Is this Intel i7 machine good for LTSpice?

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 18:47:51 -0500, "Maynard A. Philbrook Jr."
<jamie_ka1lpa@charter.net> wrote:

In article <33e106aa-a787-4b34-8385-6e758350fbc0@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...

On Saturday, 8 November 2014 08:54:52 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:51:04 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:37:43 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

Do that if you enjoy it. I

You have no fucking clue what I am talking about. I might as well be
talking to the wall. Have you ever designed a chip where you laser trim
thin film resistors?

OK, you have joined the swearing, insulting, content-free faction.

If you had something relevant to contribute, I would comment. However, your
comments were 100% non sequitur.

The laser trimming situation is a case where spice is actually useful for a
voltage divider design. You comment out elements to simulate the laser
taking bite out of thin film. It isn't the kind of situation that could be
solved with simple algebra. The sensitivity of the bite is hard to compute.

So, Spice *is* a design tool.

It can be, in the hands of people who do design, as opposed to persistent trial and error.

Yes, Bill speaks from personal experience.

Jamie

Sloman doesn't design electronics, so his opinions are irrelevant.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[josephkk]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 11:14:05 -0500, Spehro Pefhany
<speffSNIP@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat> wrote:

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 01:45:25 -0500, the renowned rickman
gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:


I heard a salesman saying the AMDs are faster on floating point. Anyone
heard that from a reliable source, like benchmarks maybe?

That would be a big change-- the last time I heard ME on the subject
he said that from his perspective AMD had no reason to exist (and the
way they're going... )


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany

They provide one very valuable service, they help keep Intel more or less
honest instead of letting them become a monopoly. Do you see any value in
that?
Dollar for dollar and MHz core for MHz core AMD chips have more relative
FP performance and less integer performance. For a complex of reasons i
usually buy AMD.

?-)

 

[josephkk]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 18:47:51 -0500, "Maynard A. Philbrook Jr."
<jamie_ka1lpa@charter.net> wrote:

In article <33e106aa-a787-4b34-8385-6e758350fbc0@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...

On Saturday, 8 November 2014 08:54:52 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:51:04 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:37:43 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

Do that if you enjoy it. I

You have no fucking clue what I am talking about. I might as well be
talking to the wall. Have you ever designed a chip where you laser trim
thin film resistors?

OK, you have joined the swearing, insulting, content-free faction.

If you had something relevant to contribute, I would comment. However, your
comments were 100% non sequitur.

The laser trimming situation is a case where spice is actually useful for a
voltage divider design. You comment out elements to simulate the laser
taking bite out of thin film. It isn't the kind of situation that could be
solved with simple algebra. The sensitivity of the bite is hard to compute.

So, Spice *is* a design tool.

It can be, in the hands of people who do design, as opposed to persistent trial and error.

Yes, Bill speaks from personal experience.

Jamie

Simplifying; SPICE is a tool. It can be used in many ways. Some are
better fits to what is does well.

?-)

 

[josephkk]

On 9 Nov 2014 04:38:47 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2014-11-08, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

Or you write a C program to generate the mesh.

You need to comment out elements to simulate the laser cutting the thin
film, so the problem is more complicated than you think.

Who would trust a design to "some DOS program"? That implies the program
hasn't be patched in decades.

not necessarily a bad thing.

I must agree. Once some time ago my then buddy and i wrote the test data
acquisition and analysis suite for a discretes test lab. You cannot
imagine how flabbergasted i was to find out that most of that code was/is
still in daily production use over 20 years later, untouched. They
had/have personnel that can, as they have extended the suite to use new
instruments but the core is untouched.

?-)

 

[rickman]

On 11/8/2014 11:14 AM, Spehro Pefhany wrote:

On Sat, 08 Nov 2014 01:45:25 -0500, the renowned rickman
gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:


I heard a salesman saying the AMDs are faster on floating point. Anyone
heard that from a reliable source, like benchmarks maybe?

That would be a big change-- the last time I heard ME on the subject
he said that from his perspective AMD had no reason to exist (and the
way they're going... )

I don't know who ME is. I would agree from a stock investment
perspective. They used to play catchup with Intel every three or four
years and if you paid attention you could make some real bucks when
their stock price jumped up and down like a yo-yo. But once they got a
full process generation behind and the architectures all reached a
plateau, there is not much they could do to get ahead anymore. Once
Intel got so far ahead in process geometry it became a matter of
accounting more than technology. Intel makes chips at a fraction of the
cost of the AMD chips... game over.

