paranoid enough, methinks.
Or perhaps your tin-foiled hat is broken.
Your history is a bit warped. Be never filed for bankruptcy.
:)
The requests for the source of BeOS were made to Palm after Palm had bought Be's IP. Bernd already had contact and some sort of contract with Be before the announcement of the sale.
The rest looks ok to me.
While it's likely that Intel has some form of 64 bit instructions built into Prescott, it is highly unlikely that they will enable it. They would have to lose much ground to the Athlon64 and Opteron systems to do that.
Remember that they are betting on the Itanium as their 64 bit processor. Enabling the 64 bit instructions on Prescott will almost instantly kill the Itanium and I doubt Intel wants to do that.
As for 64 bit Prescott killing Sun. I don't see any reason for that. It seems to be fashionable to predict the death of Sun these days, but they are not in that much problems. The Itanium already crushes UltraSparc for performance, but Sun is still doing fine. A 64 bit Prescott will not change that. The software base difference doesn't really matter here either as there is simply stuff that runs on UltraSparc but not on x86 systems. Also, a processor is not the only part of a computer. While UltraSparc's performance may be lagging at the moment, Sun's systems are very well designed and no x86 system can compete with their high end systems.
Hell, Sgi is in much more trouble than Sun and they still design their own processors (MIPS).
You're conveniently forgetting some facts, here.
You used to have to write in assembler to get any decent speed. Now you can use a decent compiler.
You used to have to write the code to access several different sound cards. Now you can use a single api.
You also used to have to write your own 3D engine or write code to access several different 3D cards. Now you can use OpenGL.
I bet these big firms have lots of code lying around they don't do anything with anymore.
That's not to say you can easily compete with the big boys, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
"I just hope some of this becomes clear before the Euro Parliament vote on the software patents directive (I heard that the vote is pushed back again, to september 22)"
2 455
Where did you hear that ? Any URL ? The closest I've found is this URL: http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?sid=9&aid=1
It states this:
"This report, which was supposed to be debated in Strasbourg next week, is being met with increasing pressure from political groups within the European Parliament, who want this report to be deferred to another session."
Keeping your customers from going to the competition perhaps ? Tell them you've got something that is much better than what the competition has and that it is almost ready.
Intel for example, is really good at that stuff. Pentium and Itanium development time and performance.
What's with the arrested stuff. Being blacklisted by SPEWS is nothing like being arrested.
Being blacklisted by SPEWS is being denied the service of having your mail delivered reliably, because some spammers use the same ISP as you do.
SPEWS doesn't just blacklist whole blocks immediately and first complaints are sent to the ISP's abuse desk. If that doesn't help, the IP is blocked. If that doesn't help, a whole block is blocked.
What I think is a better analogy (and feel free to shoot holes in it) is a taxi company not picking up passengers in your town anymore, because some people from your town who want a ride keep wrecking the taxi.
We don't need a new protocol. We need some real action by ISP's to stop the spamming.
They can check the received headers if they're checking for viruses anyway and they can also blacklist other ISP's that don't do anything about spam originating from their networks.
Doing that will take care of most of the spam I get.
Did you read a different article than me ?
People who need the Sparc/Solaris boxes will still buy them.
That won't change because they can now suddenly run SuSE on Sun's x86 servers.
It's OSNews. Have a look at this article: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3756
If you use any other browser than IE you'll be fine.
First off they are no longer Silicon Graphics ... their name is officially SGI.
;) :)
. html
Yeah, I know. Another of their stupid mistakes.
They are trying to bring back the cube and the Silicon Graphics name though. Look at the picture of the Tezro.
I am not completely familiar with IR or the exact ATI chip used in these boexes, but the FireGL X1 (based on Radeon 9700) can do 24bit(floating point)/channel, althoght the DAC is (iirc) only 10bit/channel. Is the 48bit color you speak of 12bit/channel fixed point?
I believe it is 12bit/channel integer all the way to the DAC, but I could be wrong.
What extensions are available on the IR that you can't get on a ATI?
I don't have a handy list available, but you can look here for more information: http://www.sgi.com/visualization/onyx/3000/ir/ir4
For example, I don't think the Ati cards have Image Based Rendering.
I'm not sure what is still left of the talent that they once had. A lot of them left, indeed.
As to the Sgi workstation with NVidia graphics, that was the VW 330, which was basically a standard PC. You may be confused with the VW 320, which had an architecture like the O2 and had graphics designed by Sgi themselves.
Yeah, and that has worked so well, hasn't it ? Sgi has been bleeding money for years now and there is still no end in sight to their problems and money is running out.
Sgi should drop their arrogant attitude and start caring about anyone who wants to buy their stuff.
Having a web store is quite normal these days and I don't understand why Sgi doesn't have one.
Not so good reason imho.
The new Onyx graphics have less texture memory than InfiniteReality, no 48 bit color and lacks all the extensions of IR. Sure, it's faster, but couldn't they have tried to speed up IR instead of going with Ati ?
This is Silicon Graphics we're talking about. They used to be the only option.