Actually CoreBoot both is a Linux and can run Linux.;-)
However, I prefer the new name too. Well, maybe "core" is a bit all over the place nowadays, but "CoreBoot" still rolls off the tongue better than "LinuxBIOS" and the name doesn't need to be a description. (Enthusiasts know already, casual users couldn't care less anyway.)
The sad part is that they have had a PowerVR license for years but they have insisted on their abominable "Extreme Graphics" and GMA concoctions for PCs. PowerVR's approach (deferred tile-based rendering) is the most bandwidth economical out there (and fillrate and pixel shading economical but comparatively less so with the advanced Z-buffering optimizations of ATI and Nvidia during the past few years) so it would have been a perfect fit for integrated graphics. Their Series 5 design was DX9 compliant, no less. Sad that the story stopped at Series 3 Kyro cards, not counting their triumph in the embedded/mobile scene. Who knows what me might have now in PC northbridges. All in all, looks like a case of NIH syndrome, the PowerVR tech was certainly good enough.
TFA (the Intel PDF) points out that ray bundling is problematic whenever a part of the bundle scatters differently from the rest, to the extent that it may be cheaper in the end to avoid bundling, at least with some workloads/situations. It's a good read, feels quite honest and free of usual marketing brouhaha.
No comment on SSE4 except that I would expect that Intel wanted to accelerate a wide variety of SIMD-suitable workloads; the reason you allude to wasn't immediately obvious. Care to expand on that?:-)
I bought a pair of 30GB 75GXPs and the one from IBM's Ireland factory performed flawlessly. The one from IBM's Hungary factory failed and got replaced with another Hungarian, which also failed so the retailer swapped both for a pair of bigger WDs.
It seems the DeathStar problem had something to do with the new assembly line in Hungary. They seem to have fixed the problems, Hitachi drives have been rock solid ever since.
Now try and bring it up with an old keyboard and no Windows key. (I know... No system with a keyboard that old can run Vista, but it is hypothetical, OK?)
No need to be hypothetical there. My desktop system that I built three years ago can run Vista with all bells and whistles very well, but I prefer my old clickety-clicky '94 IBM keyboard to anything else available today. (The tactile feedback is just better than any sub-$100 keyboard I've tried.) So there.:P
But in his blog post, Kohei says he signed the JCA when he started writing the solver.
I don't know if he retracted it later when he moved to Novell, but you seem to be working under the wrong assumption that he refused it outright.:-) The exact sequence of events does not come quite clear from the conversation though, I'm certain I'm missing significant details from the big picture.
Another thing, The Summer of Code stunt Sun pulled looks really weird, whatever happened elsewhere. They are rightfully accused of arrogance and disrespect, with that kind of total lack of communication toward a voluntary developer.
Indeed! The "128 cores" (in reality the shader ALUs that Nvidia calls "Stream Processors") caught my attention too. And this from Computer World. *sigh*
More weirdity in there:
"Why two screens? Most people are using two monitors at their desktop. [...]," said Wes Williams, worldwide product marketing manager for ThinkPads.
Uh, I'd think this Lenovo manager has very small values for "most people".
I would laugh but I'm crying because I just saw a Braun electric razor ad built around the highly topical concept of "Magic Christmas". Clearly, a manual razor cannot provide Magic Christmas like a Braun can.
(I mean, really, is Ol' Santa the best figurehead they could find for razors?)
BTW, TFS makes a mistake calling this Tesla rig a supercomputer. Nvidia correctly just calls it a cluster replacement. A cluster is not a supercomputer, the interconnect makes all the difference, no matter how much FP crunching power there is. See NEC NX-9 or Cray's Seastar for a real supercomputer interconnect. Can't be arsed to check (this is Slashdot after all) but that Penguin Computing system likely has only InfiniBand or 10GbE for the switch network, making it "only" a cluster.:-)
What seems to be getting glossed over here is that this internal, private email, which has absolutely no baring on the case in question, is being released to the public.
Hey, have you actually read anything about the case or these emails? The emails published so far have been directly relevant to the central issue of the lawsuit -- whether Microsoft knowingly produced a Vista edition that markedly differed from what they had assured to prospective buyers.
