Interesting read about upcoming K9 processors

Sander Vesik wrote:

In comp.arch Pleasant Thrip wrote:
Well... I would imaghine it depends a lot on how throughout work they want
to make of it. With teh IL32P64 model they are using, almost no extra work
might be needed for an initial api and lilbrary conversion.

That model is surely going to make the famous trick of using xor
to build doubly-linked lists more interesting. (Unless they used
a typedef to mean "an integer that can hold a pointer". They
certainly wouldn't have been using "long long" for that purpose in
the 16- or 32-bit days.)

Weren't we just discussing "issues with C and pointers" :-)

--
Andrew

Yousuf Khan wrote:
Tony Hill wrote:
Sun currently has 64-bit Solaris for Opteron scheduled for Dec. of
this year. Word so far is that they are pretty much right on schedule
and that the OS is up and running in their labs.

I'd never heard of that until now. Doing a Yahoo search only revealed a few
articles from 2003 (too old now to be really useful), and some Sun articles
being suitably vague ("real soon now"). You got something to link to?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07...lives_opteron/

And I can say that there's been a lot more progress than
what's reported in this article.

Seongbae

On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 03:18:40 +0000, Dean Kent wrote:

"Keith" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 04:47:58 +0000, Dean Kent wrote:


A 64bit OS is a slam dunk, though perhaps not from Micro$hit.
Perhaps politics is involved here? Nah Dean, couldn't be!

I don't think so. More likely Windows is a nightmare to code/modify. Some
people like conspiracy theories, however. :-).

Moi? Come on. Either M$ is incompetent or they're holding back. You
choose!

BTW, 64bit Linux works fine here! It seems Sun is found the light too.

Linux isn't Windows,

No (micro)$hit! Linux doesn't have the corporate skulldugery impeeding
its progress. There is a market, it will fill it. ...kinda like AMD
these days.

and therefore is a completely different argument.
Sun found religion for the same reason most others do... impending
death! g.

Perhaps not impending.

OTOH, Itanic well never see the light, no matter how hard the pundits
push.

Unlike Power, which will dominate everywhere, right?

Well, there is no longer a "Power" architecture (you really should
know by now that that is a silly marketeer's term). If you're
alluding to "PowerPC", well it seems to be invading from top to bottom;
IBM's Power(TM) and blades, Apple G5 and XServe, Nintendo,
PlayStation3, X-Box2, and a ton of embedded stuff.


Yeah, it seems to be doing a tad better than Itanic! ;-)


No politics here!!! ;-).

Who me? o;-)

BTW, Dean a decent newsreader is in order. Lookout sucks.

"Keith" wrote in message
news

Moi? Come on. Either M$ is incompetent or they're holding back. You
choose!

How many Windows programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? ;-).


No (micro)$hit! Linux doesn't have the corporate skulldugery impeeding
its progress. There is a market, it will fill it. ...kinda like AMD
these days.

Far too early to tell for AMD, unfortunately. 15% marketshare is a bit less
than their best. Server segment share is not too shabby, but still a long
way to go to be compared to Linux.


and therefore is a completely different argument.
Sun found religion for the same reason most others do... impending
death! g.

Perhaps not impending.

Hell, they're not only porting Solaris to x86-64, but are considering
PowerWhatever/IPF as well. Sun sees the light, and it is coming from
somewhere else. ;-).


Well, there is no longer a "Power" architecture (you really should
know by now that that is a silly marketeer's term). If you're
alluding to "PowerPC", well it seems to be invading from top to bottom;
IBM's Power(TM) and blades, Apple G5 and XServe, Nintendo,
PlayStation3, X-Box2, and a ton of embedded stuff.


Yeah, it seems to be doing a tad better than Itanic! ;-)

It has impressive numbers, for sure. What happened to SPEC int, though?



No politics here!!! ;-).

Who me? o;-)

BTW, Dean a decent newsreader is in order. Lookout sucks.

