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24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

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Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#221
post #181

This is one of the primary resaons I ditched Windows for Macos. The multitasking on Windows is ridiculously bad. Also, applications that freeze and can't be killed/restarted are simply part of life on Windows. Add to all that, Window slows down over time - again, the periodic reformat and rebuild is part of life on Windows. After I switched to Mac I didn't need to rebuild the operating system essentially ever. Also,…

This is a very outdated take on windows. I’m not sure what “multitasking is bad” means, but I do a heck of a lot of multitasking on windows every day with resource intensive developer tools with no problem, and have been doing so for over a decade. Apps can be killed via task manager without doing anything special. You might run into an occasional rare bug where explorer freezes so you can’t open task manager, but I…

Same experience here. I work my machine hard. It runs 24x7, hosts many sites, databases, Plex, and I do some pretty heavy development work on it daily. It pretty much "just works". The last time I had to routinely reinstall Windows was Windows XP. Ever since Windows 7 driver stability is significantly better. Despite all the bad press, the Windows 11 upgrade was smooth for me. Yes, the OS has some annoying features, but all in all it's been remarkably stable.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#222
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like this would be classic Apple territory, to one up their competitors via their unique vertically integrated position.

Yes it is. I’ve heard from Hackintosh Overclocker types that Apples ACPI[1] tables are the best and most of the PC motherboard manufacturers are compete garbage. Including WTF how does this hardware even function moments. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI

I assume things are better these days, but back in 2005 the thing that lead me to switch to mac was seeing a friend with a powerbook which had a sleep mode that actually worked.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#223
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even by mid-80s, if you used the naive serial routines built into the Apple IIe you couldn't do 1200bps- 300bps worked. Professional terminal programs used interrupt and buffers to capture incoming bytes while the screen scrolled ( https://sites.google.com/site/drjohnbmatthews/apple2/ssc?pli... ). At least that's what the author of ProTERM told me when I was a kid and I asked how it worked. It sounded pretty exotic a…

Yup, ISRs are the solution for 6800 and 6502 chips. Data I/O's LogicPak (powered by a 6502) used polling, and would now and then lose data because of that. I advised the engineer working on it to just write an ISR. Months went by, while he was convinced he could make the polling work. Finally, the manager dropped by and asked if I could just fix it. In a couple hours had it fixed with an ISR. No more problems.

The Amiga's built in serial port was particularly atrocious as the hardware could only buffer 1 character at a time. This meant that it did not work particularly well at baud rates above 9600. Combined with the CPU being starved from accessing RAM when running in hires 16 colour modes (used when emulating ANSI "graphics" common at BBSes back then), this made it rather unpleasant as a terminal emulator.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#224
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to sort by name in task manager and wait as it locks up for seconds.

I just did and it was instantaneous. How many tasks are you running?

I'll have to check when I get home this weekend. Can't be that many. Biggest thing would be my 50 chrome tabs :)

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#225
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, ISRs are the solution for 6800 and 6502 chips. Data I/O's LogicPak (powered by a 6502) used polling, and would now and then lose data because of that. I advised the engineer working on it to just write an ISR. Months went by, while he was convinced he could make the polling work. Finally, the manager dropped by and asked if I could just fix it. In a couple hours had it fixed with an ISR. No more problems.

The Amiga's built in serial port was particularly atrocious as the hardware could only buffer 1 character at a time. This meant that it did not work particularly well at baud rates above 9600. Combined with the CPU being starved from accessing RAM when running in hires 16 colour modes (used when emulating ANSI "graphics" common at BBSes back then), this made it rather unpleasant as a terminal emulator.

The Amiga supported both chip and fast RAM, precisely to solve the problem you're talking about. What you mention here was at most an issue with your particular machine, not a limit of the platform itself.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#226

I hold out forlorn hope that someday my modern workstation will achieve the responsiveness and fast boot times of my Commodore 128. Not joking in the least.

Every parts of modern computer system introduce unavoidable latency: monitor has ~50ms latency, bluetooth keyboard has ~70ms latency. Even the desktop compositor has latency (~10ms). Then you have another latency in the application layer, typically the slow text rendering stacks like GDI or Cairo (~50ms). It's basically impossible to escape them in a modern system these days.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the biggest reason that I won’t get a Framework today. Give me a Ryzen with 8+ cores, 32GB DDR5, hopefully two m.2 slots, a full-size HDMI and USB-A port(s), 99wh battery because of TSA security theater, dedicated graphics, and some real heat sinks that can handle 200w+ so it doesn’t have to run the fans constantly or cook the touchpad. A 4:3 OLED with at least 4K resolution and 120hz refresh would be perfect…

What are you talking about, it's not rare at all. My desktop is exactly like that.

Your desktop has a 99wh battery and you carry it with you on the plane?

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#228

In the follow-up blog post ( https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/what-is-windows... ) he uses a sampler to try to find the bottleneck by looking at CPU instructions, but concludes: > But the main thing I always realize when using this technique is that modern CPUs are weird and confusing. Because CPUs are massively out-of-order and super-scalar it is not at all clear what it means for a sampling interrupt to…

It was Travis Downs: https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2019/08/20/interrupts.htm...

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#229
post #96
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GUI is still essentially single-threaded. Only BeOS with its fully parallel UI had it right.

IRIX remained quite responsive no matter how much I threw at it.

IRIX was remarkable for its performance, and not just in graphics.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse (2017)

#230
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm writing this on an old i3 and it feels perfectly fine. It would probably take days to compile a large project like Chrome or LibreOffice, but, as long as I run the make under a nice, I can continue using the computer and the only sign something big is happening will be the CPU fan kicking in.

> as long as I run the make under a nice Regular users don't understand CPU quotas. It should be done by default. The current behavior on Windows/Mac/Linux of allowing a program to make the machine uncontrollable is poor.

This will probably change as we get more cores and performance/efficiency ones. Macs already run a lot of the low-priority tasks on their slow cores leaving the fast ones available for interactive activities.

I don't disagree on the current approach though. If I start a, say, long build job from a terminal window, I have control over the resources it can take. If, OTOH, I start a program from the GUI, it's reasonable to assume I want it to have full control, at least while it has the focus.

Now, letting the GUI dynamically renice non-focused processes would be very nice.

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