Posts by Bartholomew 260 posts • joined 10 Dec 2013
> This brings it into line with the Linux kernel itself
That almost sounds like once systemd has assimilated enough, the kernel will be next on the menu.
I finally worked out that one thing that systemd does and does really well better than anything else. It has become the largest attack surface, most of the recent high number (7,8,9,10's CVE's) security flaws required systemd to function.
> might be to port/run Solaris onto the hardware
Looks like there is already a port in the pipeline at least for illumos, which is derived from OpenSolaris, for RISC-V (and aarch64 AKA ARM64).
https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/search?q=risc-v
They have already removed everything SPARC, while leaving any code that would help RISC-V and aarch64 ports.
https://github.com/illumos/ipd/blob/master/ipd/0019/README.md
https://github.com/illumos/ipd/blob/master/ipd/0021/README.md
The most interesting part of the thing for me is the bit that is not on sale (yet) the 8 core 4x ARM Cortex-A76 @ 2.6 GHz with 4x ARM Cortex-A55 @ 1.8 GHz Rockchip RK3588 (made in the Samsung Foundry's 8LPP: 8 nm) boards with 32GiB of RAM and the ability to decode AV1 albeit at only a maximum of 4K 60fps. When Turing start selling that board I'll start to pay attention.
A BCM2711 4x ARM Cortex-A72 @ 1.2 GHz (made with a 28nm process) in a RPi4 is about 30480 DMIPS and nearly 5x that is the RK3588 at an estimated 130360 to 148040 DMIPS. It is a little bit of a beast.
Jasper Carrott as part of his stand-up comedy in the 80's used to read out what he claimed to be actual excuses given by motorists for accidents, recorded on insurance claim forms:
"The guy was all over the road; I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him!"
"The pedestrian had no idea which direction to run, so I ran over him!"
"I backed out of my driveway straight into a bus, it was five minutes early!"
I'm picturing the first generation of RISC-V boards (e.g. HF105-000 now a EoL board) with a PCI-e slot for graphics cards, which graphics cards will be the recommended devices Intel, AMD or NVidia ?
Intel graphics cards (e.g. DG1 or ARC3/ARC5/ARC7 - TSMC N6 DG2 ) - https://github.com/intel/media-driver
AMD graphics cards - https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers
NVidia graphics cards - kernel modules are now open source fantastic, but user space tools are not available yet for RISC-V and currently need to be generated by NVidia. FUD (Fear, uncertainty, and doubt) can make people exclude hardware that will probably work fine.
I'm not saying this will be a big market, it most definitely will not be for at least several decades, but it does highlight how hardware can be quickly excluded from future purchase decisions (maybe incorrectly).
I know, from a purely logical level, that a poorly designed website which can not handle a spike in traffic has nothing whatsoever to do with their products, but it never looks good. Every single link on their website gives the above message, which is not really the first impression that a company selling "superscalar performance" should be giving to anyone. If you do not have your own global Internet Infrastructure there is always CDN's (Content Delivery Network), some are free, but most are cheap.
> gotta be the crypto mining
I'm not saying mining crypto is smart or stupid, just that mining crypto in Ireland would be extra stupid.
Mining crypto is all about minimising the money spent per kWh on power (while simultaneously maximising your percentage of the current ~235,630,000,000,000,000,000 SHA-256 hashes per second) and Ireland would be a really bad choice (If you count the zeros Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta, so the current rate is nearly a quarter of a Zettahash/second!).
Before VAT and TAX, Ireland has the most expensive electricity in Europe (~€0.24 per kWh). After VAT and TAX only Belgium (~€0.30 per kWh), Germany (~€0.33 per kWh) and Denmark (~€0.34 per kWh) cost more than Ireland (~€0.29 per kWh).
Look at the very first image and learn https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7nm
"Intel 10nm process" is just a commercial name for a generation of a certain size and its technology, and does not represent any geometry of the transistor on the chip. Intel "10nm process" has more transistors per square millimetre than the "TSMC 7nm process" or the "Samsung 7nm process".
The real problem is that TSMC was using their "TSMC 7nm process" back in 2018, Samsung 2019 and Intel has only caught up in 2021 with their "Intel 10nm process". All three are similar enough to be roughly considered the same, even though Intel's technically has about 10% more transistors per unit area than TSMC and 5% more than Samsung.
