Advantages of Parallel Hz

[Radium]

Only true (and only to a small extent, getting smaller every year) on
things like disk drives where the head positioning isn't perfect.
Widgets like core or MRAM will be as securely erased as SRAM.

Some of my preferences are factual, while others are simply based on
opinions themselves.

Than a twenty-year-old disk drive, perhaps. Though, any data that
you want to save (kinda the point) will be as easily recovered from
either.

With an electric Flash RAM chip, it's easier to set all the values to
zero [i.e. erasing them completely and permanently].

If you (could) regenerate the data on the fly, you *are* using more
energy than if it's stored once.
Okay.

I thought you wanted minimum energy
used/dissipated?

Sometimes, yes. But not always.

 

[Wilco Dijkstra]

Calling non-trolls "troll" devalues the value of the word when applied
to real trolls.

Well that posting (and a few before that) were clearly Trolls according to
your definition. Claiming all RISCs are microcoded is clearly ridiculous,
and it looked like the posters knew that as they didn't provide any evidence.
Their explanations may seem plausible to people who don't have a degree
in Computer Science. Having various other people defending their reputation
(rather than the claims made) made it an even more obvious Troll...

Radium on the other hand is just clueless, and doesn't fit the definition at all
as he appears to listen to (and hopefully learns from) the replies.

Wilco

 

[Radium]

Obviously, anything that "generates data" can't be creating
information so the information needed to know what data must be
generated has to be stored inside the system.

In that case, yes, some amount of info is stored, however, it is the
minimum required.

My dream PC stores this "ROM" as discrete logic. Discrete logic is
faster than ROM.

My dream PC is as hardware, real-time, and digital as possible. In
addition, it uses the least amount of buffering required [hopefully
none] and experiences the least amount of latency possible [again,
hopefully none].

 

[MooseFET]

[.....]

If you (could) regenerate the data on the fly, you *are* using more
energy than if it's stored once. I thought you wanted minimum energy
used/dissipated?

Obviously, anything that "generates data" can't be creating
information so the information needed to know what data must be
generated has to be stored inside the system. This means that the
whole goal is imposible.

True, but there is a difference between ROM and logic, both solving
exactly the same equation.

That is very true but to Radium they are seen as different is some
other way. I think the problem is that he doesn't understand the
technology well enough to be comfortable with the idea that a PROM, a
CPLD, a FPGA and descrete logic that solve a given problem must be
encoding the same information. Exactly how it is encoded will be very
different as you say but it none the less must be encoded.

 

[Robert Redelmeier]

[email protected] says...

Only true (and only to a small extent, getting smaller every year) on
things like disk drives where the head positioning isn't perfect.
Widgets like core or MRAM will be as securely erased as SRAM.

Agreed! AFAIK, current HDs are highly dependant on ECC.
The bits are already slipping. What you might be able to
recover is dependant on the recovery head being much finer than
the write head. Write heads have been getting much tighter,
while scanning electron microscopes haven't been advancing
much in resolution (they have in automation).

Than a twenty-year-old disk drive, perhaps. Though, any data
that you want to save (kinda the point) will be as easily
recovered from either.

Another excellent point. There is no reason an SEM can't
recover data from flash or DRAM chips from things like residual
electromigration. It just needs horrendously expensive
mapping. Frankly, I'd expect only the founderies to do this,
and at most in a few selected (corner) areas to improve yields.

Seems a little paranoid to me. Whatcha got on there, kiddie pron? ;-)

Certainly any security program needs a threat analysis,
particularly a good estimate of costs and how much an opponent is
willing to spend. And the redundancy/recognizibility of the data.
The error rate on recovery isn't zero, and that will make recvery
probablistic. Some data is garbles easily. ASCII doesn't.

-- Robert

 

[[email protected]]

Confidential information remains no matter how much you try to format
it.
BULLSHIT!

The stored magnetic information always exists to some extent no matter
how many times it is "erased" or overwritten.
BULLSHIT!

Device sensitive to extremely weak magnetic signals, can still recover
information.
BULLSHIT!

With an electric chip it is much easer to permanently remove
confidential data.

COWSHIT!

 

[MooseFET]

In that case, yes, some amount of info is stored, however, it is the
minimum required.

