Re: My Vintage Dream PC

The hardware is faster than ever, the speed just comes in different form. The machines are fast enough for most of the users. How many users are actually complaining about the computer speed anymore, maybe gamers and there the GPU is more critical.

The direction just shifts to parallelism, which is not that familiar area for the software people. And there is still steam left in the silicon area.

--Kim

Eventually. Whether user needs increase or not, the programmers will see to that.

And, of course, eventually user needs do increase. But not very fast, in the absence of new killer apps.

Dave

apps

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same

I will assume you're not enchanted with the present gear. So what do you think OS architectures will be like ten or 20 years from now, when multi-core is the norm?

John

True, I've only done RTOSs and embedded systems. But timesharing is dead.

Multicore will change all the tradeoffs.

John

If it is that safety critical you have at least two chips and the second one takes over. After the restart the chip may recover.

Watchdog timer on the entire chip is total crash, infinity loop or too small a timeout.

Andrew Swallow

VMS ran the kernel in ring 0(K), the file systems in ring 1(E), the command interpreter in ring 2(S) and user tasks in ring 3(U), IIRC.

scott

Google among others are trying to revive it under the name of web applications. Congratulations, you've just moved your business processing and data off your computer and on to someone else's. Lot of people used online services to back up their data and lost it. Your working copy another copy on another disk on your computer, a backup on a disk not normally connected and a copy in a safe deposit box, should be enough for the average small business. Perhaps critical data could be backed up on line in real time.

Much like racing stripes on a 1980s Pontiac?

Actually, I don't think even C++'s proponents say it's faster to compile or run. They hope it's faster or easier to write.

-- Patrick

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I'm not sure more than 4 cores or so will really catch on. The benefits seem so marginal, for ordinary use. For some games, maybe. To achieve reliability for a 24x7 application, yes. For certain applications that parallelize well, yes. But ordinary work isn't waiting on CPU power much anyway, and typically doesn't parallelize well anyway. Maybe you have a couple of large applications each sitting on a core, another one for the OS and GUI, but after that I'm not sure what there is for them to do.

-- Patrick

Writing fast makes bugs. Slow down and get it right *before* you try to run it.

John

We do nightly backups to local hard drives and zero-based weekly backups of *everything* to DVDs. The backups get stashed in three different locations in two different cities. Seems to work so far.

John

Which doesn't even try to answer the question.

John

The answer is that the question contains assumptions that are probably incorrect.

-- Patrick

Properly written C++ is no slower to run than C, either. However, properly written C++ became impossible after C++ 2.1 (i.e. when templates, exceptions and the STL came about).

scott

A mere terabyte of data takes up like 200 DVDs, do you have an automatic writer?

No. A guy burns them.

Our M:\\LIB folder, the company release library, is about 2.8 Gbytes. That's all the schematics, pcb layouts, FPGA designs, Autocad stuff, embedded firmware, manuals, and test programs/procedures for about 600 circuit boards, around 100 top-assembly products. The embedded product code doesn't take a lot of space.

Much worse is our J: drive, where engineers dump local backups of stuff that they are working on, before it's formally released. That's about 35G. It's a constant battle to get them to clean it up.

We also back up accounting and inventory stuff, another DVD.

We're currently doing an embedded Linux-based system, and expect to release whole system images, at several G each. A few revs of that will get to be serious amounts of stuff. We may have to not release them to the system library and come up with some other release/backup strategy.

Hard drives costing what they do, we could almost dump it all to a hot-plug drive and physically archive them.

John

itself

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CPUs,

apps

each

cache.

same

One of the goals of AMD when they bought ATI was to use their designs to incorporate a video controller on the CPU chip. Maybe we will wind up with a lot of special-purpose processors on one chip, in addition to video, maybe networking, possibly controllers for other I/O?

That seems like a really good guess -- increasing integration has been the trend ever since they first put two transistors in a Darlington configuration. We'll be seeing more and more capable SoCs coming along for the desktop market all the time.

solve=20

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A bit clearer. Make that 2 bits. The anti-security consequences of M$ design decisions is quite well documented. This get closer to the why. =20 And still they (M$) wonder why there is the likes of wine. And the growing willingness to lock them up in a VM.