General Computer Thread

[Marc]

I thought Dell would be sneaky SOBs and have some part of the OS tied to hardware like a TPM module or something.

why is that Dell be sneaking?

It's what many of them OEM manufactures do - they put a code into the bios which make it much easier to deal with than having to worry about product keys and product activation.

After its a licence condition from Microsoft that the version is only supposed to go the computer its sold with and they are simply implementing a mechanism to ensure they don't loose access to the Microsoft products by breaching their license conditions.

Secondly given a TPM is extra cost and generally only used in business environments and would require extra configuration (for example they have to be activated in the BIOS) it doesn't make sense to use it to store information that would lock and OEM copy of Windows to a computer when mass producing them and dumping install images on to them

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

why is that Dell be sneaking?

It's what many of them OEM manufactures do - they put a code into the bios which make it much easier to deal with than having to worry about product keys and product activation.

After its a licence condition from Microsoft that the version is only supposed to go the computer its sold with and they are simply implementing a mechanism to ensure they don't loose access to the Microsoft products by breaching their license conditions.

Secondly given a TPM is extra cost and generally only used in business environments and would require extra configuration (for example they have to be activated in the BIOS) it doesn't make sense to use it to store information that would lock and OEM copy of Windows to a computer when mass producing them and dumping install images on to them

Oh no I meant as in doing that so that OS is tied to only that hardware and any installs of other OS are blocked physically.

 

[Santaman]

why is that Dell be sneaking?

It's what many of them OEM manufactures do - they put a code into the bios which make it much easier to deal with than having to worry about product keys and product activation.

After its a licence condition from Microsoft that the version is only supposed to go the computer its sold with and they are simply implementing a mechanism to ensure they don't loose access to the Microsoft products by breaching their license conditions.

Yup but this is flawed though, you can actually put that Identifier code into most non Dell board's BIOS which will then identify a non Dell machine as a Dell..

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Well today was the day, new CPU arrived and that was fun. The heatsink I bought was being a PITA to remove but I got it off and the new CPU is in place and while I was at it I changed out my rear exhaust fan and now my PC is running a lot quieter then before.

Oh and heatsink goop is terrible to get on your hands. But don't get it on clothes. I just did and I think I ruined a nice tee.

Instead of using the stock standard AMD heatsink I am using a Deep Cool Gammaxx 300 which is a vertical design with heat pipes and a 120 mm fan on the front pulling air through the front and out the rear. This particular one works even better then the stock one I had been using. Anyway everything seems to be working. Will have to try some games tonight to see how they perform, as my old one as you all know was the FX 4300 this one is the FX 6300 so we shall see how we go.

I'm so thrilled with the lack of noise after fitting the new fan. My temps while on here doing internet stuff are really nice 11 degrees C for my CPU and 21 for my GPU. that seems to max out at 59 when gaming.

Also what's the meaning of logical cores and physical cores?

 

[Santaman]

That is scheduler mumbo jumbo because M$ sucks, when Bulldozer came out M$ couldn't handle the core/module count so to the OS there are only logical cores, logical cores are cores added when your chip can do Simultanious Multi Threading, so the ability to run more than one thread per processor core, one example is Intel's "Hyperthreading"
Your chip has six full physical cores in three modules, it has six full Arithmetic Logic Units and also six full Floating Point Units when the FPU's are running in 128 bit mode, in 256 bit mode the FPU's are tied together so you get 6 ALU's and 3 FPU's to your disposal.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

That is scheduler mumbo jumbo because M$ sucks, when Bulldozer came out M$ couldn't handle the core/module count so to the OS there are only logical cores, logical cores are cores added when your chip can do Simultanious Multi Threading, so the ability to run more than one thread per processor core, one example is Intel's "Hyperthreading"
Your chip has six full physical cores in three modules, it has six full Arithmetic Logic Units and also six full Floating Point Units when the FPU's are running in 128 bit mode, in 256 bit mode the FPU's are tied together so you get 6 ALU's and 3 FPU's to your disposal.

Thank you.

 

[Santaman]

The update to Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" has arrived, installed and updated it to the last kernel and other stuff and so far it seems to run quite well, the main machine is quite modern so I'll try it on an older Phenom II machine as well and see how it behaves there.

 

[Marc]

Review of the AMD Epyc vs the new Skylake-SP (Xeons).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade

They are looking at the higher end models.

The AMD's no slouch but can't out perform then intel chips (for example loses on singled threaded operations due to the Intel Chip's higher clock speed) but on a price/performance basis they are going to give Intel a hard time.

 

[Santaman]

For such a new architecture, first time they used SMT and the whole backbone design of mainboard, power efficiency etc I would say that AMD has done something really impressive, I suspect that as the platform matures it will improve in performance, and indeed price/performance is very sharp.

 

[Marc]

For such a new architecture, first time they used SMT and the whole backbone design of mainboard, power efficiency etc I would say that AMD has done something really impressive, I suspect that as the platform matures it will improve in performance, and indeed price/performance is very sharp.

my current server (Xeon E3v2() is starting to get a big long in the tooth. If I can beg/borrow/steal about $2K i'd love to build a new server with Epyc 16c/32t single socket and min 64GB and replace some of the spnning rust at the same time.

