Madison IA64 Released -- Fastest CPU Ever

[monolith94]

Apparently the creator of the flight sim "X-Plane" was able to get his hands on a G5... from www.insidemacgames.com :

Begin quote:
Austin Meyer, creator of X-Plane says he managed to achieve a framerate of 120 on an unoptimised copy of X-Plane on a G5. He says that no PC could ever achieve this. Heres the full email newsletter.

X-PLANE STATE OF THE UNION:

I tried out X-Plane on a G-5 in California last week and it ran about 100% faster than on the top G-4. And this is before I have even pulled out the stops on multi-processing and altivec. So there will be more speed yet to come on the G-5. (X-Plane will soon be running on nitro with dual-threads for multi-processors) If you can afford a G5 (and you should, it is very affordable for a new Mac) GET ONE.

The engineering and construction make my new Vette look like a piece of cheap plastic. All aluminum. The design is so sleek it is even prettier INSIDE than OUTSIDE, and the outside is obviously tops. The materials and workmanship far exceed any car I have ever driven and any airplane I have ever flown. The aluminum interior is divided into different cooling zones with
perfect packaging everywhere.

This machine is the first truly elegant, well-engineered PC that has ever been made... never mind the fastest. (Some people say it is not the fastest, but they are grasping at straws
based on whatever statistics they can find... but I have run X-Plane on it and I have seen that for X-Plane, it is the fastest. 120 fps on a NON-OPTIMIZED copy of X-Plane. Optimizing hops us up 25% from that. How many Windows users can get 150 fps on X-Plane? (no rendering options, 7 miles vis) Try it. You won't. The G-5 does. I speak from experience with X-Plane, not newsgroup-arguing on slanted iterpretations of statistics, and for X-Plane, this is obviously what matters: FPS, not who can try to turn statisitcs around to to sound like they agree with their prejudice).

End quote.

[Asher]

Originally posted by panag
hi ,

it seems you can order one true the apple store , .....

have a nice one

Do you understand what "pre-order" means?

monolith: Of course.

First, let's examine the liklihood of this:
Apple gives X-Plane creator a G5, but refuses to give one to any hardware sites or technology sites, or even the press. The X-Plane sim is a little-known open source flight simulator game.

Now, even assuming in the unlikely event that he does have one, I find it curious he didn't release real benchmarks of it, seeing as how it's fully capable of it...

Edit: And even more suspicious, the website seems to not mention this at all: http://www.x-plane.com/default.html

So far it looks like some Mac-head is having a bit too much fun with the notorious naivity of Mac users.

[Whaleboy]

You don't like Macs do you Asher?

While I personally think apples have meant trouble since Eden, I do like their OS. Hardware isnt so great.

[Atahualpa]

Originally posted by Asher

No, maybe you don't understand what a HLL is?

A HLL is completely abstracted from the hardware beneath this.

Quite obviously, C++ doesn't count, because you can't simply switch the compiler and have it work on, say, IA-64.

However, with a language like Java or C#, this is entirely the case. Because it runs through an interpreter, it is truly a HLL.

C and C++ are not HLL, they used to be regarded as such a long time ago because, compared to machine code and assembly, it was "high" level. But it's not high anymore, it's just mid-level.

High-level languages are completely abstracted from the hardware, like Java/C#.

Java is Hardware independent
Ever programmed a Java Application for a mobile device? There you go with your Standard SDK.
Need to recompile blabla same with C++.
From the Compiletime view both are the same.
You can have C++ Code that is hardware independent. Just recompile it and there you go.

A virtual machine while in theory is a good thing, in practice it is not so much. First you need the virtual machine (which provides one extra level of possible failures) and that machine runs on hardware which of course makes this solution much slower. Then you have the versioning problem of the virtual machine. You cant run code compiled with v1.1 on the vm 1.0,... MS did really invest a lot of work in C# (version bindings and such).
Besides if that vm is not available for the hardware you have the same binary-hardware-independence as in c++.

Thats no evolution, thats a in-theory-good-looking-concept that gone horrible wrong. C# is available for hmm Windows and hmmm well whats with the mono project so far? MS does **** to port its vm to other platforms so there you go with your HLL capabilites.

ata

[Asher]

Originally posted by Atahualpa
Java is Hardware independent

Exactly!
Maybe that's why it's considered a high-level language.

Ever programmed a Java Application for a mobile device? There you go with your Standard SDK.
Need to recompile blabla same with C++.
From the Compiletime view both are the same.
You can have C++ Code that is hardware independent. Just recompile it and there you go.

But C++ code is not hardware independent, only as much as on similar computers. C++ has pointers, for one thing -- that ****s up pretty easy once you move from, say, 32-bit to 64-bit.

A virtual machine while in theory is a good thing, in practice it is not so much. First you need the virtual machine (which provides one extra level of possible failures) and that machine runs on hardware which of course makes this solution much slower. Then you have the versioning problem of the virtual machine. You cant run code compiled with v1.1 on the vm 1.0,... MS did really invest a lot of work in C# (version bindings and such).
Besides if that vm is not available for the hardware you have the same binary-hardware-independence as in c++.

Thats no evolution, thats a in-theory-good-looking-concept that gone horrible wrong.

This whole thing is a red herring, nobody is talking about performance.

Java is ass-slow compared to C++, C++ is ass-slow compared to C, C is ass-slow compared assembly. What's your point? Do you have one?

C# is available for hmm Windows and hmmm well whats with the mono project so far? MS does **** to port its vm to other platforms so there you go with your HLL capabilites.