But that doesn't mean AMD can't have an emphasis in an area that gives
them a niche market where they lead technically.

--

Rick

 

[JW]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:04:35 -0800 josephkk <joseph_barrett@sbcglobal.net>
wrote in Message id: <if236at20rs3r3p2h5r3u74aqbtogsuu1h@4ax.com>:

Dollar for dollar and MHz core for MHz core AMD chips have more relative
FP performance and less integer performance.

Don't know about dollar for dollar, but AMD is behind on floating point
performance.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7711/floating-point-peak-performance-of-kaveri-and-other-recent-amd-and-intel-chips

 

On Tue, 11 Nov 2014 06:25:25 -0500, JW <none@dev.null> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:04:35 -0800 josephkk <joseph_barrett@sbcglobal.net
wrote in Message id: <if236at20rs3r3p2h5r3u74aqbtogsuu1h@4ax.com>:

Dollar for dollar and MHz core for MHz core AMD chips have more relative
FP performance and less integer performance.

Don't know about dollar for dollar, but AMD is behind on floating point
performance.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7711/floating-point-peak-performance-of-kaveri-and-other-recent-amd-and-intel-chips

If I understood that article correctly, they are discussing the
relative performance of the SIMD (vector processing) instruction
performance between vendors.

Unless your application (e.g. LTSpice) has been compiled with a good
compiler to use those SIMD extension instructions that article might
not be of much use.

At one time several years ago AMD had indeed a better non vectored FP
performance compared to Intel, but this situation changes with each
generation of chips.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 12 November 2014 10:51:13 UTC+11, Maynard A. Philbrook Jr. wrote:

In article <c3669e5b-7f65-41a0-993f-80d45b500806@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...
On Tuesday, 11 November 2014 12:27:28 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 18:47:51 -0500, "Maynard A. Philbrook Jr."
jamie_ka1lpa@charter.net> wrote:
In article <33e106aa-a787-4b34-8385-6e758350fbc0@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...
On Saturday, 8 November 2014 08:54:52 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:51:04 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:37:43 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

Do that if you enjoy it.

You have no fucking clue what I am talking about. I might as well be talking to the wall. Have you ever designed a chip where you laser trim thin film resistors?

OK, you have joined the swearing, insulting, content-free faction.

If you had something relevant to contribute, I would comment. However, your comments were 100% non sequitur.

The laser trimming situation is a case where spice is actually useful for a voltage divider design. You comment out elements to simulate the laser taking bite out of thin film. It isn't the kind of situation that could be solved with simple algebra. The sensitivity of the bite is hard to compute.

So, Spice *is* a design tool.

It can be, in the hands of people who do design, as opposed to persistent trial and error.

Yes, Bill speaks from personal experience.

Sloman doesn't design electronics, so his opinions are irrelevant.

I haven't designed much recently, but I've designed enough over my
career for me to think that my opinion is worth propagating. This is a
personal point of view. John Larkin does tend to think that only his own
opinions are worth propagating, which may may overly restrict the
playing field.

Putting that all in prospective, you where you are and John where he
is, in his daily duties, I think I would respect his opinion in design
over yours.

Perhaps you should pay more attention to the difference in marketing skills.. A lot of what he makes is sold to physicists, who - as Rev. Sci. Instrum. frequently reveals - aren't always all that expert in electronics.

John's egomania does encourage him to think that what he sells is "insanely good" which can't hurt his sales performance.

Coke and MacDonalds also sell a lot of product, and what they sell is more "well-adapted to their market" than "the best possible product".

But bear in mind, that's only my opinion and you have already decreed
that it's not worth anything.

Your opinion isn't entirely valueless - it's worth knowing what the ignorant jackass thinks, if you want to sell him something.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 12 November 2014 11:07:53 UTC+11, rickman wrote:

On 11/11/2014 6:53 PM, Maynard A. Philbrook Jr. wrote:
In article <c3669e5b-7f65-41a0-993f-80d45b500806@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...
On Tuesday, 11 November 2014 12:27:28 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 18:47:51 -0500, "Maynard A. Philbrook Jr."
jamie_ka1lpa@charter.net> wrote:
In article <33e106aa-a787-4b34-8385-6e758350fbc0@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says..
On Saturday, 8 November 2014 08:54:52 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:51:04 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:37:43 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

<snip>

But bear in mind, that's only my opinion and you have already decreed
that it's not worth anything.

