Pentium M to become THE CPU

[keith]

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1) It doesn't appear to have an ability to enforce a minimum off-time. If
you repeatedly turn the compressor back on too soon after it has shut off,
that'll shorten its life. Choosing setpoints that are far-enough apart
might minimize this, but that would result in the temperature not being
as tightly-regulated as it could be.

Get a PIC.

2) It doesn't appear to have a way to slowly ramp the temperature up/down.
If the fridge is at 50 degrees and you want it to go up to 70 for a
diacetyl rest and then down to 35 for lagering, you want those
temperature changes to be made slowly (at a rate of maybe 1 degree per
hour).

Get a PIC.

These are things for which some sort of microprocessor control is needed. A
6502 might be overkill, but it's what I know, so there's less time getting
up to speed with an unfamiliar instruction set. I'm currently using DS18B20
sensors controlled by Apple IIs through a little bit of custom hardware, so
I already have software for the 6502 that talks to 1-Wire devices. Porting
that to another 6502-based machine would take minimal effort.

Get a PIC, though I understand. I'd use an 8051. ;-)

(If anyone's interested, the 1-Wire software is the first link at
http://alfter.us/a2soft.shtml.)

I also have the IIs graphing the temperature for the past ~4 hours; this
functionality would most likely go away, as it's (more or less) a curiosity
that was relatively easy to implement.

Trivial, though I'd use X10 for the power control.

 

[Zak]

And you can heat your house in the winter. The P-M is really low power
compared to Opteron,

The strange thing is that a Turion is 'just' a tuned Opteron with the
process shifted for low power. Turion still uses more power, but from
what I've seen the run time for otherwise identical laptops differs by
10% with P-M.

The difference in CPU power is thus greater - OTOH it is a system that
I'm using so 10% it is.


Thomas

 

[Andi Kleen]

- At least for Windows Server 2003, there's no API to allocate processor local
memory.

I don't know the details of Windows' NUMA support, but I would assume
it is just default for all allocations.

And for other systems you'd have to use such an API instead of stupid
malloc()ing.

At least on Linux malloc with large enough allocations will normally get local
memory.

-Andi

 

[Ketil Malde]

Perhaps you haven't been paying attention recently: AMD just
introduced a 2.4 GHz mobile chip with a 35W power envelope

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is intended to fit into a standard
(socket 939) motherboard¹? So if there is a demand for quiet PCs (in
addition to laptops), the market should be ready.

-k

¹ Of course, it'll be one of those with a big heatsink and fan on the
chipset, and a separate PSU for the two graphics cards

 

[Oliver S.]

And for other systems you'd have to use such an API instead of stupid

At least on Linux malloc with large enough allocations will normally
get local memory.

And what if a thread is migrated to another CPU? How can the OS estimate
what's more important: the cache working-set or the memory-distance?

 

[Bill Sommerfeld]

Even the upcoming dual-core incarnation of the Pentium-M won't
be capable of x86-64 and it seems that this version even miss VT
technology; but both are not strong arguments for Notebook-systems.

On the latter point, I know of a bunch of people using virtualization
technologies on their notebooks (vmware, xen, user-mode linux, etc.,)
because it means they only have to carry one computer around and it
matters less which one it is.

and developers are increasingly using portable systems.

maybe I just have lots of weird friends.

- Bill

 

[Bill Todd]

And what if a thread is migrated to another CPU? How can the OS estimate
what's more important: the cache working-set or the memory-distance?

That's one of the things that the ability to set hard per-thread
processor affinity (to supplement the default soft affinity) is for -
features supported in Win2K if not earlier.

- bill

 

[Scott Alfter]

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Get a PIC.


Get a PIC.

I already have the tools and the know-how (acquired over the past 20 years)
to code for the 6502. I know squat about PICs, and don't have any
assemblers and/or compilers for them.

_/_
/ v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( http://alfter.us/ Top-posting!
\_^_/ rm -rf /bin/laden >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

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[keith]

That's one of the things that the ability to set hard per-thread
processor affinity (to supplement the default soft affinity) is for -
features supported in Win2K if not earlier.

Or page it to the other processor (perhaps something inbetween).
Processor affinity issues have been dealt with for many years. There
really shouldn't be too much new here, other than perhaps the penalty for
not doing it right.

 

[keith]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is intended to fit into a standard
(socket 939) motherboard¹? So if there is a demand for quiet PCs (in
addition to laptops), the market should be ready.

I think there is a demand, but I'm not sure the market (infrastructure) is
ready.

-k

¹ Of course, it'll be one of those with a big heatsink and fan on the
chipset, and a separate PSU for the two graphics cards

;-)

 

[keith]

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I already have the tools and the know-how (acquired over the past 20 years)
to code for the 6502. I know squat about PICs, and don't have any
assemblers and/or compilers for them.

Look for 'em. They're free. Disclaimer: I've never done PICs either
but have done several 8051 designs. If I had to do some of them again, it
would be a PIC. 6502? You *must* be kidding!

