Is there a site on the net which lists the votes cast by each member of Congress, and the text of the bill voted on, soon after the votes are cast? I haven't seen one around, but such a thing would be useful for sorting out who is responsible for what silliness.
First, I must agree with your comments on the cache. I am much more curious about how the K7s with half and full speed caches will perform compared with PIIIs and cooled K6-IIIs. On the issue of video cards, I'm not even sure why high end 3d cards are used when benchmarking these machines. I suspect a more useful Q2 benchmark would software render to a tried-and-true old card, like a Millennium II. Benchmarking a processor-and-coprocessor combination appears to horribly complicate the system, and hide what the processor itself is doing. (If you're benchmarking the busses on the various machines though, it makes more sense to use very intelligent cards which utilize all of the capabilities of the various busses.) On the issue of MMX/3dNow!, my belief is that the benchmarking code should be utterly un-optimized for either of these. Maybe this is unrealistic... perhaps the usual C compilers optimize for MMX naturally. In that case, if it's really that standard, go ahead and let the compiler do it, but don't go out of your way to optimize for a specific instruction set. I'd personally prefer to see how the FPU cores compare on the same playing field, with software I have now. If some new chip gets games to run faster because of new instructions, that'll be a special treat, but I'd rather not see it in mainstream benchmarks until that instruction set is common in compiled code. I tend to do scientific simulations, so I'd like to know how well hardcore floating point code, compiled with standard compiler options, works on various processors. I don't want to know how it could perform, if I went out of my way to optimize the assembly.:) Granted, my needs are different from those of people who primarily use precompiled games, since the coders there can spend the effort tweaking the details. What I need is probably close to what a lot of other free OS users need, though, since most of our binaries are optimized solely by the compiler. One last thing... Most of the benchmarks I've seen have compared different clock speed chips on the same graph! What's the deal with this? I'd a least prefer it if the benchmarkers divided the score by the clock speed, for instance, to give a more meaningful measure of the efficiency of the chip itself! (Sure, I do this in my head already, but its a pain, and just seems like sloppy plot making.) I'd love to see what a K7 does with the full speed cache installed... hopeful we won't have to wait to long before they start to appear! John
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Is there a site on the net which lists the votes
cast by each member of Congress, and the text of
the bill voted on, soon after the votes are cast?
I haven't seen one around, but such a thing would
be useful for sorting out who is responsible for
what silliness.
John
First, I must agree with your comments on the cache. I am much more curious about how the K7s with half and full speed caches will perform compared with PIIIs and cooled K6-IIIs. On the issue of video cards, I'm not even sure why high end 3d cards are used when benchmarking these machines. I suspect a more useful Q2 benchmark would software render to a tried-and-true old card, like a Millennium II. Benchmarking a processor-and-coprocessor combination appears to horribly complicate the system, and hide what the processor itself is doing. (If you're benchmarking the busses on the various machines though, it makes more sense to use very intelligent cards which utilize all of the capabilities of the various busses.) On the issue of MMX/3dNow!, my belief is that the benchmarking code should be utterly un-optimized for either of these. Maybe this is unrealistic... perhaps the usual C compilers optimize for MMX naturally. In that case, if it's really that standard, go ahead and let the compiler do it, but don't go out of your way to optimize for a specific instruction set. I'd personally prefer to see how the FPU cores compare on the same playing field, with software I have now. If some new chip gets games to run faster because of new instructions, that'll be a special treat, but I'd rather not see it in mainstream benchmarks until that instruction set is common in compiled code. I tend to do scientific simulations, so I'd like to know how well hardcore floating point code, compiled with standard compiler options, works on various processors. I don't want to know how it could perform, if I went out of my way to optimize the assembly. :) Granted, my needs are different from those of people who primarily use precompiled games, since the coders there can spend the effort tweaking the details. What I need is probably close to what a lot of other free OS users need, though, since most of our binaries are optimized solely by the compiler. One last thing... Most of the benchmarks I've seen have compared different clock speed chips on the same graph! What's the deal with this? I'd a least prefer it if the benchmarkers divided the score by the clock speed, for instance, to give a more meaningful measure of the efficiency of the chip itself! (Sure, I do this in my head already, but its a pain, and just seems like sloppy plot making.) I'd love to see what a K7 does with the full speed cache installed... hopeful we won't have to wait to long before they start to appear! John
The beta does indeed autosave.