The death of non-x86 is now at hand?

[Yousuf Khan]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038

[Carlo Razzeto]

"Yousuf Khan" <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote in message news:<1CxVb.13543$R6H.1791@twister01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>... http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038

Interesting article, I honestly don't think they're way to far off
base... I wouldn't be surprised to see the vast majority of diversity
in CPU architecture disappear over the next few years.

Carlo

[George Macdonald]

On Sun, 08 Feb 2004 21:11:25 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
<news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038

So now we have Sun, post-Ed (Zander that is). This could kill them off....
or?? I guess they could always buy up Gateway.<guffaw>

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

[jack]

Yousuf Khan <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038

Oh Yousuf, THANK you for that link. This is all just to funny. I mean,
tooooo funny. Allow me please, to quote the 3rd paragraph:

[start quote]
In 1981 IBM announced the 5150 PC. It was the machine set to
revolutionise business computing but it had a major design flaw. For
some inexplicable reason IBM chose to use the 8088 processor in that
first PC. It was a choice that bordered on the bizarre. The 8088 was the
bottom of the line of the 8086 series of processors from Intel and most
experts agreed it was one of the worst processor designs on the market.
Its memory management has been described as "brain damaged" and register
allocation for data was like a game of Russian roulette.
[End Quote]

I feel like I'm having a major case of Deja Vu! Way back in 1983, I was
working at Zilog in Cupertino, California, and I remember the head of
the Engineering department saying almost exactly the same thing (can't
remember his name). I mean, this is almost word-for-word (the part
about "brain damaged" memory management and register allocation =
Russian roulette)! The reason I remember this is that I was SO struck
by his comments (he was x-Intel) and that I couldn't believe he actually
confided in me, a fresh out-of-college puke.

Man, what a trip down memory lane to read this article. As I said,
tooooooo funny!

Best regards,

Jack

--
--------
The end to "Personal Computing" as we know it is just around the corner.
TCPA will take away ALL rights from you, the consumer. Learn more
about it here: http://www.againsttcpa.com/what-is-tcpa.html and
here: http://www.againsttcpa.com/tcpa-faq-en.html

[Yousuf Khan]

"Carlo Razzeto" <crazzeto@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:4f91caa5.0402082125.1d623a54@posting.google.com... "Yousuf Khan" <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote in message
news:<1CxVb.13543$R6H.1791@twister01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>... http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038 Interesting article, I honestly don't think they're way to far off base... I wouldn't be surprised to see the vast majority of diversity in CPU architecture disappear over the next few years.

I can't fault them for any flaws in logic either. It makes sense that x86
descendents will take over the world, especially as they get expanded and
cleaned up, through the natural evolutionary processes. They've taken the
time to explain what the remaining advantages were in proprietary
architectures over x86, and how they are now mostly disappearing too.

I think one of the main driving influences behind trying to prevent x86 from
taking over was that Intel would have too much control over the standard.
But as has now been demonstrated, alternative companies like AMD, can also
drive standards in the x86 field, so there is room for evolution without
being locked into a single vendor.

If Intel and AMD and the rest of the x86 field are smart, they will setup a
consortium or a committee to drive x86 development, much like Sparc
International does for Sparc, MIPS International does for MIPS, or Arm
Holdings does for ARM. The time is right to turn x86 from a defacto standard
to a true dejure standard.

Yousuf Khan

[Yousuf Khan]

"George Macdonald" <fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> wrote in message
news:oh9e205fjj7ss0ptg76iivrrun9uago0p6@4ax.com... On Sun, 08 Feb 2004 21:11:25 GMT, "Yousuf Khan" <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038 So now we have Sun, post-Ed (Zander that is). This could kill them
off.... or?? I guess they could always buy up Gateway.<guffaw>

What do you mean? I thought Sun is claiming Opteron to be their saviour?

Yousuf Khan

[Yousuf Khan]

"jack" <jack@ibm.com> wrote in message
news:c07m1j$14dtt2$1@ID-127331.news.uni-berlin.de... I feel like I'm having a major case of Deja Vu! Way back in 1983, I was working at Zilog in Cupertino, California, and I remember the head of the Engineering department saying almost exactly the same thing (can't remember his name). I mean, this is almost word-for-word (the part about "brain damaged" memory management and register allocation = Russian roulette)! The reason I remember this is that I was SO struck by his comments (he was x-Intel) and that I couldn't believe he actually confided in me, a fresh out-of-college puke. Man, what a trip down memory lane to read this article. As I said, tooooooo funny!

Well, I'm sure everyone was saying the same things about the 8086 memory
management scheme back then, it was a common sentiment.

However, Intel did make the segment mechanism completely useful when they
introduced the Protected Mode of operation.

However, here's another quote from the article:

<quote>
Now it might seem that 8086 series had nothing going for it at all. Here was
a 16bit processor that was little more than a kludged up 8bit processor and
so bad that almost nobody loved it. But that turned out to be an advantage.
Where programmers on competing processors were happy to use assembly
language, getting anywhere with an 8086 meant a decent compiler was
essential. Compiler technology came on in leaps and bounds.
</quote>

I don't know if I agree with this. I don't think there were necessarily any
more assembly language programmers for other architectures than there were
for 8086 at the time. I think the general transition towards compilers was
ongoing anyways, whether x86 spurred it or not. In fact, I'd hazard a guess
that there were more x86 assembly programmers than for any other
architecture simply because of the numbers of x86 hardware sold.

Yousuf Khan

[Rob Stow]

Yousuf Khan wrote: "George Macdonald" <fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> wrote in message news:oh9e205fjj7ss0ptg76iivrrun9uago0p6@4ax.com...On Sun, 08 Feb 2004 21:11:25 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"<news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038So now we have Sun, post-Ed (Zander that is). This could kill them off....or?? I guess they could always buy up Gateway.<guffaw> What do you mean? I thought Sun is claiming Opteron to be their saviour?

No. Sun is merely seeing 10K Opteron server sales per quarter -
and growing - and they have decided that they want to be part of
that market. Sun is a big enough company that even if they had had
*all* of that market it wouldn't have saved them from bleeding
red ink.

[Yousuf Khan]

"Rob Stow" <rob.stow@sasktel.net> wrote in message
news:102f7nfpje2te9b@corp.supernews.com... No. Sun is merely seeing 10K Opteron server sales per quarter - and growing - and they have decided that they want to be part of that market. Sun is a big enough company that even if they had had *all* of that market it wouldn't have saved them from bleeding red ink.

I don't know, the real money is in selling support contracts to customers,
which is an ongoing revenue stream. The initial cost of the servers is not
where the profits are at.

Yousuf Khan

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article <1CxVb.13543$R6H.1791@twister01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com, Yousuf Khan <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> writes
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038

"At least there will be less fundamental change in the industry a decade
from now, the x86-128 will be much less of an upset."

Aaaaarrrghhh! -- already talking of x86-128..

--
A. Top posters.
Q. What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

[Robert Redelmeier]

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips Yousuf Khan <news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote: "Carlo Razzeto" <crazzeto@hotmail.com> wrote in message "Yousuf Khan" <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote in message http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038 Interesting article, I honestly don't think they're way to far off base... I wouldn't be surprised to see the vast majority of diversity in CPU architecture disappear over the next few years. I can't fault them for any flaws in logic either. It makes sense that x86 descendents will take over the world, especially as they get expanded and cleaned up, through the natural evolutionary processes. They've taken the time to explain what the remaining advantages were in proprietary architectures over x86, and how they are now mostly disappearing too.

And AMD'x x86-64 is almost certainly the way forward for
64 bit. Not because it's better than Alpha (it isn't)
or Itanium (it is) but because it's cheaper.

64 bit just isn't so compelling that it _has_ to go forward.
No killer 64 bit apps. 32 bit from 16 was a h3ll of a lot
more compelling, and it still took a long time at least
from Microsoft.

So the kludgy extention of x86 to 64 will dominate because
it will give cheap and powerful 64 bit capabilities on the
back of mostly 32 bit needs.

-- Robert

[Yousuf Khan]

"Mike Tomlinson" <nospam@nospam.jasper.org.uk> wrote in message
news:CexIQaCp06JAFwSw@jasper.livjm.ac.uk... In article <1CxVb.13543$R6H.1791@twister01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com, Yousuf Khan <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> writeshttp://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038 "At least there will be less fundamental change in the industry a decade from now, the x86-128 will be much less of an upset." Aaaaarrrghhh! -- already talking of x86-128..

It's probably not going to be necessary until 2050 though.

Somebody pointed out that if you employ that highly convenient and highly
overused Moore's Law, where you insert whatever convenient computer metric
and double it every year-and-a-half. Every additional bit on top of 32-bit
would be another doubling of memory; 33-bits is double of 32-bits, 34-bits
is double of 33, etc. So going from 32-bit to 64-bit is 32 doublings, or
about 50 years, to completely use up the full 64-bit address space.

Yousuf Khan

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Mon, 09 Feb 2004 16:16:52 GMT) it happened "Yousuf Khan"
<news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote in
<UnOVb.15073$Wb2.4461@news01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>:
"Mike Tomlinson" <nospam@nospam.jasper.org.uk> wrote in messagenews:CexIQaCp06JAFwSw@jasper.livjm.ac.uk... In article <1CxVb.13543$R6H.1791@twister01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com, Yousuf Khan <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> writeshttp://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038 "At least there will be less fundamental change in the industry a decade from now, the x86-128 will be much less of an upset." Aaaaarrrghhh! -- already talking of x86-128..It's probably not going to be necessary until 2050 though.Somebody pointed out that if you employ that highly convenient and highlyoverused Moore's Law, where you insert whatever convenient computer metricand double it every year-and-a-half. Every additional bit on top of 32-bitwould be another doubling of memory; 33-bits is double of 32-bits, 34-bitsis double of 33, etc. So going from 32-bit to 64-bit is 32 doublings, orabout 50 years, to completely use up the full 64-bit address space. Yousuf Khan
LOL so we go 65 bit:-)

[David Schwartz]

"Yousuf Khan" <news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote in message
news:UnOVb.15073$Wb2.4461@news01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com...

Aaaaarrrghhh! -- already talking of x86-128..
It's probably not going to be necessary until 2050 though.
Somebody pointed out that if you employ that highly convenient and highly overused Moore's Law, where you insert whatever convenient computer metric and double it every year-and-a-half. Every additional bit on top of 32-bit would be another doubling of memory; 33-bits is double of 32-bits, 34-bits is double of 33, etc. So going from 32-bit to 64-bit is 32 doublings, or about 50 years, to completely use up the full 64-bit address space.


This is one way to look at it, but there's another way to look at it. If
you're trying to perform certain types of computations, say multiply two
large numbers, a 32-bit processor will be able to do it faster than a 16-bit
processor at the same instruction rate.

If there's no other way to make processors keep getting faster, adding
more bits will allow them to perform at least some types of computations
more rapidly. If we have to go to 128 bits to do this, we will. And that
could happen long before 2050.

However, I don't think this really applies because the percentage of
typical computations that benefit from the extra bits is very small. Few
computations fit in 8 bits, so going to 16 bits helped almost everything.
Many computations didn't fit in 16 bits, so going to 32 bits helped a lot.
Few computations don't fit in 32 bits, so going to 64 bits won't speed up
computation in general by very much (10%?). Almost everything fits in 64
bits, so going to 128 bits for computational speed will likely be a
non-started.