How much can an opinion be worth when everyone has one?

Not all opinions are created equal. Jamie's opinions are less equal than most. Happily, he tends to plagarise most of the ones he presents, rather than subjecting us to the mouldy fruit of his native wit.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 12 November 2014 11:55:36 UTC+11, Maynard A. Philbrook Jr. wrote:

In article <14600fa1-93eb-4602-a515-2cdc2ef3cc3c@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...

On Wednesday, 12 November 2014 11:07:53 UTC+11, rickman wrote:
On 11/11/2014 6:53 PM, Maynard A. Philbrook Jr. wrote:
In article <c3669e5b-7f65-41a0-993f-80d45b500806@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...
On Tuesday, 11 November 2014 12:27:28 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 18:47:51 -0500, "Maynard A. Philbrook Jr."
jamie_ka1lpa@charter.net> wrote:
In article <33e106aa-a787-4b34-8385-6e758350fbc0@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says..
On Saturday, 8 November 2014 08:54:52 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:51:04 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:37:43 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

snip

But bear in mind, that's only my opinion and you have already decreed
that it's not worth anything.

How much can an opinion be worth when everyone has one?

Not all opinions are created equal. Jamie's opinions are less equal
than most. Happily, he tends to plagiarise most of the ones he presents,
rather than subjecting us to the mouldy fruit of his native wit.

----

Firstly:
Talking about moldy fruit, spoken from the fruit cake himself.

In Jamie's less-than-reliable opinion.

Secondly:
If you want to talk to us Yankee's, learn to spell like us, or maybe
the majority..

Why should I bother? Yanks never bother to change their spelling when writing to non-Americans, any more than they bother to change the way they speak when talking to them.

Thirdly:
Plagiarize is the correct spelling and we don't use "U" in "mould"
over here. Mother England failed long ago and I don't think you have a
chance.

"Plagarize" is an acceptable spelling. It's less phonetic than "plagarise" because the "ise" ending appears considerably more frequently.

Taking the "u" out of "mould" was just another one of Noah Webster's marketing tricks, to freeze UK publishers out of the US dictionary market. The Americans were silly enough to fall for it.

Fourthly:
Personally, with all the claims of referencing PAPERS on just about
every subject matter you have talked about, I think it's more
appropriate to say that you fit the category of plagiarism.

You might, but that's because you don't know what you are talking about. Plagiarism isn't a "catagory" but an act. You might want to catagorise me as a plagiarist, but you'd have to find what I'd plagiarised - from whom - to make it stick. Citing references isn't plagiarism, but evidence of having performed due diligence. Legally speaking, you can quote what you like so long as you make it clear that it is a quotation and identify your sources. There are common-sense limits on the proportion of a text you can quote - basically you can't quote so much that you impair the market for the original text - but citing references encourages people to read the original, so it's free advertising rather than any kind of cheat.

All I was saying was that most of your opinions are unoriginal - which isn't controversial. I happen to suspect that the rest of them are all wrong, but it would take work to prove it, and the question is inconsequential.

Of course, with your age bearing down hard on you, your brain capacity
more than likely has taken a serious turn for the worst over the years.

It doesn't seem to have happened yet. My wife's mother got Alzheimer's when she was about as old as I am now, and my mother started getting a bit absent-minded at about 88, so we know what to look for.

It's a serious condition, especially if you didn't have much
originality to start with.

Sure. Getting a Ph.D, and getting fluent in a second language (both of which I've done) do seem to delay the onset. You don't seem to be so well placed.

Finally:

It's what we call "SE" personal in the real world, but you of course
don't know about that. Most "SE" can't see or won't admit to it.

You do seem to resist recognising you own stupidity and ignorance ...

> If you want to battle me old fart, don't come empty handed..

The usual formulation is "my old fart", and the olefactory content of your posts doesn't get transmitted. If you wanted to engage in intellectual jousting, you'd need to find an intellect - you don't seem to have one of your own.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 12 November 2014 12:22:00 UTC+11, rickman wrote:

On 11/8/2014 2:14 AM, miso wrote:

The Xeon product line is all about stability. No overclocking. They use ECC,
which some say is slower. [I don't know.] If you are seriously going to do a
ram disk (dumb idea), you would want the ECC. For software RAID, you should
have ECC. I give Dell credit for at least using a Supermicro mobo, since
some of the Asus mobos don't use ECC correctly.