Once again I need to point out that this leads to a very slow
machine. Storing the minimum required would be like storing all your
programs in the ZIPed format and decompressing them only as they run.

My dream PC stores this "ROM" as discrete logic. Discrete logic is
faster than ROM.

A single gate fo dicrete logic may be much faster than a ROM but using
a ROM results in a faster all over system. If you have large ROM you
can have large lookup tables to speed up things like trig functions.

My dream PC is as hardware, real-time, and digital as possible. In
addition, it uses the least amount of buffering required [hopefully
none] and experiences the least amount of latency possible [again,
hopefully none].

This may be your dream but it may also be a nightmare. You also said
you wanted low power and no fan. If you want a lot of speed, you
really want a good cooling system and a whole lot of power. If you
want to make a faster system with low power, you want to make use of
things like lookup tables and hashes. Forbidding the use of large
ROMs means you really can do that.

 

[MooseFET]

"Guy Macon" <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote in message





Well that posting (and a few before that) were clearly Trolls according to
your definition. Claiming all RISCs are microcoded is clearly ridiculous,
and it looked like the posters knew that as they didn't provide any evidence.
Their explanations may seem plausible to people who don't have a degree
in Computer Science. Having various other people defending their reputation
(rather than the claims made) made it an even more obvious Troll...

Radium on the other hand is just clueless, and doesn't fit the definition at all
as he appears to listen to (and hopefully learns from) the replies.

Actually, I think we now haver to say "was clueless". He does appear
to be learning. I don't think he is doing so efficiently but he is
doing it. He is very like a lot of early students on the subject of
electronics. He hasn't yet learned how to learn the subject.

 

[Daniel Mandic]

My dream PC is as hardware, real-time, and digital as possible. In
addition, it uses the least amount of buffering required [hopefully
none] and experiences the least amount of latency possible [again,
hopefully none].

Hi!


Your dream PC can't be digital...



Best regards,

Daniel Mandic

 

[Daniel Mandic]

This may be your dream but it may also be a nightmare. You also said
you wanted low power and no fan. If you want a lot of speed, you
really want a good cooling system and a whole lot of power. If you
want to make a faster system with low power, you want to make use of
things like lookup tables and hashes. Forbidding the use of large
ROMs means you really can do that.

Hi MooseFET!


It depends to the application you need.

For example, a 486 with some freeware (LTSpice, FreePCB e.g.) can
outperform the old methods for schematic-design, not to mention all the
gimmicks of FreePCB (netlist, rats-nest, routing... wonderful!!!).
[Here is no need for a fast and hungry PC]

But an ol' Celluloid (e.g. std. 35mm) film will outperform any digital
version, especially when seen on big cinema screen
[Here, the faster the digital, the better :-(, with a foreseenable
No-Ending. Update Paradise ]

Audio is much easier to handle by digital but still not has the charme
of top-class magnetic tapes and/or vinyl-can.



Digital is better for my first mentioned... imho.


Best regards,

Daniel Mandic

 

[Daniel Mandic]

Actually, I think we now haver to say "was clueless". He does appear
to be learning. I don't think he is doing so efficiently but he is
doing it. He is very like a lot of early students on the subject of
electronics. He hasn't yet learned how to learn the subject.

The Basics are the most difficult ;-). U, I and R /or G.



Best regards,

Daniel Mandic

 

[krw]

Well that posting (and a few before that) were clearly Trolls according to
your definition. Claiming all RISCs are microcoded is clearly ridiculous,

Who claimed that *all* RISCs were microcoded. I think you're
dreaming.

and it looked like the posters knew that as they didn't provide any evidence.
Their explanations may seem plausible to people who don't have a degree
in Computer Science. Having various other people defending their reputation
(rather than the claims made) made it an even more obvious Troll...

You're now claiming that people who know better than you don't have
degrees (as if it matters)?

Radium on the other hand is just clueless, and doesn't fit the definition at all
as he appears to listen to (and hopefully learns from) the replies.

He's said he has Asberger's. FWIG, his online personality is
consistent with this. ...no crime committed.

