And things like virtualbox make running a Windows guest pretty simple. I'm stuck with a Win7 host for now because of one PCI card, but virtualbox claims to be able to publish PCI cards to guests presently but only on a Linux host.
-- Les Cargill
Yep. Although there is a place in the world for katana-makers. That's almost a ... religious devotion.
Of course. But we do what we can.
Har! All that's old is new again. :)
And so you end up throwing all that out and writing one layer with the business rules, and another that does transport and event management on top of UDP*.
*or something less sophisticated, like a serial port.Then you write a GUI if you need it that uses pipes/sockets to talk to the middleware.
Same as it ever was...
The Bad Things are that you end up making assumptions about the defect rates in the libraries you link in. I am relatively secure in the knowledge that it's easier to do all that from scratch. That should not be so, but it frequently is.
-- Les Cargill
I'm not going to comment on Win in a VM, because I only use win98 like that :)
But shortly before XP is discontinued (and MS shoots its corporate customers in the foot!), I'll be putting a clean WinXP inside at least one VM.
Does MS squeal about putting its o/s inside a VM? They certainly stop me re-installing my perfectly legal version of XP on a laptop, even though I have the product code for that laptop! They sure do make it difficult for me to use their products, sigh.
Part and parcel. The modern OS seems to be a constantly moving target.
I want an OS that has all the bad bugs wrung out of it and is stuck in amber (ROM) for a couple of decades so I might actually get some work done already.
That's a bit silly. Why would they want to? They don't even need to buy an SDRAM company to add SDRAM to their chips.
Trust me, it's not about "culture", it is about what they can make work the best at the lowest price. That's why they added cache memory, then put the cache memory on a module with the CPU then on the chip itself. Did they stick with a "culture" that cache should be chips on the motherboard or stick with separate cache chips, no, they continued to improve to what the current technology would support.
Yes, it's not that simple. Adding main memory to the CPU chip has all sorts of problems. But knowing how to make SDRAM is not one of them.
Making the 4004 was *not* a "bet the company" design. They did it under contract for a calculator company who paid for the work. Intel took virtually no risk in the matter.
Yes, I agree, main memory is too big to fit on the CPU die for any size memory in common use at the time. Isn't that what I said?
SDRAM does not use a lot of power. It is cooler running than the CPU.
Then why did you write "That's not generally the bottleneck"?
I'm not sure why you consider this to be a "culture" issue. Windows is the dominant OS. It is very hard to work with other OSs because there are so many fewer apps. I can design FPGAs only with Windows or Linux and at one time I couldn't even use Linux unless I paid for the software. BeOS doesn't run current Windows programs does it?
They do some of the same things which are what most people need, but they are very different products than what computers are. The market evolved because the technology evolved. 10 years ago pads were mostly a joke and there smart phones weren't really possible/practical. Now the processors are fast enough running from battery that hand held computing is practical and the market will turn that way some 99%. Desktops will always be around just as "workstations" are still around, but only in very specialized, demanding applications.
-- Rick
Many of the Linux "fanbois" also expect all users to be geeks who are happy to dig into the machine to keep it humming. Most people don't want to know how it works under the hood, they just want it to work... like a car. Linux is no family sedan. That is what Windows tries to be with some moderate level of success.
-- Rick
Many, but not all.
One deep geek whose idea of an ideal distro is that "it just works and lets me get on with what I want to do" is
Have you looked at some of the modern distros? They are easy to get going and easy to learn - arguably easier than Windows8 judging by its reviews and lack of uptake.
Try Mint, or xubuntu.
If you want an o/s in ROM, will CD-ROM do? If so, try any modern linux liveCD!
If you want security, try Lightweight Portable Security, by the US DoD, for accessing sensitive information, e.g. you bank account.
If you want multimedia, try Mint.
It works well.
Not in my experience. Even OEM versions can be activated.
That's bizarre. I know the activation process is unreliable; that's why you may have to call the phone number on some reinstalls.
-- Les Cargill
I presume for the same reasons that "soundcards" were added to motherboards. You lose traces, you lose connectors.
Right.
Right!
Interestingly, many people say they took considerable risk. It was certainly disruptive.
If you did, I missed it.
Because on most designs I have seen for the last decade or more, the memory bus is not the processor interconnect bus.
Well - that is a cultural artifact. What else can it be? There is no feedback path in the marketplace for us to express our disdain over bloatware.