The bad news is RAM prices are up for some reason.

ECC *has* to be slower. It involves calculating check bits from the
word being stored and saving them. Then on the read all the bits are
calculated to see if there is an error and to correct it. That takes
some time on both the write and the read. It may not be a lot, but it
takes time.

It doesn't have to be significantly slower. The processes of creating the check bits, and of using them to calculate a corrected output can in principle be handled by look-up tables - which get a bit big - and in practice are handled by logic networks which are almost as fast.

The process of getting stuff out of memory is slower, because memory cells have to be tiny, so the electric charge involved is equally tiny.

The last time I looked - which was a very long time ago - the costs were in extra components, extra board area, extra pins, extra bus tracks and extra bus drivers. Extra propagation delay didn't really come into it.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Maynard A. Philbrook Jr.]

In article <c3669e5b-7f65-41a0-993f-80d45b500806@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...

On Tuesday, 11 November 2014 12:27:28 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 18:47:51 -0500, "Maynard A. Philbrook Jr."
jamie_ka1lpa@charter.net> wrote:

In article <33e106aa-a787-4b34-8385-6e758350fbc0@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...

On Saturday, 8 November 2014 08:54:52 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:51:04 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:37:43 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

Do that if you enjoy it. I

You have no fucking clue what I am talking about. I might as well be
talking to the wall. Have you ever designed a chip where you laser trim
thin film resistors?

OK, you have joined the swearing, insulting, content-free faction.

If you had something relevant to contribute, I would comment. However, your
comments were 100% non sequitur.

The laser trimming situation is a case where spice is actually useful for a
voltage divider design. You comment out elements to simulate the laser
taking bite out of thin film. It isn't the kind of situation that could be
solved with simple algebra. The sensitivity of the bite is hard to compute.

So, Spice *is* a design tool.

It can be, in the hands of people who do design, as opposed to persistent trial and error.

Yes, Bill speaks from personal experience.

Sloman doesn't design electronics, so his opinions are irrelevant.

I haven't designed much recently, but I've designed enough over my

career for me to think that my opinion is worth propagating. This is a
personal point of view. John Larkin does tend to think that only his own
opinions are worth propagating, which may may overly restrict the
playing field.

Putting that all in prospective, you where you are and John where he
is, in his daily duties, I think I would respect his opinion in design
over yours.

But bare in mind, that's only my opinion and you have already decreed
that it's not worth anything.

Jamie


Jamie

 

[rickman]

On 11/11/2014 6:53 PM, Maynard A. Philbrook Jr. wrote:

In article <c3669e5b-7f65-41a0-993f-80d45b500806@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...

On Tuesday, 11 November 2014 12:27:28 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 18:47:51 -0500, "Maynard A. Philbrook Jr."
jamie_ka1lpa@charter.net> wrote:

In article <33e106aa-a787-4b34-8385-6e758350fbc0@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...

On Saturday, 8 November 2014 08:54:52 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:51:04 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:37:43 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

Do that if you enjoy it. I

You have no fucking clue what I am talking about. I might as well be
talking to the wall. Have you ever designed a chip where you laser trim
thin film resistors?

OK, you have joined the swearing, insulting, content-free faction.

If you had something relevant to contribute, I would comment. However, your
comments were 100% non sequitur.

The laser trimming situation is a case where spice is actually useful for a
voltage divider design. You comment out elements to simulate the laser
taking bite out of thin film. It isn't the kind of situation that could be
solved with simple algebra. The sensitivity of the bite is hard to compute.

So, Spice *is* a design tool.

It can be, in the hands of people who do design, as opposed to persistent trial and error.

Yes, Bill speaks from personal experience.

Sloman doesn't design electronics, so his opinions are irrelevant.

I haven't designed much recently, but I've designed enough over my
career for me to think that my opinion is worth propagating. This is a
personal point of view. John Larkin does tend to think that only his own
opinions are worth propagating, which may may overly restrict the
playing field.

Putting that all in prospective, you where you are and John where he
is, in his daily duties, I think I would respect his opinion in design
over yours.

But bare in mind, that's only my opinion and you have already decreed
that it's not worth anything.

How much can an opinion be worth when everyone has one?

--

Rick

 

[Maynard A. Philbrook Jr.]

