I dream of a CPU that fast. :) When developing our new CPUs we run them in RTL-simulators. At a realtime speed of about 100Hz. Yes, no Kilo and no Mega. Herz is what we got. Linux takes about a month to boot to init at that speed. After removing the (at 100Hz) almost eternal bogomips loop that is... Needless to say Linux is a useless ancient behemoth at that speed so we write our own OS for running in simulator.

>And considering an intern could port a complete OS port in a mere 12 weeks, shows how portable it is.

Yeah. It's called unix. As long as you have the proper C-compiler for your cpu it's not hard to port a unix-like OS to another CPU. We did this fifteen years ago for one of our CPUs. Actually was an intern who did that to. It's kind of compile, look-at-compile-error, fix, redo and finally when you got it running fix the CPU config errors and the few low-level stack handling errors you've done. Apart from the do-it-once configuration of MMUs, caches, etc it's not really that much magic to a CPU from on OS point of view.

>Anything even moderately complex would require driver code, not just descriptive data.

Our chips with 3K pages of documentation and no driver code disagrees. And they run linux in millions of products. It really depends on the quality of the documentation. Which is generally pretty bad for mosts chips I have looked at.

>But they should standardise. There's no advantage to the user, >the OEM, or the OS developers in having so many different SoCs.

So you don't want any technical development? Or you think that ARM in a monopoly situation will still develop the core functionality at the same pace as all other chip design companies?

 

Man, it is tiring to have to explain this to the slashdot drones every time one of these stupid patent stories comes up.

THE PATENT ONLY PATENTS WHAT IS WRITTEN IN THE _CLAIMS_ IN THE PATENT. NOT THE TITLE OF THE PATENT. NOT THE ABSTRACT. NOT THE DESCRIPTION. NOT THE STUPID SLASHDOT STORY. ONLY THE CLAIMS.

For this patent that means if you implement this ideas EXACTLY AS IN THE 39 CLAIMS except for, for example '7. The method as recited in claim 6, wherein the pixel offset includes a range of 1 to 16 pixels.' and your pixel offset is 17, you are cool. You are fucking golden. Gedit? So quit your whining about previous art until you find something that follows THE CLAIMS. OK? THE FUCKING CLAIMS!!!!!!!

>And Google knows better.

Apparently not.

> The point isn't "we can't afford stuff! stuff should be free! WAAAH!", it's about rights, personal integrity and in extension safeguarding a free and democratic society.

And it's a coincidence that they actually want copyrighted stuff for free?

>anyway, googletroopers, expect them to have home-brew equipment which might seem slightly crude, but is actually miles ahead of modern day military hardware,

Also expect it to read the minds of the troopers and gather statistics of how to best show them commercials directly in their brains, for the benefit of the soap and tootphaste companies.

>After a new technology is introduced to the market, there is usually a predictable decrease in price as it becomes more common. Not to defend the broadband providers in any way, but electronics get cheaper because of Moore's law on transistors and lower cost if you produce big volumes. This does not apply to ditches and cables. The biggest reason that you don't get cheaper broadband in USA is of course that you have elected senators that are bribed by the companies.

>How is this 'funny'? That's how I've archived 15 years worth of email. Really.

I don't understand the funny mod either. Even though I think I might be even more lo-tech. All outgoing mail for the last 15 years are concateneted to a plain text file (cause that's what rmail in emacs does) and old incoming mail is in a emacs rmail file (also plain text). With less, grep and some shell or perl oneliners I can search 2GB faster than all the gui-clickers.

>Can't even imagine writing in assembly code for this monster. I miss dinking around with a nice 6502 system. To each his own. I kinda agree though. I also grew up on hand coding machine code on the 6502 and it sure was fun, and educational. But now working on designing 32-bit embedded chips I feel really comfortable with a couple of hundreds of instructions instead of ~60. And I sure wouldn't want to do anyhing more complex with the limited addressing modes on the 6502. And you will never see Linux on a 6502... Btw we actually designed a 6502 once and it used a couple of thousand gates, compared with a couple of billion in a high end CPU. Hard not to be impressed by the oldschool designs.

>Super interesting Wikipedia article! You would think that if they were so good at it (the french judges) they could at least tell the difference between >American and French grapes (even if they secretly found the American taste "Better")...

The varieties of grapes in those wines where, and are, the same regardless of in which country they are made.

>If there is a more gullible group of people than audiophiles, I haven't met them.

Religious people?

>+++ No Carrier

I think the problem might be that you are tunneling your call over the modem...

>All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.

Funny. Personally I generate 3000 pages of technical documentation for our chips in about 20 seconds with latex. Secretaries and salesdrones can play with the wysiwyg toys, while we who need serious results for serious work use serious tools. Having spent the last week reading a lot of scientific papers it amazes even me that close to 100% of them are done in latex.
 

How about realising that it doesn't have to be either or? We have both well-educated aces and selftought aces at our company. Of course here in sweden the latter are much more rare as almost all intelligent people with interests in technology get a higher education, but they certainly do exist and it is a real shame if your company doesn't use them.