Back to home page

DOS ain't dead

Forum index page

Log in | Register

Search:  
Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view

modern 64-bit cpus (Miscellaneous)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 21.02.2020, 11:40

> > My Lenovo desktop (Core i5, dual core, quasi four with HTT) from 2011
> > has Nehalem Westmere (tail end of gen 1) with VT-X and nested page tables
> > (unrestricted guest mode, unreal/big real, whatever).
>
> Westmere was server, and mostly labeled as "Xeons", not "i5". If you have a
> 650 or 655, that is "enthusiast" variant Clarkdale.
You're right, I suppose (i5 650). I can barely keep track of their insane naming conventions. Even "i5" is useless. My old 2010 laptop is technically "Pentium" (mid-range?) dual-core but family 6 (obviously). One young person I talked to didn't understand "Core 2" vs. "cores" or "i7" vs. "seven cores". I swear they intentionally avoid mentioning these details (and VT-X and a billion other features, who can even keep track?).

> > Now that BIOS/CSM is effectively dead (no more native
> > booting), VT-X is very crucial (if you "need" legacy that badly).
>
> Yes. Note that VT-X is mainly for non-cooperating (full emulation) OSes.
> Stuff like Linux runs better, because some high bandwidth drivers are
> replaced by ones that hand it nicely to the hypervisor.
I think they just aren't optimized for tons of mode switches, especially not DOS/DJGPP. BTW, obviously VT-X is the new V86 mode (but took forever to get propagated to end users).

> Chromebooks are mainly intended to do some surfing (and then mostly "on the
> road"). I avoid them, and the N series in general (though I know some of
> the later ones are out of order, and not as bad as the early Atom ones).

It's no worse than an Android tablet, just bigger screen and keyboard. Slightly different but still similar.

My mother uses an old, used laptop that my brother gave her. 2 GB of RAM, single core, but barely-modern cpu circa 2009 or so (I forget exactly). It stays always plugged in, uses external mouse and keyboard, makes tons of fan noise, but otherwise works (thanks to me setting up a USB jump drive with Ubuntu for her). She's very cheap and stubborn, so if you think I'm a luddite, try convincing her to upgrade literally anything.

Sadly, I think most people are just expected to grab the first thing they see or whatever's on "sale". It's not like I need it for anything important, but still, I need to be careful.

> I do a lot of FPC compiling, and while that doesn't require a umpteen core
> threadripper, a basic quad core is nice. Higher core counts are less
> utilized. (e.g. my Ryzen 2600 hexa core is about 25-35% faster than the
> i7-3770 compiling FPC).
The only -j4 compiling I ever did was (minimal, for fun) cross-building p7zip and building a newer QEMU under Lucid Puppy Linux. "Four" cores definitely made a difference.

> Zen is nice though. The old core AMD advantages, price/performance, working
> well also if code isn't particularly optimized for it, and less playing
> games with the processor lineup than Intel does (this one gets vt-x, that
> one gets hyperthreading etc). A large part of the lineup has all features
> enabled.
>
> At work we have the budget AMDs (about Eur 50, tax inclusive) as workhorse,
> Athlon 200GE, based on original Zen. Even those are nice.
My brother and I both had AMD laptops back in 2007 or so (both something like TK-53 AMD64x2). His was a Toshiba and mine was HP Compaq. Both similarly failed/died/overheated.

(My brother also has a newer [2016??] AMD laptop, but he only got that because it was cheap, Black Friday sale or whatever. A6 APU? with VT-X and four cores, but he never did anything cool with it. I only barely got him to boot a USB jump drive successfully to DOS once, and that was a few months ago. He's more interested in multimedia and Windows. I loaned him a very old Pascal book and emailed him a bunch of links and examples re: FPC, but I don't know how much he's truly interested, despite some unprompted initiative from him. Certainly FreeDOS didn't sway his opinion.)

I still think very highly of AMD. I know they have very smart engineers. But my Dell laptop (Intel) was easily twice as good (esp. battery life). Then again, Dell was incredibly biased against AMD for years. So I don't (and shouldn't) hold a grudge.