 

[Don Bowey]

Well that posting (and a few before that) were clearly Trolls according to
your definition. Claiming all RISCs are microcoded is clearly ridiculous,
and it looked like the posters knew that as they didn't provide any evidence.
Their explanations may seem plausible to people who don't have a degree
in Computer Science. Having various other people defending their reputation
(rather than the claims made) made it an even more obvious Troll...

Radium on the other hand is just clueless, and doesn't fit the definition at
all
as he appears to listen to (and hopefully learns from) the replies.

Yes, he learns just enough to shift positions and throw out more chum, which
y'all feed on.

 

[Wilco Dijkstra]

Who claimed that *all* RISCs were microcoded. I think you're
dreaming.

The poster that said:

"Ok then, name one significant processor today that is totally ucode free..."

Ie. he was pretty sure that nobody could name a CPU that doesn't use micro code.

In fact the reverse is true, few (if any) modern CPUs use micro code.

You're now claiming that people who know better than you don't have
degrees (as if it matters)?

No, not at all. I'm saying that people who just claim to know better are trolling.
People who really know better can provide evidence supporting their claims.
So far all I've seen is baseless claims and special pleading ("Trust me, I know
what I'm talking about, but you don't"). I have to say that doesn't impress me in
the slightest. Please teach rather than preach.

He's said he has Asberger's. FWIG, his online personality is
consistent with this. ...no crime committed.

Agreed.

Wilco

 

[joseph2k]

It's a matter of personal preference.

Yes but what is the basis of this preference? Did a ROM maker say
something rude to you? :> That would be a good reason.

[....]

Why?

Lets try a simpler example: I want to make a box that finds the
length of the third side of a triangle when two sides and the angle
are known. This is the equation:

Z = SQRT( X*X + Y*Y - 2*X*Y*COS(Angle))

Lets imagine that we are going to use Newton's method to find a square
root.

Newton's method works like this:

INPUT Y
TryValue = SomeGuessMethod(Y)

Loop till good enough
NewValue = Y / TryValue
TryValue = (TryValue + NewValue)/2
end loop
PRINT "The squareroot is ", TryValue

One of the very nice thing about this way of finding the square root
is that the accuracy of the TryValue grows very quickly. The number
of digits it is good to doubles every time around the loop. The
problem is that you need to come up with an initial guess. Always
guessing 1.0 initially does work but it takes a large number of loops
to find the square root of a million if you start that way.

Adding a fairly simple look up table will get the answer much quicker.

Another issue pops up for the example equation that it needs the value
2.0. Since 2.0 is 1.0+1.0, the value can be generated but this costs
more time.

There is also the method for finding the cos() to consider. Most
cosine routines use a look up table to find the exact cosine of a
nearby angle and how the curve is changing in that area. In just a
few steps, you can have a quite exact cosine if you do this. There
are other ways of finding the cosine that don't need any tables. I
bet you've already guessed why those aren't used.

[....]

I don't use zip, unless I really need to. So far, I've never had to.

Winzip is a pain in the @$$.

Yes it is gzip, pkzip and UncleBobsZip will do better than WinZip.
They all take time to do however.

Is the ROM built into the keyboard?

There is a ROM in the keyboard and one in the PC. Inside the keyboard
is a little micro-controller with a ROM. It keeps track of which
buttons you push etc. This information is sent to the PC. Back in
the days of DOS, it was then the ROM in the PC that assigned the keys
their ASCII codes.

It may sound funny to make it take too steps to do the assigning of
the ASCII but there is a very good reason for it. The basic keyboard
design could be used all around the world. The BIOS could be made
different from country to country to handle the differences in what
the keys mean.

Close on the keyboard thing, actually sending key number closures/openings
(which is what the original IBM PC did) is absurdly handy to handle shift,
control, alt etc., keys and other multiple keypresses (control-alt-delete)
as well as simplifying keyboard design.

 

[joseph2k]

Confidential information remains no matter how much you try to format
it.

The stored magnetic information always exists to some extent no matter
how many times it is "erased" or overwritten.

Not at all true, overwrite with different garbage each of several times, the
original is no longer recoverable. Perhaps you should study some of the
physics of how various storage media actually work. Please remember that
writing ones or zeros or both regardless of media is relatively
ineffective.

Device sensitive to extremely weak magnetic signals, can still recover
information.

