Microsoft told me that multi-chip-modules count as more than one processor. Paxville really is a multi-chip-module. I showed them a picture and asked, is Paxville a multi-chip-module
(you can see the 2 die in the picture mind you) and if not, what is their definition of a
multi-chip-module. They said they were reviewing their policy and could not answer at this time.
Using Spectra-2000 rope we can make rotating space tethers that give about half of orbital velocity. This makes it easy to use a single stage rocket to get to the tether.
The rotating tether recycles energy from things going down. It also transfers energy in short times, like 20 minutes, instead of days. So you can do many payloads per day instead of days per payload. They don't need any amazing power transfer beams like the elevator. Really could be done today.
I have two little boys. A notebook touch pad is much easier for a 2 year old than a mouse. A mouse seems more like 3 or 3.5 year old stuff. There is lots of educational software on Windows that is cheap. A computer is great for teaching the alphabet, sounds of letters, vocabulary, reading, etc. And it also is good for playing educational DVDs. The kids can click on what parts they want to watch.
When my older boy was about 3 my 1 year old figured out he could pop the keys off the portable. So eventually all the keys came off, but none of the software we were using cared. We got a Walmart notebook for about $600 and it has worked well for more than a year in spite of some rather rough treatment.
The Opteron 242 is only $169 on newegg.com. So getting an extra low end Opteron is not much money. And these actually are still very fast CPUs.
Still laughing - so 50+ years still
on
Space Elevator Update
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Arthur C Clarke said: "It will be built 50 years after people stop laughing at it".
The
Space Tethers will be built far sooner and are really much better. These can toss you into space fast so you don't fry in the radiation belts, recycle the energy from payloads going down into payloads going up, and be built with materials we have today.
You can rip DVDs onto the flash. With a 1 GB flash I can do 4 movies with reasonable quality compression or 8 with low quality. So not only can it entertain my 3.5 year old with games, but my 1.5 year old also with "Bing and Bong" movies.
I use the software at http://makayama.com/ which sells for $35. As long as you have enough memory it works well enough.
Maybe eventually they will come out with a more entertainment-centric PSP, with a hard drive for storing movies instead of dinky and expensive Memory Sticks.
Apple moved from hard drive to flash. The "dinky and expensive" flash for PSP will get big and cheap in a year or two. Flash is the way to go. Takes a lot less power and does not break as easy when dropped. Yes, my kids have dropped my PSP several times already.
The screen on the PSP is really really good. When watching a movie you can't even see any pixels. Everyone I showed mine too was very impressed with the screen.
The ability to:
1) Watch movies
2) Play games
3) Surf the web / read email (with DNS hack)
means you have 3 big functions in a very small package for $250.
I have a Nintendo DS as well, and the DS seems like a cheap toy while the PSP seems like some high end electronics. Mostly just from the screen.
I think the PSP is a very good deal and will sell well as word of mouth starts to work and people get to try it out. Also, once there are more games and movies it will make more sense too. So far I can only find a few movies for it.
In
another article on this $100 PC it is clear that the display will use a chip like the one in a protector and an LED as a light source. There will be a little pop-up tent so you have a rear-projection system. With this you really can make a very cheap portable that uses very little power. Remember also that all the chips will be cheaper in 2006 than now.
So
Tyan is coming out with Geode motherboards for like $80. The only problem with the mini-itx Geode motherboard I bought was the price, since it was a developer board. Now it will be cheap to make a powerful fanless computer.
I'll say it again, using the GeodeNX series of chips for anything other than a specific set of embedded applications is a waste of time and resources.
Why? It seems like 6-watts and 1 Ghz for the "AMD Geode NX 1500@6W" makes for a really nice chip. The price on this chip
was $65 each for 10K back in May. This does not seem bad. Why is this chip a waste of time?
This is a developer board, so it is more expensive.
I ordered it about 2 months ago. It took them about 6 weeks to ship and then 3 weeks to get here (I use a forwarder in Miami so I have a US address for people to ship to, but this takes longer).
There ought to be a regular retail board by now, but I did not find it in 1 minute on google.
