something new on pctorque

No, it isn't a typo. We are now able to offer 2GB of 400DDR RAM.

Well, since your only have 2 DDr slots availible your need 2 1024 meg sticks to get that. Since the have to be matched. I havent ever seen a 1024 of DDr 400 (it is DDr 400 isnt it?). So that price seems about right.

Tom...is that trully pc3200 memory or is it just overclocked 2700?

Does this apply to the 8890???

Does this apply to the 8890? And if so what about upgrades for those of us that have already bought from PCT.

Thanks

Dave

Edit: Yep; I just checked PCT and it does apply to the 8890 as well.

...and here I thought 1GB was plenty for a laptop...

-myrkat

myrkat you obviously haven't been out much lately.
I had one of my clients load a GIS application onto antonov (they are looking to by a set of 4780's) to test out its speed. Damn thing nearly choked. Watched the cache go from normal to 1.7GB and available memory drop to zero. These guys have a serious application. He told me later that no other laptop has been able to even load the application let alone run it.

I might see if he can spring the money for me to get 2GB so he can test the application in full flight. In case you are wondering it is a complete (down to 1m resolution road map of Australia used for the Australian in-car navigation system).

Absolutely awesome to watch the 8890 eat the application - never seen the Hyper-threading work so hard - and for anyone who has doubts about the effectiveness of hyper-threading just load some decent applications and watch it fly.

those phuking ineffecient programmers write bad code and expect people to have better hardware to run the stupid code...idiots!!










dont mind me...just one of those "OFF" days

Not so much the inefficent code gs, more just the size of the dataset. The actual application is only about 200 MB - the dataset is huge - remember it is every road and street across Australia down to a 1m feature resolution.

A 200MB application is pretty big... Is this dataset in vector format (a la CAD) or is it GIS / Image/bitmap stuff? Probably the later, as I've seen incredibly detailed CAD files occupy MUCH less space...

Still, aussie, I imagine those guys are the exception rather than the norm. 2GB is a lot of RAM - especially for a laptop.

Now a real memory/processor eater is HD-NLE video editing. My uncle works in "the biz" for a major editing studio, and they do everything in RAM (we're talking tetrabytes). When I asked him what do they do for backups (wondering what kind of tape/HD solution they use), he replied, "are you a religious man?" and chuckled.

-myrkat

some trivia about GIS

There is one thing or two I know about GIS (Geographic Information Systems), but I'm far from being an expert. To put it very simply, they are very sophisticated maps, loaded with any amount of layers of information that you wish to include, picking them from a database.

the thing with GIS is that they originate from incredibly high resolution satellite photographs and infrared readings of Earth's surface, and those tend to be very, very large files. Imagine being able to resolve a car, from 800 km high: That's the type of photographs GIS works with.

They incorporate on top of that, vectorial data (drawings) which include shading and color to facilitate readability.

And on top of that, they include huge databases of everything and anything that can be documented in a map.

Take for instance a map showing a street and a neighborhood. You can have dimensions, topography, number of stories in buildings, building ownership data, land plot ownership data, position of services infrastructure (electricity, water, sewers, etc), public transportation networks, census data, temperature data, and so on and so forth. You make your map as simple or as complicated as you like, combining whatever layers you want to extract the specific information that you need.

Well, I don't want to smaller your enthusiasm or challenge the usual power of a 8890 (aka Clevo D800P), but why are you so sure that this specific data hungry app made at all any usage of the CPUs HT capabilities?

Usually you only benefit from especially thread programmed software apps via HT, otherwise there isn't this much benefit at all from HT. - Mainly in a similar manner like multi processor systems, which also only benefit from apps which are intentionally programmed to make usage from a multiprocessor system. - In other words, when an software app (an OS here too) isn't specially programmed and optimized to make any usage of fine graded parallel software based threadings, then HT won't show up much better throughput results, just a minimalistic better performance.

But if instead an app has been especially programmed in mind to make usage of fine grade software threadings, then you can yield some much better results with the help of a HT CPU.

So? We've only got about 12 roads in australia anyway, right?