That said I fully agree with your view on privacy. I felt slightly uncomfortable reading through them published snippets -- I was wondering how come the emails could appear outside the courtroom. There certainly should be clear limits to what is public and what is not, because douchebag lawyers are going to exploit anything they can to win the case.
Ah, all righty. Definitely the hotheads and the trolls are seemingly permanent furniture. Actually on second reading I figured about as much as you now clarified but then it was of course too late to modify the reply. Seems like you, I, and also Falconhell have pretty much the same reasons for hanging around here.:-)
Slashdot is one of the most polarising environments on the internet. The truth is usually somewhere between the hyperbole on both ends.
I've got to disagree with you on this one. Sure, the discussions here never fail to haul in the extremists as well, but of all tech sites/. is the one I come to look for the good arguments. And I mean the full spectrum of arguments -- informed and thoughtful takes on either (or all three or whatever) side. IMHO this really is a great community, with a distinct tradition of injecting common sense into sometimes very complex issues. IMHO, "a polarizing environment" is quite a belittling view of this community (which in turn is 99% of what/. is all about, the rest is the CowboyNeal option).
Specifically, the pro/anti MS/Apple/other factions seem to constitute a rather small portion of the audience. Whereas many here like to call bullshit (from anyone) when they see it.
AMD's real problems are in acheiving high clock speeds, and solving their fabrication process. If AMD's 45nm process is as improved as they say it is, and with their fabrication/design company split they should be able to get that side of their business under control.
The jury is still out whether splitting the fabbing into The Foundry Company was a proactive and beneficial improvement or a desperate and potentially harmful necessity. The worst case scenario is that AMD doesn't get preferential treatment for every chip run they want; the best case scenario is obviously completely different. Will be interesting to see. One would expect that the splitting causes at least some disturbance to the flow from design to fabbing -- at the minimum they have hard work ahead to make sure it stays seamless. It's hard to see anything in the split that as such helps with their process challenges (against Intel's evident leadership in reaching new process nodes). In other words, the split doesn't automagically solve any problems. (That said, I'm personally rooting for them; have been building AMD rigs since the Athlon 750 and I dislike the vitriolic bashing they are getting nowadays, even if they really dropped the ball with the way they marketed the problem ridden Phenom.)
Might be because nVidia's chips are heavily based on licensed technology, which would restrict what Intel could do with it.
Wasn't there a problem with Microsoft being pissed off because of nVidia's license for the XBox GPU, making them go to ATI for the 360?
All GPUs have some licensed technologies but for the most part Microsoft has bought these technologies from their inventors and licensed them freely with Direct3D. The vast majority of a Nvidia GPU's logic is their very own proprietary stuff. Definitely not "heavily based on licensed tehcnology", if that's what you meant. Granted, there is a lot of cross-licensing going on, but Microsoft handles most of it centrally, and the crucial parts (especially the humongous shader execution core) are all Nvidia. (Or ATI etc. respectively.)
Microsoft and Nvidia went through a legal arbitration process because Nvidia was sticking to the about $50 per chip they had agreed on, and Microsoft was already making a heavy loss on Xbox hardware. (Not just a tolerable loss as per the royalty-based console business model but a heavy loss.) Next time with the 360 Microsoft didn't buy chips, they contracted ATI to just design the GPU and handled the manufacturing themselves to have full control of the chip price. They had a similar deal with IBM about the CPU. The handwawing was only about money, not about immaterial rights to the design per se.
Just wanted to add how I love Slashdot. Only here can you take a Cosmopolitan grade scientific study and end up with a good thorough discussion on correlation and causation. Three cheers!:-)
It drives me nuts that Slashdotters always bring up "correlation does not imply causation" any time any sort of experiment is mentioned even if no one is even trying to assert a causative relationship.
I guess most of those are like me -- they see countless examples of correlation blindly equaled to causation every day in their real life, and it irks them no end, because they are logical thinkers and irked by such violations of the unwritten rules of thinking and understanding. So they are trigger-happy to shoot that tag at everything that even remotely resembles a suitable target, even when it's clearly overboard.
If you asked me, why yes, I am proud for knowing that and spotting where-ever a false causation is being sold to me. Colour me a geek or something.:-)
But I'm 100% with you about car analogies. They are like...
The correlationisnotcausation tag really winds me up because correlation DOES imply causation.
