It's not a matter of express written permission - they have to tell you that the data is kept on computer, but they generally tell you this in four-point flyspeck at the bottom right-hand corner of the form.
In principle, you can write to any organisation and ask to see, and to correct if wrong, all the information they hold about you. Very few people do this, though.
Um, software developers aren't quite imbecilic enough not to have a move-license-across-chips service; they *know* people upgrade.
Unique CPU IDs are lovely, because it means Intel can have a database of what speed rating they sold each CPU at and you immediately get rid of people relabelling CPUs (since the buyer just checks with Intel what their CPUID was speed-rated at) without having to kill off the overclockers (who check what their CPUID was speed-rated at, then ignore that).
Hardware RNG is good because it removes a very hard-to-analyse source of possible insecurities (which Netscape ran into a few years back) from your crypto algorithms.
I'll be amazed if the successor to the K7 (the K7's already taped out) doesn't deal with KNI; AMD isn't quite yet in a position to become incompatible with the way Intel's steering IA32. It's OK if some AMD stuff doesn't run on Intel; if any Intel stuff doesn't run on AMD then AMD gets horrendously bad publicity.
Remember, AMD get to implement it after seeing how Intel did it; they can stick in four KNI pipelines where Intel had only one. Just for that reason I'd expect them always to be ahead of Intel's last major revision.
Why? Because, on the CPU die, a 128-bit 400MHz bus is ten lines of VHDL. It's 0.06 millimetres wide. You can have dozens of them lying around. Off the CPU die, it's 128 IO pins - and the CPU's only got space for 600 or so such - and 128 PCB traces which have to be at least 0.5mm apart; it's a *big* orange ribbon on your motherboard.
What you have at the moment between your CPU and your graphics card is a 66MHz 64-bit bus. If the graphics card was on the special-purpose PCB inside the P3/500, you'd have a 250MHz 64-bit bus. If it were on the CPU die, you could have as many 500MHz 128-bit busses as you pleased.
I *want* integration. OK, I can't upgrade the graphics and the CPU separately - but you don't do that often anyway. You have big upgrades where you yank the motherboard and most of the cards, and replace the whole pile. Why not just replace the CPU?
Yes, Intel might not have the in-house expertise in gfx chip design - but nvidia would cost them less than $10^9, and that's a sum any bank would be pleased to lend them tomorrow.
*Everything* belongs in the CPU MCM. Seymour Cray knew that in 1986.
You've got the CPU - what to do with it
on
Pentium III review
·
· Score: 1
Too many people seem to be looking at this from precisely the wrong angle. They're saying 'normal software doesn't use that much CPU, games can get the performance more easily from 3d cards, ergo we don't need P3/500 systems'.
They're right.
On the other hand, Intel has produced these chips. There will be people around who've *GOT* P3/500 systems. These are chips which can run KDE or similar with 10% of their power; you could run software-rendered Quake 2 as the WALLPAPER, and the user won't notice except that his wallpaper freezes up when he recalculates something big. What do *you* plan to do with them?
At the moment, my machine is 80% idle at most times; if you looked only at instruction traces from the CPU, you'd guess I was a special-purpose device for checking Mersenne numbers for primality. Some of you would see the same result; some would be told they were running HLT instructions 90% of the time, some would be told they're using 20% of the cycles on a box which is basically doing RC5 trial encryptions.
But Mersenne numbers, RC5 trial encryptions, and much more so HLT loops, are not directly useful to the man whose box is providing the cycles. Quake 2 wallpaper would be nice to watch, but not what I'd call useful. Speech recognition might need fair numbers of cycles, but again it'll usually need them while the user is speaking rather than all the time.
It's embarrassing to have to ask the question 'what useful things can we do non-interactively with a dedicated P2/400', but we've got to that point now.
Quad Xeon systems are pretty competitive with anything out there. Intel are *not* bad at processor design.
My evidence - I ran a big distributed task across 25 systems ranging from a 486DX2/66 to an Alpha 533 and an Ultrasparc 267. The P2/350 systems beat both the Alpha and the Ultrasparc, the P2/400 systems beat them resoundingly, and the dual P2/400 was quite amusing.
Yes, these boxes have high-end Compaq or high-end IBM prices at the start, which isn't too bad.
But the upgrade prices are *SGI* upgrade prices, and those are indecently high - just look at what's suggested for memory, CPU or hard disc upgrades.
