adrian_b

19 ms·

271.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
> (In USA) "over half of all flood-related drownings occur when a vehicle is driven into hazardous flood water." In this context, the advice "Turn Around Don't Drown®" seems correct. Though perhaps the BYD soluti
272.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
You are right that the Russians have been frequently somewhat mistreated in the former Soviet Republics where they have become minorities. However, this is an extraordinarily hypocritical claim, because this has followed a time when for var
273.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Ukraine had the nukes in physical possession and they had enough expertise to eventually disassemble them and replace the electronics. Choosing to not do this to avoid a hypothetical external aggression was a bad choice, because they were i
274.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
NEON is an obsolete and inappropriate name, but I think that what you mean is that among the 64-bit Arm CPUs, all those that support SVE (which includes the CPUs of all recent so-called "gaming smartphones") also support the origi
275.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Earlier Apple CPUs do not support SVE. Recent Apple CPUs support a certain variant of the so-called "streaming" SVE (which is included in the SME specification), which is implemented in a way that has poor performance, so it proba
276.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
NEON is a name that should never be used again, because it is extremely ambiguous. Whenever someone speaks about Arm NEON it is impossible to guess what instruction set is meant. The 32-bit Arm architectures have used several kinds of float
277.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
There is no need whatsoever to dedicate a core for each process which owns peripherals and which services the requests for them. All the I/O requests would be submitted in queues and whenever a queue would be empty the server process w
278.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
When designing CPU cores with SIMD execution units, it is very important to ensure that data can be loaded from and stored to the L1 cache memory at a throughput high enough to not starve the SIMD execution units. Thus normally any CPU core
279.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
OK, you may be right. I have always verified that rsync copies the modification timestamps with nanosecond resolution, because I use these timestamps, but I have never looked at the creation times, because I do not use them. I always have c
280.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
I cannot see the original comment as it was deleted, but it seems very weird. There are indeed a lot of Linux/UNIX programs that lose metadata when copying or archiving files, like losing extended file attributes or the high-resolution
281.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
In 1990, I was using the BRIEF editor on MS-DOS, which was an editor for programmers and which was quite similar to Emacs (also including a scripting language somewhat similar to LISP). BRIEF must have already existed for some years. It had
282.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
The solid-state batteries with lithium do not have any significant advantage for having a solid electrolyte, but their advantage is in having an anode made of pure lithium, instead of lithium intercalated inside some electrode material. Thi
283.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
In TFA it said that the US company that was shut down (Natron) pursued a solution quite different from lithium batteries (with an organo-metallic electrode), which may have been a reason for their failure. On the other hand the 2 Chinese co
284.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Device drivers as separate processes might not improve much the resistance against intentional exploits, but they would certainly greatly improve the resistance against bugs. There are parts that are so simple that it can be practically gua
285.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Yes, but they remain confined to niche applications because none of them has been designed to be incorporated in a framework that would allow the gradual migration to them of the legacy applications and device drivers. Only Fuchsia might ha
286.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
> between the current (as in BJT) and the voltage (as in field transistor and valves) The BJT is also much more accurately modeled as a device where the collector current is determined by the input voltage (i.e. base-emitter voltage), ex
287.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Ioperm, which was introduced by 80386 in 1985, is useful only for a few legacy peripherals. It allows the operating system to allocate peripherals mapped in the special I/O address space to dedicated device driver processes. For exampl
288.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Both the CEO of Palantir and the CEO of Microsoft have recently criticized very strongly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic. Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories. The motivation of Palantir is ve
289.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Amdahl's law is one thing, and an inefficient implementation of a concurrent program is another thing. We do not know how much of the bad scaling of Geekbench 6 was due to Amdahl's law and how much was caused by an inept implement
290.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
A very frequent real-world workload is the compilation of a software project, which scales almost perfectly with the number of cores. For the other multi-threaded tasks, like running certain CAD/EDA applications, I use well-optimized p
291.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
There are plenty of things for which the results of single-threaded benchmarks are completely irrelevant, like the compilation of a big software project. There are also things that are well-correlated with the single-threaded Geekbench resu
292.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
While it would be nice to have a multi-threaded benchmark that demonstrates a realistic scaling towards many threads, I have no reason whatsoever to trust that the Geekbench implementers are capable to optimize the inter-thread communicatio
293.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Yes, for single-threaded benchmarks Geekbench 5 and 6 are very well correlated with the SPEC scores and with other single-threaded CPU benchmarks. On the other hand, whether the Geebench multi-threaded benchmarks are meaningful is questiona
294.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
I have switched from a Mac to Linux, but that was 20 years ago and the switch was only in laptops, because in desktops I had already switched from Windows to Linux earlier. I had been very satisfied with the hardware quality of my Apple lap
295.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
Many numeric parameters leave no doubt about the increase in performance. For instance the memory bandwidth of 1.6 TB/s is more than double in comparison with its predecessor. It is even greater than that of most GPUs. Similarly with t
296.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
MI455X is what AMD will sell to Anthropic (in the form of complete Helios racks, with EPYC servers full of GPUs) in the deal discussed in a couple of other HN threads (Reuters title: "AMD to sell Anthropic tens of billions in AI server
297.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
While this is true, premium desktops remain the cheapest computers accessible for consumers (in performance per dollar). The rise of the prices for mini-PCs and laptops is much worse, because there also the CPUs are now much more expensive,
298.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
At least in the initial benchmarks Xeon Max could not reach anything close to the theoretical memory bandwidth. I have no idea whether that was corrected later with some microcode update or a new mask stepping. Regardless, now Xeon Max is o
299.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
I like it too, but I am more interested in the EPYC CPUs that are cheap enough to be affordable by individuals and small businesses. For Zen 5, only a month ago AMD has finally launched the EPYC 8005 series "Sorano" CPUs, which us
300.
by adrian_b 3mo ago
But no Chinese company has copied and distributed an American LLM. Even if they had wanted that, it would have been impossible, because Anthropic et al. do not let anyone access them directly. Querying the available API can be used to extra

More ›