The UK is metric with the exception of speeds that are still marked and posted in miles / miles per hour.
I think the UK is a whole load more muddled up than that. I know my car does 50mpg, but I buy diesel in litres. I'll order a pint of beer, and what I buy in the supermarket is a two pint bottle of milk (but it's labelled as 1136ml) and a one litre carton of juice. I'll buy 6x2 (inch) timber and then chop in up into lengths measured in mm. I weigh 11 stone, but I eat margarine from a 1kg tub. I took window measurements in mm and was sold fabric in yards. Land area seems to be measured in acres or hectares variously. The only thing I think we've sorted is never to mention Fahrenheit, but then we haven't got as far as Kelvin on the whether forecast (but neither have the French).
Not sure what you mean by "Windows 7 Mobile" given:
- Windows Mobile - has long supported ARM, but has no version 7.
- Windows Phone 7 - only supports ARM.
- Windows CE - supports ARM.
I believe in Europe the proposal would violate the working time directive, and leave the company open to legal trouble. Of course, whether anyone would want that confrontation is another matter.
Manchester airport is now using a scanner from Rapiscan Systems (ref: BBC).
Their Secure1000 system claims to be active (from here):
"The Rapiscan Secure 1000’s patented technology is composed of an ultra low-dose X-ray source that images backscattered X-rays through to a remote operator’s workstation."
A lot of the comments here are as the result of a misquote in the headline. The headline reports that the bone was found below the "ocean" floor, while the article describes it as being the "sea" bed, the North Sea in particular. There is a very significant difference between the two (apart from the depth - oceans are typicially a few km deep, while seas are only a few 100m), namely the way that they formed. The North Sea was once continental crust (upon which this dinosaur lived), but it stretched, sank, and was flooded. Ever since, sediments have been accumulating, and over time these have buried the fossil to its current depth. Ocean floor is formed from spreading ridges, and has never been part of the continent - you would not expect to find a land dinosaur there.
There's no need to change everything at once. Install Ububtu on one machine (if they are worried about loss of capacity, and you are able, then lend them a machine for a while). Let the teachers try, let the kids try. Get feedback then re-assess.
It's also possible that one Ubuntu machine could provide you with more than one seat. If the machines are networked, then all the machines could access the one server (VNC?). Ultimately, something like the Ndiyo project may end up providing small schools with lots of seats for a small cost.
You stated that the clock period (and therefore the length of the ring oscillator) should be about the same length as the critical path through the design. This is likely to be significantly less than 50 gates, and therefore your oscillator will only have 25 inverters. In a design with a million gates or more, this is not really enough to monitor the process and temperature variation across the die (which is surprisingly significant). If you could get enough gates into the ring (use NAND gates?), then they will start consuming significant area, and therefore slow the chip down.
The idea is good and the physics is sound, but putting something like this into practice is much harder than you make out. Speed binning of chips goes part way to adjusting for process variation. Sophisticated chips have temperature monitors that will scale back the clock when things get too hot (but in a crude, broad-brush way). ARM is already working on more fine-grained closed-loop systems (see here), but as a way of saving power rather than going faster, and with an indirect link between chip speed and clock.
Very simply, this aperture synthesis experiment is not the same as being able to resolve a house on the moon, unless the house was emitting radio waves.
Optical aperture synthesis is harder, but it has been done, at COAST, among others.
I'm sure it's in MUL, and could be in the others. Basically, there are three register operands (two inputs, and one output), and for some reason that I would expect has to do with how the instruction is implemented, one of the source operands (I forget whether it's the first or second) can't be the destination. Sure, you can swap the operands, unless you want to square a number (and don't need to keep the original around), but it's a pain.
IIRC, this restriction was removed in ARM architecture version 6.
Incorrect. ARM licences its instruction set architecture (ISA) as well as its own implementations of that ISA. Intel (and DEC before them) do pay a license fee and royalties for the StrongARM and all the XScales.
Have a look at the ARM Milestones. 2001, Intel and TI license the ARM architecture.
Intel bought part of DEC (Digital), which had, in its product portfolio, the StrongARM processor. StrongARM is a DEC implementation of the ARM Instruction Set Architecture (version 4 if you care).