The one I have is a 1 Ghz Geode NX 1500. You can see the motherboard here:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/Pro ductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863_10837%5E11090,00.h tml
If you need to do 100,000 writes over 2 GB of flash, that is 200 TB of writes. If my system averages 1 MB per minute of writes, this will take 380 years. A bigger flash (4 GB etc) takes even longer, and flash is getting bigger. Also some flash says 1 mil writes. I don't think disk drives can be trusted after 3 or 4 years. Forever is only a slight exaggeration for most of my machines.
Most failures seem to be writes. If you read after each write, and relocate the data if the write did not work, you can keep going even in the face of some errors.
Errors tend to be bit errors and not whole blocks. So if you have any ECC in your filesystem you can fix errors without a huge overhead.
If you do not have a filesystem designed for flash, you can wear out part of the flash quickly. But with something like JFFS2 on Linux, it should last a very long time for light to normal loads.
It does have a normal partition table. We did dd to clone the disk onto a CF and it still did not boot. However, it did act differently. This time it goes through the diagnostics and then blanks the screen and starts all over again. Our CF is only 2 GB, and the disk is 10 GB, so it may not have all fit.
>Its seems that Intel have lost their technology edge.
You haven't seen Montecito, then.
2GHz, dual core, 100W total. It will crush everything else. In the labs, it already has. Sampling to OEMs now.
But at 3 or 4 times the die size of the dual-core Opteron the Montecito will cost 20 or 30 times as much to make. Intel will loose money selling a few Montecitos at 5 to 10 times the dual Opteron price. I think dual-core Opterons are at sampling to key software developers and probably OEMs too. I think we will see dual-core Opterons ship at 10,000/month more than a year before we see Montecitos ship at that level. It is hard to make a lot of working chips when you have a huge die.
Intel has yet to release a 1.6 Ghz single core Itanium. I don't believe they are about to release a 2 Ghz dual-core.
I find it interesting that people who think Intel has the tech lead usually post Anonymously.
It seems Intel has plenty of 2.8 and 3 Ghz chips, more than they can sell, but very few 3.6 Ghz chips. So they have an inventory problem. Once people realize they want the NX-bit for worm protection and 64-bit so they can run the next Windows, this inventory will be nearly worthless.
Intel released their
Q3 results late Tuesday.
In their
conference call they were evasive about a
suprising drop in their tax rate and also about the amount of
their inventory writeoff.
Intel claimed their inventory was down $43 million to $3.2 billion with an
unspecified writeoff amount.
Investors were happy to
see inventory did not go up again and the stock went up Wednesday.
In
several
different
articles
people are working out the mystery of the writeoff amount.
Normally Intel's "cost of sales" is a steady number. Any writeoff will add to this number.
So you can estimate the writeoff just by seeing how much this increased. With this calculation, it seems Intel had a writeoff of $472 million.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft told me that multi-chip-modules count as more than one processor. Paxville really is a multi-chip-module. I showed them a picture and asked, is Paxville a multi-chip-module (you can see the 2 die in the picture mind you) and if not, what is their definition of a multi-chip-module. They said they were reviewing their policy and could not answer at this time.
The rotating tether recycles energy from things going down. It also transfers energy in short times, like 20 minutes, instead of days. So you can do many payloads per day instead of days per payload. They don't need any amazing power transfer beams like the elevator. Really could be done today.
Check out spacetethers.com.
I have two little boys. A notebook touch pad is much easier for a 2 year old than a mouse. A mouse seems more like 3 or 3.5 year old stuff. There is lots of educational software on Windows that is cheap. A computer is great for teaching the alphabet, sounds of letters, vocabulary, reading, etc. And it also is good for playing educational DVDs. The kids can click on what parts they want to watch. When my older boy was about 3 my 1 year old figured out he could pop the keys off the portable. So eventually all the keys came off, but none of the software we were using cared. We got a Walmart notebook for about $600 and it has worked well for more than a year in spite of some rather rough treatment.
The Opteron 242 is only $169 on newegg.com. So getting an extra low end Opteron is not much money. And these actually are still very fast CPUs.
The Space Tethers will be built far sooner and are really much better. These can toss you into space fast so you don't fry in the radiation belts, recycle the energy from payloads going down into payloads going up, and be built with materials we have today.
We also have a DS and it can keep the 3.5 year old happy for hours, but not the 1.5 year old. Videos seem best for the 1.5 year old.
