It _is_ separate from the main memory on all modern graphics cards. The core circuitry of a PC has nothing to do with screen refresh. That was even the case with an old Tseng Labs card I had in the early 90's.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Should be fine for ltspice. The 1600 dram makes a hugh difference. If you want a real screamer, then it's another story. Xeon class, a real number cruncher.
Cheers
And if that gear was not designed to spec you are screwed. You will have to sit down and reverse engineer the unit so you can design the interface. Do you really expect MS to do that with all the crappy software that was designed poorly?
And the software written for the OS like Win95 are not assured of working with the newer and better made OS. Heck, software written for Win95 didn't work with Win95 half the time. That was what was wrong with Win95, it didn't do a good enough job of protecting your computer from the crappy software.
You seem to think everything is as simple as your bicycle. OS development is continuing. There are significant problems with older OS and they are trying to fix those problems. If you want to run DOS software, why not run DOS? I have read here that it is still available and the hardware should still run it.
See, that is the BS that got you into the problem. Now you are trying to justify the bad development practices. I surely hope you don't use that philosophy in the stuff you design. If it works, it is ok, ship it! Then someone changes a process a bit and the design stops working.
Then put that on the CAD designers, not MS. They told them not to do it with W2k and XP, they make it hard to do with Vista and 7. Now with Win8 they have found a way to fake it out and put the files somewhere else. They are just trying to make the computer harder to hack, but no one want to work with them.
Yes, tell your clients that there has been no software written since 1975.
If you think that is at all analogous then you deserve the problems you are having.
I suppose you are still driving the car you had in the 70's too?
I guess you will have to close down shop in a few more years then. Even Win7 is going bye-bye before too long. You can learn to use computers or be a victim, your choice.
-- Rick
Ok, now I understand why you couldn't get what I am saying. Computers have come a long way since the 90's. Most computers, desktop as well as laptop now integrate the video controller into the main chipset and use main memory as video RAM, *NOT* as a separate function with its own memory. If you don't believe me look at the specs on a few systems. Anything that talks about Intel XYZ graphics has an integrated controller and shares main memory for video. In fact, you said something about this yourself in this thread where you mentioned video on the motherboard I believe.
Video on the motherboard is usually integrated. If you get a graphics card it will be separate. A very few motherboards have separate video controller on board with separate video memory.
-- Rick
Yes, exactly! Just refreshing the monitors is some significant percentage of the available memory bandwidth. Why spend a bunch of money on an i7 with fast memory only to share that with the video controller? Running multicore is typically memory bandwidth limited so a 5 or 10% hit to the memory bandwidth will be a 5 to 10% hit to CPU performance in the critical sections of code... where it matters.
-- Rick
That's also why I asked Joerg if this machine had dual memory channels. That makes a big difference running multicore. I would expect that to show up in the promotional material somewhere.
-- Rick
The exact specs are: 1 pc ACC-3C0-3C13685 Supermicro Chassis 733TQ 1 pc ACC-3C0-3C13685 SUPERMICRO H8DGI-F 2 pcs CFN-OTH-AC170 2 OPTERON COOLING FAN 2 pcs AMD OPTERON 6128 8-CORE 16 TOTAL CORES 8 pcs MM3-KIN-4G133ER KINGSTON 4GB DDR3 ECC REGISTERED CL9 1.35-1.5V (32gb of ram installed) 4 pcs HDA-WDC-WD1002F WDC RE4 1TB CDW-LGE-22XSATA 1 pc GOLDSTAR DVDRW 22X GH22NS30
It runs CentOS 6 Linux, with four Windows VMs under Qemu/KVM: two XP and two Win7.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
What's your video card?