I realise I can't get a UMA box with P2s in it anywhere else at the moment, but I'd like to know how much I could upgrade the machine with commodity parts.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a matter of express written permission - they have to tell you that the data is kept on computer, but they generally tell you this in four-point flyspeck at the bottom right-hand corner of the form.
In principle, you can write to any organisation and ask to see, and to correct if wrong, all the information they hold about you. Very few people do this, though.
Um, software developers aren't quite imbecilic enough not to have a move-license-across-chips service; they *know* people upgrade.
Unique CPU IDs are lovely, because it means Intel can have a database of what speed rating they sold each CPU at and you immediately get rid of people relabelling CPUs (since the buyer just checks with Intel what their CPUID was speed-rated at) without having to kill off the overclockers (who check what their CPUID was speed-rated at, then ignore that).
Hardware RNG is good because it removes a very hard-to-analyse source of possible insecurities (which Netscape ran into a few years back) from your crypto algorithms.
I'll be amazed if the successor to the K7 (the K7's already taped out) doesn't deal with KNI; AMD isn't quite yet in a position to become incompatible with the way Intel's steering IA32. It's OK if some AMD stuff doesn't run on Intel; if any Intel stuff doesn't run on AMD then AMD gets horrendously bad publicity.
Remember, AMD get to implement it after seeing how Intel did it; they can stick in four KNI pipelines where Intel had only one. Just for that reason I'd expect them always to be ahead of Intel's last major revision.
You want things on the CPU die.
Really, you do.
Why? Because, on the CPU die, a 128-bit 400MHz bus is ten lines of VHDL. It's 0.06 millimetres wide. You can have dozens of them lying around. Off the CPU die, it's 128 IO pins - and the CPU's only got space for 600 or so such - and 128 PCB traces which have to be at least 0.5mm apart; it's a *big* orange ribbon on your motherboard.
What you have at the moment between your CPU and your graphics card is a 66MHz 64-bit bus. If the graphics card was on the special-purpose PCB inside the P3/500, you'd have a 250MHz 64-bit bus. If it were on the CPU die, you could have as many 500MHz 128-bit busses as you pleased.
I *want* integration. OK, I can't upgrade the graphics and the CPU separately - but you don't do that often anyway. You have big upgrades where you yank the motherboard and most of the cards, and replace the whole pile. Why not just replace the CPU?
Yes, Intel might not have the in-house expertise in gfx chip design - but nvidia would cost them less than $10^9, and that's a sum any bank would be pleased to lend them tomorrow.
*Everything* belongs in the CPU MCM. Seymour Cray knew that in 1986.
Too many people seem to be looking at this from precisely the wrong angle. They're saying 'normal software doesn't use that much CPU, games can get the performance more easily from 3d cards, ergo we don't need P3/500 systems'.
They're right.
On the other hand, Intel has produced these chips. There will be people around who've *GOT* P3/500 systems. These are chips which can run KDE or similar with 10% of their power; you could run software-rendered Quake 2 as the WALLPAPER, and the user won't notice except that his wallpaper freezes up when he recalculates something big. What do *you* plan to do with them?
At the moment, my machine is 80% idle at most times; if you looked only at instruction traces from the CPU, you'd guess I was a special-purpose device for checking Mersenne numbers for primality. Some of you would see the same result; some would be told they were running HLT instructions 90% of the time, some would be told they're using 20% of the cycles on a box which is basically doing RC5 trial encryptions.
But Mersenne numbers, RC5 trial encryptions, and much more so HLT loops, are not directly useful to the man whose box is providing the cycles. Quake 2 wallpaper would be nice to watch, but not what I'd call useful. Speech recognition might need fair numbers of cycles, but again it'll usually need them while the user is speaking rather than all the time.
It's embarrassing to have to ask the question 'what useful things can we do non-interactively with a dedicated P2/400', but we've got to that point now.
Quad Xeon systems are pretty competitive with anything out there. Intel are *not* bad at processor design.
My evidence - I ran a big distributed task across 25 systems ranging from a 486DX2/66 to an Alpha 533 and an Ultrasparc 267. The P2/350 systems beat both the Alpha and the Ultrasparc, the P2/400 systems beat them resoundingly, and the dual P2/400 was quite amusing.
Tom
Yes, these boxes have high-end Compaq or high-end
IBM prices at the start, which isn't too bad.
But the upgrade prices are *SGI* upgrade prices,
and those are indecently high - just look at what's suggested for memory, CPU or hard disc upgrades.
I realise I can't get a UMA box with P2s in it anywhere else at the moment, but I'd like to know how much I could upgrade the machine with commodity parts.