Intel Atom: pros/cons/hazzards?

Actually his point is bang-on. The above is available on Home Depot's web site, but is not a stock item in their stores (they will ship it for free to one of their stores for pickup, however, but that doesn't help me if I need it before next Thursday).

And while the do stock some small metric sets (or is that Menards?), an 18mm bit is pretty big, and even if they had a set of more common sizes, finding an 18mm in stock is going to be much harder. Even finding something as simple as a 4mm x .7 x 60mm bolt is probably not going to happen* at your local home center (although you might well find 30 and 40mm lengths).

*Yeah, I needed two a few months ago. Fortunately my favorite Internet supply house is willing to ship a package of a dozen (or so). Still, I had to wait for that. I was ready to drill it out and re-tap it for a #10, but there wasn't all that much extra material there, and I decided I could wait...

NASA, only sort-of. ISS is chock full of 5/16, 7/16 and 3/8 inch bolts.

18 mm is not large. It would be a flat bit for wood.

--

Rick

(snip on speedometer units)

I think electronic (digital display) speedometers have a switch that can change the units.

More traditional ones have tiny blue numbers for kph and big white ones for MPH. I have driven in Canada, and sometimes it is hard to see the little numbers.

I believe, though, that on a lot of cars now the electronics is digital with an analog display. The computer that does all the engine ignition calculations also knows the speed, and just sends it out through a DAC.

I believe that in Puerto Rico, that road distances are in km, where speed limits are in MPH. Gasoline is sold in liters, I am not sure about milk.

-- glen

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 18:18:15 -0500, Robert Wessel Gave us:

Harbor Freight stocks a lot of metrics.

So, BTW, does Sears stores.

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 18:23:07 -0500, Robert Wessel Gave us:

Nice snip of the subsequent statement which addressed the fact that both are still used as the adoption of the new one does not cancel out the use of the current one. So, one will see mixed use.

All stores? That bit, no. They do carry metric drill bits, though, as do the better hardware stores (and wood working stores).

I said that.

Once again, you haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about.

Little, if any, of the hardware on ISS was designed prior to the early seventies", when you said NASA went metric. Another aerospace example is Boeing's rather new 787 - again, mostly standard sized parts.

Ahhh... pollution limits set by the EPA. Check out page 23421 (actually the 9th page of the PDF) of:

You'll notice emission limits being given in milligrams per mile.

Crying at this point is perfectly understandable.

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 08:15:54 -0500, Robert Wessel Gave us:

Again, you miss the point. Both STILL get and WILL get used, even within the same design.

The adoption of metric does not cancel the continued use of the previous standard.

Several reasons cause this. Just one that comes to mind would be the implementation of COTS into the system(s).

Look how long it has taken to stop using magnetic tape for data storage. It is, in fact, STILL being used, despite a changeout being able to pay for itself in record time.

So many elements of a modern society and governing body that have grown so pathetically lethargic in refinement, all the while claiming to be civil, and sophisticated and refined.

I see no refinements. I see undeserving greedy bastards everywhere.

(snip)

(snip)

New magnetic tape systems are still being developed.

To do so, and to make any sense, the storage density has to keep increasing. So far Ultrium (LTO) has been able to do that.

LTO-6, released Dec 2012, stores 2.5TB uncompressed on one cartridge. The data capacity doubles about every 2.5 years.

-- glen

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 21:51:02 +0000 (UTC), glen herrmannsfeldt Gave us:

How utterly stupid of them.

Yes. I bought an Intel Atom motherboard, D510MO, to build a small file server some years ago, for home use. The board including CPU sold for just $60. Not really suited for a file server since it only has two SATA ports, but back then PCI SATA cards were still easily available. OS is bog standard Debian Linux for x86_64.

I run three disks, boot and two larger ones in RAID1 (Linux software RAID). For slow file serving it's fine but there seem to be a rather serious I/O bottleneck (disk to ram goes at 100MB/s, ram to net 80MB/s but disk to net only 25 MB/s). I do sometimes run Firefox to get to my router's config pages or some other light surfing but that's not much fun. Firefox startup alone is about 10-15 seconds with CPU pegged... Page rendering is painful.