You could think of the process name like a brand name, it has no connection whatsoever to any measurement on the silicon.
If a "<insert company brand name here> 1 nm process" actually used structures in a silicon chip that were 1 nm (they will not):
The Van der Waals radius of a silicon atom is about 210 pico-metre, so 1 nanometre in the real world would be like 2 silicon atoms wide. And that is not even thinking about the effects of natural impurities or doping agents.
At that scale you would need to use only one Isotope of Silicon ( Silicon-28 ) because trace amounts of normal silicon is naturally radioactive. How would a 2 atom wide signal path behave when one atom undergoes radioactive decay, probably emits an electron and then changes into a phosphorus atom (which is a doping agent for silicon)! So you need to purify the silicon using similar techniques to the ones used to purify the elements used in nuclear bombs, but to make isotopically enriched silicon tetrachlorides instead which can then be used to grow single crystal 99.9999% pure silicon-28.
Oh and the doping of silicon never actually stops, it just slows down a lot at room temperature, so the lifetime of chips made with such small structures is very limited, at some future date the dopants in bleeding edge chips made today will be homogeneous. And how long that will be is a low number of years.
But I can see automated jobs to increment the revision of the codebase by 1 and push new binaries every 3 months to comply to the letter of the rules. The end result will be flash chips inside phones failing faster and Apple selling more devices due to continual updates. Oh and a yearly fee from all developers to remain being apple developers.
My guess would be that quantum tunneling memory is going to be amazingly similar to current pre-existing technology, but now has quantum in the name for easy access to more venture capital funding. The future of digital neural networks is good old fashioned analogue technology, but with rebranding.
Basically it is trapping electrons like an eeprom (2 transistors, so that individual bit can be flipped) or a flash memory cell (1 transistor, large blocks of bits need to be flipped - designed this way to cram more bits into less physically space).
https://www.rfwireless-world.com/images/Flash-memory.jpg
Oh and SLC flash is where a single bit is stored in each cell (2 states - more than half full with electrons or less than half empty with electrons)
MLC is where 2 bits are stored in each individual cell (4 states - more than 3/4 full with electrons, less than 3/4 full with electrons but more than 1/2 full with electrons, less than 1/2 full with electrons, but more than 1/4 full with electrons, or less than 1/4 full with electrons)
TLC is where 3 bits are stored in each individual cell (8 logic states)
QLC is where 4 bits are stored in each individual cell (16 logic states)
And every year the size of the cells gets smaller and smaller and the number of electrons stored in each cell gets less and less and the error correcting codes to compensate for the continual data loss at the lowest level bigger and better.
At the end of the day it is going to be a tiny patch of insulating silicon holding a few isolated electrons, working in a similar way to rubbing an insulating balloon on your head. It is basically a temporary static charge, but in the case of eeprom/flash stored inside an insulator, and not on it's surface like a balloon does.
One problem with flash/eeprom is their limited write lifetime (pushing and pulling electrons into and from an insulated island eventually degrades the quality of the insulating layer and it does not work as well as it did on day one after manufacture) and another perhaps less well known issue is that the data (unless powered up and actively corrected) will eventually after a good few years being powered off just fade away (This depends on the temperature of the device when the data was written, hotter is better for long term offline storage but worse for Mean Time Between Failure, and the storage temperature when the device is powered off, the colder the better for long term storage).
Smart people can firewall IPv6 devices, but is that the default behaviour for the average person. Most people just want to plug something in, for it to work the way they think it should work (magic?) and never give a thought about it ever again.
I agree that everything inside China will be protected from the big bad world by the great firewall of China (AKA China's Internet censorship infrastructure), but what about the rest of the worlds devices ? What will be the default for IPv6 devices, direct access or some or most devices behind firewalls ?
Interplanetary networks have a totally different requirement to local networks, store and forward when connection is available, massive amount of redundancy (forward error correction) to hopefully avoid the need for any retransmission.
Neptune is the furthest planet from the Sun (4.298 billion km to 4.7 billion km from earth, which is about 14337 to 15678 light seconds away) waiting 24-30 hours for a TCP three way-handshake, is not really not really practical means of communication. IP is just not practical for interplanetary communications.
