141–150 of 220 posts
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The governments have to subsidize solar, so it can compete with government subsidized fossil fuels. You may be surprised to learn that global fossil fuel subsidies rose from $4.5 trillion in 2015 to $7 trillion in 2022. https://www.statista.com/chart/31016/volume-of-global-fossil...
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There's a lesson here. Intel basically wanted to get away from x86 because it was licensed to AMD (and Cyrix) due to an earlier (and essentially unlimited) licensing agreement. In the late 90s, the likes of DEC, HP and Sun ruled the server and workstation space. Intel wanted in on this space and didn't want AMD to be able to produce compatible parts so... enter EPIC [1]. The projections (as you point to) were wildly…
Thank you, people usually miss the importance of Banias and Centrino. Banias was the Israeli team asking how do we make an incredibly efficient mobile CPU and the answer was finish your work quickly and go to sleep. In order to finish quickly, you had to be fast and efficient. Someone said well what if we don't actually go to sleep? IIRCC, Core was a combination of the Banias CPU architecture, an evolution of P3, com…
Pentium 4 was heavily marketing driven, to win the Gigahertz war.
Why it took so long?
With the possible exception of darwin, all the major operating systems are fairly careful about maintaining backwards compatibility. They've certainly been making noises about cutting support for a long time, but it's not surprising that they were very deliberate about doing it for real.
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There's a lesson here. Intel basically wanted to get away from x86 because it was licensed to AMD (and Cyrix) due to an earlier (and essentially unlimited) licensing agreement. In the late 90s, the likes of DEC, HP and Sun ruled the server and workstation space. Intel wanted in on this space and didn't want AMD to be able to produce compatible parts so... enter EPIC [1]. The projections (as you point to) were wildly…
Alpha would have been such a better path to follow, and Intel even ended up with a license for it because of Compaq/HP's incompetence.
1. Windows NT, which is the ancestor of modern Windows, was originally released on multiple platforms including Alpha and, I believe, MIPS; and
2. DEC, for awhile at least, had one of the most popular Web search engines: AltaVista. It wasn’t a commercial enterprise. It was mostly a technology demonstration for Alpha. For the time it was pretty good. No one at this time (the 1990s) thought there was a future in search engines. Many (including Yahoo) seemed to think curated directories were the future. Search engines were viewed as a solved problem, except by Larry Page and Sergei Brin who founded Google.
The highly underrated show “Halt and Catch Fire” covers this early era of computing really well and is worth watching.
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In this situation I would assume that the political/internal pressures from the member companies and advisory board were dominating factors as opposed to the forecasters being total dummies. There must have been some reasons why it was not appealing to assume the growth could keep ramping like that. Because it’s an obviously insane forecast after the first few data points are in.
I'd love to hear someone chip in with what it takes to make a solar panel and the rate limiting factors. E.g. if a solar panel factory (simplifying into a single entity) already exists, is there any reason not to run it at 100% production capacity? What consumables are used?
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You seem very insightful on this topic. May I ask your opinion as to why ARM is taking off on the server market?
None of this is my area of expertise. I’m just old enough to have lived through this era and remember what happened. Many people don’t realize ARM can trace its origins back to the BBC Micro. For a variety of reasons it found a niche in low power applications, even 30+ years ago. ARM, the company, simply sells licenses without producing its own silicon. There’s concern now with it going public that it will seek reven…
This makes it sound as if xscale was an alternative platform to ARM. Intel xscale cores implemented the ARMv5 isa.
The worst thing about Itanium is that it killed DEC Alpha, high-performance MIPS and some other arches I keep forgetting about.
In contributing to the death of the Alpha it also ensured the decline of Tru64 Unix and thereby stalled the development of AdvFS, which I definitely mourn.
advfs addvol -> zpool add
advfs advscan -> zpool import
advfs clonefset -> zpool clone
advfs mkfset -> zfs create
advfs rvdump -> zfs send
advfs rvrestore -> zfs receive
advfs showfsets -> zfs get/list
advfs verify -> zpool scrubEarlier quoted context omitted.
numalink, 1.6GB/s in 2003! there's an altix 3000 on ebay that I'm kinda tempted by https://www.ebay.com/itm/174917876903 it only runs like one specific version of suse or red hat
I've always wanted an Indy or an O2,but other than running the demos, I don't know what I'd do with them. Also, high-end kit is also interesting, but again, I kind of want an Altix (or Origin 2000/3000), or .AS/400 or a Tandem Cyclone.. just because it's neat. Do you have anything specific you'd do with an Altix 3000? (I don't mean to sound snooty)
The rackmount Tezros and Origin 350s sound like they belong at the airport.
I really like the idea of VLIW CPUs, it's a shame none of them have worked out. Does anyone know of any other cool more modern CPU designs? Stuff like RISCV is fine but doesn't feel particularly innovative
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There's a lesson here. Intel basically wanted to get away from x86 because it was licensed to AMD (and Cyrix) due to an earlier (and essentially unlimited) licensing agreement. In the late 90s, the likes of DEC, HP and Sun ruled the server and workstation space. Intel wanted in on this space and didn't want AMD to be able to produce compatible parts so... enter EPIC [1]. The projections (as you point to) were wildly…
The lesson here is that AMD should not have been allowed access to Intel's IP, that is what allowed them in first place to undermine Intel's Itanium plans.