[QUOTE=Levelog;51306849]I love the fact that right out of one of my client's going towards a tech center with Oracle and the like there's a road called "Disk Drive" and one called "Tape Drive"[/QUOTE]
Silicon Valley was a magical place in the 80's.
[QUOTE=wingless;51306246]Don't forget a turbo button.[/QUOTE]
I've always wondered what modern CPUs would be like if you could still toggle the caches on and off.
For stuff that assumes every CPU in the world has a cache, what happens?
[QUOTE=pentium;51308119]Silicon Valley was a magical place in the 80's.
I've always wondered what modern CPUs would be like if you could still toggle the caches on and off.
For stuff that assumes every CPU in the world has a cache, what happens?[/QUOTE]
(Un)fortunately I do not live in Silicon Valley.
[QUOTE=Levelog;51307480]No it was pretty bad. The only acceptable colors for computer cases are black, white, and gunmetal.
[editline]4th November 2016[/editline]
No LED's, no weird knobs or protrusions, a clean window with no design is acceptable.[/QUOTE]
I like LEDs for practical purposes
it doesn't need to be RGB gaymen shit but a nice bright light that does nothing other than say "I AM POWERED AND TURNED ON" is nice to have
[QUOTE=pentium;51308119] I've always wondered what modern CPUs would be like if you could still toggle the caches on and off.
For stuff that assumes every CPU in the world has a cache, what happens?[/QUOTE]
Things would be slow. Crucially slow. Not much else to say to that.
I was legitimately disappointed when that beige corsair case turned out to be a joke.
[QUOTE=lavacano;51308239]I like LEDs for practical purposes
it doesn't need to be RGB gaymen shit but a nice bright light that does nothing other than say "I AM POWERED AND TURNED ON" is nice to have[/QUOTE]
on what planet is "I AM POWERED AND TURNED ON" not gay
[QUOTE=pentium;51308119]
I've always wondered what modern CPUs would be like if you could still toggle the caches on and off.
For stuff that assumes every CPU in the world has a cache, what happens?[/QUOTE]
I had a Pentium II system where you can turn the caches off. The performance of a ~233MHz PII became as fast as a 66Mhz 486DX with caches disabled.
People tends to take caches for granted without realizing just how much performance improvements they make for load/store operations.
[QUOTE=B!N4RY;51308623]I had a Pentium II system where you can turn the caches off. The performance of a ~233MHz PII became as fast as a 66Mhz 486DX, according to benchmark softwares.[/QUOTE]
That would have only disabled the L2 as well, which was pretty slow anyway due to being low clocked and off-package, you'd still have L1, like the 486. That is probably what helped you not go lower than a 486.
But not only that but cache's are critically important to any modern µarch. It's can and does make or break your entire design no matter the rest of the chip. Eg Bulldozer and ThunderX:
For all the problems Bulldozer had, one massive one was that it was strangled by it's cache. It had a terribly high access latency for it's L1, L2 and L3, and worse yet this was amplified to main-memory access.
ThunderX is similar, even if the core was good (Hint: It's not) it has a terrible cache strangling it. It has a horrendous hierarchy, tremendously high latency L2 and a not-good latency L1 with poor, slow bandwidth.
Not to mention this isn't even talking about actual cache and backend configuration aside from latency and bandwidth, which can also make or break you.
Cache is critically important, yo.
[QUOTE=pentium;51308119] I've always wondered what modern CPUs would be like if you could still toggle the caches on and off.
For stuff that assumes every CPU in the world has a cache, what happens?[/QUOTE]
(I'm pretty sure you know most of this but I'll repeat it so others can understand. Also this is a vast simplification in many ways because I don't have time to write a book about it.)
Caches are (on every architecture I know) software transparent. Code doesn't have to do anything to manage it - during instruction decode, the hardware will flag that a cache line might be needed and send off a request for it, and the pipeline is long enough that it can usually load it from at least a higher-level cache before it actually needs it.
The 486 added some basic "flush all caches" instructions, then SSE added "I am going to need this data soon and it's probably in main RAM, go ahead and start fetching it", then SSE2 added a more specific "I am done with this cache line, go ahead and flush it to make room for more data", but that's just compiler optimization stuff, and on chips that don't support it (like your cacheless CPU idea) it can just be a nop.
