61–69 of 69 posts
That website is a trainwreck on mobile firefox. Two screen-covering popups and wrong language detection.
Agreed. They’ve disabled reader mode, too. Took one look at that mess and decided I didn’t care enough to even try tapping the deliberately minuscule X buttons. I’m at the point where I am so done with disrespectful websites that I’m willing to forgo information I’d otherwise care about just so I don’t have to engage with them.
Using PPC in a laptop form factor is a really confusing choice, given that Apple abandoned PPC [1] in their laptops for Intel because they judged that there was no way that IBM was ever going to come out with a PPC chip that was ever going to be as power efficient as the comparable Intel parts. Their "Why PPC" page [2] makes no mention of power or thermal efficiency, and just states that PowerPC is better because the…
What's even more confusing is their choice of parts. The NXP QorIQ line is designed for use in networking hardware, not in mobile devices -- it has limited power management functionality, and, as best I was able to tell when I looked into this last year [2], has idle power consumption somewhere around 7W, ramping up to 20W under load. It's not especially fast, either -- it's only got four cores at 1.8 GHz. Most new c…
That website is a trainwreck on mobile firefox. Two screen-covering popups and wrong language detection.
I agree it's horrible with scripts enabled though!
Using PPC in a laptop form factor is a really confusing choice, given that Apple abandoned PPC [1] in their laptops for Intel because they judged that there was no way that IBM was ever going to come out with a PPC chip that was ever going to be as power efficient as the comparable Intel parts. Their "Why PPC" page [2] makes no mention of power or thermal efficiency, and just states that PowerPC is better because the…
I am surprised this is the most upvoted comments. Energy efficiency of a chip has relative little if not close to zero relation to the choice of ISA in PC usage. Apple moved to Intel because of Fabs and uArch design choices.
Both Pentium 4 and Pentium M are x86? What has the ISA got to do with it? Seriously? Intel had the Fab advantage at the time, and IBM didn't want to design Laptop based computer chips. It was as simple as that. It has nothing to do with PowerPC incapable of making energy efficient chip.
Using PPC in a laptop form factor is a really confusing choice, given that Apple abandoned PPC [1] in their laptops for Intel because they judged that there was no way that IBM was ever going to come out with a PPC chip that was ever going to be as power efficient as the comparable Intel parts. Their "Why PPC" page [2] makes no mention of power or thermal efficiency, and just states that PowerPC is better because the…
I hope it's not big endian. A lot of modern software now just expects everything to be little endian, and won't work properly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the open/libre/trustworthy potential of PPC and Power products compare with RISC-V? Current, and near future? This is something I've been wondering. It's started looking like there will be a lot more hardware options based on RISC-V. Thus far, PPC/Power has had better libre options due to: https://www.raptorcs.com/ I hope there will be healthy competition from open/libre/trustworthy and performant RISC-V boa…
Unfortunately with POWER10, a couple of blobs are required, so Raptor are sticking to the older POWER9 for now.
I would be happy with an affordable Power10 workstation. I want that more than ARM or RISCV. Raptor starts at around $3800 and goes way up. Been dreaming about one of those for a long time. My workstation now costs about $16.000 (And they dont feature the Power10 yet)
BTW what do you do on a workstation this large? Mechanical / electronic CAD and modeling? Video / animation? Computer chemistry?
I do photography, video editing, video conversion on the personal side and research into distributed and parallel execution for a programming language I am working on at work.
I have a lot of VMs running at the same time, compiling the programming language is time consuming.
I have also made some hacky alterations to the Linux kernel so I get to compile that one a lot too.