Musk's space junk is in low earth orbit with a minimum altitude of 550km (~0.0018 light seconds) and because the refractive index of glass ~1.5 (used in fibre-optic cables) is greater than the refractive index of air/vacuum ~1.0, on paper starlink should always have a lower latency (unless your destination is less than 733km of fibre-optic cable away from the source, but with additional delay of repeater every 100 km on fibre, in reality you are probably taking less than 30% of that). So no special modifications to TCP/IP is needed for it to function correctly on MuskNet.
IPv6 makes every device directly accessible from the internet. So I'm picturing all the Internet of Trash devices which due to price point will have no firewall an minimal security features, could be very interesting. For some reason I'm picturing a botnet of fridges à la Silicon Valley. Or maybe a botnet of toasty toasters, could be brilliant.
One thing I love about OpenBSD is the secure by default philosophy (no daemons/services are enabled during insall). Oh and CARP, is still mind blowing ('... Left with little choice, we proceeded to reinvent the wheel or, more correctly, abandon the wheel entirely and go for a "hovercraft".').
The IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research) have published a few papers about initial attacks on the current lattice algorithms (WARNING: they are all heavy on the crypto maths) plug the following into your personal search engine of choice:
site:iacr.org attack against lattice
You can passively cool most things, you just need a massive copper heatsink (or an aluminium one) and a large enough mass of air.
500 watts of power, is 500 joules of energy that needs to be dissipated every second.
The Specific heat capacity of pure copper is 385 J/kg/°C (density 8.96 kg/m³ and a thermal conductivity of 401 W/m/°C)
The Specific heat capacity of aluminium is 900 J/kg°C (density 2.710kg/m³ and a thermal conductivity of 237 W/m/°C)
The specific heat capacity of Air (in a typical room) 1012 J/kg°C (density 1.2 kg/m³ and a thermal conductivity of 0.026 W/m/°C)
You just increase the mass of the heatsink, and the surface area, until the required operating temperature is achieved.
Of course with the price of copper these days it is much cheaper, and reduce the cost of shipping, to use active cooling. But a 20kg+ copper heatsink would also work! (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LauL5JxYis )
And if you waste any resources on the "Grace" CPU, the ghost of Rear admiral (lower half) Grace Hopper will appear and hang a micro second around your neck.
An example would be the '“C” Standard Extension for Compressed Instructions'. RISC-V learned all they could from the previous "ARM Thumb" and "MIPS16" and then from "ARM Thumb2, microMIPS, PowerPC VLE".
"Typically, 50%–60% of the RISC-V instructions in a program can be replaced with RVC instructions, resulting in a 25%–30% code-size reduction."
"Benefiting from 25 years of hindsight, RISC-V was designed to support compressed instructions from the outset, leaving enough opcode space for RVC to be added as a simple extension on top of the base ISA (along with many other extensions). The philosophy of RVC is to reduce code size for embedded applications and to improve performance and energy-efficiency for all applications due to fewer misses in the instruction cache. Waterman shows that RVC fetches 25%-30% fewer instruction bits, which reduces instruction cache misses by 20%-25%, or roughly the same performance impact as doubling the instruction cache size"
"It is surprising that the most popular 64-bit ISA for mobile platforms (ARM v8) does not include a compressed instruction format given that static code size and dynamic instruction fetch bandwidth are important metrics. Although static code size is not a major concern in larger systems, instruction fetch bandwidth can be a major bottleneck in servers running commercial workloads, which often have a large instruction working set."
The one thing that appeals to me about RISC-V is that they went through all the expired patents in that area, and took the best of the best from everything that was there and merged it very nicely into a very coherent ISA.
How you implement the ISA behind the scenes is effected by those decisions, and most of the best ones were to maximise what you got out while simultaneously minimising the resources required.
Ultimately it does not bring anything new to the table (It is not "Mill Computing, Inc"), but it is still very solid. But to interface to PCIe, DRAM, you will realistically still need to license those (proprietary) blocks from others, it is not like a free ISA makes everything magically cheaper.
> developers almost always focus on performance
Not Microsoft, they focus on making sure that Wirth's law is obeyed, or maybe Gates's law.
Wirth's law: "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster"
Gates's law: "The speed of software halves every 18 months"
Thanks for that and the YouTube video in that about LEO is amazing: LEO: The Story of the World’s First Business Computer - Computing History UK
"But the vast majority of people simply didn't know anything at all. And when you talked to people, they took you as some strange, esoteric being. When you said you were a programmer, they didn't know what that meant." - I feel that the first sentence should resonate with any people who work with technology.