No. My point is that the culture does not reward minimalist software solutions unless they're in the control or embedded space.
Phones and tablets are and will always be cheezy little non-computers. They don't have enough peripheral options to do anything besides post cat pictures to social media sites.
You *can* make serious control surface computers out of them, but they're no longer at a consumer-friendly price. And the purchasing window for them is very narrow, so managing market thrash is a problem.
Or they can be a laptop in a box. The world* is glued together by Visual Basic. Dunno if the Win8 tablets can be relied on to run that in a manner to support all that.
*as opposed to the fantasy world - the Net - which is glued with Java.I expect the death of the desktop is greatly exaggerated.
-- Les Cargill
The only fly in the ointment is that it isn't practical to combine an x86 CPU with 4 GB of DRAM on a single chip. Oh well, otherwise a great idea. That might be practical in another 5 years when low end computers are commonly using more than 16 GB of DRAM on the board.
You presume a lot. That is not the same as it being correct.
You seem to be learning... ;^)
Like who? What was the risk, that the calculator wouldn't work, they wouldn't get the contract??? Where was the "considerable" risk?
Actually, there was little risk. Once they convinced the calculator company that they could do it more cheaply it was an obvious move to make. The technology was to the point where they could put a small CPU on a chip (or chips) and make a fully functional computer. There was no idea of becoming the huge computer giant. I am sure they realized that this could become the basis of a very significant industry. So where was the risk?
Uh, look above...
"The main reason why main memory isn't on the CPU chip is because there are lots of variations in size *and* that it just wouldn't fit!"
What does that mean? I don't know what processor designs you have seen, but all of the multicore stuff (which is what they have been building for nearly a decade) is memory bus speed constrained because you have two or three or four or eight processors sharing just one memory interface or in some cases I believe they have used two. This is a classic problem at this point referred to as the "memory wall". Google it.
You can't buy a computer with Linux or some other OS?
Why is that? Of course rewards are there for anyone who makes a better product.
Ok, another quote to go up there with "No one will need more than 640 kBytes" and "I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years."
I'll bet you have one of these things as a significant computing platform in four years... you can quote me on that!
I don't know what the "death of the desktop" is, but I think you and I will no longer have traditional computers (aka, laptops and desktops) as anything but reserve computing platforms in six years.
I am pretty much a Luddite when it comes new technology. I think most of it is bogus crap. But I have seen the light of phones and tablets and I am a believer. I have been shown the way and the way is good.
Here's a clue to the future. How many here want to use Windows after XP? Who likes Vista? Who likes Win7? Win8? Is your new PC any faster than your old PC (other than the increased memory for memory bound apps)? PCs are reaching the wall while hand held devices aren't. Handhelds will be catching up in six years and will be able to do all the stuff you want from your computer today. Tomorrow's PC's, meanwhile, won't be doing a lot more. So the gap will narrow and who wants all the baggage of traditional PCs when they can use much more convenient hand helds? I/O won't be a problem. I think all the tablets plug into a TV via HDMI and you can add a keyboard and mouse easily. So there you have all the utility of a PC in a tiny form factor along with all the advantages of the handheld when you want a handheld.
If the FPGA design software ran on them well, I'd get one today. But I need to wait a few more years for the gap to close.
-- Rick
I had that conversation recently in one of the newsgroups and it ended up with an argument where at least one person was arguing that you shouldn't use a computer unless you are prepared to work on it.
I don't want to have that discussion again. Maybe later.
Linux reminds me of Forth in that regard. Someone said, "If you've seen one Forth, you've seen one Forth". There seem to be so many different Linux distros, one of them has to be good, right?
Oh, BTW, one of the disk copy programs I tried to use installed a dual boot Linux partition on my laptop. It runs ok, but it craps out because it finds an error in one of the files... the exact sort of hard drive error that is the reason why I am trying to copy my hard drive to a new one. Maybe this is just the stupid program, but this is one reason why I don't think Linux is the answer to any problems I have.
-- Rick
So you are saying that multiprocessors are dead on arrival? I don't think so. No one I have seen has started the design process from scratch thinking like they were designing hardware.
How does a bee hive work? How about an ant farm? How do all the cells in your body work together? No, the fact that the answer has not been found does not mean it does not exist.
Well, the other approaches are hitting a wall. It is clearly time for a change. You can say this or that doesn't work, but they have only been tried in very limited contexts.