So I've heard. I haven't made the investment (timewise) to put Linux on,
and don't have the funds to upgrade my K7 box to a K8 yet. I figure to do
that all at the same time - will you stop your whining then? :-) Besides,
I keep hoping IBM will let me play with a Thinkpad with FLEX-ES and z/OS on
it (or they approve z/OS to run on Hercules along with an affordable
single-user license) so I can pretend I am on a *real* computer while at
home... g.

Regards,
Dean

Pleasant Thrip wrote:
In comp.arch Bill Davidsen wrote:

Pleasant Thrip wrote:

why do you say that? Maybe there will be particular issues for
applications to make use of all those CPUs but I don't see why it would
be such a big deal for the OS kernel scheduler.


You don't understand the problem... the o/s needs to make all sorts of
decisions about moving a process to another processor to load balance
vs. cost of moving, etc. It is a nasty problem!


Sure it is a nasty problem and I do understand that. But, I'm talking
about the total amount of work for Microsoft here.

I think this is a serial problem, time to solution is at least the time
to solution for the most dificult problem, or more depending on how many
things can be done in parallel.

How many people do you think would need to be working on the kernel
development for this particular problem as opposed to migrating the
entire Win32 API and attendant APIs such as DirectX to 64-bit? That was
my point. The real world is more than some academic abstraction that
"NUMA is hard" and so on. The real world is about delivering a complete
shrink-wrapped 64-bit Windows XP I can buy.

People are still doing graduate thesis on NUMA, it's not clear that more
people will mean shorter time to solution. The first cut may settle for
being stable and running well where Ntask = Ncpu. Getting it wrong
means bigtime bad throughput, which is probably an issue, since there
are more mature Linux and Solaris (I'm told) models as competition.

I think the rest of the steps are pretty well understood and can be
solved in reasonable time. Or course things like keeping the CPU number
in a byte will need work ;-)

For those that think the issue was solved with the Itanium/Alpha ports
you obviously aren't Windows programmers nor conversant with the various
APIs.

And if anybody wants to further this discussion, please stick OT. We're
talking _Windows_ here, much as some of you might not like.


IMHO, 64-bits is much harder considering the Win32 API.


--
bill davidsen )
SBC/Prodigy Yorktown Heights NY data center
Project Leader, USENET news
http://newsgroups.news.prodigy.com

"Dean Kent" wrote:

It has impressive numbers, for sure. What happened to SPEC int, though?

Does anyone care about integer performance anymore? 8)

In article ,
says...
"Keith" wrote in message
news

Moi? Come on. Either M$ is incompetent or they're holding back. You
choose!

How many Windows programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? ;-).

That's easy; none. But that certainly doesn't answer the question
(quite the opposite, in fact). ;-)

No (micro)$hit! Linux doesn't have the corporate skulldugery impeeding
its progress. There is a market, it will fill it. ...kinda like AMD
these days.

Far too early to tell for AMD, unfortunately. 15% marketshare is a bit less
than their best. Server segment share is not too shabby, but still a long
way to go to be compared to Linux.

Linux has 15%? The server segment is not too shabby, but...

and therefore is a completely different argument.
Sun found religion for the same reason most others do... impending
death! g.

Perhaps not impending.

Hell, they're not only porting Solaris to x86-64, but are considering
PowerWhatever/IPF as well. Sun sees the light, and it is coming from
somewhere else. ;-).

When one has so many lamps to choose from, why would one keep lamp-
designers on payroll?

Well, there is no longer a "Power" architecture (you really should
know by now that that is a silly marketeer's term). If you're
alluding to "PowerPC", well it seems to be invading from top to bottom;
IBM's Power(TM) and blades, Apple G5 and XServe, Nintendo,
PlayStation3, X-Box2, and a ton of embedded stuff.


Yeah, it seems to be doing a tad better than Itanic! ;-)

It has impressive numbers, for sure. What happened to SPEC int, though?

Don't look at me! I didn't take it! ...which SPEC Int were you
referring to?

No politics here!!! ;-).

Who me? o;-)

BTW, Dean a decent newsreader is in order. Lookout sucks.