Possibly notable exceptions include encryption.

DS

[Yousuf Khan]

"David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com> wrote in message
news:c08nkb$lgc$1@nntp.webmaster.com... This is one way to look at it, but there's another way to look at it.
If you're trying to perform certain types of computations, say multiply two large numbers, a 32-bit processor will be able to do it faster than a
16-bit processor at the same instruction rate. If there's no other way to make processors keep getting faster, adding more bits will allow them to perform at least some types of computations more rapidly. If we have to go to 128 bits to do this, we will. And that could happen long before 2050.

I don't think there is much of an outcry for very large integer calculations
yet. Most of the call for 64-bit is about large address calculations. In
fact, in the AMD64's Long Mode implementation, the default address size is
64-bit, but its default register size is 32-bit. That means by default
you'll be using 32-bit sized registers unless you explicitly ask for 64-bit
sized registers when doing your integer calculations.

As matter of fact, I think if you're going to be doing calculations beyond
32-bit integers, most people would want to switch over to floating point
calculations at that point.

Yousuf Khan

[Keith R. Williams]

In article <1CxVb.13543$R6H.1791
@twister01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>, news.20.bbbl67
@spamgourmet.com says... http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038

Simple tabloid fluff. Nothing new, much wrong.

--
Keith

[Spam Me Please]

>>>>> "Yousuf" == Yousuf Khan <news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> writes:

Yousuf> If Intel and AMD and the rest of the x86 field are smart,
Yousuf> they will setup a consortium or a committee to drive x86
Yousuf> development, much like Sparc International does for Sparc,
Yousuf> MIPS International does for MIPS, or Arm Holdings does for
Yousuf> ARM. The time is right to turn x86 from a defacto standard to
Yousuf> a true dejure standard.

That will tough to pull off. We can all hope.

Alan

[jack]

Keith R. Williams <krw@attglobal.net> wrote:
: In article <1CxVb.13543$R6H.1791
: @twister01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>, news.20.bbbl67
: @spamgourmet.com says...
:: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038
:
: Simple tabloid fluff. Nothing new, much wrong.

Please elaborate and set us all straight then, smarty man. ;-)

J.

--
--------
The end to "Personal Computing" as we know it is just around the corner.
TCPA will take away ALL rights from you, the consumer. Learn more
about it here: http://www.againsttcpa.com/what-is-tcpa.html and
here: http://www.againsttcpa.com/tcpa-faq-en.html

[Carlo Razzeto]

"Yousuf Khan" <news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote in message news:<5vJVb.16715$R6H.5338@twister01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>... If Intel and AMD and the rest of the x86 field are smart, they will setup a consortium or a committee to drive x86 development, much like Sparc International does for Sparc, MIPS International does for MIPS, or Arm Holdings does for ARM. The time is right to turn x86 from a defacto standard to a true dejure standard. Yousuf Khan


I would love to see this happen too... Unfortunetly for the many
things Intel is, they are also a very greedy corperation. Let's not
forget one of the big driving motivations behind IA-64 was so intel
could once agian have (almost) complete ownership over a CPU ISA, no
3rd party licences, and then force that down on the average joe so
they can take another step twards because a true CPU monopoly.

Carlo

[George Macdonald]

On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 10:43:13 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
<news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
"George Macdonald" <fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> wrote in messagenews:oh9e205fjj7ss0ptg76iivrrun9uago0p6@4ax.com... On Sun, 08 Feb 2004 21:11:25 GMT, "Yousuf Khan" <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038 So now we have Sun, post-Ed (Zander that is). This could kill themoff.... or?? I guess they could always buy up Gateway.<guffaw>What do you mean? I thought Sun is claiming Opteron to be their saviour?

Sorry I should have made that clearer - the "or??" was meant to suggest the
alternative. I can see it going either way but surely it reduces the
perceived value of their hardware offerings... so can they pull new
customers??

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

[Dorothy Bradbury]

> It's probably not going to be necessary until 2050 though.

A bit like no-one requiring more than 640KB :-)

Microsoft Law: Software with an uncanny knack of partly negating
any jump in performance or memory increase nearly as fast as it occurs.


I think I used WP5.1 for DOS on an 8086 8Mhz with 20MB HD,
memory was 640MB - an Amstrad 1640 ECD (colour EGA). It
was lousy since it wasn't VGA which made such a big difference.

Today I need an 80786 of 2200Mhz with a RAM that is 13x bigger
than that machines entire *hard-drive*, and a HD 1,000x bigger. The
O/S has gone from a small fraction of 640KB to one that is a small
fraction of 640MB. Ok, not that small a fraction of 640MB.

I can see a trend, if it continues we might create a "human machine"
which will have monumental capability, but can't finish painting a house.
A machine eventually as inefficient & unproductive as humanity :-))

Perhaps, as inefficient & unproductive as bank staff or politicians...
--
Dorothy Bradbury

[Keith R. Williams]

In article <c0abh8$13hdpv$1@ID-127331.news.uni-berlin.de>,
jack@ibm.com says... Keith R. Williams <krw@attglobal.net> wrote: : In article <1CxVb.13543$R6H.1791 : @twister01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>, news.20.bbbl67 : @spamgourmet.com says... :: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038 : : Simple tabloid fluff. Nothing new, much wrong. Please elaborate and set us all straight then, smarty man. ;-)

In a future installment of "PeeCee History for Dummies", perhaps.
....but too much work, too little time now.

--
Keith

[Nate Edel]

In comp.sys.intel Yousuf Khan <news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote: ongoing anyways, whether x86 spurred it or not. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that there were more x86 assembly programmers than for any other architecture simply because of the numbers of x86 hardware sold.

Especially given that there were a lot of 8080/Z80 assembly programmers, and
while it wasn't quite 1:1, if you knew 8080/Z80 first, learning 8086 was
EASY.

There were a lot of 6502 assembly programmers of my generation too, but
knowing assembly on that one gave you nowhere to go, until the 65816 came
out (and unless you got a IIGS or were programming for the SNES, not much
chance to program those.)

--
Nate Edel http://www.nkedel.com/

"I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer

[Nate Edel]

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips David Schwartz <davids@webmaster.com> wrote: If there's no other way to make processors keep getting faster, adding more bits will allow them to perform at least some types of computations more rapidly. If we have to go to 128 bits to do this, we will. And that could happen long before 2050.

Well, that's register/ALU/FP width, rather than address space. Adding width
is easy, given the transistor budgets we have today...
Few computations don't fit in 32 bits, so going to 64 bits won't speed up computation in general by very much (10%?). Almost everything fits in 64 bits, so going to 128 bits for computational speed will likely be a non-started.

Depends on what sort of computations; most FP has been 64 or 80 bit for a
long time.

--
Nate Edel http://www.nkedel.com/

"I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer

[The little lost angel]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 00:56:40 -0000, "Dorothy Bradbury"
<dorothy.bradbury@ntlworld.com> wrote:
than that machines entire *hard-drive*, and a HD 1,000x bigger. TheO/S has gone from a small fraction of 640KB to one that is a smallfraction of 640MB. Ok, not that small a fraction of 640MB.

I'm not sure it's even less than 640MB now! The last I looked, a bare
Win2K installation ate up almost 1GB :PppP

--
L.Angel: I'm looking for web design work.
If you need basic to med complexity webpages at affordable rates, email me :)
Standard HTML, SHTML, MySQL + PHP or ASP, Javascript.
If you really want, FrontPage & DreamWeaver too.
But keep in mind you pay extra bandwidth for their bloated code

[Alex Johnson]

The little lost angel wrote: On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 00:56:40 -0000, "Dorothy Bradbury" <dorothy.bradbury@ntlworld.com> wrote:than that machines entire *hard-drive*, and a HD 1,000x bigger. TheO/S has gone from a small fraction of 640KB to one that is a smallfraction of 640MB. Ok, not that small a fraction of 640MB. I'm not sure it's even less than 640MB now! The last I looked, a bare Win2K installation ate up almost 1GB :PppP

she meant memory not disk space. the 640KB Amstrad probably ran DOS
3.3, which took about 1-1.5MB disk and 10-100KB ram by the time you got
a prompt. my windows installations take about 2-3 GB (including extras)
and while running the task manager reports 120-150MB memory used after
startup.

Alex
--
My words are my own. They represent no other; they belong to no other.
Don't read anything into them or you may be required to compensate me
for violation of copyright. (I do not speak for my employer.)

[Yousuf Khan]

"Dorothy Bradbury" <dorothy.bradbury@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:d5fWb.3187$vo1.605@newsfep4-winn.server.ntli.net... I think I used WP5.1 for DOS on an 8086 8Mhz with 20MB HD, memory was 640MB - an Amstrad 1640 ECD (colour EGA). It was lousy since it wasn't VGA which made such a big difference.

You used WP5.1 on an 8086? I couldn't imagine that, I used WP4.2 on it, and
I didn't switch to 5.1 until I got myself a 386. :-)

Yousuf Khan

[Yousuf Khan]

"Nate Edel" <archmage@sfchat.org> wrote in message
news:clepf1-o6s.ln1@mail.sfchat.org... In comp.sys.intel Yousuf Khan <news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote: ongoing anyways, whether x86 spurred it or not. In fact, I'd hazard a
guess that there were more x86 assembly programmers than for any other architecture simply because of the numbers of x86 hardware sold. Especially given that there were a lot of 8080/Z80 assembly programmers,
and while it wasn't quite 1:1, if you knew 8080/Z80 first, learning 8086 was EASY. There were a lot of 6502 assembly programmers of my generation too, but knowing assembly on that one gave you nowhere to go, until the 65816 came out (and unless you got a IIGS or were programming for the SNES, not much chance to program those.)

I dabbled in 6502 assembly when I had a Commodore Vic-20, and used to play
with the school's Commodore Pets and SuperPets, as well as friend's C64's.
Assembly language on that was done through the machine language monitors.

I then got a PC, I was amazed to find that instead of machine language
monitors they had those highly convenient assemblers, which allowed you to
create machine language offline and run them only once you were completely
done! Wow, now that was convenience. :-)

Yousuf Khan

[Tony Hill]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 00:56:40 -0000, "Dorothy Bradbury"
<dorothy.bradbury@ntlworld.com> wrote: It's probably not going to be necessary until 2050 though.A bit like no-one requiring more than 640KB :-)Microsoft Law: Software with an uncanny knack of partly negatingany jump in performance or memory increase nearly as fast as it occurs.I think I used WP5.1 for DOS on an 8086 8Mhz with 20MB HD,memory was 640MB - an Amstrad 1640 ECD (colour EGA). Itwas lousy since it wasn't VGA which made such a big difference.Today I need an 80786 of 2200Mhz with a RAM that is 13x biggerthan that machines entire *hard-drive*, and a HD 1,000x bigger. TheO/S has gone from a small fraction of 640KB to one that is a smallfraction of 640MB. Ok, not that small a fraction of 640MB.

So what you're saying is that memory use has gone up by a factor of a
thousand since the 8086 days. That's 2^10, ie it's doubled 10 times
in about 20 years, or more simply, it's doubled every two years.