In article <14600fa1-93eb-4602-a515-2cdc2ef3cc3c@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...

On Wednesday, 12 November 2014 11:07:53 UTC+11, rickman wrote:
On 11/11/2014 6:53 PM, Maynard A. Philbrook Jr. wrote:
In article <c3669e5b-7f65-41a0-993f-80d45b500806@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says...
On Tuesday, 11 November 2014 12:27:28 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 18:47:51 -0500, "Maynard A. Philbrook Jr."
jamie_ka1lpa@charter.net> wrote:
In article <33e106aa-a787-4b34-8385-6e758350fbc0@googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@gmail.com says..
On Saturday, 8 November 2014 08:54:52 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:51:04 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:37:43 -0800, miso <miso@sushi.com> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

snip

But bear in mind, that's only my opinion and you have already decreed
that it's not worth anything.

How much can an opinion be worth when everyone has one?

Not all opinions are created equal. Jamie's opinions are less equal

than most. Happily, he tends to plagiarism most of the ones he presents,
rather than subjecting us to the mouldy fruit of his native wit.

----

Firstly:
Talking about moldy fruit, spoken from the fruit cake himself.

Secondly:
If you want to talk to us Yankee's, learn to spell like us, or maybe
the majority..

Thirdly:
Plagiarize is the correct spelling and we don't use "U" in "mould"
over here. Mother England failed long ago and I don't think you have a
chance.

Fourthly:
Personally, with all the claims of referencing PAPERS on just about
every subject matter you have talked about, I think it's more
appropriate to say that you fit the category of plagiarism.

Of course, with your age baring down hard on you, your brain capacity
more than likely has taken a serious turn for the worst over the years.

It's a serious condition, especially if you didn't have much
originality to start with.

Finally:

It's what we call "SE" personal in the real world, but you of course
don't know about that. Most "SE" can't see or won't admit to it.

If you want to battle me old fart, don't come empty handed..

Jamie

 

[rickman]

On 11/11/2014 10:31 AM, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:

On Tue, 11 Nov 2014 06:25:25 -0500, JW <none@dev.null> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:04:35 -0800 josephkk <joseph_barrett@sbcglobal.net
wrote in Message id: <if236at20rs3r3p2h5r3u74aqbtogsuu1h@4ax.com>:

Dollar for dollar and MHz core for MHz core AMD chips have more relative
FP performance and less integer performance.

Don't know about dollar for dollar, but AMD is behind on floating point
performance.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7711/floating-point-peak-performance-of-kaveri-and-other-recent-amd-and-intel-chips

If I understood that article correctly, they are discussing the
relative performance of the SIMD (vector processing) instruction
performance between vendors.

Unless your application (e.g. LTSpice) has been compiled with a good
compiler to use those SIMD extension instructions that article might
not be of much use.

At one time several years ago AMD had indeed a better non vectored FP
performance compared to Intel, but this situation changes with each
generation of chips.

The same is true for floating point performance. I recall when the 486
came out with built in floating point acceleration many benchmarks
didn't show an appreciable speed up on apps like spread sheets because
most of the program time was spent doing things other than the floating
point calculations. I believe most programs fit this category as well,
with the programs where enhanced floating point performance making a
real difference being in the small minority.

I haven't looked at the stock in a while, so I don't know how much money
they are losing, but I really can't see AMD being in business in 5 to 10
years if they don't find the next new thing to give them an opportunity
to make a little profit. Intel is sitting on their pile of cash at the
high end and all the various ARM makers are cutting the profit out of
the bottom end. AMD sure as heck isn't going to be able to make money
in CPUs.

Looking at their profit for the last few years they have been loosing
money pretty hard in 2012 and less so in 2013. 2014 is showing a small
loss to date. I guess if they can keep bleeding slowly enough they can
hold on for a while.

Does AMD have anything worthwhile in the pipeline?

--

Rick

 

[rickman]

On 11/8/2014 2:14 AM, miso wrote:

The Xeon product line is all about stability. No overclocking. They use ECC,
which some say is slower. [I don't know.] If you are seriously going to do a
ram disk (dumb idea), you would want the ECC. For software RAID, you should
have ECC. I give Dell credit for at least using a Supermicro mobo, since
some of the Asus mobos don't use ECC correctly.

The bad news is RAM prices are up for some reason.