So I've heard. I haven't made the investment (timewise) to put Linux on,
and don't have the funds to upgrade my K7 box to a K8 yet. I figure to do
that all at the same time - will you stop your whining then? :-)

Linux isn't needed to get a decent reader. Agent works fine under Win,
though I prefer Gravity. There are many choices, most *free*, and all
better than outhouse. It doesn't take a lot of time to switch. It took
me an hour or so to switch from Win/Gravity to Linux/PAN.

Besides,
I keep hoping IBM will let me play with a Thinkpad with FLEX-ES and z/OS on
it (or they approve z/OS to run on Hercules along with an affordable
single-user license) so I can pretend I am on a *real* computer while at
home... g.

I can't remember the last time I logged onto a 'Z' system. Must be
close to five years for VM (I've long forgotten my password) and
fifteen for MVS.

--
Keith

Dean Kent's last words before the Sword of Azrial plunged through his body
we
"Keith" wrote in message
news
BTW, Dean a decent newsreader is in order. Lookout sucks.
So I've heard. I haven't made the investment (timewise) to put Linux on,
and don't have the funds to upgrade my K7 box to a K8 yet. I figure to do
that all at the same time - will you stop your whining then? :-) Besides,
I keep hoping IBM will let me play with a Thinkpad with FLEX-ES and z/OS on
it (or they approve z/OS to run on Hercules along with an affordable
single-user license) so I can pretend I am on a *real* computer while at
home... g.

You can get different email and news readers for windows too, ya know

On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 17:48:05 +0000 (UTC), Sander Vesik
wrote:
In comp.arch Ketil Malde wrote:
"Dean Kent" writes:

It would be supremely embarrassing to Microsoft if Sun gets Solaris for
Opteron out before Windows.

My money is on embarassement...

I guess it's somewhat embarrassing if Sun ships Opteron servers, and
can't offer Solaris to go with them. Microsoft can still afford to
wait, the vast majority of their market is still Intel and 32 bits.

I though Solaris 9 something was an option on the Opterons?

The 32-bit version of Solaris 9 is indeed an option on the Opterons,
but that's not really what we're interested in here. It's the 64-bit
version of Solaris 10 that people are waiting for.

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

On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 19:34:59 GMT, "Hank Oredson"
wrote:
"Tony Hill" wrote in message
.. .
For those that aren't familiar with WinXP SP2, it is a pretty
significant change to WinXP (many have referred to it more as "WinXP
Second Edition" rather than just a service pack). Lots of positive
changes with regards to the basic security concept of the system, but
MS seems to be having HUGE problems making it work. Reports from the
recently released "Release Candidate 2" suggest that this is still
definitely beta software (certainly not an actual candidate to be
released). I suspect that until MS gets these sorted out they aren't
going to try to push the other new OSes and service packs out.


Kinda curious where you found the reports on SP2 RC2.
Have three systems running it, with zero problems.

I'd like to read the reports so I can tell what problems
to look for and test.

The biggest issue I've been hearing about (admittedly mostly
second-hand) seems to be with actually getting the service pack
installed. A lot of people seem to have had all sorts of problems,
ranging from changing settings and breaking things right up to making
the machines blue-screen and not boot.

Once installed I have heard of a few application compatibilities,
particularly with software that does kind of funky things with
hardware (some CD burning applications, virtual drives, etc.). Some
of these problems are probably almost by design, ie they tie in to the
new security features of SP2, but in the process break compatibility
with some odd-ball software. This isn't entirely a bad thing, MS
really NEEDED to break compatibility with some software in order to
improve their security, but there do still seem to be a few rough
edges to be worked out.

Of course, that being said, "release candidates" are never really
actual candidates for release, so I shouldn't really be directing too
much blame at MS for this one. They're really just late-beta releases
that are going through their final testing and bug-fixing before an
actual release candidate can be created. In this regards RC2 seems
fine. Hopefully MS will get the rough edges smoothed out and get SP2
out by the end of the year (only about a year late) so that all the
other new operating systems can get here.

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