This is what happens when I take my eye off the ball.

[andrewducker]

Julie recently bought a desktop - and got a quad core processor, which I thought sounded pretty high end.

Until I just went and took a look at processors, and realised that you pretty much can't buy single-core CPUs any more - dabs has three uni-core cpus, versus thirteen dual-core and twenty one with 3 or 4 cores.

Desktops still seem to be maxed out at four-core - but I do wonder how much longer that will last, and whether there's much point scaling beyond that for most people, without something that uses that much CPU, and isn't heavily hard drive dependent.

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Actually they have - check out hybrid hard drives. However they really didn't work too well, as the interfaces between drive and SSD were rather lousy...

[andrewducker]

I remember reading about early versions of it - where for some reason it required the OS to know about it, which seemed remarkably odd to me. After all, if it's a cache built into the drive controller why would the OS need to know it was even there?

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Ideally, you don't want the SSD to be a simple cache per se, as 1) it would get overwritten a lot, and 2) the SSD isn't necessarily faster than the HDD for continuous accesses.

The idea was that by surrendering control to the OS, they'd be able to make use of OS-level information like global power management: allow the OS to decide what stuff to put in SSD so that it can shut down the HDD and jsut run from the SSD. Good in theory, but in practice, it looks like none of the OS vendors ever bothered.

Theoretically, the drive could profile all this itself, but that would push up the complexity and the cost of the drive.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Yes, Hybrid SSDs made me very excited for a while, and then completely failed to deliver, largely because of the necessary OS support. I'm not 100% sure why they decided to delegate policy to the OS, rather than allow the drive to manage its own storage, but that seems to have been a major contributing factor to their failure.

Also, the decision by MS that the best use they could make of the SSD portion is as save/restore for hibernation...

[andrewducker]

Aha!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10327453-23.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Interesting link, thanks.

I have to admit I was entirely unaware of ReadyBoost, and am quite tempted to buy a cheapie flash drive to stick in my work desktop machine; but it's seems to be quite hard to find any objective benchmarks on what sort of improvement could be expected, mostly because almost everything I've read in the first page of Google hits is either hand-wavingly high-level ("it makes things faster because flash is faster than an hdd in some way i'm not going to explain") or simply written by complete morons who seems disappointed it doesn't make Quake 5 (or whatever they're up to now) faster.

I may have to actually construct myself some objective benchmarks and try it myself. If only it wasn't for the fact that the only Vista machine I have is my work desktop, so my results would be owned by the company ;)

[andrewducker]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost#Performance

Looks like it's great if your computer only has 512MB of RAM and a slow hard drive.

Not so useful in a modern PC...

[andrewducker]

Aha!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10327453-23.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5