 

[Alex Gibson]

Look for 'em. They're free. Disclaimer: I've never done PICs either
but have done several 8051 designs. If I had to do some of them again, it
would be a PIC. 6502? You *must* be kidding!

Why a pic ?, the new Philips lpc21xx series are around the same price
more features , 16/32 bit, , more processing power etc plus armgcc

Philips just announced the lpc2101, 2102 and 2103 at US$1.5 in large
quantity. 70MHz , 2K ram 8k flash, 6 pwm, 8x 10bit adc, 2 usart , 2x i2c
serial boot loader
http://www.semiconductors.philips.com/news/content/file_1188.html

http://www.standardics.philips.com/products/lpc2000/new/~LPC2101/

For a cross platform tools and ide use armgcc + eclipse
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/ARM/ARM_Cross_Development_with_Eclipse.pdf
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/ARM/sample_programs.zip

or
http://www.newmicros.com/download/appnotes/ARM/TiniARM_Dev_Eclipse.pdf
http://www.newmicros.com/store/product_manual/GNUARM/GNUfiles.zip

http://www.hitex.co.uk/arm/lpc2000book/index.html

Or one of the many other arm7 chips
Sam7 from Atmel
ST STR711
Oki ML67Q5003
Aduc7020 from Analog devices (1Msps adc)

One of new micros tini arm or plug an arm modules
http://www.newmicros.com/cgi-bin/store/order.cgi?form=prod&cat=tiniarm
http://www.newmicros.com/cgi-bin/store/order.cgi?form=prod&cat=plugarm

Or one of the many arm7 boards available from Olimex
(easier to buy from Sparkfun)
<http://www.sparkfun.com/shop/index....0&cat=73&keywords=&match_criteria=&searchCat=>

Or any of the many other arm7 boards

www.lpctools.com
http://www.armkits.com/Product/productmain.asp
http://www.micronix.ca/sbc213x_main_new.htm

Alex

 

[keith]

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 15:07:57 +1000, Alex Gibson wrote:

Why a pic ?, the new Philips lpc21xx series are around the same price
more features , 16/32 bit, , more processing power etc plus armgcc

Whatever. Were I designing a new application I'd likely look at them. I
wouldn't even consider a 6502.

 

[Oliver S.]

Heeeeey, aren't you able to quote properly?

That's really

ANNOYING !

 

[Oliver S.]

That's one of the things that the ability to set hard per-thread processor

affinity (to supplement the default soft affinity) is for - features supported
in Win2K if not earlier.

Yes, of course, but in most casess this isn't done.
And there's a cooler API like SetThreadAffinityMask: SetThreadIdealProcessor()!

 

[Jason Ozolins]

On the latter point, I know of a bunch of people using virtualization
technologies on their notebooks (vmware, xen, user-mode linux, etc.,)
because it means they only have to carry one computer around and it
matters less which one it is.

and developers are increasingly using portable systems.

maybe I just have lots of weird friends.

Most programmers I know have a laptop. Lots of the Sun OS folks who are
blogging have mentioned their use of laptops too. And any developer would
find some use in good virtualization support... but this is probably a small
fraction of the people buying laptops.

-Jason =:^(

 

[Jens Meyer]

Processor affinity issues have been dealt with for many years.

If you have a large number of threads and don't use processor-affinity,
thread-migration is very frequent and degrades the performance. So the
usual software that doesn't deal with hard affinities (or weak affinities
like with the SetIdealProcessor-API of Win32/64) will have problems with
that.

 

[Alex Gibson]

Heeeeey, aren't you able to quote properly?

That's really

ANNOYING !

What is annoying ?
From the previous post I only cut out the pgp junk.
Look at the other previous posts.

The rest was relevant especially the controller for beer fridge part.

Alex

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jan_Vorbr=FCggen?=]

And for other systems you'd have to use such an API instead of stupid

malloc()ing.

- What does malloc() have to do with it? sbrk(), yes, but not malloc().

- The implementations I have seen tell the OS to (preferentially) allocate
physical memory on the local node (which can have more than one processor
or memory unit). Memory allocation syscalls itself are unaffected. Indeed,
such an allocation hint will usually be set at process creation.

- A thread will usually get migrated from one CPU to another sooner or
later (if it hasn't fixed CPU-affinity)

That, of course, cannot be allowed to happen, otherwise such a memory
allocation optimization makes little sense.

- Memory allocated by one thread might be used more by another thread
running on another CPU.

That's why you should have gang scheduling available as well. Nonetheless,
even without it, one thread might be the major use of the data, and it can
make sense to put the data as near to it as possible.

Jan

 

[dannysdailys]

Nathan Bateswrote
Pentium M has all the right ingredients for total world domination

low power consumption, short pipeline stages, hi-performance

Pentium M will kill its brother Pentium 4 and its bastard cousi
Athlon
PowerPC is a Neanderthal that's nearing its end (Jobs figured tha
out)
But ARM will survive due to its ultra-low power consumption an
elegance

Proof of the pudding from my post on page 3

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123043,tk,dn101705X,00.as

And, it's only just begun..