Now, if 32-bit systems are at their limit now, going by historical
trend with memory use doubling every 2 years, that means that we've
got another 64 years before we start hitting the limits of 64-bit
machines.

So the comment about 64-bit machines being good enough until 2050 is
erring on the side of caution. In reality 64-bit machines will
probably be enough until closer to 2070.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[Tony Hill]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 03:04:15 -0800, archmage@sfchat.org (Nate Edel)
wrote:In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips David Schwartz <davids@webmaster.com> wrote: If there's no other way to make processors keep getting faster, adding more bits will allow them to perform at least some types of computations more rapidly. If we have to go to 128 bits to do this, we will. And that could happen long before 2050.Well, that's register/ALU/FP width, rather than address space. Adding widthis easy, given the transistor budgets we have today...

Easy but pointless. Even 64-bit integers registers aren't really that
useful except in very rare cases, and 128-bit registers would
basically never be used. All you would do is have a whole lot more
zeros to toss around. You can probably count on one hand the total
number of applications in all the world that use integers with a range
larger than 10^19. Basically you'll end up with cryptography.

Also having wider registers has a tendency to hurt performance a bit.
Take a look at the Athlon64/Opteron some time, a number of the integer
operations have higher latency in 64-bit mode than they do in 32-bit
mode. It's not a very significant difference, but given that having
128-bit wide integer registers buys you absolutely nothing in terms of
performance, the net effect would be to make things slower. So you
end up with a slower design that costs more money, ie pointless.
Few computations don't fit in 32 bits, so going to 64 bits won't speed up computation in general by very much (10%?). Almost everything fits in 64 bits, so going to 128 bits for computational speed will likely be a non-started.Depends on what sort of computations; most FP has been 64 or 80 bit for along time.

Floating point is used for slightly different things than integer
math. It's not a simple matter of "well, we need more range than a
32-bit integer provides so let's use floating point instead". If you
need a range of more than 4 billion for integers, you use a 64-bit
integer (compilers will do this for you with no trouble at all on a
32-bit architecture, albeit with a performance hit). If you need
floating point, you use floating point.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[Robert Myers]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 16:35:53 GMT, Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca>
wrote:

<snip>So the comment about 64-bit machines being good enough until 2050 iserring on the side of caution. In reality 64-bit machines willprobably be enough until closer to 2070.

Only through modesty have you failed to mention Hill's law: All
processes of relevance to computing can be represented by a straight
line on a semi-log plot. ;-).

RM

[Neil Maxwell]

On 10 Feb 2004 15:26:12 -0800, crazzeto@hotmail.com (Carlo Razzeto)
wrote:I would love to see this happen too... Unfortunetly for the manythings Intel is, they are also a very greedy corperation. Let's notforget one of the big driving motivations behind IA-64 was so intelcould once agian have (almost) complete ownership over a CPU ISA, no3rd party licences, and then force that down on the average joe sothey can take another step twards because a true CPU monopoly.

I don't think they're really interested in becoming a monopoly, as
that would involve even more attention from government legal types.
Based on the behavior of the last 6 years or so, I believe Intel is
reasonably happy with 80% market share (as long as it includes the
fastest, high-margin CPUs). When the competition approaches or
exceeds 20%, they crank the competitive muscle into high gear,
otherwise, they seem to pace themselves and the market.

Just an observation...


Neil Maxwell - I don't speak for my employer

[Yousuf Khan]

"Neil Maxwell" <neil.maxwell@nospam.intel.com> wrote in message
news:kask201u100a0do9718iu8kd86cjvs4ois@4ax.com... I don't think they're really interested in becoming a monopoly, as that would involve even more attention from government legal types. Based on the behavior of the last 6 years or so, I believe Intel is reasonably happy with 80% market share (as long as it includes the fastest, high-margin CPUs). When the competition approaches or exceeds 20%, they crank the competitive muscle into high gear, otherwise, they seem to pace themselves and the market.

In the eighties, they had control of more than 90% of the PC chip market,
obviously. That was before they had steady competition from competitors in
the same marketplace. Now that they have gone down to 80% of the market,
after the steady competition came in. It's now a major battle for them to go
over 85% these days.

The majority of the Intel advantage comes from having products that are
competing in markets not covered by the competition -- yet. Especially,
higher margin markets like servers and laptops. However, the competition is
now starting to cover some of those other markets -- and heavily. The
ability for Intel to crank up the competitive muscle is now severely being
hampered, since those muscles are being attacked themselves. One of the
competitive muscles is laptops, which Intel still has a lot of strength in.
But the other major muscle was servers, which are now starting to look like
has gotten weaker.

For the servers, it looks like trouble for the two ends of the market that
Intel was targetting for itself: the Xeon and Itanium. The Opteron seems to
truly have the Xeon's number, it does everything that the Xeon does, except
more. When the Xeon CT comes out, it might close the 64-bit gap slightly on
Opteron, but it still loses out to Opteron's other major advantages:
integrated RAM controller, and Hypertransport. These advantages of Opteron
have very little to do with greater performance, but much more to do with
greater simplicity in developing systems around them.

Now in all of these Opteron vs. Xeon battles, you'd think Itanium is safely
tucked away in a higher end of the market, but it isn't, people don't
consider it to be higher end at all, except for its price. It is said that
Xeon is for lower-priced servers while Itanium is for big-iron servers.
However, what features does Itanium have that distinguish it for use in
big-iron than the Xeon, apart from the IA64 language? Itanium and Xeon both
use the same shared bus for their i/o operations, although the Itanium might
get a slightly faster version of the bus; Itanium and Xeon use the same
shared i/o bus to access their memory as well. As a matter of fact, Opteron
is technically more suitable for big-iron than Itanium is.

Then we get to the laptop muscle of Intel, which Intel is still currently
strong in. Laptop sales are entirely based around marketing. Last year,
Intel cleaned up with a marketing campaign based around slightly lower power
consumption, and built-in WiFi, known as Centrino. This year, the "latest
thing" may very well be a neat color scheme, and 64-bit chips. Witness how
Acer is marketing the Ferrari notebook: the only thing it's got going for it
seems to be a fluorescent red paint job and a famous namebrand; but people
are absolutely nuts about it. Now Intel might be able to market a Toyota
Itanium notebook, but I doubt it. :-)

Yousuf Khan

[RusH]

crazzeto@hotmail.com (Carlo Razzeto) wrote :
"Yousuf Khan" <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote in message news:<1CxVb.13543$R6H.1791@twister01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> ... http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14038 Interesting article, I honestly don't think they're way to far off base... I wouldn't be surprised to see the vast majority of diversity in CPU architecture disappear over the next few years.

on PC market yes, but forget about embedded x86


Pozdrawiam.
--
RusH //
http://kiti.pulse.pdi.net/qv30/
Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.

[Keith R. Williams]

In article <6lnk209unugtavq79ul7km47dc88bk4dau@4ax.com>,
rmyers@rustuck.com says... On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 16:35:53 GMT, Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote: <snip>So the comment about 64-bit machines being good enough until 2050 iserring on the side of caution. In reality 64-bit machines willprobably be enough until closer to 2070. Only through modesty have you failed to mention Hill's law: All processes of relevance to computing can be represented by a straight line on a semi-log plot. ;-).

....and more importantly; "past performance is no guarantee of
future growth".

--
Keith

[Carlo Razzeto]

"RusH" <rush@pulse.pdi.net> wrote in message
news:Xns948D27498ACA5RusHcomputersystems@193.110.122.80... crazzeto@hotmail.com (Carlo Razzeto) wrote : on PC market yes, but forget about embedded x86 Pozdrawiam. -- RusH // http://kiti.pulse.pdi.net/qv30/ Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery. You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.

If I'm not mistaken I believe that they mentioned that x86 has not been and
probably will continue to not be very successful in the embedded market.

Carlo

[Nate Edel]

In comp.sys.intel Yousuf Khan <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote: "Dorothy Bradbury" <dorothy.bradbury@ntlworld.com> wrote in message news:d5fWb.3187$vo1.605@newsfep4-winn.server.ntli.net... I think I used WP5.1 for DOS on an 8086 8Mhz with 20MB HD, memory was 640MB - an Amstrad 1640 ECD (colour EGA). It was lousy since it wasn't VGA which made such a big difference. You used WP5.1 on an 8086? I couldn't imagine that, I used WP4.2 on it, and I didn't switch to 5.1 until I got myself a 386. :-)

I used WP 5.1 on 4.77mhz 8088s and V20s, nothing so quick as a 8mhz 8086.
By and large, the performance was fine as long as you had a hard drive or
LAN; ISTR that running 5.1 with dual floppies was was a royal pain in the
neck with disk swapping.

Wouldn't want to have tried WP 6 on a machine that slow.

--
Nate Edel http://www.nkedel.com/

"I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer

[Tony Hill]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 11:58:46 -0500, Robert Myers <rmyers@rustuck.com>
wrote:On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 16:35:53 GMT, Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca>wrote:So the comment about 64-bit machines being good enough until 2050 iserring on the side of caution. In reality 64-bit machines willprobably be enough until closer to 2070.Only through modesty have you failed to mention Hill's law: Allprocesses of relevance to computing can be represented by a straightline on a semi-log plot. ;-).

Who's limiting it to just processes of relevance to computing? Isn't
a straight line plot is how *everything* works?! :>

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[Tony Hill]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 19:36:27 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
<news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:"Neil Maxwell" <neil.maxwell@nospam.intel.com> wrote in messagenews:kask201u100a0do9718iu8kd86cjvs4ois@4ax.com... I don't think they're really interested in becoming a monopoly, as that would involve even more attention from government legal types. Based on the behavior of the last 6 years or so, I believe Intel is reasonably happy with 80% market share (as long as it includes the fastest, high-margin CPUs). When the competition approaches or exceeds 20%, they crank the competitive muscle into high gear, otherwise, they seem to pace themselves and the market.In the eighties, they had control of more than 90% of the PC chip market,obviously. That was before they had steady competition from competitors inthe same marketplace. Now that they have gone down to 80% of the market,after the steady competition came in. It's now a major battle for them to goover 85% these days.

I seem to remember that AMD actually competing very effectively in the
late 386s days with their 40MHz 386DX chip while Intel was just
starting out with the (at the time) very expensive 486s. And back in
the 286 days there were quite a number of competitors (including AMD
back then).

Intel's peak, from what I can tell, was around mid 1995 through to mid
1997. At that time everyone had pulled out of the x86 market except
Intel, AMD and Cyrix. AMD was floundering around having all kinds of
trouble with the K5 (first it was a year+ late, then under performing
compared to had been when the chip was supposed to be released).
Cyrix was doing ok with their 6x86 line, though compatibility
problems, first with Microsoft disabling cache, then later with
motherboards not supporting 75MHz bus speeds properly, kept this chip
in the real low-end and fairly low quantities.

It was only really when AMD got their K6 production up and running
that they really started competing again.
The majority of the Intel advantage comes from having products that arecompeting in markets not covered by the competition -- yet. Especially,higher margin markets like servers and laptops.