Some more specialized, RISCy architectures might have a bit more, I remember hearing the Xb360 CPU had a lot of cache hinting operations, but I haven't heard of any where caches are manually managed in software. Itanium maybe? Or GPU internal architectures? I don't know.
So basically all that would happen if you disabled all caching is that you'd be effectively underclocking your CPU to your RAM's clock speed. CPU cores are designed to be about as fast as their L1 cache can supply it, and most L1 caches are clocked at CPU speed, 1-2 cycle latency. Going from that to something with tens of times less bandwidth and hundreds of times more latency will always bottleneck it - if only because you got rid of instruction caches, and not just data.
In short: take your i7 (assuming you've got one) and clock it down to 4000KHz. That'll be more or less how it will perform without caching.
Now, what might be really interesting is disabling the L1$D and L3$, but leaving L1$I and L2$. Some code might be able to run at basically full speed, while some code will run as slowly as if it had no caching at all. I'm pretty sure Prime95 wouldn't notice, but any sort of video encode will.
[QUOTE=gman003-main;51308823]Some more specialized, RISCy architectures might have a bit more, I remember hearing the Xb360 CPU had a lot of cache hinting operations, but I haven't heard of any where caches are manually managed in software. Itanium maybe? Or GPU internal architectures? I don't know.[/QUOTE]
Cache hinting was certainly present in IPF and it can really be useful but it's not common. Lots of ISAs support it but usually in varied forms. But a fully managed cache? Nope, realistically that's scratchpad at that point.
I found an opened package in a server room today. It was postmarked May 1999.
It was a software upgrade for a program we don't use to patch a Y2K bug. On 11 floppy disks.
I still remember when distribution updates were mailed out on QIC.
[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;51309603]Does anyone wanna loan me a Z77 board?
PCI-E 2.0 makes my system rock solid but putting my 950 in my 3.0 slot causes it to shit itself randomly after a few days/week for a period of time.
Or a Z77 board and an i5 replacement?
Either is fine cause I really want off this fucking train.[/QUOTE]
You won't bottleneck a 950 in a 2.0 slot, run that until you can replace stuff
I encountered a horrific home network today. Everything was connected something like this:
[code] +------------------+
| router 1 |
| (192.168.1.0/24) |
| wifi: [name] |
+------------------+
| |
+------------------+ +------------------+
| router 2 | | router 3 |
| (10.213.72.0/24) | | (10.213.72.0/24) |
| wifi: [name] | | wifi: [name]2 |
+------------------+ +------------------+
+------------------+
| isolated AP |
| No DHCP |
| wifi: guest |
+------------------+[/code]
So if you're connected to [name] and you roam access points shit quits working until the device realizes it's on a new network and asks for a new dhcp lease, or roams back.
And who know's what that isolated AP is doing.
And the weird IP scheme on #2 and #3 means whoever set this up wasn't just following the config wizard.
[QUOTE=IpHa;51310309]I encountered a horrific home network today. Everything was connected something like this:
[code] +------------------+
| router 1 |
| (192.168.1.0/24) |
| wifi: [name] |
+------------------+
| |
+------------------+ +------------------+
| router 2 | | router 3 |
| (10.213.72.0/24) | | (10.213.72.0/24) |
| wifi: [name] | | wifi: [name]2 |
+------------------+ +------------------+
+------------------+
| isolated AP |
| No DHCP |
| wifi: guest |
+------------------+[/code]
So if you're connected to [name] and you roam access points shit quits working until the device realizes it's on a new network and asks for a new dhcp lease, or roams back.
And who know's what that isolated AP is doing.
And the weird IP scheme on #2 and #3 means whoever set this up wasn't just following the config wizard.[/QUOTE]
Do router 2 and 3 have the same subnet? But why? Does he not understand how routing, switching and APs work?
[QUOTE=IpHa;51310309]I encountered a horrific home network today. Everything was connected something like this:
[code] +------------------+
| router 1 |
| (192.168.1.0/24) |
| wifi: [name] |
+------------------+
| |
+------------------+ +------------------+
| router 2 | | router 3 |
| (10.213.72.0/24) | | (10.213.72.0/24) |
| wifi: [name] | | wifi: [name]2 |
+------------------+ +------------------+
+------------------+
| isolated AP |
| No DHCP |
| wifi: guest |
+------------------+[/code]
So if you're connected to [name] and you roam access points shit quits working until the device realizes it's on a new network and asks for a new dhcp lease, or roams back.