ARM is still an separate, publically listed company. XScale is an Intel implementation of the ARM ISA (version 5TE I think). Intel pays ARM to use their architecture.
ARM also designs implementations of the ARM ISA and licences these designs to chip designers to include in System-on-Chip designs.
As Intel is now discovering (and promoting) it has long been known that clock frequency is not a sufficient measure of performance. It matters how much processing you can do in each clock tick as well as how often your clock ticks. Naturally, the faster the clock ticks, the less processing you can do per clock tick.
1/2 GHz quoted for this core may not sound a lot, but there are some good reasons for it:
- ARM cores use a shorter pipeline than Intel cores (in general). This requires less logic to get a good throughput of operations. Less logic means less area (less cost) and less power consumption. These are important in embedded applications (you don't want your phone to be putting out 50W and costing $200).
- These cores are synthesisable. This means that ARM will deliver a "model" of the device, and customers can translate this to a silicon layout on their own process, and they can integrate peripherals, memory etc. on the same silicon. Getting a higher clock speed requires custom logic which is hard to translate between processes. Essentially the processor has sold separately as a piece of silicon, and this means a slow off-chip interface to the rest of the system.
For a multi-threaded or multi-process application such as this core is targetted, using MP cores makes more sense than using a single high-speed core and switching between processes all the time. For one thing you save all the context switching overhead.
Forget the April fool. Acorn Computers (the ahead-of-its-time UK computer manufacturer that created the ARM architecture) put a toaster into one the their demo machines years ago. Then the following year they put a sink and a pizza oven in!
The computer, the oven and the sink all worked of course.
You can't disprove a hypothesis by demostrating something else. Just because you (anecdotally) observe that you can solve problems after a long period of being awake doesn't mean that you wouldn't also solve those problems (or more) after 8 hours sleep.
Further, your sample of "my coworkers", I assume represents a team of programmers, and is therefore seriously biased.
...smaller geometries mean more chips/wafer and therefore lower cost
However, smaller geometries also means more performance, which means higher cost (the fabs have to cover the huge cost of new production lines somehow). The fact that it is still possible to have chips fabricated in the larger geometries shows that larger geometries are actually cheaper.
Processor: ARM9, 75 MHz (32 bits, probably 0.13 or 0.18 micron process, est. 20-70 mW)
0.13 sounds like overkill for an ARM9 at 75MHz - given that they can do over 200MHz in that kind of a process. I expect the manufacturer would have used a larger, cheaper process like 0.35 or 0.25.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the article. The complaint (at least from the family) is about the manner in which the agents approached the task rather than the task itself.
And the answer is supposed to be "42".
There are however notable exceptions.
The UK is metric with the exception of speeds that are still marked and posted in miles / miles per hour.
I think the UK is a whole load more muddled up than that. I know my car does 50mpg, but I buy diesel in litres. I'll order a pint of beer, and what I buy in the supermarket is a two pint bottle of milk (but it's labelled as 1136ml) and a one litre carton of juice. I'll buy 6x2 (inch) timber and then chop in up into lengths measured in mm. I weigh 11 stone, but I eat margarine from a 1kg tub. I took window measurements in mm and was sold fabric in yards. Land area seems to be measured in acres or hectares variously. The only thing I think we've sorted is never to mention Fahrenheit, but then we haven't got as far as Kelvin on the whether forecast (but neither have the French).
Intel's aquisitions may be changing that. See their quote on this recent press release.
- Windows Mobile - has long supported ARM, but has no version 7.
- Windows Phone 7 - only supports ARM.
- Windows CE - supports ARM.
The only thing that doesn't support ARM is "big" Windows 7, and this is changing:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2011/jan11/01-05socsupport.mspx
I believe in Europe the proposal would violate the working time directive, and leave the company open to legal trouble. Of course, whether anyone would want that confrontation is another matter.
You might want to visit the Marmite shop on Regent Street to try some first. Also sells what must be the cheapest tea in London (£1).
Their Secure1000 system claims to be active (from here): "The Rapiscan Secure 1000’s patented technology is composed of an ultra low-dose X-ray source that images backscattered X-rays through to a remote operator’s workstation."