The larger volume also helps a lot. A HUGE amount of the costs
involved in CPUs are tied up in R&D and capital costs. But where the
up front costs are large, the unit costs are relatively small. Any
money made from the first few million CPUs goes to pay off the R&D
costs and it's only later that they start really making profit.
For the servers, it looks like trouble for the two ends of the market thatIntel was targetting for itself: the Xeon and Itanium. The Opteron seems totruly have the Xeon's number, it does everything that the Xeon does, exceptmore. When the Xeon CT comes out, it might close the 64-bit gap slightly onOpteron, but it still loses out to Opteron's other major advantages:integrated RAM controller, and Hypertransport. These advantages of Opteronhave very little to do with greater performance, but much more to do withgreater simplicity in developing systems around them.

I'd say that it's a bit of both there, particularly if you look at
4-way servers. The Opteron seems to smack totally smack the XeonMP
around any time you start playing with 4P systems. On 2P systems the
shared bandwidth of the Xeon doesn't seem to hurt as much, though the
Opteron does almost always win here as well.
Now in all of these Opteron vs. Xeon battles, you'd think Itanium is safelytucked away in a higher end of the market, but it isn't, people don'tconsider it to be higher end at all, except for its price. It is said thatXeon is for lower-priced servers while Itanium is for big-iron servers.However, what features does Itanium have that distinguish it for use inbig-iron than the Xeon, apart from the IA64 language? Itanium and Xeon bothuse the same shared bus for their i/o operations, although the Itanium mightget a slightly faster version of the bus; Itanium and Xeon use the sameshared i/o bus to access their memory as well. As a matter of fact, Opteronis technically more suitable for big-iron than Itanium is.

The glue around the Itanium is currently allowing it to perform a lot
better in very large servers than anything we've seen from the Xeon.
Of course, we haven't really had a chance to see what the Opteron can
really do in large servers since no one has made anything more than a
4P system.

It is a bit of a coup though that AMD has managed to compete VERY well
with the Itanium in a LOT of 2P and 4P benchmarks.
Then we get to the laptop muscle of Intel, which Intel is still currentlystrong in. Laptop sales are entirely based around marketing. Last year,Intel cleaned up with a marketing campaign based around slightly lower powerconsumption, and built-in WiFi, known as Centrino. This year, the "latestthing" may very well be a neat color scheme, and 64-bit chips. Witness howAcer is marketing the Ferrari notebook: the only thing it's got going for itseems to be a fluorescent red paint job and a famous namebrand; but peopleare absolutely nuts about it. Now Intel might be able to market a ToyotaItanium notebook, but I doubt it. :-)

Hehe, I'd like to see that Toyota notebook, complete with non-descript
styling and a boring paint job :> Actually a Centrino Toyota notebook
might just work, "sure it doesn't look very exciting, but it's
extremely reliable and gets excellent millage (low power
consumption)".

I think Intel is pretty well positioned in the laptop market for the
time being. AMD/Acer might have a bit of a win on their hands with
the Ferrari notebook, but really Intel has a great base of technology
in their Pentium-M and i855 chipset. AMD does have some options here,
particularly if they can do something with the AthlonXP-M line on a
90nm fab process. If they could combine some of the features of the
Athlon64/Opteron and the very low power consumption of the AthlonXP-M
(that chip is actually in the same basic power range as the
Pentium-M), they could have a decent competitor. I'm just not sure
that AMD has the resources to develop two completely separate cores
like Intel does (err, I guess Intel develops 3 cores).

Of course, VIA could start eating into the low-end here if they can
follow through on their plans effectively. Their chips are getting
some pretty impressive power consumption numbers and, perhaps more
importantly, combining that with VERY low costs. VIA has yet to get
the marketing going well, but the opportunity is there. VIA could
potentially start leading a low-cost notebook revolution in much the
same way that the K6 did on the desktop. I'm sure there are a lot of
people who would be willing to sacrifice some performance for a $500
laptop instead of a $1000 one. Intel's Celeron-M seems to be a
non-starter so far (though it's still early), while the Celeron Mobile
consumes a fair chunk of power while offering terrible performance.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[Tony Hill]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 22:57:04 -0500, "Carlo Razzeto"
<crazzeto@hotmail.com> wrote:"RusH" <rush@pulse.pdi.net> wrote in messagenews:Xns948D27498ACA5RusHcomputersystems@193.110.122.80... crazzeto@hotmail.com (Carlo Razzeto) wrote : on PC market yes, but forget about embedded x86If I'm not mistaken I believe that they mentioned that x86 has not been andprobably will continue to not be very successful in the embedded market.

x86 isn't doing all that bad in the embedded market actually. I've
used it before in an embedded system design for the simple reason that
software development was MUCH easier. Now admittedly were weren't all
that constrained in terms of size or power, the box was going to sit
on a machine that was half the size of an american football field.
Still, the real strength of x86 was that it was EASY to develop
software for it. We could do essentially all the development and
testing on a plain old desktop system running Linux. We could even
get an OS image for the all done up on a desktop as well. This all
ended up being VERY handy since we didn't receive the hardware until
just over a week before the final product had to be shipped out.

You can start to see this sort of thing happen for a lot of embedded
projects. The ease of development for embedded x86 systems often out
weights any potential loss in the performance/watt measure. I don't
expect to see any x86 chips in smoke detectors any time soon, but
things like set-top boxes and many industrial processes can benefit a
lot here.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[Robert Myers]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 13:27:30 GMT, Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca>
wrote:
On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 11:58:46 -0500, Robert Myers <rmyers@rustuck.com>wrote:On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 16:35:53 GMT, Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca>wrote:So the comment about 64-bit machines being good enough until 2050 iserring on the side of caution. In reality 64-bit machines willprobably be enough until closer to 2070.Only through modesty have you failed to mention Hill's law: Allprocesses of relevance to computing can be represented by a straightline on a semi-log plot. ;-).Who's limiting it to just processes of relevance to computing? Isn'ta straight line plot is how *everything* works?! :>

Well, if you work with some of the people I've worked with, you *can*
draw a straight line through anything, and I mean anything. No need
even to confuse things by running a correlation coefficient or
anything.

Notice that y-axis in the law I named after you is logarthmic, so as
to fit most predictions for the IT industry. If you like, I'll be
happy to credit you with a Generalized Hill's Law, in which the y axis
is allowed to take on any mapping you want. Then *all* monotonic
processes map into a Generalized Hill Graph (tm).

Coping with non-monotonic functions is beyond the scope of this post.

RM

[Carlo Razzeto]

"Tony Hill" <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote in message
news:5bc769dc65fd9eaa0a17052f1c044b11@news.1usenet.com... On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 22:57:04 -0500, "Carlo Razzeto" <crazzeto@hotmail.com> wrote:"RusH" <rush@pulse.pdi.net> wrote in messagenews:Xns948D27498ACA5RusHcomputersystems@193.110.122.80... crazzeto@hotmail.com (Carlo Razzeto) wrote : on PC market yes, but forget about embedded x86If I'm not mistaken I believe that they mentioned that x86 has not been
andprobably will continue to not be very successful in the embedded market. x86 isn't doing all that bad in the embedded market actually. I've used it before in an embedded system design for the simple reason that software development was MUCH easier. Now admittedly were weren't all that constrained in terms of size or power, the box was going to sit on a machine that was half the size of an american football field. Still, the real strength of x86 was that it was EASY to develop software for it. We could do essentially all the development and testing on a plain old desktop system running Linux. We could even get an OS image for the all done up on a desktop as well. This all ended up being VERY handy since we didn't receive the hardware until just over a week before the final product had to be shipped out. You can start to see this sort of thing happen for a lot of embedded projects. The ease of development for embedded x86 systems often out weights any potential loss in the performance/watt measure. I don't expect to see any x86 chips in smoke detectors any time soon, but things like set-top boxes and many industrial processes can benefit a lot here. ------------- Tony Hill hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

I guess the embedded market is a little wider than I was thinking when I
wrote that. True, it could do very well in the set top box type market. But
when it comes to small embedded apps, Cell Phones/PDA/PDA-Phone etc. x86 is
going to have a hard time competing with the likes of ARM and MIPS. Heck,
x86 is even having a hard time in the consol gaming market. X-Box has no
foothold to speak of in Japan because it's so large... Rumors are MS is
going to switch to a RISC chip for X-Box 2.

Carlo

[Yousuf Khan]

"Tony Hill" <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote in message
news:2abdb4c7c32f5eb3d05daa792916ed76@news.1usenet.com... On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 19:36:27 GMT, "Yousuf Khan" <news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:In the eighties, they had control of more than 90% of the PC chip market,obviously. That was before they had steady competition from competitors
inthe same marketplace. Now that they have gone down to 80% of the market,after the steady competition came in. It's now a major battle for them to
goover 85% these days. I seem to remember that AMD actually competing very effectively in the late 386s days with their 40MHz 386DX chip while Intel was just starting out with the (at the time) very expensive 486s. And back in the 286 days there were quite a number of competitors (including AMD back then).

In the 286 days, there were two non-Intel 286 processors, one from AMD, and
one from Harris. I think both of them were endorsed by Intel as
second-sources to its own 286s. AMD did push the speed of their 286 out to
16Mhz, higher than Intel's 12Mhz maximum, but that seems to be the only real
difference between them at that time.

It was with the 386 processor generation that AMD and Intel first began
having their legal troubles with each other. AMD began bringing out its own
386's towards the end of the 386 generation and the beginning of the 486
generation, which was very late 80's, 1989 as a matter of fact. So for the
majority of the 80's, it had really no competition, even its competition
were simply partners which produced the same chips as Intel with their full
permission.

Also very early on, Intel had some competition in the form of the NEC V20
and V30 processors which were 8086-compatibles, but a separate design. They
never really took off greatly. IBM definitely only bought from Intel and its
official second sources at the time, so it wasn't going to buy any NEC
work-alikes.
I'd say that it's a bit of both there, particularly if you look at 4-way servers. The Opteron seems to smack totally smack the XeonMP around any time you start playing with 4P systems. On 2P systems the shared bandwidth of the Xeon doesn't seem to hurt as much, though the Opteron does almost always win here as well.

The only way they seem to know how to make Xeon win here is to create a
custom chipset that turns Xeon into a ccNUMA architecture. Opteron already
does this out of the box without anything special required.
The glue around the Itanium is currently allowing it to perform a lot better in very large servers than anything we've seen from the Xeon. Of course, we haven't really had a chance to see what the Opteron can really do in large servers since no one has made anything more than a 4P system.

Yes, again, with Itanium, they need special chipsets to take it out of the
shared-memory domain and into the ccNUMA domain. If people are going to be
spending money to develop chipsets around Itanium just to make it perform
well, then spending money on something else that already performs well out
of the box, may net you better results.

I guess once Cray Strider systems become available, I guess we'll know how
well an external interface performs for Opteron then.
Hehe, I'd like to see that Toyota notebook, complete with non-descript styling and a boring paint job :> Actually a Centrino Toyota notebook might just work, "sure it doesn't look very exciting, but it's extremely reliable and gets excellent millage (low power consumption)". I think Intel is pretty well positioned in the laptop market for the time being. AMD/Acer might have a bit of a win on their hands with the Ferrari notebook, but really Intel has a great base of technology in their Pentium-M and i855 chipset.