Joe

Isn't Australia a little island off the coast of New Zealand?

Oh ok, very funny guys. And for you DavidB congrats on sweeping the pool with the Oscars dude. Some very creative people in NZ. About time we gave these 'merkins something to think about .

Andersen, 14 roads now and a rail link. We added the extra two last week .

krobotkin - what I did was to open the task manager and watch the CPU utilisation graphs. You can definitely see the hyperthreading go into action. One misconception that a lot of people have is that programs are not threaded. If you open the task manager and enable the thread count option you will see how many threads are really active. On average most programs running on my laptop have at least 5 threads. You also have to remember that WinXP is based in part on the Mach micro-kernel (which David Butler, the architect of DEC/VMS fame (now that was an operating system) used to build NT. It uses threads quite extensively (most modern operating systems do - Solaris, Linux, Tru64, HP/UX, XP, NT, AIX). So to say HT is not going to give you any gain without knowing the underlying code is merely heresay. We need facts dude. Facts.

spitzbube has the best handle on it. The description of the system is pretty accurate. I am no GIS specialist (my brother is who developed the system in conjunction with Telstra and Philips BV) but I know enough of what these guys do to realise it eats CPU and disk. Just to handle the raw database they have a Sun processor farm and more disks than you can poke a stick at (if I can ever get their new StorEdge box to work ).

I think his name is David Cutler. And yes VMS was a great OS in its time.
I am not so sure about the Mach kernel part. NT was born from what was orignally going to be the next gen of VMS. To bad MS went and added so much junk ontop of what David Cutler built for 'em. It would have been much better if NT/2K/XP was a modular os, but that did not fit MS's busniess model.

XP still works pretty good once you turn a bunch of stuff like messenger off.

Dave

Yes you are right dswantek about Cutler, not Butler - I got confused with our once useful UN Weapons inspector David Butler. Yes it was David Cutler who used to work for DEC then got swiped by Bill.

I would have to dig thru my archives about the Mach roots of NT, I know Apple went down the same route with their OSX.

As to turning messenger off, did you also realise there is a registry tweak to kill the delay that MS Outlook suffers if you do turn Messenger off.

Anybody interested in GIS and its complexity, check out www.grime.net. When you finish with that check out www.vterrain.org.

When you finish with that, the joint venture between the US Army and There.com may have yielded some usable products. Check out
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3507531.stm

Forget DOOM X or MM, this is the real earth with real firepower and potentially a real armageddon or .... not. As I pointed out to those who noted me on this project, there is an awful lot of there out there. I figure with a good program a dedicated worker might be able to do a very basic model (outside block of buildings with photo textures) of a moderate sized city (say 100,000 pop or roughly 6000 to 10000 buidings) every 3 to 5 years, assuming the data for it all was available. Frankly, there aren't enough photographers and surveyors but that's a minor point.

By the way, the US Govs GIS are now based on the radar images taken by Endeavor in February 2000, see http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/. This represents the most complete and accurate mapping of the world ever. The public has access to 90 meter resolution data outside the US, within the US 30 meter resolution is available from the USGS.

Well, I too know enough about Mach-Kernels and related operating systems, since I had a NeXT Computer running NextStep/OpenStep (the BSD 4.3 non ful POSIX based versions with a mach kernel) from 1991 on and I also programmed for such systems for >10 years.

However, the point I meant isn't that much OS related but instead from the end applications point of view (the navigation system). So to say, even HT workload parallelism makes thread synchronisations more painless, basic multithreading technics still apply here for software developers. So one still has to use thread pools with not too many active coarse grain threads and less synchronization when developing software applications which should have to benifit much more from HT hardware technics.

Without accordingly thread programmed apps you will just gain a ~ <=10% performance boost, which is finally only a minimalistic sort of feeled performance increase at all, since a HT CPU is only emulation a second CPU and doesn't have a real second unit of account. - On the other side with especially conceptional programmed apps you may get a theoretical maximum of say ~20% performance increase (according to Intel 40%). So you still need hyperthreading-aware software (apps) to get any increased performance boost at all. - Everything else are just fairy tales...