Yes, actually component lead time is a PITA. The orders are very "lumpy" as one of my customer contacts refers to it. So I'm not willing to inventory anything I don't have to. At this point that will only be connectors.
One of my better kayaking friends has a cochlear implant with an external processor. She either wears her older back up processor or none at all.
Yes, but it is a lot more training than learning to drive and a lot more money. It is also a lot more demanding of scheduling in that you can't just say, "Dad, can I drive you to the store?"
Not at this time. I'm way too busy with other things including getting a hip replacement.
-- Rick
I'd like to give the FPGA vendors a piece of my mind regarding their FPGA t ools. Talk about the bloatiest of great white whale bloaty-bloat SW. Fire up your virus scanner and go to bed, only to wake up and find it listlessl y pawing C:\Altera or C:\Xilinx, wearing your hard drive head down to a blo ody nub.
(snip)
OK, but how about 4G of DRAM off chip, but in the same package. Maybe call it L4 cache instead of DRAM. Use a high interleave so you can keep the access rate up, and besides the cost of the wiring isn't so high as it would be outside the package.
-- glen
How is that any real advantage? Once you go off chip you have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous output drivers.
-- Rick
Making separate chips and putting them in the same package is the golden middle road here. You need output drivers - but you don't need the same sort of drivers as for separate chips on a motherboard. There are several differences - your wires are shorter (so less noise, better margins, easier timing, lower currents, lower power), you can have many more wires (broader paths means higher bandwidth), and you have dedicated links (better timing, easier termination, separate datapaths for each direction). It is particularly beneficial if the die are stacked vertically rather than horizontally - your inter-chip connections are minimal length, it's (relatively) easy to have huge parallel buses, and you can arrange the layout as you want.
There is significant work being done in making chip packaging and driver types for exactly this sort of arrangement. It is perhaps more aimed at portable devices rather than big systems, but the idea is the same.
I am examining the "isn't practical" premise, and trying to do that without any preconceptions. I've seen ... high levels of integration in real life before - stuff you wouldn't normally think of as practical.
Of *course* i don't know for sure - I wasn't there when it wasn't done... :)
That's the goal! :)
Journalists, mainly. They're probably doing the usual; "constructing a narrative". There's a general credo in storyteller spheres that SiVa is all about doing crazy things .
As the story was told, the risk was mostly in what they'd have to do to adapt.
Well, I got that eventually - although I suppose I got hung up on "variations in size" - just pick one.
We're back to the interconnect bus vs. the memory bus distinction. Interconnects must be arbitrated or otherwise act like "networks"; what I am calling a memory bus does not have to.
Sadly, now we have to distinguish between usage of these terms in whether it's multicore or not.
FWIW, I have nearly avoided anything multicore in terms of my living successfully so far that does not run shrink wrap.
Linux isn't bloated? I don't know if you can buy something preloaded with BeOS or not. Used to be that specialist things like DAW machines used Be.
Don't be silly.
Both of those are also true, given other constraints. I would say the commercial potential of the internet has been more limited than people would perhaps prefer.
We'll see - I can't find that today, and I have looked. Gave up in a fit of despair and bought a netbook.
We'll see. FWIW, the people that made this machine I am typing on now no longer make desktops, so I see something coming. Not sure what, though.
Skepticism != Luddism.
They're all fine, so far. No trouble with Win7 or Win8 here. Win8 is far too clever but it works.
Yes. But my old PC is a 3.0GHz monocore.
The only reason I upgraded was that Silverlight stopped utilizing graphics cards.
There is more than one wall.
Uh huh. Right :)
That's true enough. But that isn't all the I/O I would need. It isn't even the right *software*.
Ironically, I expect Apple to sell desktops for quite some time. Other than that, here's to the gamers.
-- Les Cargill
This is what I was meaning - although I don't know enough deeply enough about DRAM to know what the slings and arrows are.
DRAM still seem like magic to me, in a way. Magic I am used to, but still....
-- Les Cargill
(snip, I wrote)
It must help some, or Intel wouldn't have put the off chip in package cache on some processors. Pentium pro if I remember, and maybe Pentium 2.
Yes it is off chip and requires drivers, but the capacitance will be less than off package, the distance (speed of light) delay will be less, and known. The drivers can be sized optimally for the needed speed and distance.
-- glen
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