AMD also recently started sponsoring the Ducatti motorcycle racing team. Yet
another avenue of marketing available for them now.
AMD does have some options here, particularly if they can do something with the AthlonXP-M line on a 90nm fab process. If they could combine some of the features of the Athlon64/Opteron and the very low power consumption of the AthlonXP-M (that chip is actually in the same basic power range as the Pentium-M), they could have a decent competitor. I'm just not sure that AMD has the resources to develop two completely separate cores like Intel does (err, I guess Intel develops 3 cores).

I think power-savings is important, but I don't think anybody cares if it
gets to an extremely high level. I doubt anyone would notice too much
difference between a 5 hour battery life vs. a 7 hour one.
Of course, VIA could start eating into the low-end here if they can follow through on their plans effectively. Their chips are getting some pretty impressive power consumption numbers and, perhaps more importantly, combining that with VERY low costs. VIA has yet to get the marketing going well, but the opportunity is there. VIA could potentially start leading a low-cost notebook revolution in much the same way that the K6 did on the desktop. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would be willing to sacrifice some performance for a $500 laptop instead of a $1000 one. Intel's Celeron-M seems to be a non-starter so far (though it's still early), while the Celeron Mobile consumes a fair chunk of power while offering terrible performance.

Are you talking about VIA chipsets, or the VIA processor?

Yousuf Khan

[RusH]

"Yousuf Khan" <news.20.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote :
I dabbled in 6502 assembly

my first bitbanging
I then got a PC, I was amazed to find that instead of machine language monitors they had those highly convenient assemblers, which allowed you to create machine language offline and run them only once you were completely done! Wow, now that was convenience. :-)

you missed Turbo Assembler then, huge leap from C64 cartridge monitor
Going for x86 on my brand new 386 with Borland Tasm was easy too,
different mnemonics but assembler is assembler.

mmm LDA STA days ...

Pozdrawiam.
--
RusH //
http://kiti.pulse.pdi.net/qv30/
Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.

[Neil Maxwell]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 19:21:19 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
<news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
In the 286 days, there were two non-Intel 286 processors, one from AMD, andone from Harris. I think both of them were endorsed by Intel assecond-sources to its own 286s. AMD did push the speed of their 286 out to16Mhz, higher than Intel's 12Mhz maximum, but that seems to be the only realdifference between them at that time.

And Harris got theirs all the way up to 25 MHz, for all the good it
did them. I think I still have one of these in the dusty old parts
bin, along with crystal sockets and such.

They were exact copies of the Intel chips, so the clock rate was all
there was to it.



Neil Maxwell - I don't speak for my employer

[Nate Edel]

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips Yousuf Khan <news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote: Also very early on, Intel had some competition in the form of the NEC V20 and V30 processors which were 8086-compatibles, but a separate design.

The best $8 upgrade I ever saw, by the late 1980s, and not a bad $20 upgrade
in the mid 1980s. A 4.77mhz V20 was a noticeable speed bump over a stock
8088.
They never really took off greatly.

Got used in a few clones, and it was a reasonably popular hobbyist upgrade
since they were socket-compatible.
I think power-savings is important, but I don't think anybody cares if it gets to an extremely high level. I doubt anyone would notice too much difference between a 5 hour battery life vs. a 7 hour one.

With realistic workloads, 5 hours off one battery would be an improvement,
even over many Pentium-M laptops.
Of course, VIA could start eating into the low-end here if they can follow through on their plans effectively. Their chips are getting some pretty impressive power consumption numbers and, perhaps more importantly, combining that with VERY low costs. VIA has yet to get Are you talking about VIA chipsets, or the VIA processor?

I imagine he's talking about the latest C3-derived chips.

What I'd love to see is what Intel could come up with for _really_ low power
processors; the Pentium-M runs around 12W for the 1.2ghz model, or 7W for
the 900Mhz model. The two lowest power Intel chips I could find were the
embedded ULV Celeron 400 which runs on 4.2W, and the embedded ULV P166MMX
which runs on 4.1W. Now the latter is probably too slow to do non-embedded
work these days, but the ULV C400 might well make an intriguing subnotebook
chip.

What does a P-M 900mhz cost? How about the ULV C400? And which process was
the C400 make on...?

--
Nate Edel http://www.nkedel.com/

"I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer

[Yousuf Khan]

"RusH" <rush@pulse.pdi.net> wrote in message
news:Xns948DD21DC860ERusHcomputersystems@193.110.122.80... you missed Turbo Assembler then, huge leap from C64 cartridge monitor Going for x86 on my brand new 386 with Borland Tasm was easy too, different mnemonics but assembler is assembler.

I assume the Turbo Assembler you're talking about was one for C64, then? The
only Turbo Assembler I'm familiar with was Borland's Tasm for PCs.

Yousuf Khan

[RusH]

Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote :
x86 isn't doing all that bad in the embedded market actually. I've used it before in an embedded system design for the simple reason that software development was MUCH easier. Now admittedly were weren't all that constrained in terms of size or power, the box was going to sit on a machine that was half the size of an american football field. Still, the real strength of x86 was that it was EASY to develop software for it. We could do essentially all the development and testing on a plain old desktop system running Linux. We could even get an OS image for the all done up on a desktop as well. This all ended up being VERY handy since we didn't receive the hardware until just over a week before the final product had to be shipped out. You can start to see this sort of thing happen for a lot of embedded projects. The ease of development for embedded x86 systems often out weights any potential loss in the performance/watt measure. I don't expect to see any x86 chips in smoke detectors any time soon, but things like set-top boxes and many industrial processes can benefit a lot here.

You seem to mistake the real reason why all went so well for you. It
wasnt some magical x86 power that made your project easy, it was a good
development base build around Linux (gcc and all). With uCLinux you can
develop on any supported system for any other supported system. ARM is
particularly strong in this area, but there are others like Mips or
M68k. Emulators and compilers reached the point where you can expect
the same level of confidence while debbuging as it was your actual
target hardware.

Pozdrawiam.
--
RusH //
http://kiti.pulse.pdi.net/qv30/
Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.

[RusH]

"Yousuf Khan" <news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote :
I assume the Turbo Assembler you're talking about was one for C64, then? The only Turbo Assembler I'm familiar with was Borland's Tasm for PCs.

Exactly, there was Turbo Assembler for C64. At first I was soo amazed
that you could use those magical thingies called labels and constants.
Assembler never was simplier before.

http://www.c64.ch/programming/ta-docs.php


Pozdrawiam.
--
RusH //
http://kiti.pulse.pdi.net/qv30/
Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.

[Tony Hill]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 12:04:10 -0500, "Carlo Razzeto"
<crazzeto@hotmail.com> wrote:I guess the embedded market is a little wider than I was thinking when Iwrote that. True, it could do very well in the set top box type market. Butwhen it comes to small embedded apps, Cell Phones/PDA/PDA-Phone etc. x86 isgoing to have a hard time competing with the likes of ARM and MIPS. Heck,

For the time being x86 isn't really the best option for the really low
power ( > 2W or so) devices. Many embedded applications fall into
this category and many do not. It's not just set-top boxes though,
there are lots of industrial applications where a 2-5W processor is no
problem. Set-top boxes are just one of the most common uses of x86
CPUs in an embedded application that you're likely to see.
x86 is even having a hard time in the consol gaming market. X-Box has nofoothold to speak of in Japan because it's so large... Rumors are MS isgoing to switch to a RISC chip for X-Box 2.

I would not really call a gaming console an embedded application.
Even though on the surface it might seem to be rather similar to a
set-top box, I would say that they are quite different. Reason being
a set-top box is really intended only to run a fairly small set of
applications that are bundled with the box when you purchase it. A
game console is designed to run software purchased later. I'm sure
that this is by no means a true distinction of what is/is not an
embedded application (I'm quite certain that a lot of people wouldn't
consider either set-top boxes or gaming consoles to be "embedded"
applications), but at least for this particular situations it would be
how I would differentiate them.

As for the X-Box2 (or X-Box Next as it's sometimes being called), it's
no rumor, MS is going to be using a PowerPC chip from IBM. I don't
think that physical size has anything to do with this change though,
or even power consumption. The 733MHz Celeron core used on the
original X-Box probably only gobbled up a 15W or less, not really that
significant when you consider there are now 50W+ processors in
notebooks. Besides, I expect that the PPC chip in the next X-Box will
probably consume more power than the x86 chip in the current one.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[Tony Hill]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 09:58:44 -0500, Robert Myers <rmyers@rustuck.com>
wrote:Notice that y-axis in the law I named after you is logarthmic, so asto fit most predictions for the IT industry. If you like, I'll behappy to credit you with a Generalized Hill's Law, in which the y axisis allowed to take on any mapping you want. Then *all* monotonicprocesses map into a Generalized Hill Graph (tm).

Hmm... Generalized Hill's Law eh? I like the ring of that, it could
definitely work! :>

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[Tony Hill]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 19:21:19 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
<news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:"Tony Hill" <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote in messagenews:2abdb4c7c32f5eb3d05daa792916ed76@news.1usenet.com... I'd say that it's a bit of both there, particularly if you look at 4-way servers. The Opteron seems to smack totally smack the XeonMP around any time you start playing with 4P systems. On 2P systems the shared bandwidth of the Xeon doesn't seem to hurt as much, though the Opteron does almost always win here as well.The only way they seem to know how to make Xeon win here is to create acustom chipset that turns Xeon into a ccNUMA architecture. Opteron alreadydoes this out of the box without anything special required.

Unfortunately for AMD, I'm not sure that this alone is a big enough
reason for the design to succeed. Simply being better and cheaper has
never been enough when it comes to computers.
The glue around the Itanium is currently allowing it to perform a lot better in very large servers than anything we've seen from the Xeon. Of course, we haven't really had a chance to see what the Opteron can really do in large servers since no one has made anything more than a 4P system.Yes, again, with Itanium, they need special chipsets to take it out of theshared-memory domain and into the ccNUMA domain. If people are going to bespending money to develop chipsets around Itanium just to make it performwell, then spending money on something else that already performs well outof the box, may net you better results.I guess once Cray Strider systems become available, I guess we'll know howwell an external interface performs for Opteron then.

I'm not sure that we'll really get to see anything too interesting
come out of this Cray system. Sure, it'll make for some decent HPC
numbers, but it doesn't look to me like Cray is going to be selling
these systems in competition with Dell and HP's regular server
line-up.
I think Intel is pretty well positioned in the laptop market for the time being. AMD/Acer might have a bit of a win on their hands with the Ferrari notebook, but really Intel has a great base of technology in their Pentium-M and i855 chipset.AMD also recently started sponsoring the Ducatti motorcycle racing team. Yetanother avenue of marketing available for them now.

Yes, but I doubt that these are really big volume sellers. Nice
marketing, sure, but they aren't going to do much to shake up the
market. Intel's Centrino marketing campaign, on the other hand, has
shaken up the notebook market.
I think power-savings is important, but I don't think anybody cares if itgets to an extremely high level. I doubt anyone would notice too muchdifference between a 5 hour battery life vs. a 7 hour one.

Well we aren't really at 5 hour battery life for most Pentium-M
notebooks yet, so there's still a ways to go. Also a lower powered
CPU allows the use of a larger screen or a faster hard disk without
requiring more battery power.
Of course, VIA could start eating into the low-end here if they can follow through on their plans effectively. Their chips are getting some pretty impressive power consumption numbers and, perhaps more importantly, combining that with VERY low costs. VIA has yet to get the marketing going well, but the opportunity is there. VIA could
<snip>Are you talking about VIA chipsets, or the VIA processor?