It'd be nice if you knew what you were talking about.
MS developed, and released the sourcecode for, Rotor which runs on BSD, MacOS, and *nix. Ximian is also working on Mono, which runs basic .NET programs already and is improving, and the .NET Framework 1.1 is very mature on Windows.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3A1C93FA-7462-47D0-8E56-8DD34C6292F0&displaylang=en

[monolith94]

Asher, I'm skeptical too, of course. Nowhere in that last post of mine did I say that it was reputable, or a 'sure thing' - I was just showing a different perspective. And I feel that it could be legitimate. We'll have to see.

Boy, talk about being rabid about stuff...

[Atahualpa]

Okay Asher here are some links as of the definition of HLL.

From: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/H/high..._language.html

[..]Such languages are considered high-level because they are closer to human languages and further from machine languages[..]

Closer to human languages and further from machine language. Now Java's Language Specification is basically nothing more than a mixture of C++ and Pascal/Modula. C# - well the name says everything.

From: http://www.nue.org/foldoc/foldoc.cgi...level+language

(HLL) A programming language which provides some level of abstraction above assembly language. These normally use statements consisting of English-like keywords such as "FOR", "PRINT" or "GOTO", where each statement corresponds to several machine language instructions[..]

It also mentions that there are terms like VHLL (very high language e.g. prolog) and MLL (jokingly to describe C).

From: http://glossary.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1...-018/_2581.htm

high-level language (HLL): A computer programming language that is primarily designed for, and syntactically oriented to, particular classes of problems and that is essentially independent of the structure of a specific computer or class of computers; for example, Ada®, COBOL, Fortran, Pascal. Synonym high-order language.

So for me it seems (and for me it is) that the term High Level Language has established itself much earlier and describes languages like C++, Pascal, (Oberon), Java, C#, Visual Basic, ....

If you want to raise the bar for Java or C# as of their use of a virtual machine I suggest calling them VHLL or something similar.
Basically I still think the use of a VM is in theory a good thing. In practice however there are a lot of downsides to this.

You are right about 64 bit portability. I just read a view links on that topic and it is indeed more difficult than I thought.
Especially since 64bit Windows still uses longs of 32 bit length, while 64bit Linux uses longs of 64 bit length. I guess that will make porting Windows-Linux and vice versa much more difficult. *sigh*

Here is a link: http://www.migratec.com/MigraTEC/wht...whitepaper.pdf
And here another: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...o64BitCode.asp

This whole thing is a red herring, nobody is talking about performance.

Ohh Asher the WHOLE world is talking about performance. You are talking about performance EVERYONE is!! Specint, Specfp, Benchmark here, Benchmark there. Hardwareperformance, Softwareperformance. Tweaking tuning...
Framerate is life! Performance is everything.

It'd be nice if you knew what you were talking about.
MS developed, and released the sourcecode for, Rotor which runs on BSD, MacOS, and *nix. Ximian is also working on Mono, which runs basic .NET programs already and is improving, and the .NET Framework 1.1 is very mature on Windows.

Yes of course Mono can run basic .net programs. Now how long has the .NET Framework been available for?

ata

[Asher]

Originally posted by Atahualpa
So for me it seems (and for me it is) that the term High Level Language has established itself much earlier and describes languages like C++, Pascal, (Oberon), Java, C#, Visual Basic, ....

I don't agree with the ancient definition of HLL...a high-level language, as I'm taught in school these days and in practice, is one that can run independently of hardware. C/C++ only somewhat runs on it, which is why all my profs (and me) consider it to be a mid-level language, while Java/C# are high level.

You are right about 64 bit portability. I just read a view links on that topic and it is indeed more difficult than I thought.
Especially since 64bit Windows still uses longs of 32 bit length, while 64bit Linux uses longs of 64 bit length. I guess that will make porting Windows-Linux and vice versa much more difficult. *sigh*

Here is a link: http://www.migratec.com/MigraTEC/wht...whitepaper.pdf
And here another: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...o64BitCode.asp

I don't think you understand -- "long" is still 32-bit in Windows 64. If you want 64-bit, it's "long long"

Ohh Asher the WHOLE world is talking about performance. You are talking about performance EVERYONE is!! Specint, Specfp, Benchmark here, Benchmark there. Hardwareperformance, Softwareperformance. Tweaking tuning...
Framerate is life! Performance is everything.

But it wasn't relevant to the debate of what constitutes a high-level language. Nice try.

Yes of course Mono can run basic .net programs. Now how long has the .NET Framework been available for?

ata

How does Mono relate to MS at all? Mono is a Ximian project, if it's progress is slow it's Ximian's fault.

And are you completely ignoring Rotor, which is a full-featured .NET Framework and has been available since late 2002 for MacOS X, BSD, and *nix?

So wouldn't you agree that saying "MS doesn't care about the other platforms" (paraphrased) is rather ridiculous, given a fully-featured open-sourced version of the Framework is freely available, written by MS?

[Atahualpa]

Of course I am ignoring Rotor - just like everyone else does too

I don't think you understand -- "long" is still 32-bit in Windows 64. If you want 64-bit, it's "long long"

Thats what my penix can be if I would just follow the advice of some of the "more serious" mails I get!
Actually thats the only thing that comes to my mind reading this

But maybe thats due to all the wine I drank. Oh my god I feel

[Urban Ranger]

And time marches on

IBM steps over HP to take benchmark lead

IBM no longer has to rely on Oracle's database to set record scores. For the latest benchmark, it used a 32 processor p690 server equipped with Power4+ chips, DB2 and the IBM TotalStorage FastT900 storage system. IBM managed to crank out 763,898 transactions per minute. HP put up 707, 102 transactions per minute with a 64 processor Itanium 2 server running 64bit Microsoft Windows and SQL Server.

Say, IBM's server uses 32 Power4+ CPUs, as compared to the HP server that uses 64 Itanium 2 CPUs. That looks like the Power4+ is faster than the Itanium - by a whole lot, too.