Dick's netbook

[Derek]

Am I the only one who heard Dick say he had a ~$300 quad-core netbook?

I've been looking for specs on any quad-core netbook and the best I
can find is mention that someone's planning to release a quad-core ARM-
based one in 2013.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated (Dick?). :o)

D.

[Phil]

Dick does say his Eee PC has four cores. I suspect it has two cores,
each supporting two threads, so Linux shows four logical cores. I
think Windows does the same (although I can't remember for certain,
not having used Windows in anger for a few years).

Checking on the AMD site you'd need a machine with a Phenom to get
four cores. The latest Eee PC 1215P has a dual core N550 (Turion)
processor.

[Justinas]

Thats true, i have Intel Atom dual core CPU, and linux shows 4 cores. That meas 2threads per core

j.

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group.
> To post to this group, send email to java...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
>

[Derek]

Great, thanks guys. I wasn't aware of the core/thread reporting in
linux.

D.

On Jul 29, 8:53 pm, Justinas <cofeinesunsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thats true, i have Intel Atom dual core CPU, and linux shows 4 cores. That
> meas 2threads per core
>
> j.
>

[Dick Wall]

yep - sorry folks - I thought I should have clarified this at the time. It is dual core, with 2 threads per core. Each thread can have it's own independent clock speed, so one or all can fire up to full speed or draw back to power saving independently. The upshot is that 4 things can be happening in the same clock cycle, and the point was to demonstrate that parallel processing is here on even the smallest machines. My netbook is a EEEPC 1015PEM, it gets about 6-8 hours from a charge, and can compile our non-trivial scala codebase just fine, along with producing many of the Java Posse episodes using Audacity. It fits in my bicycle pack as well. I love it :-)

[Casper Bang]

HT only dublicates part of the CPU though, mainly those parts dealing
with state - there is still only two ALU's doing real work in the
n550, so the notion of a virtual CPU (one without execution units)
having an independent clock speed, makes little sence (to me anyway).

Where HT shines is with long pipelines and unpredictable work (cache
miss and prefetch errors). Indeed most people sees only an improvement
of 10 -30%. Are you seeing more than that? And under which conditions?

[Casper Bang]

I should add that using the highly parallelizable transcoding software
Handbrake on my i7 Lynnfield rig, enabling HT only results in a 7%
increase in performance, and that just barely makes up for the 5% die
size increase required for supporting HT. In other words, HT largely
still remains the gimmick it was when introduced in the Netburst
architecture. It makes people and the OS think there are twice the
resources, when really there aren't.

Moreover, the Atom's are in-order architectures, and it's my
understanding HT is utilized mainly to make up for their long
pipelines and in-order architectures where a branch misprediction will
incur significant overhead (entire 16 stage pipeline has to be flushed
and filled again with instructions before the actual execution units
gets something to work with).