-- Rick
Interesting. I had a similar experience when I bought my mil-spec Durabook many years ago. It has an AMD Turion 64. We sat there at a Cypress seminar and we all built and compiled. When I finished the first one and the blinkenlights began on the board the guys around me could not believe the compile speed. Even the super expensive Thinkpads were still thinking.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
It also has: 1 pc Adaptec 6405 RAID controller board 1 pc XFX ATI Radeon HD6670 1 GB DDR3 VGA/DVI/HDMI PCI-Express Video Card HD667XZHF3
It isn't a high end card, but then I don't do a lot of really demanding video stuff--I just needed something better than the server-class mobo video.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
I expect them to provide a way that programs can write into their install directories. What is so difficult about that?
My bicycle is not simple at all. In fact, the suspension is way more complicated than on a car.
Supposedly that's a problem on PCs with Win-8. With XP, no problem, I've done it. And I do not need to reboot for that. This is what I call performance.
Nope. Software that writes into its program folder may not be ideal but can be perfectly sound.
If this causes older CAD and other stuff not to run I do not want that OS. My computer is a tool which I expect to be able to do the jobs that I've been doing since decades. If it can't do that is isn't very useful to me. Then I will strive to buy another one which can do that. It's that simple.
Ever wondered why industrial users hung on to XP for so long and are now (grudgingly) upgrading to Win-7 while shunning Win-8?
ROFL! You clearly could not do my job.
What problem?
I would be still driving my 1987 Audi station if it had been possible to register it in California. My former neighbor has it now and it still works fine. I drive a 1997 SUV and the way it goes I might still drive that 10 years from now.
A former coworker tools around in one of two cars. A 1950's Chevy truck or a 1950's Bel Air, sometimes depending on whether he has to pick up heavier stuff at the hardware store. Both cars in impeccable shape. Why should he "upgrade"?
Win 7 will be around for a long time. MS has learned from the Vista debacle, giving XP a long lifetime. They know that Win-8 is in a lot of aspects a dud.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
You can do that. Don't install it in Program Files. Many programs do just that if they don't want to play by the rules. The ones that can't figure out that there *are* rules and just ignore the requirements of the OS don't work so well.
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were an OS expert. I guess you can consult with MS and help them fix their problems.
Windows 7 has many of the same issues you don't like about Win 8.
No, I would just get more current software.
Yes, he "tools around". Not exactly the same as doing work.
No, MS knows how to make money and Win 7 won't be around for a long time.
I just find it funny how every new Windows that comes out is spawn of the devil. I remember when XP came out it was shunned as being far too restrictive. lol I'm looking for bumper stickers, "you can have my Win XP when you tear it from my cold, dead hands".
Win 7 was considered to be a poor choice, but became successful because it was the only choice.
-- Rick
A quick check to see how well the various threads are executing on different CPUs is to select in Task manager the "One Graph Per CPU". The CPU load should be high in every window if the simulation threads use the CPUs well.
If the CPU load is high on one CPU only and low on the other and the full load jumps from CPU to CPU, either the simulation isn't multithreaded or there are some serious interlocks between threads.
Running a single thread application on a multi-core system may in fact deteriorate the performance, if the application is scheduled to different CPUs during execution, causing cache and pipeline reloading.
Non-essential programs such as web browsers and PDF readers could also be locked into a single CPU (Set Affinity), reducing the risk of rescheduling of the simulation threads on other CPUs.
Lowering the priority of non-essential programs will also give more time to the simulation instead of Flash videos etc.
That's not all. "List of features removed in Windoze 8" "Top 10 Windows 7 features you'll miss in Windows 8"
Missing from the list of missing features is the removal WET (Windoze Easy Transfer), which was a great time saver when it worked right. This is about a year old but still accurate: The excuse is that "WET is being deprecated now that many settings roam automatically and you can share data using SkyDrive." (Skydrive is now OneDrive). Unfortunately, there is nothing common between WET and OneDrive that might even be remotely useful for a "data migration" between machines.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
1920x1080x60x24bits is just 120 Mpixels/s or 360 MB/s. DDR3 memories have peak transfer rates over 10 GB/s, so the video refresh is less than 3 % of the memory bandwidth.