VIA processors. Unfortunately the two tend to go together, and it's
likely that the (generally crummy) VIA chipsets are preventing the VIA
processors from gaining much ground.

VIA's processors might not win any number crunching contests, but they
seem to offer reasonably compelling performance at the low-end for a
VERY low cost (most of their chips seem to sell for about $20-$25 in
quantity) and low power consumption. Their roadmaps has the
performance going up by a decent amount in the near future without a
large increase in power consumption or cost.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[Yousuf Khan]

"Tony Hill" <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote in message
news:abf4af056f58a57a295caf45280319ac@news.1usenet.com...The only way they seem to know how to make Xeon win here is to create acustom chipset that turns Xeon into a ccNUMA architecture. Opteron
alreadydoes this out of the box without anything special required. Unfortunately for AMD, I'm not sure that this alone is a big enough reason for the design to succeed. Simply being better and cheaper has never been enough when it comes to computers.

It also has something to do with having ready-made infrastructure available.
I think this is really the big factor behind the success, that AMD has
already done most of the groundwork ahead of time for systems development.
I guess once Cray Strider systems become available, I guess we'll know
howwell an external interface performs for Opteron then. I'm not sure that we'll really get to see anything too interesting come out of this Cray system. Sure, it'll make for some decent HPC numbers, but it doesn't look to me like Cray is going to be selling these systems in competition with Dell and HP's regular server line-up.

Cray won't be competing against the two or four processor servers obviously,
but it's going to compete against HP and Sun and IBM's 64-processor units.

Yousuf Khan

[Felger Carbon]

"Tony Hill" <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote in message
news:abf4af056f58a57a295caf45280319ac@news.1usenet.com... Well we aren't really at 5 hour battery life for most Pentium-M notebooks yet, so there's still a ways to go. Also a lower powered CPU allows the use of a larger screen or a faster hard disk without requiring more battery power.

Tony, my casual observations of laptops tell me that the display is
the power hog, followed by the CPU and then the hard disk. How far
off am I?

VIA's processors might not win any number crunching contests, but
they seem to offer reasonably compelling performance at the low-end for a VERY low cost (most of their chips seem to sell for about $20-$25 in quantity) and low power consumption. Their roadmaps has the performance going up by a decent amount in the near future without a large increase in power consumption or cost.

Via CPUs might be optimum smarts/power chips for portables, as
modified by a low cost constraint. If only the darned TFT display
didn't consume so much power...

[Robert Myers]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 03:08:10 GMT, "Felger Carbon" <fmsfnf@jfoops.net>
wrote:
"Tony Hill" <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote in messagenews:abf4af056f58a57a295caf45280319ac@news.1usenet.com... Well we aren't really at 5 hour battery life for most Pentium-M notebooks yet, so there's still a ways to go. Also a lower powered CPU allows the use of a larger screen or a faster hard disk without requiring more battery power.Tony, my casual observations of laptops tell me that the display isthe power hog, followed by the CPU and then the hard disk. How faroff am I?
Slide 19 of

http://nesl.ee.ucla.edu/courses/ee202a/2002f/lectures/L07_4pp.pdf

shows the display consuming 36% of the power and CPU/memory only 21%
(fall 2002). Funny thing is, I've had my legs made overly warm even
by my Centrino laptop, with which I am very happy, but I can't ever
remember being made uncomfortable by the heat of the display. :-P.

<snip> VIA's processors might not win any number crunching contests, butthey seem to offer reasonably compelling performance at the low-end for a VERY low cost (most of their chips seem to sell for about $20-$25 in quantity) and low power consumption. Their roadmaps has the performance going up by a decent amount in the near future without a large increase in power consumption or cost.Via CPUs might be optimum smarts/power chips for portables, asmodified by a low cost constraint. If only the darned TFT displaydidn't consume so much power...
and weren't so expensive, making it kind of strange to look for a
sub-$100 processor to pair up with one. :-P.

RM

[Grumble]

Nate Edel wrote:
What I'd love to see is what Intel could come up with for _really_ low power processors; the Pentium-M runs around 12W for the 1.2ghz model, or 7W for the 900Mhz model. The two lowest power Intel chips I could find were the embedded ULV Celeron 400 which runs on 4.2W, and the embedded ULV P166MMX which runs on 4.1W. Now the latter is probably too slow to do non-embedded work these days, but the ULV C400 might well make an intriguing subnotebook chip. What does a P-M 900mhz cost? How about the ULV C400? And which process was the C400 make on...?

Both ULV Celerons in the µFC-BGA package (400 MHz and 650 MHz) were
designed with a 130 nm process.

http://intel.com/design/intarch/datashts/27380402.pdf

In a laptop, what fraction of the battery consumption is the CPU
responsible for? How much energy can a battery store?

[Yousuf Khan]

"Robert Myers" <rmyers@rustuck.com> wrote in message
news:394p20trrmemrqummfh9cd1g4m7leni9up@4ax.com... Slide 19 of http://nesl.ee.ucla.edu/courses/ee202a/2002f/lectures/L07_4pp.pdf shows the display consuming 36% of the power and CPU/memory only 21% (fall 2002). Funny thing is, I've had my legs made overly warm even by my Centrino laptop, with which I am very happy, but I can't ever remember being made uncomfortable by the heat of the display. :-P.

Probably because the display is efficiently converting most of its
electricity into light, whereas the CPU is inefficiently radiating some of
its energy off into space.

Yousuf Khan

[chrisv]

RusH <rush@pulse.pdi.net> wrote:
"Yousuf Khan" <news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote : I assume the Turbo Assembler you're talking about was one for C64, then? The only Turbo Assembler I'm familiar with was Borland's Tasm for PCs.Exactly, there was Turbo Assembler for C64. At first I was soo amazedthat you could use those magical thingies called labels and constants.Assembler never was simplier before.http://www.c64.ch/programming/ta-docs.php

Wow. I could have used that on a couple occasions... But where's the
challenge if you're not counting bytes for jumps? 8)

[Tony Hill]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 03:08:10 GMT, "Felger Carbon" <fmsfnf@jfoops.net>
wrote:"Tony Hill" <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote in messagenews:abf4af056f58a57a295caf45280319ac@news.1usenet.com... Well we aren't really at 5 hour battery life for most Pentium-M notebooks yet, so there's still a ways to go. Also a lower powered CPU allows the use of a larger screen or a faster hard disk without requiring more battery power.Tony, my casual observations of laptops tell me that the display isthe power hog, followed by the CPU and then the hard disk. How faroff am I?

Depends on the chip your using. The "Mobile" Pentium4 processors can
consume up to 70W when going full out, and even for fairly limited
processing they'll use 30-40W. Most laptop displays use a maximum of
about 20W, and usually they have a reduced power mode when running off
batteries.

On the other hand, the Pentium-M uses only 25W TDP, and will often be
using only 5-10W during light processing.
VIA's processors might not win any number crunching contests, butthey seem to offer reasonably compelling performance at the low-end for a VERY low cost (most of their chips seem to sell for about $20-$25 in quantity) and low power consumption. Their roadmaps has the performance going up by a decent amount in the near future without a large increase in power consumption or cost.Via CPUs might be optimum smarts/power chips for portables, asmodified by a low cost constraint. If only the darned TFT displaydidn't consume so much power...

Well unfortunately finding specifications for this is a bit tough, but
even 15" desktop TFT screens only consume 25-30W of power. Presumably
a laptop TFT, with their reduced power operating mode, would be
noticeably less than that.

I would throw out a guess of 10-15W for a 14" or 15" TFT screen
running off batteries, maybe even less. Certainly the processor and
the screen are well within the same ballpark. Compare that to the
Mobile Celeron with a TDP of 35W and very few power saving features
and the VIA's ~10W CPU starts to look fairly reasonable, especially
when it only costs $25.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[Grumble]

Tony Hill wrote:
Depends on the chip your using. The "Mobile" Pentium4 processors can consume up to 70W when going full out, and even for fairly limited processing they'll use 30-40W. Most laptop displays use a maximum of about 20W, and usually they have a reduced power mode when running off batteries. On the other hand, the Pentium-M uses only 25W TDP, and will often be using only 5-10W during light processing.

Only the latest models have a TDP spec of 25 W:

1.70 GHz @ 1.484 V 24.5 W
1.60 GHz @ 1.484 V 24.5 W
1.50 GHz @ 1.484 V 24.5 W
1.40 GHz @ 1.484 V 22 W
1.30 GHz @ 1.388 V 22 W
1.20 GHz @ 1.180 V 12 W
1.10 GHz @ 1.180 V 12 W
1.00 GHz @ 1.004 V 7 W
900 MHz @ 1.004 V 7 W
600 MHz @ 0.956 V 6 W
600 MHz @ 0.844 V 4 W

http://intel.com/design/mobile/datashts/25261202.pdf

[Robert Myers]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 13:03:22 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
<news.tally.bbbl67@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
"Robert Myers" <rmyers@rustuck.com> wrote in messagenews:394p20trrmemrqummfh9cd1g4m7leni9up@4ax.com... Slide 19 of http://nesl.ee.ucla.edu/courses/ee202a/2002f/lectures/L07_4pp.pdf shows the display consuming 36% of the power and CPU/memory only 21% (fall 2002). Funny thing is, I've had my legs made overly warm even by my Centrino laptop, with which I am very happy, but I can't ever remember being made uncomfortable by the heat of the display. :-P.Probably because the display is efficiently converting most of itselectricity into light, whereas the CPU is inefficiently radiating some ofits energy off into space.

All of the processor's energy, usefully expended or not, has to be
eventually gotten rid of as heat. The display gets to get rid of some
of it's energy as useful visible radiation, it's true, but all of that
radiation will be converted to heat, too.

You don't feel the effects of the display energy radiated in the
visible for the same reason you don't feel the effects of the display
energy radiated in the infrared: it's spread over a much larger area
than the heat being dissipated by the processor, and it has such a
large area over which to be cooled both by radiation and conduction
that it never gets very warm.

I was trying to make the point that power consumption by the processor
is not just a battery problem. It's a cooling problem, too.

RM

[Alex Johnson]

Robert Myers wrote: All of the processor's energy, usefully expended or not, has to be eventually gotten rid of as heat.

That's not correct, AFAIK. True, all the energy must go somewhere, but
heat is just one form of radiative energy. There are a lot of options.
It just so happens that heat is the prime mechanism of escape for this
energy in this situation. Photons are another common escape route. The
photons can then strike atoms elsewhere, getting converted into heat,
but that's not required. I'm sure given time and someone who knew lots
of physics we could give you a list of non-heat energy-loss situations.

Alex
--
My words are my own. They represent no other; they belong to no other.
Don't read anything into them or you may be required to compensate me
for violation of copyright. (I do not speak for my employer.)

[Robert Myers]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 13:40:36 -0500, Alex Johnson <compuwiz@acm.org>
wrote:
Robert Myers wrote: All of the processor's energy, usefully expended or not, has to be eventually gotten rid of as heat.That's not correct, AFAIK. True, all the energy must go somewhere, butheat is just one form of radiative energy. There are a lot of options. It just so happens that heat is the prime mechanism of escape for thisenergy in this situation. Photons are another common escape route. Thephotons can then strike atoms elsewhere, getting converted into heat,but that's not required. I'm sure given time and someone who knew lotsof physics we could give you a list of non-heat energy-loss situations.