With an electric chip it is much easer to permanently remove
confidential data.

Any kind of "stored" field is equally recoverable.

I like things to be lively. Discrete logic is far more effervescent
than ROM.

Please explain how hardwired logic can be more effervescent (ephemeral) than
ram.

 

[Guy Macon]

Let's review, shall we? watch as an ordinary technical discussion
turns to flamage, and note who the flamer is.

---------------------

From: krw
The PPC-750 is not microcoded. Perhaps you want a G3 Mac, or
Nintendo game console.

From: "Wilco Dijkstra"
Well you're in luck then as most CPUs don't have any micro code anymore.

From: krw
Most modern ones do (have microcode), even RISC processors. For
example, among the PowerPCs, only the 60x and 750s are hard-wired.
Power4 (including PPC-970), and Power 5 are microcoded. Many
instructions translate to one microinstruction but the microcode is
there. Many are cracked into two microinstructions and others have
vertical microcode.

From: "Wilco Dijkstra"
Most RISCs do not contain microcode - not having any microcode is one of
the criteria of being called RISC! While POWER has complex instructions,
only a few instructions are complex and they are effectively expanded rather
than microcoded. Calling Power4 & 5 microcoded is like calling x86 RISC!

From: krw
No, "RISC" does not mean no microcode. RISC == simple instructions,
for example, no arithmetic on memory instructions.

From: daytripper
Ok then, name one significant processor today that is totally ucode free...

From: "Wilco Dijkstra"
Every one of the billions of ARM CPUs that are sold every year for example.

From: "Wilco Dijkstra" <[email protected]>
Simple instructions in the architecture implies no microcode in the
implementation.

From: krw
Sorry, but The Power4 and 5 certainly are microcoded.

From: "Wilco Dijkstra"
They most definitely are not. You're confusing the out of order execution
engine
with a micro code engine. These are completely different beasts.

From: "Wilco Dijkstra"
Alpha is an example of a pure RISC that only supports simple instructions.

From: daytripper <[email protected]>
And an example of a microcoded RISC processor.

From: "Wilco Dijkstra"
Troll.

---------------------

(Guy writing again...)

BZZZZ!


Under the "when a person resorts to personal attacks, that means
he is losing the argument on facts and logic" rule, Wilco forfeits.

Game over.

 

[joseph2k]

In that case, yes, some amount of info is stored, however, it is the
minimum required.

My dream PC stores this "ROM" as discrete logic.

What a curious idea. Too bad the inter-chip interconnect time losses wipe
out any possible advantage.

Discrete logic is
faster than ROM.

My dream PC is as hardware, real-time, and digital as possible.

As if anything about a PC other than the power supply and some sensors was
anything else.

In
addition, it uses the least amount of buffering required [hopefully
none]

What are you rambling on about?

and experiences the least amount of latency possible [again,
hopefully none].

Latency is a fact of nature. Interactivity is a design issue, which is
seriously degraded with graphical interfaces. The masses have spoken,
eye-candy is king.

 

[Andrew Reilly]

That is very true but to Radium they are seen as different is some
other way. I think the problem is that he doesn't understand the
technology well enough to be comfortable with the idea that a PROM, a
CPLD, a FPGA and descrete logic that solve a given problem must be
encoding the same information. Exactly how it is encoded will be very
different as you say but it none the less must be encoded.

Having seen Radium go on about sound cards on comp.dsp some time ago, I
think (now) that I understand his point, and it's a subtle one, but it's
actually (I think) becoming a more significant one as the performance
relationship between memory and processors change.

It's the difference between using the 2D video accelerator in your
graphics card to render your desktop icons from SVG, rather than copying
some bitmaps that someone has rendered (once) with PhotoShop.

It's TruType or PostScript fonts, rather than bitmap fonts.

It's on-the-fly synthesis rather than wave-table or sample synthesis.

It's the wheel of reincarnation coming up behind Terje's "all computing
can be viewed as an exercise in caching" aphorism.

Pretty obviously there are serious limits to how far one can "generate on
the fly" and still do anything useful, but I don't think that we've
returned to the limit yet, either.

Cheers,

 

[Radium]

It's on-the-fly synthesis rather than wave-table or sample synthesis.

Exactly.