OT Dual core CPUs versus faster single core CPUs?

Round up the usual suspects... the transformer, driven by an ideal source ??

Ha! The USPS regularly declared me as non-existent, until I gave them a ration of shit in a letter-to-the-editor... then the postman came to the door, "It wasn't me, it was a substitute"... sure ;-)

But I agree, only use UPS _and_ USPS when you can afford to have it get lost ;-)

...Jim Thompson

It's all real parts around there. FETs, resistors, snubbers and such. And they react the way I expect them to. Darn, I wish I could plug a fat extension cord into the output of that sim and connect it at our breaker panel. Anyway, in the lab the dream of free energy was shattered. Worked but not quite there yet in efficiency. I initially thought the smell of "amperage" came from the kitchen where my wife was baking the bread for lunch. It didn't ...

WRT that bread, we successfully have baked bread in a regular 26" Weber charcoal barbie. Nice thick and crunchy crust just like bread from a German bakery (Steinofenbrot). Tonight I am going to bake another one in there. Same as my wife baked in the oven just now. She split the dough in half so we'd have an honest side-by-side comparison this time.

I'm usually happy with FedEx ringing the doorbell...

Not that they always do it :^(

Just to be fair and give due when it is due... I ordered some parts from Digikey last Friday. UPS and FedEx are both 4 days by ground at about $5 for the first pound. I know because I misread the map and thought it was 3 days only to have a package come a day later than I wanted. Seems Digikey is up in that Northwest corner of Minn that is in the 4 day delivery zone for me. Anyway, I wanted it sooner than 4 days and the faster shipping by UPS and FedEx gets expensive real fast. So I asked for my last shipment to be sent Priority. Today I asked about a tracking number and got the response, USPS don't give no stinkin' tracking numbers! I was thinking I had made a mistake since I realized that now it might take more than 4 days and I wouldn't have any way to tell where it was. Just after that I went out to get the mail and found the package in the mailbox! It came in one business day!!!

So you can't say the PO is all bad.

Software doesn't have bugs, rather, "feechurs". Hardware doesn't have bugs, rather, "erata".

Spice's "initial conditions" can store a lot of energy!

John

separate

Spice is not the do-all solve-all of the world. It takes some realism from the cockpit to get useful results.

...Jim Thompson

WRONG. Errant software is software that has yet to be released into a product. (at least where I am from)

Proper, fully functioning software is all that goes into such systems. Then, they can be called a product.

Hell Firmware even. Hell, you could even make the watchdog/overseer redundant.... or use three, and develop a "minority report" style.

There is at least one vendor that i cannot deal with, their defective shippers software refuses a known correct addresses (UPS).

It has its limitations. Do not expect them to handle anything heavy or bulky with grace. On the other hand they do all together too well with junk mail.

Multicore has already run up against memory bandwidth limitations. The quad cores actually deliver less total performance, generally. Even i can devise a benchmark to make them look good.

Again, the real problem in personal computing, or indeed in realtime systems, isn't performance: it's reliability. Thinking of multicore as a performance increaser is just playing the same old tired game. Of course 1024 CPUs are going to be memory bandwidth limited, not to mention thermally limited, if you run them all full blast. So don't do that.

Besides, a benchmark usually evaluates the solution of one algorithm. One of my gripes about Windows is that some processes occasionally block all other processes for tens of seconds at a time, unless they block them forever.

John

Yeah, I was looking at a commercial PCI data acquistion card. Looks like about 5% analog front and AND high speed ADC, and most of the rest is massive digital circuitry (1E6+ gates) to keep from losing data due to Winblows.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Yup. A bloated, high-overhead OS running on a single CPU forces peripherial controllers to be smarter and smarter, the classic IBM "channel controller" evolution, where even printers had their own essentially DMA-based controllers. The big VAX machines didn't do I/O at all, they just crunched and let a PDP-11 do the small stuff for them.

So, why not generalize the channel controller by making each one just another CPU? And then run the OS, and nothing but the OS, one one of the many CPUs?

This is going to happen. The idea of a cpu being a precious resource, and context switching it between a hundred different processes, is just getting sillier and sillier when you can put a few billion transistors on a chip.

John

When I am not in a rush I use USPS with Digikey as well. Quite fast and when the package doesn't fit into the mailbox the carrier brings it up to the house. You do need a secure mailbox though.

separate

quiet.

Certainly not in the analog high-power world. For RF small signal stuff it's pretty good though.

I thought 100K in series with the lone source would be enough realism. Shoulda killed it but didn't :-)

With some apps the time spent on models can be much longer than actually building stuff in the lab. As long as the parts from Thief River Falls arrive in due course.

Then how did Windows, Word, IE, and Acrobat ever make it in to the wild?

John

On Thu, 01 May 2008 16:20:49 -0400, Rich Webb wrote: ...

Oh, you mean the "ANY" key? ;-P

Cheers! Rich

Oh. I thought we were talking about software, as in what those of us that design products make.

I didn't know that you wanted to throw the horseshit money ploy scamware that has been rammed down our throats for the last two decades into the software "pool".

Like I stated "where I come from". Not Billy Ware. What I generate is software, and it does work in the item BEFORE it gets called a product. But that's just me.