Well, yes. A CPU radiates photons just the way an antenna would. The
CPU itself is a terrible antenna and it is effectively trapped inside
a Faraday cage, which will very quickly convert those photons to joule
heating in the very near vicinity of the CPU.

Some tiny amount of energy has to be able to make it out of the CPU in
some form other than heat in order to allow it to communicate with the
outside world. *Some* of that energy will be radiated succesfully as
photons without first being thermalized, but thanks to the
machinations of the FCC, which imagines that people still watch TV by
some means other than cable, most of those photons are trapped by a
larger effective Faraday cage which quickly converts those photons to
heat.

The energy in this particular category is not necessarily dissipated
in the direct vicinity of the CPU. They *are* converted to heat, but
they do not create a cooling problem unless you keep your laptop
running in a confined space. In any case, the amount of energy in
question is tiny.

Some photons will actually make it into the wild without being
converted to heat. The amount of energy involved is so tiny as to be
irrelevant to the discussion.

My statement as you quoted it is still literally true, but it is also
true that not all of the energy dissipated by the processor has to
contribute to the warm leg effect. Nit-picking aside, the statement
is also practically true in terms of the warm leg effect, with one
important exception.

The important exception, and one that does confuse me, is that I don't
know how to account for the energy dissipated in voltage regulation
circuitry in the immediate vicinity of the CPU. I'm sure that Intel
does not include that power dissipation in its quoted numbers, I
suspect that it is a non-negligible amount of heat, it does contribute
to the warm leg effect, and I wonder what category people would put it
into if they had to make all the means of power dissipation equal the
actual power being drawn at the DC connection of the laptop.

RM

[George Macdonald]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 04:11:10 -0500, Robert Myers <rmyers@rustuck.com>
wrote:
On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 03:08:10 GMT, "Felger Carbon" <fmsfnf@jfoops.net>wrote:"Tony Hill" <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote in messagenews:abf4af056f58a57a295caf45280319ac@news.1usenet.com... Well we aren't really at 5 hour battery life for most Pentium-M notebooks yet, so there's still a ways to go. Also a lower powered CPU allows the use of a larger screen or a faster hard disk without requiring more battery power.Tony, my casual observations of laptops tell me that the display isthe power hog, followed by the CPU and then the hard disk. How faroff am I?Slide 19 ofhttp://nesl.ee.ucla.edu/courses/ee202a/2002f/lectures/L07_4pp.pdfshows the display consuming 36% of the power and CPU/memory only 21%(fall 2002). Funny thing is, I've had my legs made overly warm evenby my Centrino laptop, with which I am very happy, but I can't everremember being made uncomfortable by the heat of the display. :-P.

That is one of the recent warning notices added in the safety booklets -
alas a "laptop" is no longer a laptop. There was apparently some guy who
got seriously burned - not so much surface burn but deep flesh-cooking
burn.<ugh>

Take a 1.6GHz Pentium-M with 512MB added memory, which is usually close to
the bottom under the memory slot cover, run it intensively and it really
heats up - on a T40 we have, they have the fan vent on the side just where
you'd rest a hand off the keyboard. You can't leave your hand there long
before it gets uncomfortable.

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

[Robert Myers]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 18:00:48 -0500, George Macdonald
<fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> wrote:

<snip>That is one of the recent warning notices added in the safety booklets -alas a "laptop" is no longer a laptop. There was apparently some guy whogot seriously burned - not so much surface burn but deep flesh-cookingburn.<ugh>Take a 1.6GHz Pentium-M with 512MB added memory, which is usually close tothe bottom under the memory slot cover, run it intensively and it reallyheats up - on a T40 we have, they have the fan vent on the side just whereyou'd rest a hand off the keyboard. You can't leave your hand there longbefore it gets uncomfortable.

Fortunately, I can never get sufficiently comfortable with a laptop in
any one position other than leaving it sitting on a hard surface just
as if it were a desktop to leave it in such a position for very long.

Even leaving aside the prospect of flesh burns, there are multiple
vents on the back of my laptop, with a small clearance for those vents
created by stubby feet, so the computer is clearly not designed to
operate in any position other than having it rest solidly on those
four feet leaving clearance elsewhere for the vents. A laptop plainly
it is only in name.

As you have pointed out, even the lower-power Pentium M can get very
hot in normal use, making the Pentium 4M seem like one of the most
brain-damaged products I've ever encountered.

RM

[Tony Hill]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 18:00:48 -0500, George Macdonald
<fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> wrote:On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 04:11:10 -0500, Robert Myers <rmyers@rustuck.com>wrote:http://nesl.ee.ucla.edu/courses/ee202a/2002f/lectures/L07_4pp.pdfshows the display consuming 36% of the power and CPU/memory only 21%(fall 2002). Funny thing is, I've had my legs made overly warm evenby my Centrino laptop, with which I am very happy, but I can't everremember being made uncomfortable by the heat of the display. :-P.That is one of the recent warning notices added in the safety booklets -alas a "laptop" is no longer a laptop. There was apparently some guy whogot seriously burned - not so much surface burn but deep flesh-cookingburn.<ugh>

Err.. am I the only one who is currently wondering why this guy didn't
move the laptop off his lap when he first started getting burned? The
thing would have to be several hundred C before it would give him a
deep flesh-cooking burn in a very short period of time!

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[Tony Hill]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 20:08:45 -0500, Robert Myers <rmyers@rustuck.com>
wrote:On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 18:00:48 -0500, George Macdonald<fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> wrote:Even leaving aside the prospect of flesh burns, there are multiplevents on the back of my laptop, with a small clearance for those ventscreated by stubby feet, so the computer is clearly not designed tooperate in any position other than having it rest solidly on thosefour feet leaving clearance elsewhere for the vents. A laptop plainlyit is only in name.

Some of these days I really do start to think that the Mac zealots
aren't entirely wrong when they say that Apple is doing things the
right way (of course, said Mac zealots usually follow this up with
some foaming at the mouth, but that's another story). Surely the PC
vendors seem to be losing touch with things here.
As you have pointed out, even the lower-power Pentium M can get veryhot in normal use, making the Pentium 4M seem like one of the mostbrain-damaged products I've ever encountered.

The "Mobile Pentium4-M" isn't so bad, it's the "Mobile Pentium4" that
is the really space heater! The P4-M has a TDP of only 35W at it's
maximum, still hot but not entirely out of line. The Mobile Pentium4
(no -M) is the one that you can use to cook your breakfast on while
you work. Those chips have a TDP of up to 70W!

AMD is currently taking the title with their "Desktop Replace"
Athlon64 chips, with a TDP of 82W, though the actual power use of
those chips seems to be a fair bit lower (though still 50-60W).

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[Yousuf Khan]

"Tony Hill" <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote in message
news:9f413761d27610f34f222f822e250cc3@news.1usenet.com...That is one of the recent warning notices added in the safety booklets -alas a "laptop" is no longer a laptop. There was apparently some guy whogot seriously burned - not so much surface burn but deep flesh-cookingburn.<ugh> Err.. am I the only one who is currently wondering why this guy didn't move the laptop off his lap when he first started getting burned? The thing would have to be several hundred C before it would give him a deep flesh-cooking burn in a very short period of time!

I think I recall this incident too. It seemed like his flesh was getting
slowly burned from the inside out over several months of usage ontop of his
lap. Almost like as if it were like a type of microwave that zeroed in on
certain molecule in his body that only existed in his deep flesh but not his
skin and began heating that.

OTOH it could've been one of those urban legends too. :-)

Yousuf Khan

[Nate Edel]

In comp.sys.intel Grumble <invalid@kma.eu.org> wrote: Nate Edel wrote: What does a P-M 900mhz cost? How about the ULV C400? And which process was the C400 make on...? Both ULV Celerons in the ?FC-BGA package (400 MHz and 650 MHz) were designed with a 130 nm process. http://intel.com/design/intarch/datashts/27380402.pdf

Thanks, didn't find that before. So there's not much room for a process
shrink there -- I can't imagine those will go to 90nm all that soon, they're
not likely to be high-profit parts.
In a laptop, what fraction of the battery consumption is the CPU responsible for?

Depends on the workload, but I don't know the exact details.
How much energy can a battery store?

If I recall right, typical lithium-ion batteries range from 45 watt-hours to
90 watt hours.

--
Nate Edel http://www.nkedel.com/

"I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer

[Nate Edel]

In comp.sys.intel Robert Myers <rmyers@rustuck.com> wrote: shows the display consuming 36% of the power and CPU/memory only 21% (fall 2002). Funny thing is, I've had my legs made overly warm even by my Centrino laptop, with which I am very happy, but I can't ever remember being made uncomfortable by the heat of the display. :-P.

The processor is spread over a much smaller area than the display, and is a
good deal more contained. For that matter, since I can't get the PDF you
listed to come up, I wonder what workload that's under. LCD/TFT
modified by a low cost constraint. If only the darned TFT displaydidn't consume so much power... and weren't so expensive, making it kind of strange to look for a sub-$100 processor to pair up with one. :-P.

They're not that expensive anymore. 14" external flat panel displays are
under $200 at retail, including the case and power supply, so the actual
manufacturer cost of the TFT panel itself is very likely under $100.

--
Nate Edel http://www.nkedel.com/

"I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer

[Nate Edel]

In comp.sys.intel Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca> wrote: The "Mobile Pentium4-M" isn't so bad, it's the "Mobile Pentium4" that is the really space heater! The P4-M has a TDP of only 35W at it's maximum, still hot but not entirely out of line. The Mobile Pentium4 (no -M) is the one that you can use to cook your breakfast on while you work. Those chips have a TDP of up to 70W!

How big is the point source for the heating though? My impression was that
the surface temperature of the P4-M actually got hotter than a typical
desktop-use P4 (even when embedded in a laptop).

--
Nate Edel http://www.nkedel.com/

"I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer

[George Macdonald]

On Sat, 14 Feb 2004 04:04:46 GMT, Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca>
wrote:
On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 18:00:48 -0500, George Macdonald<fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> wrote:On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 04:11:10 -0500, Robert Myers <rmyers@rustuck.com>wrote:http://nesl.ee.ucla.edu/courses/ee202a/2002f/lectures/L07_4pp.pdfshows the display consuming 36% of the power and CPU/memory only 21%(fall 2002). Funny thing is, I've had my legs made overly warm evenby my Centrino laptop, with which I am very happy, but I can't everremember being made uncomfortable by the heat of the display. :-P.That is one of the recent warning notices added in the safety booklets -alas a "laptop" is no longer a laptop. There was apparently some guy whogot seriously burned - not so much surface burn but deep flesh-cookingburn.<ugh>Err.. am I the only one who is currently wondering why this guy didn'tmove the laptop off his lap when he first started getting burned? Thething would have to be several hundred C before it would give him adeep flesh-cooking burn in a very short period of time!

