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barsoap

@ barsoap @lemm.ee

Posts
9
Comments
743
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • T-Mobile, AT&T oppose unlocking rule, claim locked phones are good for users

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  • Newsflash: T-Mobile is a big provider. They took some standard European practices, also technology, and then pretended to be a small scrappy startup in the US until they had enough of a customer base to return to their usual monopolistic ways.

    The only thing that keeps them half-way in check over here is forced unbundling: If you have network infrastructure you need to let other providers use it, at regulated prices. Which is really necessary as they inherited every single landline in the country from the old state monopoly.

    Be glad that the postal service got broken up into telecoms, postal/parcel and banking before getting privatised if it hadn't it would be an absolute scourge on the world. Imagine them cross-financing such market takeovers with the additional resources from the largest logistics company in the world (DHL). Banking sector is less impressive right now Deutsche Bank doesn't know what to do with it. I have no idea why they even bother, they don't care about end-consumer banking there's no money in that.

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

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  • Great! Now please explain how opcodes are expressions. Also, what processor instruction a cast from one pointer type to another pointer type corresponds to.

    You are way out of your depth here. Have you even implemented a compiler.

    EDIT:

    You don’t even have a clue, you are just talking trash.

    In assembly you don’t generally talk about pointers, but address modes. Like register, immediate or memory (indirect).

    Have you ever actually been programming any serious assembly? Because you sure don’t sound like it.

    Oh cute edit to make to make my response look bad retroactively.

    But as you wanted to get pedantic: A pointer is a value which is intended to be dereferenced, that (hopefully) corresponds to a valid memory address. "address", "pointer", "reference", it's a matter of taste which one you use. It exists "in assembly" just as "an index" exists in C: Not because it's a language feature, but because it's a concept you use when writing in the language. And yes I speak pretty fluent x86, at least the non-SIMD part. Did I mention that I was there, at ground zero "why is is thing not compiling in 64 bit mode" times, fixing code?

    Now, back to my question:

    what processor instruction does a cast from one pointer type to another pointer type corresponds to.

    Figuring out the answer to that will tell you everything you need to know about where you went wrong. Where you went from talking about actual concepts to arguing semantics.

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

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  • I'm sorry are we somehow assuming floating-point pointers, now, of course you need to convert there. "casting" is a specific thing you do in C which may or may not involve conversion of actual data. Processors don't speak C. Processors don't have a type system.

    You can use 32-bit pointers in x86_64 long mode, no issue. You don't even need to bit-fiddle: mov rax, [esi] is perfectly legal. Opcode 0x67488B06. Dereferencing rsi would be 0x488B06.

  • What are some mind blowing Rust tricks?

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  • Now that you mention it yes Lua is probably the one that I remember. It's an incredibly well-designed language from start to finish but also culturally an odd-ball. .. isn't even the biggest offender: Their indices start at 1. Haskell accosts you with zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms but at least [1,2,3] !! 1 is 2.

  • What are some mind blowing Rust tricks?

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  • I try not to and if I have to I'd use string interpolation. I'm not even sure whether you're pulling my leg right know, I literally don't remember whether they have a string append operator.

    Like 99.999% of the sh I ever wrote was in Makefiles and short wrapper scripts which could just as well be aliases. No argument handling past $@, no nothing the language is just too fickle for me to bother dealing with. The likes of zsh are make-up on a pig, I think I had a quick run-in with fish but never really got the hang. Nushell is different, it's actually bold enough in its changes to get rid of all the crufty nonsense.

  • Literally Nineteen Eighty-Four

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  • 1/2 pound (225 g)

    What kind of insanity is this a pound is 500g.

    2 cups (390 g) rice

    Your cups weigh 195g a piece? Reasonable for stoneware, I guess. But why are you telling me and what does it have to do with the mass of rice?

  • Literally Nineteen Eighty-Four

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  • The German standard is to write out everything up to 12 and as English also doesn't say one-teen and two-teen that's how I always did it. (why not tenty-one btw? be consistent your numbers are all weird)

  • Does crates.io have a backup plan?