And who know's what that isolated AP is doing.
And the weird IP scheme on #2 and #3 means whoever set this up wasn't just following the config wizard.[/QUOTE]
:sick:
[QUOTE=Demache;51310357]Do router 2 and 3 have the same subnet? But why? Does he not understand how routing, switching and APs work?[/QUOTE]
Same subnet, and same SSID on 2 of the 3. As for why... the world may never know.
[QUOTE=DrTaxi;51308602]on what planet is "I AM POWERED AND TURNED ON" not gay[/QUOTE]
how do you know that wasn't intentional
wouldn't be my first time either
[QUOTE=lavacano;51310471]how do you know that wasn't intentional
wouldn't be my first time either[/QUOTE]
The RGB cycling it is!
When Infinite Warfare bought from the Windows 10 Store has no cross-platform (i.e. Steam) multiplayer
[t]http://i.imgur.com/j4XEi7N.jpg[/t]
[QUOTE=Van-man;51306482]My main beef with that color is the fact the plastic faded over time to a gaudy yellow-ish tint[/QUOTE]
Painting it with a UV resistant clear-cut prevents/heavily reduces that. One of the flame retardant chemicals in it reacts with UV light causing the yellowing. If you manage to find something from the era still in-box, it'll look the same as it did out of the factory.
[QUOTE=TrafficMan;51310633]When Infinite Warfare bought from the Windows 10 Store has no cross-platform (i.e. Steam) multiplayer
[t]http://i.imgur.com/j4XEi7N.jpg[/t][/QUOTE]
like, how do you fuck up so bad you can't get steam and UWP clients on the same server
it's literally the same socket code. [url=https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/networking/sockets]MSDN even says you can use Winsock like you've always done[/url]. and you're probably still using the old quake protocol from when you forked id Tech 3, so what the hell gives
[QUOTE=IpHa;51310309]I encountered a horrific home network today. Everything was connected something like this:
[code] +------------------+
| router 1 |
| (192.168.1.0/24) |
| wifi: [name] |
+------------------+
| |
+------------------+ +------------------+
| router 2 | | router 3 |
| (10.213.72.0/24) | | (10.213.72.0/24) |
| wifi: [name] | | wifi: [name]2 |
+------------------+ +------------------+
+------------------+
| isolated AP |
| No DHCP |
| wifi: guest |
+------------------+[/code]
So if you're connected to [name] and you roam access points shit quits working until the device realizes it's on a new network and asks for a new dhcp lease, or roams back.
And who know's what that isolated AP is doing.
And the weird IP scheme on #2 and #3 means whoever set this up wasn't just following the config wizard.[/QUOTE]
I just died
[QUOTE=TrafficMan;51310633]When Infinite Warfare bought from the Windows 10 Store has no cross-platform (i.e. Steam) multiplayer
[t]http://i.imgur.com/j4XEi7N.jpg[/t][/QUOTE]
For the first time in a long time I want cod to do well, but c'mon.
[QUOTE=wingless;51306246]Don't forget a turbo button.[/QUOTE]
Don't they kinda still exist on gaming-specific laptops and desktops?
[QUOTE=pentium;51311268][url=http://keithlynch.net/pics/]Nerd Alert.[/url][/QUOTE]
Something about this guy's place upsets me greatly.
[QUOTE=garychencool;51311277]Don't they kinda still exist on gaming-specific laptops and desktops?[/QUOTE]
If your gaming laptop was made in 1990, then maybe
[QUOTE=B!N4RY;51311317]If your gaming laptop was made in 1990, then maybe[/QUOTE]
I've seen them on the recent MSI ones and I guess all it does is make it go to High Performance mode and make the fans go at max speed by a press of a button.
[QUOTE=garychencool;51311321]I've seen them on the recent MSI ones and I guess all it does is make it go to High Performance mode and make the fans go at max speed by a press of a button.[/QUOTE]
Is the button labelled "AlienWare Mode" by any chance because my god if those fuckers ain't loud as shit regardless of whether it's in a game or the desktop.
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