After startup, I would expect that in simulation both code and intermediate results are read from the cache, which these days seem to be several megabytes. The main memory is mainly needed to store results.
If a huge amount of data is to be generate, a sensible simulation program on a 64 bit machine would allocate hundreds of gigabytes of virtual memory and write the result into that memory. Associate a disk file with that virtual memory range (memory mapped file) and let the page fault mechanism write those virtual memory pages to disk in the background.
They will raise their eyebrows and try to persuade you to have a 3D video card but you can usually persuade them to downgrade the card and give you more memory if you explain that it isn't for any 3D gaming.
The gains with faster RAM are really very marginal. If had done my homework properly I wouldn't have got the faster parts myself. More RAM is a better bet min 8GB preferably 16GB and matched chips - no matter what the makers say about being able to fit any size they generally perform better in matched pairs and very probably a matched set of four.
I was hoping someone with an i5 and i7 might post some benchmarks with different thread counts from 1-4 and 1-8 respectively. My instinct is still that the i5 will give better price performance on up to 4 cores.
I have never been a great fan of hyperthreading. It tends to saturate memory bandwidth and generate heat without additional performance.
BTW given what you have said elsewhere in the thread you probably want it with Win7 Pro installed so that you get the XP license thrown in and don't have to faff about setting up your own VMs for legacy code.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
And provided that the high performance code that you are running is sensible and cache aware the hit from the video refresh overhead is barely detectable. The box runs a *lot* cooler without a 3D GPU in.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
It is no longer considered good practice to permit this without asking permission. It could be writing things that modify executable code.
Legacy code that needs to do this should live in some 8.3 filename compatible hovel from the root directory. You will otherwise find programs that don't work because fully qualified filenames overflow buffers in ancient DOS programs. Peeky pokey ancient print IO port stuff is at the mercy of the OS as to whether or not it will work.
Comparatively few DOS programs are really tetchy about what version they are on and some of them merely baulk at running on an OS that has version numbers much higher than it expects to see.
Yes. But if you want to do that for legacy keep a specific directory where the permissions are right for this (ab)usage.
I wouldn't recommend installing it in user documents or the directory name length starts getting a bit long for comfort.
Most windows programs now do allow you to put the libraries in user documents or somewhere else that they can be modified safely.
My favourites are
C:\Program.dos
and
C:\DATA
For legacy DOS code that is only 8.3 filename aware. You are probably out of luck if you have any of the software that insists on having a dongle plugged into the non-existent centronix printer port these days.
Main reason is inertia and Vista was such a dog.
Other problem is that scientific instrument makers (and engineering toolmakers) can't be bothered to provide drivers for 10 year old kit on newer OSs and the gear will typically last for 15-20 years.
Several of my wife's older lab instruments are firewalled off from the corporate network because they run now unsupported legacy XP with no prospect of ever upgrading to any new OS. Device drivers simply do no exist - of course the maker would love to sell them a brand new one.
Mainly because it forces desktop users to leave greasy fingerprints on their screens and the new GUI looks like Picasso on a bad acid trip.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
I always install in another directory but some SW won't give you a choice.
[...]
Sometimes it would behove them to listen to customers some more. It would most certainly have prevented the failure of their RTOS efforts. After an Embedsyscon I told them they'll fail with RT and why. And then they did.
Same with the housing bubble. I still remember a top notch realtor laughing at me. Then they lost their own house ...
I know :-(
But what can you do other than VMs?
So how do you convince a research group that has disbanded in the 80's or 90's and where the professor is retired to pull that off?
[...]
He commutes to and from the work place, gets all his materials, what else can one ask? A farmer around here still uses one of those Chevys in the field, every day. Of course, that one does not look showroom.
[...]
Because some of the were.
I like it right from the start. And it's been good to me.
Right now it is but wasn't until recently.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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