I put it in a cheapie mini-ITX case. I had to add a case fan since the cheapo case is so badly designed, the only front panel accessible place for drives is right on top of the CPU heatsink... Quite a WTF moment. Although with just one drive the case design is actually fine, one disk goes on the bottom of the case and the case can act as a heat sink for the drive.

Sounds a lot like the D510MO board. The CPU is an Atom D510, dual cores at 1.6GHz, 4 GB DDR2 max, NM10 chipset. Legacy PC I/O, VGA, dual PS2 ports & serial. Second serial port and parallel port as pin headers on the board.

You may be saturating the PCI bus.

I've seen systems in which the primary PCI bus had only a limited number of ports available, which were mostly used for "internal" peripherals. The PCI slots were all connected to secondary PCI bus, which was connected to the primary via a PCI bridge.

I/O through the bridge was slow, with extra latency on each transaction and a relatively small PCI transaction size.

As a result, when doing a multi-way copy (reading from one disk connected to the primary-bus SATA controller, and writing "in parallel" to four disks on a pair of two-port SATA PCI cards) I was only getting about half of the throughput I expected. An older-generation motherboard, with a slower CPU, but with the PCI slots on the primary PCI bus, was able to push data at about 95% of the theoretical PCI-bus saturation speed.

You might want to check the bus configuration (use "lspci" if on Linux), and try playing around with the PCI-bus latency and transfer-size settings.

Also, for file-sharing of that sort, you might want to check your filesystem readahead parameters. Increasing the readahead size or memory budget might improve matters.

No PCI slots (of ANY flavor) in this box. Truly an SBC.

Wow! That's discouraging! OTOH, I won't be using any display features so any bottlenecks attributable to it would not apply.

Here's an image of the box:

Unfortunately, the disk obscures a great deal. :<

There's a second SATA port (power+signal) on the MB just under the blue SATA data cable (upper left). No idea how it is expected to be used as to use it "as is" would result in the disk drive "aimed for the stars" once mated to it! (i.e., normal to the MB PCB)

Also obscured by disk are DVI & VGA connectors, some of the USB connectors (6 on back, 2 on front) as well as single serial port (the PS2 mouse/keyboard connectors are visible at the right of the disk).

Silver cooler front right appears to be for video (?).

AFAICT, no second serial port (at least not on any uncommitted headers). Likewise, no parallel. Any headers seem to be used to connect the front panel to the MB (you can see a bundle of black-jacketed cables along the left side of the image) or support the wireless module (under the disk).

It's a cute little box. *With* a disk (and the fan hidden beneath it) it is still virtually silent (i.e., I could easily sleep with this on my night stand!). Remove the disk (fan comes with it) and there's no sound at all.

I may opt to configure one with a disk and PXE serve boot images to others.

Also pursuing Andrew's thumb drive approach.

Rescued an NAS the other day (primarily for the 2.5TB of media it contained) so I can now clean off one of my (too large!) laptop SATA drives and get to work exploring this. Unfortunately, I can't imagine what to clutter up a 640GB drive with in such a box! :-/ (hence the idea of serving up images to other boxen)

If you use a browser, an older copy is better in that it uses less memory and runs faster. Chrome is a lot better than Firefox in speed, but I understand it can use more memory. IE is the pits... lol

--

Rick

Things are a little different since this is a PCIe chipset. There's a decent block diagram in the motherboard manual at

So basically, SATA ports are connected directly to the chipset, the integrated fast ethernet isn't used and instead an external Realtek gigabit ethernet is connected via a PCIe x1 connection. Two PCI ports exist and now that I think about it, transfers from SATA via PCI to ethernet go faster than builtin SATA to ethernet...

So it looks like there's some internal bottleneck in the chipset from SATA to PCIe but I don't really know what I could do. As is, 25 MB/s is about 200 Mbits/s so way more than any video I might want to stream.

PCIe devices seem to always have 0 for latency. As for transfer size, I can't seem to find anything about that.

Well, as above, for my file sharing this is plenty fast enough.

None of your electronics is 19" rackmount?

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to 
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.