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back to article IBM slips automatic tranny into Power7

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them," said mathematician Alfred Lord Whitehead, in his 1911 tome, An Introduction to Mathematics. And with its Autonomic Computing effort, IBM believes it's advancing civilization. On Monday in Palo Alto, …

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  1. Wonko the Sane

    Alfred NORTH Whitehead

    The man was British for godsakes, how can you get his name wrong.

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  2. A J Stiles

    Think I accidentally invented something like this once

    I had an idea for a processor that would run flat-out, as fast as propagation delays would let it, by using an oscillator formed from an even number of NOT gates and a NAND or NOR gate (just so you can stop the oscillator dead when needed). That much, of course, isn't new. My idea was to distribute the gates (which are small enough) throughout the silicon, so that anything that increased the propagation time through one region would automatically slow down the oscillator.

    (Side note: Does discussing this on the Reg Forums count as Prior Art?)

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Smart apps first

    I'm sure this works great on their smart code, but the first time you run it with typical code, all of the benefits are gone because of how wait timing is done, which is usually spin the CPU for N seconds, and then try again...

    Or am I being overly pessimistic?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Stop

      Well

      ...there are rumors that some developers actually use proper synchronization techniques like pthread_mutex_lock(), select(), WaitForSingleObject() and signal handlers.

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      1. A J Stiles
        Reply Icon

        But

        Only if they publish their Source Code.

        Take a dekko at the first-ever Open Source releases of Mozilla and OpenOffice.org for an example of the sorts of things that developers of closed-source software have been known to think they could get away with because nobody was watching.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Been there done that

    I use my hand to determine which burners are on and turn off the ones i dont need once the grill is up to heat and I dont need all the grills on

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