I got the SanDisk 1 GB "memory stick pro duo" which you can get for about $115 (though a bunch of places seem not to have it in stock).
I use the software at http://makayama.com/ which sells for $35. As long as you have enough memory it works well enough.
The screen on the PSP is really really good. When watching a movie you can't even see any pixels. Everyone I showed mine too was very impressed with the screen. The ability to: 1) Watch movies 2) Play games 3) Surf the web / read email (with DNS hack) means you have 3 big functions in a very small package for $250. I have a Nintendo DS as well, and the DS seems like a cheap toy while the PSP seems like some high end electronics. Mostly just from the screen. I think the PSP is a very good deal and will sell well as word of mouth starts to work and people get to try it out. Also, once there are more games and movies it will make more sense too. So far I can only find a few movies for it.
But if Intel really believes this is "fair and lawful", why is it that Intel does not use written contracts for these deals?
In another article on this $100 PC it is clear that the display will use a chip like the one in a protector and an LED as a light source. There will be a little pop-up tent so you have a rear-projection system. With this you really can make a very cheap portable that uses very little power. Remember also that all the chips will be cheaper in 2006 than now.
So Tyan is coming out with Geode motherboards for like $80. The only problem with the mini-itx Geode motherboard I bought was the price, since it was a developer board. Now it will be cheap to make a powerful fanless computer.
This is a developer board, so it is more expensive. I ordered it about 2 months ago. It took them about 6 weeks to ship and then 3 weeks to get here (I use a forwarder in Miami so I have a US address for people to ship to, but this takes longer).
There ought to be a regular retail board by now, but I did not find it in 1 minute on google.
The board I have again with a real html link.
The one I have is a 1 Ghz Geode NX 1500. You can see the motherboard here: http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/Pro ductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863_10837%5E11090,00.h tml
If you need to do 100,000 writes over 2 GB of flash, that is 200 TB of writes. If my system averages 1 MB per minute of writes, this will take 380 years. A bigger flash (4 GB etc) takes even longer, and flash is getting bigger. Also some flash says 1 mil writes. I don't think disk drives can be trusted after 3 or 4 years. Forever is only a slight exaggeration for most of my machines. Most failures seem to be writes. If you read after each write, and relocate the data if the write did not work, you can keep going even in the face of some errors. Errors tend to be bit errors and not whole blocks. So if you have any ECC in your filesystem you can fix errors without a huge overhead.
The shipping of a big Dell box to this island is far more than the shipping on the PIC.
If you do not have a filesystem designed for flash, you can wear out part of the flash quickly. But with something like JFFS2 on Linux, it should last a very long time for light to normal loads.
It does have a normal partition table. We did dd to clone the disk onto a CF and it still did not boot. However, it did act differently. This time it goes through the diagnostics and then blanks the screen and starts all over again. Our CF is only 2 GB, and the disk is 10 GB, so it may not have all fit.
Monday Forbes reports Intel told software companies they should license a multi-core chip as one processor. Also on Monday, Intel compared their new Itanium to the "best published RISC" machine. Their graph indicates a 64-processor Itanium is about the same SpecIntRate as a 64-processor RISC machine. Now the funny part is for the RISC result they used the 32 chip Power5 SpecIntRate as 64-processors. So 64 Itanium-2 chips are really about the same as 32 Power-5 chips. So while Intel advocates per-chip licensing, they use per-core benchmarking. It is also interesting to note that this new Itanium-2 SpecIntBase of 1590 is just a bit faster than a 2 Ghz Pentium-M and much slower than a 2.6 Ghz Athlon-64-FX.
Intel has yet to release a 1.6 Ghz single core Itanium. I don't believe they are about to release a 2 Ghz dual-core.
I find it interesting that people who think Intel has the tech lead usually post Anonymously.
Intel released their Q3 results late Tuesday. In their conference call they were evasive about a suprising drop in their tax rate and also about the amount of their inventory writeoff. Intel claimed their inventory was down $43 million to $3.2 billion with an unspecified writeoff amount. Investors were happy to see inventory did not go up again and the stock went up Wednesday. In several different articles people are working out the mystery of the writeoff amount. Normally Intel's "cost of sales" is a steady number. Any writeoff will add to this number. So you can estimate the writeoff just by seeing how much this increased. With this calculation, it seems Intel had a writeoff of $472 million.