Not really - ever heard of "coddled eggs"? You can cook flesh with much
less than 100°C. I can imagine where it starts as feeling comfortably
warm, then as it gets warmer, an anaesthetizing effect as the nerve ends
get cooked from the slow umm, simmer.:-)

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

[RusH]

archmage@sfchat.org (Nate Edel) wrote :
If I recall right, typical lithium-ion batteries range from 45 watt-hours to 90 watt hours.

more like 15-40 (typical)


Pozdrawiam.
--
RusH //
http://pulse.pdi.net/~rush/qv30/
Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.

[RusH]

George Macdonald <fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> wrote :
with much less than 100°C. I can imagine where it starts as feeling comfortably warm, then as it gets warmer, an

[cut damn CUT]

not STOP mister before I get sick !
yuck ! I will never use my Laptop again :(

Pozdrawiam.
--
RusH //
http://pulse.pdi.net/~rush/qv30/
Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.

[The little lost angel]

On Sat, 14 Feb 2004 15:22:18 +0000 (UTC), RusH <rush@pulse.pdi.net>
wrote:
archmage@sfchat.org (Nate Edel) wrote : If I recall right, typical lithium-ion batteries range from 45 watt-hours to 90 watt hours.more like 15-40 (typical)

Both my old IBM and current one were above 40Wh for an average of 2.5
to 3hrs useful life doing office type work.


--
L.Angel: I'm looking for web design work.
If you need basic to med complexity webpages at affordable rates, email me :)
Standard HTML, SHTML, MySQL + PHP or ASP, Javascript.
If you really want, FrontPage & DreamWeaver too.
But keep in mind you pay extra bandwidth for their bloated code

[The little lost angel]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 15:01:51 GMT, Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca>
wrote:
I would throw out a guess of 10-15W for a 14" or 15" TFT screenrunning off batteries, maybe even less. Certainly the processor andthe screen are well within the same ballpark. Compare that to theMobile Celeron with a TDP of 35W and very few power saving featuresand the VIA's ~10W CPU starts to look fairly reasonable, especiallywhen it only costs $25.

I'm not sure how valid this is but I did a short experiment on my 1.7
P4M (not the hot Mobile P4) with speedstep set for maximum
performance.

With LCD, full brightness, running BurnP7 normal priority, 37~38W
LCD off, video out to CRT, running BurnP7 normal priority, 33~34W.

So the LCD uses only 4~5W? Seems a bit on the low side.
--
L.Angel: I'm looking for web design work.
If you need basic to med complexity webpages at affordable rates, email me :)
Standard HTML, SHTML, MySQL + PHP or ASP, Javascript.
If you really want, FrontPage & DreamWeaver too.
But keep in mind you pay extra bandwidth for their bloated code

[Tony Hill]

On Sat, 14 Feb 2004 06:43:49 -0500, George Macdonald
<fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@tellurian.com> wrote:On Sat, 14 Feb 2004 04:04:46 GMT, Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.ca>wrote:Err.. am I the only one who is currently wondering why this guy didn'tmove the laptop off his lap when he first started getting burned? Thething would have to be several hundred C before it would give him adeep flesh-cooking burn in a very short period of time!Not really - ever heard of "coddled eggs"? You can cook flesh with muchless than 100°C. I can imagine where it starts as feeling comfortablywarm, then as it gets warmer, an anaesthetizing effect as the nerve endsget cooked from the slow umm, simmer.:-)

Yumm... "coddled legs" :>

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

[RusH]

a?n?g?e?l@lovergirl.lrigrevol.moc.com (The little lost angel) wrote :
On Sat, 14 Feb 2004 15:22:18 +0000 (UTC), RusH <rush@pulse.pdi.net> wrote:archmage@sfchat.org (Nate Edel) wrote : If I recall right, typical lithium-ion batteries range from 45 watt-hours to 90 watt hours.more like 15-40 (typical) Both my old IBM and current one were above 40Wh for an average of 2.5 to 3hrs useful life doing office type work.

hmm, my toshiba has a 10V 3000mA battery pack and thats a typical
capacity. New cheap laptops sometimes come with funny 1500mA batteries
:) (One hour on a Centrino).



Pozdrawiam.
--
RusH //
http://pulse.pdi.net/~rush/qv30/
Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.

[Nate Edel]

In comp.sys.intel RusH <rush@pulse.pdi.net> wrote: archmage@sfchat.org (Nate Edel) wrote : If I recall right, typical lithium-ion batteries range from 45 watt-hours to 90 watt hours. more like 15-40 (typical)

At least in terms of rated capacities, that means that Dell uses bigger
batteries than most. The batteries used in my Inspiron (and in earlier
4000-series models, and most of the Lattitude CP and C serieses) is a 66 Whr
battery. They advertise a 90 Whr battery for several of their heavier
models.

--
Nate Edel http://www.nkedel.com/

"I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer

[Keith R. Williams]

In article <402e6bfc.93793578@news.pacific.net.sg>, a?n?g?e?
l@lovergirl.lrigrevol.moc.com says... On Sat, 14 Feb 2004 15:22:18 +0000 (UTC), RusH <rush@pulse.pdi.net> wrote:archmage@sfchat.org (Nate Edel) wrote : If I recall right, typical lithium-ion batteries range from 45 watt-hours to 90 watt hours.more like 15-40 (typical) Both my old IBM and current one were above 40Wh for an average of 2.5 to 3hrs useful life doing office type work.

Another data point: I have my spare ThinkPad A21p battery here in front
of me. It's a 58Wh (5.4Ah, 10.8V) battery and lasts about 2hrs doing
real work. The screen on this things eats the power (the reason I have
a spare).

--
Keith

[Alex Johnson]

Robert Myers wrote: My statement as you quoted it is still literally true, but it is also true that not all of the energy dissipated by the processor has to contribute to the warm leg effect.

Yes, I suppose in a non-nit way, your statement is correct or close
enough for approximation. Just didn't seem right from a basic physics
POV. Another thing occured to me besides heat and light. Radio waves!
Computers do create enough EM interference that you can hear it on a
cell or portable phone (especially 2.4GHz frequency sets). Most of that
is probably the power supply, but I'm pretty confident the CPU also
radiates radio frequencies.
The important exception, and one that does confuse me, is that I don't know how to account for the energy dissipated in voltage regulation circuitry in the immediate vicinity of the CPU. I'm sure that Intel does not include that power dissipation in its quoted numbers, I suspect that it is a non-negligible amount of heat, it does contribute to the warm leg effect, and I wonder what category people would put it into if they had to make all the means of power dissipation equal the actual power being drawn at the DC connection of the laptop.

It is probably a significant number, but I doubt it is more than a
fraction of the CPU itself (1's of watts vs 10's of watts?). Otherwise
there'd be lots more chatter about having the right battery for your CPU
so that voltage stepping losses don't eat into your battery life budget.

Alex
--
My words are my own. They represent no other; they belong to no other.
Don't read anything into them or you may be required to compensate me
for violation of copyright. (I do not speak for my employer.)

[Robert Myers]

On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 13:50:03 -0500, Alex Johnson <compuwiz@acm.org>
wrote:
Robert Myers wrote: My statement as you quoted it is still literally true, but it is also true that not all of the energy dissipated by the processor has to contribute to the warm leg effect.Yes, I suppose in a non-nit way, your statement is correct or closeenough for approximation. Just didn't seem right from a basic physicsPOV. Another thing occured to me besides heat and light. Radio waves! Computers do create enough EM interference that you can hear it on acell or portable phone (especially 2.4GHz frequency sets). Most of thatis probably the power supply, but I'm pretty confident the CPU alsoradiates radio frequencies.
To introduce some specific terminology, to the extent that the CPU is
surrounded by by a solid, all of the energy that is dissipated by the
CPU has to escape either as a signal with useful and energy-carrying
information going out through a pin, be converted into a phonon or
escape as a photon.

There must be whole classes of quantum states that correspond to the
signals that make it onto PC board traces, and I truly have no idea
what to call them, since some of them must correspond to correlated
pairs of electrons, one on each trace if differential signalling is
being used, and they would qualify to be called a "particle" in the
same way that the Cooper pairs of superconductivity qualify to be
called particles. If it can be imagined, surely someone has written a
paper about it.

Electromagenetic radiation at any frequency is carried by photons.
The phonons are what we normally think of as heat. Very little energy
gets out of the CPU in any fashion whatsoever without at some point
being scattered and at least temporarily converted to a phonon. If
you _really_ wanted to look at all the possibiliteis, Feynman diagrams
would be helpful for categorizing all the exotic combinations of
energy pathways (taxonomy: ugh!).

There is, I am sure, a finite quantum transition amplitude for
production of every conceivable quantum particle that anybody has ever
heard of, but on balance it is clear that they contribute nothing that
anybody knows how to calculate to the energy budget of the CPU.

If you've ever once actually played with Feynman diagrams, which are
almost necessary even to keep track of all the terms in the equations,
you will quickly discover that there is both more and less to all of
this than meets the eye.

Nature knows nothing (and I believe that this statement would have
stood up to scrutiny by Prof. Feynman himself) of the discrete
interactions that field theoreticians and solid state physicists draw
on blackboards.

Instead, there are an infinite number of interactions, involving an
infinite number of Feynman diagrams, going on all of the time. Some
of those interactions involve evanescent intermediate states that are
as real as the xerox toner on the printed page, but they violate
either energy or momentum conservation or both so we call them
"virtual" particles. All of this can happen without a CPU present.
In fact, all of it can happen without anything present at all. Go
google for vacuum fluctuations if you don't believe me.

Prof. Feynman might give me an argument about the following, but much
of what physicists routinely peddle as identifiable physicial
phenomena (an example being virtual photons) are really nothing more
than artifacts of the way he chose to go about solving the
(non-linear) equations of QED. This is clear enough to me because
I've used the same formal apparatus in a classical context, where it
is clear that you can write the equations down, you can draw the
Feynman diagrams, and you can draw useful conclusions, but no new
physics spring into existence because you choose to solve non-linear
equations in a particular way.

Your posts reverberate with the confusions of someone who has been
bamboozled in a physics classroom. *Nobody, nobody, nobody* knows
enough physics to answer your question with absolute, final certainty.
If the "standard model" is to be believed, the most ordinary F=ma type
calculation of freshman physics involves a Higgs field that is carried
by bosons that no one has managed to capture in a measurement. That
way lies madness. Be happy if you are in computer science or
electrical engineering and don't have to sit through arguments about
these things.
The important exception, and one that does confuse me, is that I don't know how to account for the energy dissipated in voltage regulation circuitry in the immediate vicinity of the CPU. I'm sure that Intel does not include that power dissipation in its quoted numbers, I suspect that it is a non-negligible amount of heat, it does contribute to the warm leg effect, and I wonder what category people would put it into if they had to make all the means of power dissipation equal the actual power being drawn at the DC connection of the laptop.It is probably a significant number, but I doubt it is more than afraction of the CPU itself (1's of watts vs 10's of watts?). Otherwisethere'd be lots more chatter about having the right battery for your CPUso that voltage stepping losses don't eat into your battery life budget.
It is, in any case, more important than any kind of exotic particle
interaction you and I both understand less well.

RM

[Alex Johnson]

What do you DO for a living?? :-)

Sorry, my physics is limited to:
classical mechanics, electromagnetic field theory, a couple classes on
the subatomic side of transistors and diodes (ugh!), and a personal
interest in quantum mechanics / quantum computing