 

[Santaman]

My only real server is a really old IBM Netfinity 3000 with a Pentium III 650 128Mb RAM and a Quantum Viking II 4.5Gb SCSI drive, it only runs Win2K or Xubuntu 6.06 LTS every other OS gets eaten/destroyed, it even killed Puppy Linux..

Of course I would love to be able to play a bit with the top of the line single socket Epyc, as for drives hmm, that new Intel 3D-Xpoint stuff sounds interesting, as for drives, I do still rely on spinning glass platters covered in rust dust... SSD's somehow don't appeal to me since they keep getting slower and less reliable with every generation, yes the storage capacity goes up but everything else doesn't improve..
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/toshiba-claims-1000-write-cycles-for-3d-qlc-nand.html

More stuff crammed into less cells sounds like a bad idea..

 

[Qonundrum]

Review of the AMD Epyc vs the new Skylake-SP (Xeons).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade

They are looking at the higher end models.

The AMD's no slouch but can't out perform then intel chips (for example loses on singled threaded operations due to the Intel Chip's higher clock speed) but on a price/performance basis they are going to give Intel a hard time.

A chip's clock speed doesn't really say many instructions can be carried out per clock cycle - wouldn't that make more sense? (almost like the RISC vs CISC days of old, I'd guess...) And, of course, single vs multiple threads for an application. Ryzen certainly offers far more bang for the buck with 3D rendering apps... know the product, its strengths, and where to utilize it. There's room for both companies. Each keeps the other going, and sane. Like Arnold and David do on that old mining ship... )

 

[Marc]

A chip's clock speed doesn't really say many instructions can be carried out per clock cycle - wouldn't that make more sense? (almost like the RISC vs CISC days of old, I'd guess...) And, of course, single vs multiple threads for an application. Ryzen certainly offers far more bang for the buck with 3D rendering apps... know the product, its strengths, and where to utilize it. There's room for both companies. Each keeps the other going, and sane. Like Arnold and David do on that old mining ship... )

Read the review and look a the bench tests which should explain the single thread performance but it's not quite down to the instructions per clock cycle i.e RISC vs CISC (I'm not a programmer and deep processor design stuff makes my eyes glaze over so the experts can explain it better).

A 3D rendering app worth it's salt will be multi-core/multii-thread away which is how Ryzen can match and even beat intel in such areas and where clock speed doesn't become quite so critical when you're spreading the load

Nobody is saying there isn't room for both companies (competition is good unless you're a monopolist bastard).

I was reading some discussion on reddit (/r/homelab) and issue that hamstrings AMD is that while apps such as game are are multi-more/multi-thread they're not properly scaling for the number of cores/threads that are present in Ryzen. After all until recently anything more than 4c/8t thread was server chip. Then alone come the Ryzen 7 with 8 cores, Threadripper which is 12 or 16 cores and Intel's new i9 series (upto 18 cores). So hopefully before long we'll see the programs able make use of all these cores.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Holographic storage.

http://www.techradar.com/news/compu...tever-happened-to-holographic-storage-1099304

Yes it was a thing.. But it never blossomed.

 

[Santaman]

^^ Saw something asbout it halfway the '90's but then it was IBM IIRC...

As for Ryzen, Epyc and multicore..
AMD already has done a lot of impotant firsts which later on became common place, multicore chips, AMD made the first real dual core and the first real quad core chips and not glued together single and dual core affairs like Intel made at that time, 64 bit extensions also becauseof AMD.

As for programming for multicore, seems it slowly gets done more and more but is not easy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_processor#Software_effects

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

What about quantum computers will we ever get a true quantum computer that can work in states other then binary?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

What about quantum computers will we ever get a true quantum computer that can work in states other then binary?

A qudit-based system? They're working on it.
http://www.computerworld.com/articl...dits-may-be-the-key-to-quantum-computing.html
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/qudits-the-real-future-of-quantum-computing

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

A qudit-based system? They're working on it.
http://www.computerworld.com/articl...dits-may-be-the-key-to-quantum-computing.html
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/qudits-the-real-future-of-quantum-computing

A company in the USA called D-Wave claims to have made them and many companies like google have bought them. They actually use chips with Qudits on them but they have only really specific uses.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Yeah, as you're probably aware, there is a controversy over whether D-Wave's devices are "true" quantum computers.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/dwaves-year-of-computing-dangerously
I'm not aware D-Wave claims to use qudits rather than qubits but other teams are building qudit devices.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/quantum-computing-explained

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Yeah, as you're probably aware, there is a controversy over whether D-Wave's devices are "true" quantum computers.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/dwaves-year-of-computing-dangerously
I'm not aware D-Wave claims to use qudits rather than qubits but other teams are building qudit devices.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/quantum-computing-explained

Here you go....... All about D-Wave

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But yes the company is jammed in controversy...