But this greatly depends on what you actually mean by correlation! In the article's case, "correlation" simply means co-existence; I don't see any other relation stated. So I'd say nobody brought any causation into play.
Now, if there was some more complex relation -- actually a relation *between* A and B, originating from their own qualities -- then that kind of correlation could indeed imply a causation process also there. (With A or B or a C as the "causer".) But mere coexistence doesn't imply anything -- you just have apple A and orange X in the same space of observation.
So off the cuff I'd just reply "Nopers." to you.:-)
Uh, the reception seems to focus on the proprietary hardware and the resulting disadvantage with upgrading, the foolishness of RAIDing low seek-time SSDs, and the bogus patent claim.
Are you sure you wanted it to end up on Slashdot?;-)
(I'm sure the company is legit and sincere, but there's a hefty Fool's Gold factor in that system.)
I glanced through the MaximumPC article but that SSD RAID still doesn't make sense. The by far best advantage of SSD is the orders of magnitude lower seek time, and RAIDing simply kills that. There is room for a couple of hot-swap 3.5" HDs but no special cooling for them. Why not, say, an oil-tight aluminum 6-drive HD cage for some 15K SAS RAID-5 goodness, submersed in the oil, then a couple of SSDs firmly in JBOD? Meh. Idiot specs.
And at $4k you'd expect a totally fanless and silent solution. This had a radiator with four apparently 120mm fans. It's good to have lots of fan area, lower rpm means lower noise, but silent this case is not. Stovepipe effect cooling or a similar passive solution would be trivially easy to integrate to an already difficult to access design like this...
BTW, looking at how the SLI interconnect bends sideways in that special staggered placement... I'm not sure how good that is for long term.
But I have to admit that the case is very good looking, even with the obligatory blue LED bling-bling.
Overall, cannot help thinking that they got those millions of VC just as a reaction to the Alienware/Dell deal. Hop on the bandwagon...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually CoreBoot both is a Linux and can run Linux. ;-)
However, I prefer the new name too. Well, maybe "core" is a bit all over the place nowadays, but "CoreBoot" still rolls off the tongue better than "LinuxBIOS" and the name doesn't need to be a description. (Enthusiasts know already, casual users couldn't care less anyway.)
The sad part is that they have had a PowerVR license for years but they have insisted on their abominable "Extreme Graphics" and GMA concoctions for PCs. PowerVR's approach (deferred tile-based rendering) is the most bandwidth economical out there (and fillrate and pixel shading economical but comparatively less so with the advanced Z-buffering optimizations of ATI and Nvidia during the past few years) so it would have been a perfect fit for integrated graphics. Their Series 5 design was DX9 compliant, no less. Sad that the story stopped at Series 3 Kyro cards, not counting their triumph in the embedded/mobile scene. Who knows what me might have now in PC northbridges. All in all, looks like a case of NIH syndrome, the PowerVR tech was certainly good enough.
TFA (the Intel PDF) points out that ray bundling is problematic whenever a part of the bundle scatters differently from the rest, to the extent that it may be cheaper in the end to avoid bundling, at least with some workloads/situations. It's a good read, feels quite honest and free of usual marketing brouhaha.
:-)
No comment on SSE4 except that I would expect that Intel wanted to accelerate a wide variety of SIMD-suitable workloads; the reason you allude to wasn't immediately obvious. Care to expand on that?
I bought a pair of 30GB 75GXPs and the one from IBM's Ireland factory performed flawlessly. The one from IBM's Hungary factory failed and got replaced with another Hungarian, which also failed so the retailer swapped both for a pair of bigger WDs.
It seems the DeathStar problem had something to do with the new assembly line in Hungary. They seem to have fixed the problems, Hitachi drives have been rock solid ever since.
*whoosh* ;)
Aw shucks. Did you miss semester?
Thank you, I'll be here all semester. Try the Dell.
Now try and bring it up with an old keyboard and no Windows key. (I know... No system with a keyboard that old can run Vista, but it is hypothetical, OK?)
:P
No need to be hypothetical there. My desktop system that I built three years ago can run Vista with all bells and whistles very well, but I prefer my old clickety-clicky '94 IBM keyboard to anything else available today. (The tactile feedback is just better than any sub-$100 keyboard I've tried.) So there.