A lot of the comments here are as the result of a misquote in the headline. The headline reports that the bone was found below the "ocean" floor, while the article describes it as being the "sea" bed, the North Sea in particular. There is a very significant difference between the two (apart from the depth - oceans are typicially a few km deep, while seas are only a few 100m), namely the way that they formed. The North Sea was once continental crust (upon which this dinosaur lived), but it stretched, sank, and was flooded. Ever since, sediments have been accumulating, and over time these have buried the fossil to its current depth. Ocean floor is formed from spreading ridges, and has never been part of the continent - you would not expect to find a land dinosaur there.
There's no need to change everything at once. Install Ububtu on one machine (if they are worried about loss of capacity, and you are able, then lend them a machine for a while). Let the teachers try, let the kids try. Get feedback then re-assess.
It's also possible that one Ubuntu machine could provide you with more than one seat. If the machines are networked, then all the machines could access the one server (VNC?). Ultimately, something like the Ndiyo project may end up providing small schools with lots of seats for a small cost.
Q: And if it is enough, why waste some of it converting it to hydrogen, then back to electricity? Why not just use it directly?
A: Hydrogen is a lot easier to store than electricity is.
The idea is good and the physics is sound, but putting something like this into practice is much harder than you make out. Speed binning of chips goes part way to adjusting for process variation. Sophisticated chips have temperature monitors that will scale back the clock when things get too hot (but in a crude, broad-brush way). ARM is already working on more fine-grained closed-loop systems (see here), but as a way of saving power rather than going faster, and with an indirect link between chip speed and clock.
Very simply, this aperture synthesis experiment is not the same as being able to resolve a house on the moon, unless the house was emitting radio waves. Optical aperture synthesis is harder, but it has been done, at COAST, among others.
Incorrect. ARM licences its instruction set architecture (ISA) as well as its own implementations of that ISA. Intel (and DEC before them) do pay a license fee and royalties for the StrongARM and all the XScales. Have a look at the ARM Milestones. 2001, Intel and TI license the ARM architecture.
The article is correct but misleading. This is ARM's first multiprocessor core and therefore also its first "synthesisable multiprocessor core".
Eeek. No.
Intel bought part of DEC (Digital), which had, in its product portfolio, the StrongARM processor. StrongARM is a DEC implementation of the ARM Instruction Set Architecture (version 4 if you care).
ARM is still an separate, publically listed company. XScale is an Intel implementation of the ARM ISA (version 5TE I think). Intel pays ARM to use their architecture.
ARM also designs implementations of the ARM ISA and licences these designs to chip designers to include in System-on-Chip designs.
As Intel is now discovering (and promoting) it has long been known that clock frequency is not a sufficient measure of performance. It matters how much processing you can do in each clock tick as well as how often your clock ticks. Naturally, the faster the clock ticks, the less processing you can do per clock tick.
1/2 GHz quoted for this core may not sound a lot, but there are some good reasons for it:
- ARM cores use a shorter pipeline than Intel cores (in general). This requires less logic to get a good throughput of operations. Less logic means less area (less cost) and less power consumption. These are important in embedded applications (you don't want your phone to be putting out 50W and costing $200).
- These cores are synthesisable. This means that ARM will deliver a "model" of the device, and customers can translate this to a silicon layout on their own process, and they can integrate peripherals, memory etc. on the same silicon. Getting a higher clock speed requires custom logic which is hard to translate between processes. Essentially the processor has sold separately as a piece of silicon, and this means a slow off-chip interface to the rest of the system.
For a multi-threaded or multi-process application such as this core is targetted, using MP cores makes more sense than using a single high-speed core and switching between processes all the time. For one thing you save all the context switching overhead.
Forget the April fool. Acorn Computers (the ahead-of-its-time UK computer manufacturer that created the ARM architecture) put a toaster into one the their demo machines years ago. Then the following year they put a sink and a pizza oven in!
The computer, the oven and the sink all worked of course.
You can't disprove a hypothesis by demostrating something else. Just because you (anecdotally) observe that you can solve problems after a long period of being awake doesn't mean that you wouldn't also solve those problems (or more) after 8 hours sleep.
Further, your sample of "my coworkers", I assume represents a team of programmers, and is therefore seriously biased.
The statistic is that: 9% of people who download music think it is wrong.
This suggests to me that the majority of people who think downloading music is wrong don't download music.
What would be interesting would be: what proportion of the population think downloading music is wrong?