Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.
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It's a strange world when hardware refuses to run on a given OS, and not the other way around.
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@Zecc said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
It's a strange world when hardware refuses to run on a given OS, and not the other way around.
Not so strange. I remember a lot of motherboards don't provide driver for Windows servers too.
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@Zecc I can't see how that's what's happening. Looks to me like MS has just strongarmed Intel and AMD into agreeing not to release GPU drivers for their new chips' integrated video whose INF files mark them as compatible with earlier versions of Windows.
I would be very surprised to learn that anything more complicated than a bit of INF file editing was required to make a 10-only GPU driver run on 7, and utterly astonished to learn that the new CPUs enforce "only supports Windows 10" any more deeply than chip-manufacturer driver unavailability.
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You guys are taking my jab at "hardware running software" way too seriously.
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WTF. I guess my next PC is gonna be a VIA...or maybe ARM will take off by then.
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@bb36e I would be beyond astonished to learn that I can't migrate my existing Debian installation onto a mobo with one of the new CPUs just by unplugging the HD from the 2009 mobo it's connected to now and plugging it into the new one.
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@flabdablet said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@bb36e I would be beyond astonished to learn that I can't migrate my existing Debian installation onto a mobo with one of the new CPUs just by unplugging the HD from the 2009 mobo it's connected to now and plugging it into the new one.
INB4 UEFI that no longer includes the "Legacy BIOS Mode" modules and can't boot MBR-based installations...
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@bb36e said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
WTF. I guess my next PC is gonna be a VIA...or maybe ARM will take off by then.
I guess my next PC is going to be an upgrade to a
586Pentium.
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@groo ONLY WINDOWS 10? What if I wanted to run Fedora on it? I don't, but WHAT IF!!!
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
INB4 UEFI that no longer includes the "Legacy BIOS Mode" modules and can't boot MBR-based installations
Fair point; might have to chroot from a live CD and
apt remove grub-pc
andapt install grub-efi
after the transplant. All my installations have been GPT, with both a tiny GRUB boot partition (I allocate 960KiB right before the 1MiB boundary that the first "real" partition starts on) and a 100MiB EFI system partition, for quite some while.
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@flabdablet until you learn that your motherboard mfg fucked up their EFI implementation and somehow allowed it to brick itself
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@Lorne-Kates said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@bb36e said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
WTF. I guess my next PC is gonna be a VIA...or maybe ARM will take off by then.
I guess my next PC is going to be an upgrade to a
586Pentium.As long as you don't care about floating point...
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@dcon said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@Lorne-Kates said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@bb36e said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
WTF. I guess my next PC is gonna be a VIA...or maybe ARM will take off by then.
I guess my next PC is going to be an upgrade to a
586Pentium.As long as you don't care about floating point...
Isn't that the new thing? I heard about an article that says a chip can be made that generates approximate results so much faster than typical, and these results wouldn't matter too much in graphics processing (for some reason) so... Profit?
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@ben_lubar not sure if old linuxes would be affected, but they can't stop linux from supporting it afaik
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@Tsaukpaetra
A little error here and there is fine for images, that's how Steganography works after all.
But the opportunity was lost when people started doing scientific computing and bitcoins on GPUs -- You can't do bitcoins with error
- You can sort of do numerical analysis with errors, but if your rival has precise hardware, nobody will buy yours
Also, there's some hearsay that certain transcendental functions can just a few times return just a bit different results, for the same arguments, on the same binary code, on different (AMD or Intel) CPUs. Transcendentals are not guaranteed to be absolutely precise anyway... but it's not like anyone keeps that in mind.
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@bugmenot said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@Tsaukpaetra
A little error here and there is fine for images, that's how Steganography works after all.
But the opportunity was lost when people started doing scientific computing and bitcoins -- You can't do bitcoins with error
- You can sort of do numerical analysis with errors, but if your rival has precise hardware, nobody will buy yours
Also, there's some hearsay that certain transcendental functions can just a few times return just a bit different results, for the same arguments, on the same binary code, on different (AMD or Intel) CPUs. Transcendentals are not guaranteed to be absolutely precise anyway... but it's not like anyone keeps that in mind.
Well it was more about rendering stuff, in that the "less optimized" maths were so much faster that the inaccuracies were less important to that specific workload than performing all the calculations on time. I don't know I didn't write it, so I'm probably explaining it wrong.
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@bugmenot you can still do precise math on a fast imprecise math chip. You just repeat the operation until you have sufficient confidence in the result. Or if you know that the final bit of the result might be wrong, shift everything left so you can just throw that bit away.
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@anotherusername said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
you can still do precise math on a fast imprecise math chip.
Depends on the type of error. Randomly distributed errors can be compensated for. Systematic errors can also be compensated for, but you need to do it totally differently. Semi-systematic errors (e.g., that only happen for some input values) are total PITAs.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
Isn't that the new thing? I heard about an article that says a chip can be made that generates approximate results so much faster than typical, and these results wouldn't matter too much in graphics processing (for some reason) so... Profit?
They wouldn't matter 99.99% of the time and break everything horribly for the remaining 0.01%
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@bugmenot said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
You can't do bitcoins with error
Depends on the type of error. As it stands, it's a trial-and-error operation. If you can cheaply generate values with a higher chance to succeed, you can save a lot of errors, even if not all your candidates end up being valid.
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@PleegWat said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
If you can cheaply generate values with a higher chance to succeed, you can save a lot of errors, even if not all your candidates end up being valid.
Bitcoins are hash-based, so even a small error would throw your calculation wildly off.
AFAIR they also exclusively use the integer ALUs and don't even touch the floating point hardware, so it's a moot point anyway.