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  • So can any TLD holder. The rules for .org might change to disallow individuals. .com might outlaw non-profits. .net might get restricted to ISPs. There is a small, but existent, chance that all the oxygen molecules in the room I'm in are going to decide that they'll huddle up in some corner, leaving me to suffocate. I refuse to worry about it.

    If you want to be paranoid like that you can send the rust foundation some money and tell them to spend it on the .rust and .ferris gTLDs.

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

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  • That the CPU should be called by a single aspect they can’t actually handle!!! That’s moronic.

    People literally use the word "literally" to mean figuratively. It doesn't make any sense. One might even call it moronic.

    But it's the way it's done. Deal with it.

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

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    1. The whole article overall lacks sources.
    2. That section is completely unsourced.
    3. It doesn't say what you think it says.

    You were arguing the definition of "X-bit CPU". We're not talking about "X-bit ALU". It's also not up to contention that "A 64-bit integer is 64 bit wide". So, to the statement:

    Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size.

    This does not say which of "processor register, address buses, or data buses" applies to CPU and which to ALU.

    Obviously 64 bits means registers are 64 bit, the addresses are therefore also 64 bit,

    Having 64 bit registers doesn't necessitate that you have 64 bit addresses. It's common, incredibly common, for the integer registers to match the pointer width but there's no hard requirement in theory or practice. It's about as arbitrary a rule as "Instruction length must be wider than the register size", so that immediate constants fit into the instruction stream, makes sense doesn't it... and then along come RISC architectures and split load immediate instructions into two.

    otherwise it would require type casting every time you need to make calculations on them

    Processors don't typecast. Please stop talking.

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

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  • As I stated it’s MORE complex today, not less, as the downvoters of my posts seem to refuse to acknowledge.

    The reason you're getting downvoted is because you're saying that "64-bit CPU" means something different than is universally acknowledged that it means. It means pointer width.

    Yes, other numbers are important. Yes, other numbers can be listed in places. No, it's not what people mean when they say "X-bit CPU".

    claiming that new CPU architectures haven’t increased in bit width for 30 years is simply naive and false, because they have in many more significant ways than the base instruction set.

    RV128 exists. It refers to pointer width. Crays existed, by your account they were gazillion-bit machines because they had quite chunky vector lengths. Your Ryzen does not have a larger "databus" than a Cray1 which had 4096 bit (you read that right) vector registers. They were never called 4096 bit machines, they Cray1 has a 64-bit architecture because that's the pointer width.

    Yes, the terminology differs when it comes to 8 vs. 16-bit microcontrollers. But just because data bus is that important there (and 8-bit pointers don't make any practical sense) doesn't mean that anyone is calling a Cray a 4096 bit architecture. You might call them 4096 bit vector machines, and you're free to call anything with AVX2 a 256-bit SIMD machine (though you might actually be looking at 2x 128-bit ALUs), but neither makes them 64-bit architectures. Why? Because language is meant for communication and you don't get to have your own private definition of terms: Unless otherwise specified, the number stated is the number of bits in a pointer.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • People who don't understand bees and think that the queen is ruling the hive -- if the queen can't swarm then they're going to dispose of her and raise a new one. All you're doing is weakening the hive without actually preventing it from swarming. You might even kill it off.

    You let them swarm, you let them get their rocks on, and you also have a nice property ready for them to settle back into.

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

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  • The Intel 80386DX did NOT have any 80 bit instructions at all, the built in math co-processor came with i486.

    You're right, I misremembered.

    And in that regard, the Databus is a very significant part, that directly influence the speed and number of clocks of almost everything the CPU does.

    For those old processors, yes, that's why the 6502 was 8-bit, for modern processors, though? You don't even see it listed on spec sheets. Instead, for the external stuff, you see number of memory controllers and PCIe lanes, while everything internal gets mushed up in IPC. "It's wide enough to not stall the pipeline what more do you want" kind of attitude.

    Go look at anything post-2000: 64 bit means that pointers take up 64 bits. 32 bits means that pointers take up 32 bits. 8-bit and 16-bit are completely relegated to microcontrollers, I think keeping the data bus terminology, and soonish they're going to be gone because everything at that scale will be RISC-V, where "RV32I" means... pointers. So does "RV64I" and "RV128I". RV16E was proposed as an April Fool's joke and it's not completely out of the question that it'll happen. In any case there won't be RV8 because CPUs with an 8-bit address bus are pointlessly small, and "the number refers to pointer width" is the terminology of

    <currentyear>

    . An RV16 CPU might have a 16 bit data bus, it might have an 8 bit data bus, heck it might have a 256bit data bus because it's actually a DSP and has vector instructions. Sounds like a rare beast but not entirely nonsensical.

