I was interviewed recently by EEMBC, the embedded computing industry’s foremost benchmarking consortium. You can read that interview here.
I was interviewed recently by EEMBC, the embedded computing industry’s foremost benchmarking consortium. You can read that interview here.
Bill Gates: We can lower the world’s population with vaccines
At a time when anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is becoming broadly recognized as a politically driven, pseudo-scientific power-grab, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates recently “unvielded his vision” of global catastrophe unless net man-made carbon emissions are reduced to zero. The video of his peculiar, ill-timed, February TED2010 talk is here. Gates also delivered a very odd [...]
8.8 Chilean earthquake predicted two days ago
Two days ago a poster on the popular Godlike Productions message board predicted large quakes might occur on February 27. At 3:45 AM today, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile, the fifth or sixth strongest quake of the last 100 years. The poster, “ZOSIME,” based his prediction on the impact of a coronal mass ejection (CME) [...]
Listen to my new Future Quake interviews
Dr. Mike “Dr. Future” Bennett and Mike “Tom Bionic” Tatar, Jr., put on a fantastic radio program called Future Quake. I had the privilege of being interviewed by them recently and that recording will be broken up into four parts and broadcast next week on WENO, AM 760 in Nashville, TN. Those interviews are now available [...]
Listen to my new 2-hour radio interview
Dr. Stan Monteih interviewed me for two hours on his Radio Liberty program last night. You can now listen to MP3 archives of the broadcast. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Dr. Monteith has scheduled to interview me again tonight at 11PM Central / 9PM Pacific. You can listen to that interview live [...]
Apple iPad: It might be worse than you think
Apple introduced its greatly anticipated tablet computer, the iPad, yesterday. It was impossible for the product to meet the unbelievable hype surrounding the computer’s debut, but even taking this into account, the reaction to the device, which will not ship for months, has been mostly negative. Critics point out the iPad’s lack of multitasking, the low [...]
Direct Link to my Radio Liberty interview
You can download the MP3 archive of my Radio Liberty interview here: http://radiolibertyarchives.gsradio.net:8080/012510d.mp3 Dr. Monteith also has scheduled several additional interviews with me for the upcoming weeks.
Georgia Guidestones, 2012 and HAARP discussion
Over the last few weeks, I made several posts to the message board of the TV program Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura. I discuss the Georgia Guidestones here. I post that we have nothing out of the ordinary to fear from nature on 12 / 21 / 2012 here. Responding to many questions on the [...]
More Linkage between the Georgia Guidestones and the Burj Khalifa
NOTE: A better, updated account of the linkage between the Georgia Guidestones and the Burj Khalifa can be found here. This brief post is a followup to my recent Georgia Guidestones article which can be read here: http://www.vanshardware.com/2009/12/decoding-georgia-guidestone.html The Georgia Guidestones monument is composed of three primary components: the center “Gnomen” stone, the capstone and [...]
Decoding the Georgia Guidestones
A recent nighttime photograph of the Georgia Guidestones Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about? – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Program It’s a beautiful, warm, November Saturday in Georgia and the defaced granite monument looms above Mart Clamp while [...]
Essential Free Windows Programs
Although I use Ubuntu more and more, I still have to spend a large portion of my day working in Windows, primarily because of my job. Gaming and navigation software are other reasons why I boot up Windows. Whenever I load a box with Windows, I usually install the following programs. OpenOffice: OpenOffice 3 has [...]
1970s record album suggests 9/11 foreknowledge
Now they’re planning the crime of the century Well what will it be? Read all about their schemes and adventuring. It’s well worth a fee. So roll up and see How they rape the universe How they’ve gone from bad to worse. Who are these men of lust, greed and glory? Rip off the masks [...]
You might be a terrorist if you read iFixit
Recent U.S. Government flyers claim that reading electronics information on the Internet might mean you are a terrorist and need to be reported to law enforcement authorities. Popular electronics website iFixit, famous for tearing apart the latest gadgets, is understandably worried about the ramifications of such broadly worded fear mongering coming straight from the Feds. [...]
Tetragrammaton and the recent solar triangle
The recent strange and gigantic hole in the sun’s corona, visible in certain space-based images taken earlier this week, bears an eerie resemblance to a French representation of the Tetragrammaton, a word that refers to the name of God. The following image was taken from Wikipedia. From the Greek word “τετραγράμματον,” “Tetragrammaton” literally means “having [...]
Triangular Coronal Hole Opens on Sun Images
A large and very oddly shaped coronal hole has appeared on recent images of the Sun taken from various American space-based observatories (SDO, SOHO, and SXI shown below). The hole is distinctly triangular in shape and is pointed at the Earth. According to SpaceWeather.com, the solar winds from this hole should arrive at Earth around [...]
New Skype drops calls after 30 minutes, 24 seconds
I updated Skype recently to version 5.8.0.156 and I have had three straight calls that were dropped after 30 minutes, 24 seconds. This did not happen with previous Skype versions where I could maintain calls for hours. Microsoft purchased Skype last year for $8.5-billion and the service has been balky on several occasions since then.