Am I the only one thinking that the part that fails a lot on SAN's (storage area network) and wide area networks is the fibre optic SFP's (Small form-factor pluggable transceiver) or QSFP(Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable transceiver). So much so that they are designed to be rapidly replaced in a matter of seconds. I'm guessing that this new silicon will also be designed to be easily replaced, since I see no mention of higher MTBF (Mean Time between failures) with this more compact integration. In my mind moving things closer means it will run hotter (higher energy per unit area) and since every 10°C increase in temperature reduces the life of electronics by half (ref: Arrhenius equation), I suspect the opposite will be true.
Zero trust should really be called 100% trust.
You need to 100% trust your CPU (code running on the Intel ME can not be audited, neither can code running on the AMD PSP - both of which have read/write access to all RAM and network traffic).
You also need to 100% trust your TPM (Trusted Platform Module, designed by all US based companies - AMD, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft - that legally must obey all Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court orders with gagging). That when initialised in the factory with with the Endorsement Primary Seed (EPS) which is typically hardcoded (because it is cheaper), that no "backup" copy was kept.
The Zero Trust model is good, but the foundation it is built on has a lot of unfounded implicit trust.
Sacrilege, everyone knows that the one true editor is ed, it has been in active use since 1969 (mostly because no one can remember the correct key combination to save and quit) - so all the bugs must have been squashed by now. Although if they were using ed to fix the bugs in ed and ed had bugs ... *ponder*
And possibly EDLIN (The standard MS-DOS line editor since 1980) - I'm sorry but legal has just advised me to make no statements regarding bugs in closed source code developed by Microsoft.
Now that Intel have the guiding hand, the software could be guided into two tiers support. Intel chips getting all the bells and whistles and all other chips would still be supported, but not supported as well.
And judging by the history of Intel (link to video) that is very likely. Or search for "intel compiler lawsuit" - where high performance instructions were chosen e.g. SSE when "genuine intel" was found and slower instructions used when it was not found - at runtime if the program was compiled using the Intel compiler.) Intel currently own multiple popular benchmarking organisations and companies, and needless to say that the benchmarks were tweaked to make one CPU brand look the best that it can.
"<insert company brand name here> <insert low number here>nm process" is just a commercial name like how "TSMC 7nm process" (roughly 95.8 million transistors per square millimetre) is nearly the exact same as the "Intel 10nm process" (roughly 100.76 million transistors per square millimetre). So technically the "Intel 10nm process" on paper is nearly 5% better than the "TSMC 7nm process".
Why did companies that manufacture silicon chips choose to use "nm process" which is easily confused with nanometre for branding when the number used does not represent any geometry of the transistor inside the chip at all, was it MBA conmen who started this while high on cocaine the 90's ? Who knows.
If a "<insert company brand name here> 1 nm process" actually used structures in a silicon chip that were 1 nm (they will not):
The Van der Waals radius of a silicon atom is about 210 pico-metre, so 1 nanometre in the real world would be like 2 silicon atoms wide. And that is not even thinking about the effects of natural impurities or doping agents.
At that scale you would need to use only one Isotope of Silicon ( Silicon-28 ) because trace amounts of normal silicon is naturally radioactive. How would a 2 atom wide signal path behave when one atom undergoes radioactive decay, probably emits an electron and then changes into a phosphorus atom (which is a doping agent for silicon)! So you need to purify the silicon using similar techniques to the ones used to purify the elements used in nuclear bombs, but to make isotopically enriched silicon tetrachlorides instead which can then be used to grow single crystal 99.9999% pure silicon-28.
Oh and the doping of silicon never actually stops, it just slows down a lot at room temperature, so the lifetime of chips made with such small structures is very limited, at some future date the dopants in bleeding edge chips made today will be homogeneous. And how long that will be is a low number of years.
Not one mention of "https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/" a site that generates images of people who do not exist.
The way I tell if it is real or fake is by ignoring the human and concentrating on the background! It is either heavily blurred or just does not make any sense if you really look at it. (e.g. https://imgur.com/a/cBRicKs )
> A thorium reactor would happily munch its way through the bulk of the spent fuel
What is the solution to the high intensity gamma ray emissions produced as it munches through that waste. Do not get me wrong I think thorium reactors are great, but even they need their waste stored for a few centuries. Every solution has some problem.
