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big RAM / 64-bit / etc. (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 04.04.2009, 17:21
(edited by Rugxulo on 04.04.2009, 18:01)

> Well, there are several levels here. Sufficient to say that the recent
> "consumer" SSD are not what you want except for netbooks.
>
> The "real" ones are very expensive Eur 800-1000+.
I hear Intel's are the best, currently.

> Better wait some years.
Unlikely. Maybe six months to a year, maybe more. But it's definitely hit mainstream and is heading towards us. Then again, so is x86-64 (and I don't know what to do about that for DOS: I suppose dual mode .EXEs, DOSBox, DOSEMU, QEMU).

> Well, the monitor part annoys me more than an unused BR engine on the
> videocard. Why? It is fun to be able to play them, but it is a rare
> circumstance, and I don't want to mutilate somehting I look at every day
> for the doubtful benefits of having "no stripes" that one time I watch
> video.
Most people have standalone players anyways (well, DVD, not necessarily Blu-Ray although those have finally come down in price cheaper than the PS3). Did I mention that I'm so dumb that I accidentally rented a BD video a few months back despite having no BD player? (Had to go back and exchange it, doh!) :-D In my defense, the packaging looks very very similar (and I just wasn't expecting that to be an issue, I'm so "behind the times", lol).

> > > Well, that limit is not hard, and shifts with time. There have been
> > people
> > > making the same argument for 4kb, 64kb, 640kb, 16MB, 64MB, 512MB etc.
> >
> > I don't think anybody ever said 4k was enough for anything! ;-)
>
> Yes they did, when the C=64 came out.
I thought the C64 had 64k? (Okay, too lazy to look it up, I never used one, but still ...) Even the VIC-20 had more than its claimed 2k, I think.

> > As for the other numbers, blame seems to lie with either Intel or MS.
> (I
> > actually read today, although highly doubt, that it was IBM's fault for
> > 640k although MS had to push hard else IBM wanted 512k !!)
>
> Not really. Mac have similar limitations. The 640k barrier was actually ok
> and visionary for quite a while. The problem is more that most people that
> hit it, got into PCs rather late in that cycle (1980-1994, the dos golden
> age)
The original IBM PC supposedly came with anywhere from 16k to 64k. And Gordon Letwin (of MS fame) blames Compaq (exclusive 386 rights initially) and IBM (already promised 286 support) for delaying OS/2 32-bit for way too long. MS wanted to skip the 286 and jump to the 386, but IBM refused. So they got started way late. Also, they thought beating the 640k limit would make OS/2 1.x sell like hotcakes, but DOS extenders took that market away. Plus, Win 3.0 was a hit, and IBM politics kicked them out for refusing to make OS/2 exclusively. (See here for the actual post, I'm just weakly paraphrasing.)

> > > I'd put the number on 2GB. Unless you use Vista, then go to the next
> > > switch.
> >
> > I'm on Vista with 1 GB, which seems to work fine, but I'm used to low
> RAM
> > DOS software, plus my (integrated / shared) video card sucks (and I
> > disabled desktop composition), so I guess the latter doesn't waste much
> > RAM (thankfully).
>
> Brave :-)
The video card only uses 64 MB of shared memory. The Windows Experience Index (or whatever dumb name they call it) rates it lowest of all the pieces, so that's my score (2.4 or so, not very good). Actually it used to be a little bit higher, so I blame some OS or driver upgrade (go figure).

Processor: 4.6
Memory: 4.5
Graphics: 3.1
Gaming graphics: 2.4
Primary hard disk: 4.9

(And BTW, they've already changed/increased the scale in Windows 7, so basically it almost doesn't even make sense!!)

"New hardware detected (huh??) Your Windows Experience Index needs to be refreshed (oh joy)." :-|

EDIT: Graphics is now 3.0. Hooray. :rotfl:

EDIT #2: Disabled antivirus real-time scan, swapped power config to High Performance, closed all apps, and it changed to: 4.6, 4.5, 3.2, 2.4, 4.9 (and even tried again with "desktop composition" enabled, no difference ... note that this is DX10, not 10.1).

EDIT #3: Confused about some things, here's what it says:

NVIDIA GeForce Go 6100
Approx. Total Memory: 281 MB
Current Display Mode: 1280x800 (32bit) (60Hz)
DirectX Version: DirectX 10
DxDiag 6.00.6001.18000 32-bit Unicode Copyright (c) 1998-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The 281 is dubious since I think BIOS allows me to select a different max. amount of "shared" memory (min. 64 MB, I thought). It says DX 10 (aka, 10.0, I assume) despite the 6.00.6001.18000 (which Wikipedia says is 10.1). The 2006 copyright would indicate 10.0, but I dunno. I'm pretty sure my XP machine will say 9.0c or something like that (so I assume it would explicitly say 10.1 if my card supported it, which I don't think all cards do, even if they were approved for 10.0).

Anyways, for normal everyday use I disable desktop composition (which disables Flip3d, boo freakin' hoo) just because UAC took at least 5 secs. to recover (fully blank screen!) each time it was invoked. That was just stupid, esp. since I didn't need it. (Silly Sidebar widget says I have 53% RAM used right now. It doesn't typically go too high for me, but I'm not really hardcore in that way. VMs are typically the greediest.)

> > > Without VMs or specially memory hungry programs, I have enough with
> > 2GB.
> > > 1GB is simply to little if you use GNU tools, since I saw GNU LD use
> > 1.6GB
> > > to use a 6MB app. It is quite inefficient.
> >
> > I guess you mean building something big like FPC. Obviously for my
> wimpy
> > attempts at using GCC/DJGPP, it's never gotten that high (mostly
> because
> > the OS won't allow it, heh).
>
> It is if you try to get the binaries as small as possible.
Not for GCC. -Os for them is even faster / lighter than -O2 (although -O1 is recommended for best speed / RAM usage if you need at least some optimizations). Besides, don't forget BinUtils 2.17+ have --reduce-memory-overheads (for slower but less RAM used methods previously utilized).

> > I still say you should try building the
> > "Gold" (ELF) linker sometime or get one of the other FPC devs to send
> it
> > to you (or tell you how it works for them, etc).
>
> They see Ian Lance Taylor's msgs on comp.compilers, just like I do.
But have they tried it? And if not, why not? :-)

> > BTW, still haven't heard if you were
> > able to build DOSEMU for FreeBSD yet (no pressure). ;-)
>
> Hmm. I have to boot freebsd anyway this weekend. Will see if I can do
> anything.
I didn't mean you have to, just curious if somebody knew if it would build there or not. (The DOSEMU docs were very inconclusive. I guess somebody must've tried previously but not recently.)

P.S. Tran's Timeless demo (DOS, w/ .ASM srcs) runs perfect in DOSEMU, and the Win32 SDL port runs perfect in WINE. (But I didn't have GCC, so I couldn't test the GNU/Linux port, go figure).

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