UPDATED: Georgia Guidestones Interactive Movie Debuts
NOTE: The makers of Guidestones contacted us about the manner the movie is distributed. A bug in their email scheduling code resulted in our getting all of the episodes jumbled in our inbox simultaneously. This bug has been fixed and we have updated the review below to reflect these distribution changes and have added other [...]
Occult symbolism in 2012 Chevrolet Silverado Super Bowl commercial
Chevrolet has uploaded to YouTube a 2012 Super Bowl advertisement for its popular Silverado line of pickup trucks. Based in a post-apocalyptic world foretold by the Maya, the ad shows a surviving Chevy Silverado emerging from the rubble and driving past a series of end-of-the-world disaster movie cliches while Barry Manilow’s Looks Like We Made [...]
Strange Circular Object Sighted at the Bottom of the Baltic
Using sonar, a group of Swedish treasure hunters have discovered an odd 60 meter (200 foot) disc-shaped object on the bottom of the Baltic Sea adjacent to 400 meter (1,300 foot) “drag marks.” Referred to as an underwater “UFO” by the discoverer, the circular feature does not appear to be natural.
The talented Blue Grass group The Cleverlys covers the Bangles hit Walk Like an Egyptian and the result is comedic genius that sounds great. The spastic, twitchy, hilarious and gifted drummer is “Digger Jr. Jr.” who has been missing from the band for nearly two years. Whatever happened to him, The Cleverlys need to bring [...]
Recipe for a Revolution
The memory system bus speed may not be important to CoreMark’s code once loaded into a core’s cache, but communication between multiple cores still operates on that bus, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t that be a factor? Or are shared, on-die cores operating at non-memory-bus speeds?
Hi, Rick. If it’s an SMP system, then the cores communicate and coordinate over the bus, but multi-core chips do most of this through their integrated caches which usually operate at core speed.
Van, that’s interesting. I’ve always thought the same-die multi-core CPUs still communicated over the system bus (and the MOESI protocol), they just did it on-die, with the cache being its own component that’s sort of “in the loop,” as it were, sending data to the cores as it’s requested and present. I didn’t realize there were different integrated buses internally and externally.
How does that work with power planes and variable-clocked cores? The bus between cores must be maintained at a constant voltage and clock speed then, separate from the thing it’s communicating with, and regardless of the other core’s compute clock speed, right? Or in the alternative, when a particular core goes high / low voltage, there must be circuitry at every other core which auto-adjusts up/down to transmit to the other cores?
Well, you’re right for some of the very primitive “dual-core” implementations like the P4-D and the “dual-core” Atoms. In those cases, you really have an SMP system on a package where two discrete dice are tied together over a shared bus. The 65-nm “dual-core” VIA Nano (CNB) prototype at the last Computex was implemented similarly, but it apparently will not be released. Instead, Centaur plans a true dual-core design for the 45-nm shrink. I believe that design will be very similar to a Core2 Duo with a large, shared L2. The last I heard, Glenn, Al and Rodney were targeting C2D-level IPC as well, and they were confident that they could reach it.
I’m not an expert on maintaining cache-coherency in true multi-core environments, particularly with integrated memory controllers like you see with AMD, ARM and newer Intel processors — in those cases, there is no external FSB. I believe they all communicate with the outside world using high-speed serial buses. I think Centaur planned to use PCIe for this.
Power management with modern CPUs has become extremely complicated. My experience has been with single-core chips. My assumption has been that multicore chips need separate power planes if each core is going to be turned off individually. Regarding P-States, I’m sure each core has its own PLL triggered by the same master B-Clock and the only way for voltages to be different for each core is if they each had their own power plane.
One issue that has been problematic over the years is the timestamp counter (TSC). Microsoft issued a recommendation many years ago that the TSC should be incremented at a constant rate regardless of the true CPU frequency; this would make it easy to keep the TSCs in sync between cores. However, it hasn’t worked that way until recently and it was a headache for benchmark developers who use the TSC as a high resolution timer.
Van, definitely makes sense. I remember reading about the RDTSC issue as well. I also remember Intel working on their 40-core Terascale 2 CPU, which contained an undisclosed x86 core (though I believe it was based on the modern Pentium-like in-order version seen in Larrabee), which had a 6-way proprietary bus architectures for massive data migration per core per clock.
Terascale 2′s die cores were arranged in a tile pattern with each core having north/south/east/west communication in 4-ways, and then 1-way dedicated back-and-forth to main memory and 1-way dedicated back-and-forth to non-adjacent cores. The total aggregate bandwidth on that CPU was theoretically unreal (don’t remember exact figures, but I believe around 256 Terabits/s (320 GB/s) on around 100 watts).
When I interviewed Jerry Bautista in 2007, he was extremely excited about Terascale 2. I even managed to arrange a meeting between him and another person I had interviewed previously, Dr. Ioannis A. Kakadiaris of the Texas Learning & Computation Center at the University of Houston. Dr. Kakadiaris hoped to utilize the amazing compute potential of Terascale 2 for 3D medical scanning systems he was developing, that had just a volume of data that it was not feasible to conduct in real-time. He was hoping to develop “agent algorithms” which would sift through the 3D medical scans, looking for problems automatically, without a doctor having to eyeball the scans to see the tumors, etc. It was a fascinating medical technology, and an equally fascinating application of the hardware side to solve it.