But in his blog post, Kohei says he signed the JCA when he started writing the solver.
:-) The exact sequence of events does not come quite clear from the conversation though, I'm certain I'm missing significant details from the big picture.
I don't know if he retracted it later when he moved to Novell, but you seem to be working under the wrong assumption that he refused it outright.
Another thing, The Summer of Code stunt Sun pulled looks really weird, whatever happened elsewhere. They are rightfully accused of arrogance and disrespect, with that kind of total lack of communication toward a voluntary developer.
Ahtisaari is Finnish though.
Indeed! The "128 cores" (in reality the shader ALUs that Nvidia calls "Stream Processors") caught my attention too. And this from Computer World. *sigh*
More weirdity in there: "Why two screens? Most people are using two monitors at their desktop. [...]," said Wes Williams, worldwide product marketing manager for ThinkPads.
Uh, I'd think this Lenovo manager has very small values for "most people".
I would laugh but I'm crying because I just saw a Braun electric razor ad built around the highly topical concept of "Magic Christmas". Clearly, a manual razor cannot provide Magic Christmas like a Braun can.
(I mean, really, is Ol' Santa the best figurehead they could find for razors?)
Ah, Parseltongue. So you are of the Slytherin school of programmers?
Shameless exploitation of the good name of one of the greatest inventors of all time. :-)
BTW, TFS makes a mistake calling this Tesla rig a supercomputer. Nvidia correctly just calls it a cluster replacement. A cluster is not a supercomputer, the interconnect makes all the difference, no matter how much FP crunching power there is. See NEC NX-9 or Cray's Seastar for a real supercomputer interconnect. Can't be arsed to check (this is Slashdot after all) but that Penguin Computing system likely has only InfiniBand or 10GbE for the switch network, making it "only" a cluster. :-)
What seems to be getting glossed over here is that this internal, private email, which has absolutely no baring on the case in question, is being released to the public.
Hey, have you actually read anything about the case or these emails? The emails published so far have been directly relevant to the central issue of the lawsuit -- whether Microsoft knowingly produced a Vista edition that markedly differed from what they had assured to prospective buyers.
That said I fully agree with your view on privacy. I felt slightly uncomfortable reading through them published snippets -- I was wondering how come the emails could appear outside the courtroom. There certainly should be clear limits to what is public and what is not, because douchebag lawyers are going to exploit anything they can to win the case.
Ah, all righty. Definitely the hotheads and the trolls are seemingly permanent furniture. Actually on second reading I figured about as much as you now clarified but then it was of course too late to modify the reply. Seems like you, I, and also Falconhell have pretty much the same reasons for hanging around here. :-)
Slashdot is one of the most polarising environments on the internet. The truth is usually somewhere between the hyperbole on both ends.
/. is the one I come to look for the good arguments. And I mean the full spectrum of arguments -- informed and thoughtful takes on either (or all three or whatever) side. IMHO this really is a great community, with a distinct tradition of injecting common sense into sometimes very complex issues. IMHO, "a polarizing environment" is quite a belittling view of this community (which in turn is 99% of what /. is all about, the rest is the CowboyNeal option).
Specifically, the pro/anti MS/Apple/other factions seem to constitute a rather small portion of the audience. Whereas many here like to call bullshit (from anyone) when they see it.
I've got to disagree with you on this one. Sure, the discussions here never fail to haul in the extremists as well, but of all tech sites
AMD's real problems are in acheiving high clock speeds, and solving their fabrication process. If AMD's 45nm process is as improved as they say it is, and with their fabrication/design company split they should be able to get that side of their business under control.
The jury is still out whether splitting the fabbing into The Foundry Company was a proactive and beneficial improvement or a desperate and potentially harmful necessity. The worst case scenario is that AMD doesn't get preferential treatment for every chip run they want; the best case scenario is obviously completely different. Will be interesting to see. One would expect that the splitting causes at least some disturbance to the flow from design to fabbing -- at the minimum they have hard work ahead to make sure it stays seamless. It's hard to see anything in the split that as such helps with their process challenges (against Intel's evident leadership in reaching new process nodes). In other words, the split doesn't automagically solve any problems. (That said, I'm personally rooting for them; have been building AMD rigs since the Athlon 750 and I dislike the vitriolic bashing they are getting nowadays, even if they really dropped the ball with the way they marketed the problem ridden Phenom.)
