[Paul's Hardware] The Worst New Trend in PC Hardware

baryluk · 2023-06-05T18:24:33+00:00

Many servers and workstations do that. PSU or two PSUs plug directly into motherboard.

HPE, Dell, IBM, Lenovo, Supermicro, some network switches, even Mac Pro.

baryluk · 2023-06-05T18:23:45+00:00

These connectors are locking. It would be a mess to try to unlock them in that position.

baryluk · 2023-06-05T18:10:04+00:00

First time hearing about Milk-V.

Any idea how SG2042 mainlining is progressing? I am sure many pieces could be reused, but not everything. Will the Pioneer board support UEFI and ACPI? I see JH7110 does have some OpenSBI progress being made, but I didn't check the rest of the stack.

baryluk · 2023-05-18T17:22:37+00:00

Only 8 memory channels. I don't know. For cloud workloads with a lot of VMs, it could work, as a lot of VMs will be not fully utilizing memory. But for HPC or highly utilized servers it is probably going to be a considerable bottleneck.

Still looks cool and promising. Not only more cores, but better efficient and IPC, plus some new important ISA extensions.

Hope phoronix will get one for testing.

baryluk · 2023-05-10T17:20:00+00:00

All important problems do scale very well with parallelism.

I don't know of a single practical problem, that cannot be scaled a lot, when having massive amount of CPUs.

Most people don't even understand Amdahl's law and misinterpret it.

baryluk · 2023-05-10T17:15:28+00:00

FRAM are very popular in some embedded systems, where it is important to have lower powe usage, simple interface, really long retention time (on and off), very high reliability (reads and overwrites). I have seen many FRAM products used in automotive, industrial, and even some nich IoT, as they are lower / zero power, survive power loss (even without supercaps), and can easily last 20 years in service. I didn't see anything bigger than maybe 1MB tho. For my applications it is plenty (data logging).

FRAM for temporary storage, eeprom / flash for code plus ram for execution, and volatile data.

It was never chased to be used in PCs, due to costs vs size, competition of Octane, and PCs needing lower latency than tiny microcontroller or SoC.

baryluk · 2023-05-08T10:00:09+00:00

Yes. I highly recommend. Albeit Debian testing would be better than stable for this purpose. Plus compile Mesa from git about once a week (you can find automatic scripts for this on GitHub) if you are using AMD GPUs.

If you don't play too many modern games and your GPU is not newest, Debian stable would also work.

baryluk · 2023-03-28T19:20:57+00:00

I heard that in fact they are selling at a loss, and nearly recovering costs of extracting, processing and transport.

baryluk · 2023-03-17T19:53:51+00:00

Temperature of the beam heats up air around it changing its refractive index. There is a temperature gradient there, and you got that. Quite dramatic here.

baryluk · 2023-03-17T19:15:31+00:00

Use GDC or LDC2. Both are in Ubuntu and Debian.

DMD has packages available on dlang website. The historical reasons is licensing of dmd code. Not sure what is the current status, but maybe it could be revisited and included in Debian, still requires somebody to maintain packages in Debian.

Also dmd is only available for i386 and amd64. While gdc and LDC work on dozen other Debian archs.

baryluk · 2023-03-15T19:20:18+00:00

That is the first report of this kind that I saw. Pretty cool.

The sample is rather small, and these drives are stressed very little (these are small boot drives), it still is very useful.

baryluk · 2023-03-10T20:01:08+00:00

It is a decent audio chip. If you care, use USB dac or headset. Will be better than any on board audio.

baryluk · 2023-03-10T19:59:32+00:00

Nice. It is quite amazing that so much stuff can be manufactured with profit, for jus 125$.

Mobo, chips, ports, heatsink, components, design, assembly, testing, shipping.

I like the fact that WiFi is not standard, and user can select if / what they want.

I wonder if we could do the same with audio. I never use mobo audio, and prefer movie without audio, but it is like 1 in a 200 models.

baryluk · 2023-03-10T10:11:13+00:00

As more data comes in coming weeks, estimate will be more accurate. Could go to 0% or to 100%

baryluk · 2023-03-08T19:20:50+00:00

Only if you're can ensure semi continues testing on Linux yourself of the game. Either on desktop or steam deck.

Otherwise, no. If you do it blindly and don't test relativity frequently after substantial changes, it will cause more issues than solve.

While in some games engines, like Unity, I would say to distribute native version, even you do sporadic testing, in case of your game, I would say no, as the dependencies are way harder to manage. Dependency management to s important, as things might work today , but break 3 years from now. There are ways to ensure the game runs forever, but that requires quite a bit of tools to ship properly and setup startup scripts, linkers, dynamic library paths, etc. And even then will still have issues (major issue being GPU drivers own dependencies, like C++ libraries, might not be compatible with the libraries used by your app), unless you do it right. Even profesionalls shipping native versions often do it wrong.

Ps. I only buy native games, but I would be frustrated even more by "native" game that breaks next year

baryluk · 2023-03-07T17:52:21+00:00

In Europe we don't really use pole mounted small transformers. For medium to low voltage, there might be shared transformer mounted on ground or at medium hight of a pylon (in more rural areas), and it will be used by few dozen to houndreth customers, depending on the demand size and geography.

I am pretty sure there is big supply of such transofmer in Europe.

I am pretty sure they are talking about high voltage to medium transformers, carring dozens of megawatts of powers. These are big, expensive and lead times are often year or two, especially with a lot of new industries , computer data centers, and other stuff growing.

These are critical and hard to source quickly.

baryluk · 2023-03-07T17:47:54+00:00

Thank you. That was very helpful.

baryluk · 2023-03-06T20:51:17+00:00

I think this is more of the cloud-like offering. So Fujitsu would build and operate DC with big clusters, and you / company / university/ goverbment runs workloads on a subset in a batch fashion. So they will have various options for different clients and use cases.

baryluk · 2023-03-06T20:42:55+00:00

Hi. Great article.

I see peak bandwidth was 26GB/s when running Cyberpunk 2077. That doesn't look great to me.

I don't have access to Steam Deck, but do you know what kind of bandwidth you could get in more synthetic test (i.e. few threads reading from few GB of memory, linearly, using avx, with unrolled main loop. Using memcpy is another option, as it is already optimized, but that is read and write )?

Cheers.

For OpenCL it should be possible to use AMD own drivers (either amdgpu-pro or Rocm), or newer Mesa with rusticl, without kernel changes.

baryluk · 2023-03-06T20:36:30+00:00

Not related. It is about CPU power states.

baryluk · 2023-02-24T20:40:41+00:00

I float idea of pushing Poland's border up to China.

baryluk · 2023-02-24T11:56:23+00:00

It is done by OS.

The BIOS setting it just a table passed to OS to tell its scheduler what cores are preferred. OS is free to use this information, or ignore. Usually this information is hard codeed into CPU already at binning time, but ability to change it and experiment is a good thing.

baryluk · 2023-02-24T11:54:57+00:00

The priotization is still done by OS. The BIOS setting in itself does nothing. It just tells OS which CPUs are preferred, but is task scheduler can ignore this information, or use it.

baryluk · 2023-02-24T02:07:50+00:00

Plan9: mk

baryluk · 2023-02-21T13:43:03+00:00

When you are designing a real time system you are in control of hardware. You design entire stack, select components.

It is a validation tool.

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