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

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  • There's no non-reference designs of Radeon PROs, I think. Instincts, even less. If the ranges bleed into each other they might actually sell reference designs down into the gamer mid-range but I admit that I'm hand-waving. But if, as a very enthusiastic enthusiast, you're buying something above the intended high-end gaming point and well into the pro region it's probably going to be a reference design.

    And as a side note finally they're selling CPUs boxed but without fan.

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

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  • I wonder, what is easier: Convincing data centre operators to not worry about the power draw and airflow impact of those LEDs on the fans, or convincing gamers that LEDs don't make things faster?

    Maybe a bold strategy is in order: Buy cooling assemblies exclusively from Noctua, and exclusively in beige/brown.

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

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  • Kodak isn't dead they're just not dominating the imagining industry any more. They even multiplied, there's now Kodak Alaris in addition to the original Kodak.

    Between them they still are dominating analogue film which still has its uses and it could even be said that if they hadn't tried to get into digital they might've averted bankruptcy.

    There's also horse breeders around which survived the invention of the automobile, and probably also a couple that didn't because their investments into car manufacturing didn't pan out. Sometimes it's best to stick to what you know while accepting that the market will shrink. Last year they raised prices for ordinary photography film because they can't keep up with demand, their left-over factories are running 24/7.

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

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  • And modern X86 chips are in fact NOT 64 bit anymore, but hybrids that handle tasks with 256 bits routinely, and some even with 512 bits, with instruction extensions that have become standard on both Intel and AMD

    On a note of technical correctness: That's not what the bitwidth of a CPU is about.

    By your account a 386DX would be an 80-bit CPU because it could handle 80-bit floats natively, and the MOS6502 (of C64 fame) a 16-bit processor because it could add two 16-bit integers. Or maybe 32 bits because it could multiply two 16-bit numbers into a 32-bit result?

    In reality the MOS6502 is considered an 8-bit CPU, and the 386 a 32-bit one. The "why" gets more complicated, though: The 6502 had a 16 bit address bus and 8 bit data bus, the 368DX a 32 bit address and data bus, the 368SX a 32 bit address bus and 16 bit external data bus.

    Or, differently put: Somewhere around the time of the fall of the 8 bit home computer the common understanding of "x-bit CPU" switched from data bus width to address bus width.

    ...as, not to make this too easy, understood by the instruction set, not the CPU itself: Modern 64 bit processors use pointers which are 64 bit wide, but their address buses usually are narrower. x86_64 only requires 48 bits to be actually usable, the left-over bits are required to be either all ones or all zeroes (enforced by hardware to keep people from bit-hacking and causing forwards compatibility issues, 1/0 IIRC distinguishes between user vs. kernel memory mappings it's been a while since I read the architecture manual). Addressable physical memory might even be lower, again IIRC. 248B are 256TiB no desktop system can fit that much, and I doubt the processors in there could address it.

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

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  • I expect them to merge enthusiast into the pro segment: It doesn't make sense for them to have large RDNA cards because there's too few customers just as it doesn't make sense for them to make small CDNA cards but in the future there's only going to be UDNA and the high end of gaming and the low end of professional will overlap.

    I very much doubt they're going to do compute-only cards as then you're losing sales to people wanting a (maybe overly beefy) CAD or Blender or whatever workstation, just to save on some DP connectors. Segmenting the market only makes sense when you're a (quasi-) monopolist and want to abuse that situation, that is, if you're nvidia.

  • FCC mandates all mobile phones in the US to be compatible with hearing aids

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  • I've had phones newer than the first RAZR that didn't have bluetooth but it's been a while and bluetooth is incredibly cheap -- in fact it probably comes for free with the GSM module, just needs the right software the hardware is already capable of doing it. Separate bluetooth modules (ESP32) cost what 1.30, antenna, maybe ten cents.