Besides, AMD's Zen was redesigned from scratch, "no longer a generation behind", and is very popular and affordable. For fun (even though I refuse to play the stock market), I was watching their stock price for years. It's gone quite high in recent months, surprisingly. But the market is fickle and irrational, so I don't draw any conclusions there. (PS4 and XBox1 both were wildly successful and used AMD64, but that made no dent in their stock price, surprisingly.)

> > There's too many cpus. Zen was from early 2017. MS Surface has Zen+. Zen
> > 2 was just released. Intel's on, what, gen 10 or 11?? It's too much.
> > I did briefly online look at some Dell Ryzen laptops, but I really
> > wanted a reasonable Linux one, not Windows.
>
> Wait. This summer a Ryzen 4xxx series laptops should come out, and they
> will be good. My work laptop is up for a change, so I might snap one up
> myself.
Ever looked at FSF's "Respect Your Freedom" (refurbished?) laptops? I forget what that fork of Coreboot is used (Libreboot??). Quite ancient (2008-ish?) tech but no ME or PSP or whatever. Not dirt cheap either but nothing horrible.

> "official" linux branded hardware is maybe not wise. Usually they
> are targeted at education and research institutions and relatively
> overpriced.
Software engineers want good stuff, not old refurbished ten-year-old crap. SSD, 16 GB RAM, UHD, or whatever. Yes, it's overpriced a bit, but it's not for the lowly masses like myself. I just don't majorly want or need Windows, even though Win10 has WSL for running Linux 64-bit binaries.

> [Threadripper] is a beast, but also expensive (Eur 4000) a very unpractical
> power requirement (noisy) etc.
Compared to what? I think one person said the Intel equivalent was $10000!
Similarly, noise compared to what? A Pentium 4?? :-P :-P Even one streamer I watch played one XBox360 game on his XBox1 because it was quieter. (Yeah, 2005 PPC tri-core tech wasn't as efficient, big surprise.)

> The FPC project's build process uses Make in parallel mode on directories,
> getting about two to four times as fast when enabling multi core. But going
> from quad to hexacore or higher doesn't bring much, since due to
> dependencies they are underutilized.
>
> But that is compiling FPC, not compiling WITH FPC.
But ... but ... you compile FPC with FPC! (I did read once that Delphi won't build it due to their bugs. Who knows if that's changed.)

I've probably never even rebuilt FPC. I need to rebuild the Go32v2 version one of these days, for fun. It really should be buildable in DOS natively (famous last words).

> Yes. All main apps are 64-bit at work except for one.
Have you seen any Windows ARM64 machines? What are your opinions?

> That exception does a lot of x87 math. (like sin/cos etc),
> which seems to be faster in 32-bit, at least with Delphi.
AMD64 went minimal and only supported (like C89 or Oberon) REAL and LONGREAL (aka, single and double). Doesn't even FPC "extended" not work on AMD64? Meh. So yeah, third-party library needed ... or maybe AVX, dunno.

> C++20 has exciting new features like Modules and Coroutines. You know, the
> features that Modula2 had in 1980, and Modules were backported to Turbo
> Pascal as units in '86 or so :-)
It will be great when modules finally stabilize. I hope they backport it to C. The less reliance on brittle (unportable) makefiles and POSIX shell, the better. (Doesn't even Win10 have Bash and Curl nowadays??)

Speaking of p7zip, it's not the best code (how would I know??), could be better abstracted or portablized or simplified or modularized, but it's quite nice for what it does. I have no idea why I waste time on such things that I know nothing about. (I do have a DOS-era C++ book from 1995, heh. I only halfway read it and gave up, decades ago. Probably shouldn't now learn C++ from before '11, if even that old. Then again, who cares, I can fire up a VM.)

> Maybe in 2040 they finally realize that = vs == is not smart either.
The switch statement could definitely be fixed. But they'll probably keep assignment in expressions. (Nested functions would be very nice to standardize, too. GCC and TCC support it, so do others like D.)

Post reply
 

Complete thread:

Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view
22049 Postings in 2034 Threads, 396 registered users, 135 users online (0 registered, 135 guests)
DOS ain't dead | Admin contact
RSS Feed
powered by my little forum