ECC *has* to be slower. It involves calculating check bits from the
word being stored and saving them. Then on the read all the bits are
calculated to see if there is an error and to correct it. That takes
some time on both the write and the read. It may not be a lot, but it
takes time.

--

Rick

 

[rickman]

On 11/10/2014 1:16 AM, miso wrote:

Have a nice day.

Lol, I have killfiled the person you are responding to, but I can tell
your response is appropriate...

--

Rick

 

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUn]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2014 21:41:53 -0500, "Maynard A. Philbrook Jr."
<jamie_ka1lpa@charter.net> Gave us:

Back in the 486 days, the majority of software that was being used
didn't support the FPU because it didn't exist on many PC's.

You mean the 386 days. The 486 had it integrated in.

Software authors were most definitely writing to use it.
Titles out at the time lacked, but that did not last long at all.

 

On Tue, 11 Nov 2014 20:21:22 -0500, rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/8/2014 2:14 AM, miso wrote:

The Xeon product line is all about stability. No overclocking. They use ECC,
which some say is slower. [I don't know.] If you are seriously going to do a
ram disk (dumb idea), you would want the ECC. For software RAID, you should
have ECC. I give Dell credit for at least using a Supermicro mobo, since
some of the Asus mobos don't use ECC correctly.

The bad news is RAM prices are up for some reason.

ECC *has* to be slower. It involves calculating check bits from the
word being stored and saving them.

The actual data bits can be stored as they arrive, calculating the
check bits take some time, but they can be written into memory cells
which will occur slightly later. With multiple write cycles in
succession, storing the check bits from the previous write can overlap
with writing the actual data bits of the next write.

Doing a partial memory word update, e.g. writing only a single byte
into a 64 bit (8 byte) memory word is costly, since first you have to
read the 7 unmodified bytes, combine the new byte, calculate the ECC
for 8 bytes and write 8 bytes+ECC or at least the new byte+full ECC.
With cache between the processor and main memory, memory writes should
use the full memory words, so this is not be an issue today.

Then on the read all the bits are
calculated to see if there is an error and to correct it.

These days the read returns correct results in a huge majority of
cases, so why not just send out the speculative data and after ECC
check declare it valid by a separate signal from memory to CPU.
However, if the ECC check fails, the memory needs to calculate the
correct data and indicate that the data word is now valid. Then the
memory must calculate the new correct data+ECC and store it into that
memory cell to deal with soft errors (i.e. flush the memory cell). Of
course, if there is a hard error, this does not help, since the
correction must be repeated on each read access to that cell, slowing
it up considerably.

That takes
some time on both the write and the read. It may not be a lot, but it
takes time.

With hard errors in some memory pages, this can be a considerable
delay and the OS should be able to map out these bad pages as in disk
drive bad block replacement.

 

[Maynard A. Philbrook Jr.]

In article <m3ubfh$fkq$1@dont-email.me>, gnuarm@gmail.com says...

If I understood that article correctly, they are discussing the
relative performance of the SIMD (vector processing) instruction
performance between vendors.

Unless your application (e.g. LTSpice) has been compiled with a good
compiler to use those SIMD extension instructions that article might
not be of much use.

At one time several years ago AMD had indeed a better non vectored FP
performance compared to Intel, but this situation changes with each
generation of chips.

The same is true for floating point performance. I recall when the 486
came out with built in floating point acceleration many benchmarks
didn't show an appreciable speed up on apps like spread sheets because
most of the program time was spent doing things other than the floating
point calculations. I believe most programs fit this category as well,
with the programs where enhanced floating point performance making a
real difference being in the small minority.

What you believe is false, mostly that is.

You should really do your home work before posting here.

Back in the 486 days, the majority of software that was being used
didn't support the FPU because it didn't exist on many PC's.

Then you had the option in the math libs to have it detect the presents
of a FPU and the lib would then call the FPU instructions. A lot of
DOS based programs also did this trick.

This detouring didn't help with the speed performance but it did show
a faster operating program when ever there was floating point math
involved.

It was only later when the Pentium's came along is when new software
and updates demanded that you have FPU support, because there
was no longer support for software FP, with the exception of some
custom forms of floating point that can only be supported in software.

Of course the first Pentium's had the problem of a bug in the FPU due
to some missing silicon. I wrote a command line app just to test
for that bug and found many PC's that had those CPU's in it.


I am sure you knew all of this, correct?

Yeah sure.

Jamie