[... clipped ARM9E core license press release--by Lucent ...]
> That sounds like it would make a nice disk for my laptop. I wonder if I
> could get it to do something in it's idle time? :-)
>
The ARM are interesting processors. They're great for embedded
applications--
which is where they have been specializing. I haven't looked at them in
detail
since the ARM7 core days, so I might have missed something, but I don't
remember them being all that fast per/MHz. I remember their goals being
small code space, low power usage, and small die. Still would be cute to
have your HD do LL testing....
> There does seem to be some prejudice against our elderly less able
> processors.
> So what if it takes months for one task if there are enough of them. What
> a lovely way for those 486s to spend their retirement years running
> Prime95.
> I am guessing that the minima of the Price/Performance curve has not yet
> touched Pentia. Maybe the best P/P is the Z80, I am certain that it can
> square and subtract 2 (still). This is not completely in jest. I am
> thinking
> (dreaming) about a dedicated box of cheap processors (Gate Arrays even?)
> that are nicely pipelined (and the other dimensions of parallelism) like
> the
> EFFs DeepCrack.
> Any thoughts?
>
On the i486 front, I'd say, in the US at lease, that the cost of even
powering up
the box costs more than the processing you get from it. Old Socket7 MBs can
be had for under $10 and the same goes for processors. Throw in two or four
old 72 pin simms and you have a good low end Prime95 system--throw in a NIC
and net boot it into Linux--no HD, just a NIC with a boot PROM.
The topic of using FPGAs and such to do LL testing has been tossed around
on this mailing list as long as I can remember--what, since the early to mid
'90s?
I think that there can be some merit to it, but the break even point--the
point at
which it's no longer practical to just buy off the shelf processors to do
the job--
is way up there. Maybe EFF can afford to do it--or some university with
free
design labor in the form of students--but most of the people on this group
are
not in that group. Too many mathematicians and not enough of us computer
engineers. :) (kidding, just kidding, I love math, too...)
> Apologies if this is slightly off topic (tho' this can add depth and
> interest)
> as this wouldn't be very distributed or internet - although I would
> reserve
> the exponents for the machine via PrimeNet - or maybe I'll pick up one
> of those small long overdue.... [only joking!]
>
I marked it OT, now, so they're warned.
What we need is some good integer factoring code with hand tuned assembly
for 6x86 (all flavors), IDT WinChip, and AMD K6 (all flavors). I don't know
x86
assembly--I do RISC assembly, but I can probably figure it out given some
example
code. I'm willing to work with some mathematician to get some of the code
written. Anyone interested? I'll do it myself if I get no replies. :)
Cheers,
David
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