Might be because nVidia's chips are heavily based on licensed technology, which would restrict what Intel could do with it.
Wasn't there a problem with Microsoft being pissed off because of nVidia's license for the XBox GPU, making them go to ATI for the 360?
All GPUs have some licensed technologies but for the most part Microsoft has bought these technologies from their inventors and licensed them freely with Direct3D. The vast majority of a Nvidia GPU's logic is their very own proprietary stuff. Definitely not "heavily based on licensed tehcnology", if that's what you meant. Granted, there is a lot of cross-licensing going on, but Microsoft handles most of it centrally, and the crucial parts (especially the humongous shader execution core) are all Nvidia. (Or ATI etc. respectively.)
Microsoft and Nvidia went through a legal arbitration process because Nvidia was sticking to the about $50 per chip they had agreed on, and Microsoft was already making a heavy loss on Xbox hardware. (Not just a tolerable loss as per the royalty-based console business model but a heavy loss.) Next time with the 360 Microsoft didn't buy chips, they contracted ATI to just design the GPU and handled the manufacturing themselves to have full control of the chip price. They had a similar deal with IBM about the CPU. The handwawing was only about money, not about immaterial rights to the design per se.
Maybe not on a plain but on a circus arena, Ballmer undressed from the waist up and holding a whip and a chair...
Urgh, I just lost my appetite typing this.
Just wanted to add how I love Slashdot. Only here can you take a Cosmopolitan grade scientific study and end up with a good thorough discussion on correlation and causation. Three cheers! :-)
It drives me nuts that Slashdotters always bring up "correlation does not imply causation" any time any sort of experiment is mentioned even if no one is even trying to assert a causative relationship.
:-)
I guess most of those are like me -- they see countless examples of correlation blindly equaled to causation every day in their real life, and it irks them no end, because they are logical thinkers and irked by such violations of the unwritten rules of thinking and understanding. So they are trigger-happy to shoot that tag at everything that even remotely resembles a suitable target, even when it's clearly overboard.
If you asked me, why yes, I am proud for knowing that and spotting where-ever a false causation is being sold to me. Colour me a geek or something.
But I'm 100% with you about car analogies. They are like...
The correlationisnotcausation tag really winds me up because correlation DOES imply causation.
:-)
But this greatly depends on what you actually mean by correlation! In the article's case, "correlation" simply means co-existence; I don't see any other relation stated. So I'd say nobody brought any causation into play.
Now, if there was some more complex relation -- actually a relation *between* A and B, originating from their own qualities -- then that kind of correlation could indeed imply a causation process also there. (With A or B or a C as the "causer".) But mere coexistence doesn't imply anything -- you just have apple A and orange X in the same space of observation.
So off the cuff I'd just reply "Nopers." to you.
Uh, the reception seems to focus on the proprietary hardware and the resulting disadvantage with upgrading, the foolishness of RAIDing low seek-time SSDs, and the bogus patent claim.
;-)
Are you sure you wanted it to end up on Slashdot?
(I'm sure the company is legit and sincere, but there's a hefty Fool's Gold factor in that system.)
I glanced through the MaximumPC article but that SSD RAID still doesn't make sense. The by far best advantage of SSD is the orders of magnitude lower seek time, and RAIDing simply kills that. There is room for a couple of hot-swap 3.5" HDs but no special cooling for them. Why not, say, an oil-tight aluminum 6-drive HD cage for some 15K SAS RAID-5 goodness, submersed in the oil, then a couple of SSDs firmly in JBOD? Meh. Idiot specs.
And at $4k you'd expect a totally fanless and silent solution. This had a radiator with four apparently 120mm fans. It's good to have lots of fan area, lower rpm means lower noise, but silent this case is not. Stovepipe effect cooling or a similar passive solution would be trivially easy to integrate to an already difficult to access design like this...
BTW, looking at how the SLI interconnect bends sideways in that special staggered placement... I'm not sure how good that is for long term.
But I have to admit that the case is very good looking, even with the obligatory blue LED bling-bling.
Overall, cannot help thinking that they got those millions of VC just as a reaction to the Alienware/Dell deal. Hop on the bandwagon...