Re: Fwd: [Discuss-gnuradio] AMD Phenom II X6 1055T

[Marcus D. Leech]

On 04/28/2010 08:46 PM, Juha Vierinen wrote:
> How many SSE instructions can AMD do per clock cycle nowadays? A
> couple of years ago Intel could do 1 per clock cycle and AMD could
> only do 1/2, which was a huge downer for AMD. If they can now do 1 SSE
> per clock cycle, they might be back in the game, which would be a
> really good thing in terms of competition.
>
> On the other hand, I think CUDA and OpenCL are in the brink of
> changing the whole game. I have a couple of NVidia GTX 295 cards which
> are doing most of my crunching nowadays -- they are easy to program
> and they are much faster than any CPUs on the market.
>
>   
Last time I saw anything in the Gnu Radio context with CUDA, it was not very
  good.  The overhead of setting up a transaction with the GPU was too high
  compared to the work you wanted it to do.  This may have changed--I'd
be delighted
  beyond belief if it were the case.


> BTW, wtf is this rant about newbies? People are just panicking with
> their coursework -- chill-out man.
>
>   
To be clear, I have *nothing* against newbs.  We are all newbs at one
point or other in whatever
  new endeavours we engage in.  What I was ranting about was those folks
(newbs or other) who
  seem to want a free ride, and get really shirty at you when you
can't/won't give them said free
  ride.

Juha, I've been in engineering for over 30 years, and I've found that
there is a class of folks
  who belong to the "I'm too busy and important to learn anything new,
why can't you just
  give me the answer".  That class is what I'm complaining about.  The
class who feel "entitled",
  who feel that their own inability to make any progress on whatever it
is they're working on is
  not due to their own ineptness or inability/unmotivation to learn, but
rather because "those who
  know stuff" are churlishly not helping them.

I worked for many years for one of the well-known, but now failing,
telecom engineering giants.
  I used to, when I first got there, help run a technical support help
desk.  Just about *every single day
  I did that job*, there would be people calling in, software
developers, engineers, who just couldn't
  fathom that we weren't there to do their job for them.  That because
they were having trouble getting
  their heads around how to write whatever 1000 lines of code they'd
been assigned that day, didn't
  make it the tech-support folks job to write it for them.

Anyway, I'm ranting again.  I'll stop.   Someone pass me a beer.

Cheers


-- 
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org