Watch a 2010 documentary film called "Into Eternity", it is mostly about Phase 1 of a facility being built on Olkiluoto Island in southwest Finland, where they plan to store 65 tons of spent nuclear fuel for a minimum of 100000 years. They started building the tunnels for the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository in 2004 and expect to begin storing waste in 2023 when Phase 4 is complete. KBS-3V storage does require that the waste is stored for 30 years to become less radioactive (For the 'hot' material to decay through their chain, eventual producing less neutrons) before it can be stored permanently, well for 100000 years hopefully all going well.
It could actually work as envisioned, at least on paper it is the best attempt at long term nuclear storage that I've seen. And it is duplicating what was found in nature.
But it is probably time for Finland to start selecting the site to build the next spent nuclear fuel repository, because there is only enough room for about one hundred years of waste.
It is an odd phrase "power more MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) than in any previous program in the company’s history". Since they are only looking at old IBM hardware, what other companies have products with higher MIPS than this IBM offering ? There much be quite a few, just from the way that they made a statement that is always true. Or a statement that does not provide any useful information at all.
> After losing his Supreme Court bid in 2012, he fled into the Ecuadorian embassy's broom cupboard in London, only to be turfed out in 2019 and promptly arrested
Ecuador did get a massive loan around the time, basically one month to the day after the cash was released, the cops were let inside the Ecuadorian embassy! The IMF, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is basically the US.
It was an amazing multimedia OS that existed about 3 to 5 years to early. If it had peaked just a bit latter or if Microsoft did not have their backroom deal with most system sellers where they had to buy a Microsoft license irregardless if they shipped their OS.
Watch the video section of the 1998 demo https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=829
The machine used for the demo had 64 MiB of RAM
A dual core Pentium 2 system running at 266 MHz
At times during the demo they disabled one core to see the effect on performance.
(or the realtime audio https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=758 is damn cool as well)
Worker 1: What are all those barrels with the blinking red light and antennas on their side all around the plant for ?
Worker 2: I heard a rumour that it is part of the half M.A.D. final solution.
Worker 1: huh ?
Worker 2: There is some kind of super hive mind AI inside each and every one that live streams US TV via satellites 24/7, the "intelligence" mostly watches CNN and NBC. If ever Carson Daly goes off air, the $#1t will hit the fan big time. Or if the internet goes down, or the satellites are destroyed by space junk, or someone forgets to pay the streaming subscription, or the SSL certificates expire, or ...
Worker 1: What ? No, no, what I meant like what is in them ? And what do you mean by the final half M.A.D. solution.
Worker 2: The safety label on the side says that they are totally safe, that they are filled with sugar, spice and all things nice. But if I put a Geiger counter near them it goes totally bat$#1t crazy. A M.A.D. solution is Mutually Assured Destruction, they were meant to install barrels just like these in all the Silicon fabs worldwide. But the European union opted out, something to do with their RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) directive, where they want to keep their citizens safe for some insane reason. And the US says that they do not need to bother that they have been dumping all their toxic waste in the water, air and soil for the last two centuries and that a few extra barrels will not make things any worse. So yea, everywhere "was" meant to have them, but currently it just us, there is no absolutely no reason for it to be called M.A.D. (I suspect it is just marketing - S.A.D. and T.A.D. did not play well with the test group study), now it is just us - but some people do think that the idea is mad as in totally bat$#1t insane.
Worker 1: So is that why all the management are working from home these days ?
Worker 2: How the hell would I know I only work here, they never tell us anything. I only found out about them when I had to swipe the dude who was installing them into the building.
Worker 1: Should I be worried that they have a sticker on them saying Intel inside and fully compatible with Windows 11 ?
Electrolytic capacitors are usually larger through hole parts and are generally hand soldered onto the board after the pick and place machine and the boards have gone through the ovens. Basically any non-SMD (Surface Mount Device) parts end up typically being hand soldered. So the guess would be the "new" staff were trained how to solder on parts, but not that some parts are polarised and need to be soldered on one way around only (plus to plus and minus to minus to match the part up with what is shown on the silkscreen layer of the PCB (Printed Circuit Board)).
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