Why are PC sales declining ? (Skybuck thoughts on it too)

On 22/04/2013 21:36, rickman wrote:
On 4/22/2013 2:52 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

It is about every six years now to get a threefold increase. I generally
buy for the best price performance at the time. Clock speed used to be a
simple metric from the original 4.7MHz right up to some now on offer
brutally overclocked to 4.8GHz that is a 1000x increase since 1981 or
roughly speaking a 25% average improvement annually. Recent improvements
have been largely in CPU utilisation, pipelining and speculative
execution rather than raw clockspeed.

My old Q6600 benchmarks at 2962 and uses ~350W with graphics card
whereas the new i7-3770K benchmarks at 9461 and about ~120W all in.

I can't say I've run any tests, but I don't see how they are getting
more processing other than adding to the cache sizes. Pipelining and
speculative execution should have been mature some 10 years ago. What
exactly is left to improve on?

I had to think about that since I largely agree. Although register
colouring and other tricks are comparatively recent as a refinements
that keep the execution pipeline from stalling so easily.

Taking CPUs I have most experience of tormenting:

9630 i7-3770K TDP 77W @ 3.5GHz (peak 3.9GHz) and 4 x 2 cores
8962 i7-2700K TDP 95W @ 3.5GHz and 4x2 cores
7130 i5-3570K TDP 77W @ 3.4GHz (peak 3.8GHz) and 4 cores
6402 i5-2500K TDP 95W @ 3.3GHz and 4 cores
2962 Q6600 TDP 105W @ 2.4GHz and 4 cores

Back of the envelope calculations suggest that the most recent benchmark
improvements have come from on demand turbo boost - that is the
difference between 3770 & 2700 and 3570 & 2500 can be largely explained
by the 10% faster clock when asked to work really hard.

And even my old Q6600 with a toasty 105W TDP if it could be scaled to
the same hardware spec as the new CPU would improve by the ratio of the
clock speeds and a factor of two for hyperthreading (optimistic).

2962 x (3.9/2.4) = 4813 and double that for hyperthread = 9626

Suspiciously close agreement! So arguably they are gaming the standard
benchmarks now to make new chips look more attractive. Underlying
performance is rather similar except when heavily loaded by optimally
designed parallel algorithms designed to use all the cores at once.

Actual benchmark speeds are still increasing provided that you have the
right software and can use fully multicore and multithreaded code. The
problem is that after about 6 CPUs the law of diminishing returns sets
in and the code spends an increasing amount of its time sharing the load
between threads or worse still doing work in parallel that will later be
scrapped when the independent thread results are combined.

That assumption is a big one! The study I read said the turn was less
than 4 CPUs. Many apps just won't see much improvement with even two
processors. The observed increase in performance is because the OS
needs elbow room, so a second processor helps get it out of the way of
the user app.

It depends on the application. Some things benefit whereas others don't.
Hyatt did a lot of work on optimising chess search algorithms on
multiple processors (and that is a tricky algorithm to parallelise).

N_CPUS 1 2 4 8 16
Naive 1 1.8 3 4.1 4.6
EVP 1 1.9 3.4 5.4 6
DTS 1 2 3.7 6.6 11.1

Taken from his paper
http://www.cis.uab.edu/hyatt/search.html

Naive is typical of what happens if you try and parallelise without
thinking very carefully about the bottlenecks and DTS is more typical of
what you get with a streamlined optimised multiprocessor algorithm.

Most decent multicore code is somewhere between these two extremes ~ EVP
where you do OK on up to 4 cores.

These days the biggest performance increase can be had by putting
frequently used files onto an SSD with essentially zero seek time and a
transfer speed that maxes out SATA3. The Samsung 830 & now 840 drives
are very impressive - beware that some benchmarks give artificially high
performance figures of merit on highly compressible data.

The SSD upgrade is capable of giving old kit a new lease of life.

I'm taking a look at the combined drives now. I'm not going to pay an
arm and a leg for one. I can get a SSD for under $200 that is bigger
than what I have now. A combined drive should be close to $100 I am
thinking.

I found the Samsung drives performed better on incompressible data which
was important to me.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

Any of you like Windows 8? I feel zero urge to install it.

On 4/23/2013 6:18 AM, Andy Valencia wrote:
rickman writes:
I've always wondered why the hard drive or the OS doesn't automatically
take the bad sectors out of service. It's not like rotating media
doesn't develop problems with age.

I was under the impression that modern drives not only take bad sectors
out of service, but attempt to copy failing sector to new locations
and transparently remap the storage location. This process might be
what your drive is doing when your system locks up.


Correct. And the attempted recovery could take longer than a "normal"
read as they typically do more retries etc., as a failure here will be
an unrecoverable loss of data so it is more severe than reporting an
unreadable sector to the host (which the host could retry).

Note also that SSDs perform wear leveling, which is different from bad
sector relocation. With wear leveling, the idea is to try to write to
each sector of the media about the same number of times in order to
maximize the devices life in the face of a limited number of writes per
flash cell. Since magnetic disks don't have the same phenomenon, there
is no relocation for wear leveling required.




--
- Stephen Fuld
(e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)

On Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:58:01 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 4/19/2013 11:56 AM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:25:00 +0100, Mike
wrote:

I thought they had algorithms to rotate any memory changes throughout
the disk?

Most SSD's have such an algorithm and more. What it does is detect
errors, and reassign alternate blocks in its place. When access time
to any block on the drive is the same, such a system makes good sense.

Do they do that with rotating media?

Yes. Bad track tables and alternate block assignments are very common
with todays disk drives. If you have an S.M.A.R.T. utility available,
you can get a clue as to how your hard disk is doing. For Windoze, I
use:
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
Be sure to have it generate a report for human decodable diagnostics.
For Linux, it's smartmontools or others:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/S.M.A.R.T.

I have a problem with my laptop
where it occasionally looks like it is locked up. If I wait long enough
it returns.

Can you hear or feel the drive head banging around during this
interval? If yes, it's having problems reading a block and
continuously retrying. You could run a bad track scan, to force it
test the bad block, and hopefully reallocate it to something that
works.

Usually it is one or two programs that stop, but if I try
to use other programs they can all end up halted. Eventually it returns
to normal operation. The cause seems to be a disk access that ties up
the interface without moving much data as indicated by the Resource
Monitor.

Resource monitor suggests that you're running Vista, Win 7, or Win 8.
Numbers are always useful when asking questions. The maker and model
of the laptop, drive, and operating system would be helpful.

The blue line maxes hard at 100% with a low erratic data rate.
When I looked up what the blue line is, it appears to be the disk
interface usage. This says to me the drive it trying to read a sector
which is bad and continues to reread it for some time before it either
gets the data correctly or finally fails.

That would also be my interpretation. Note that it's showing hard
disk *ACTIVITY* and not data transfer rate. You can find the transfer
rate under disk I/O somewhere in the Resource Monitor. If activity is
high, but nothing is moving, it's busy retrying a bad block.

I was ready to replace the drive at one point, but some of the files are
corrupted and the copy software throws up its hands and says, "What do
you want me to do about it?" I found my recovery disk but haven't taken
the time to fix the corrupted files yet. In the meantime, I've noticed
the SSDs are getting cheaper. This machine only has a 160 GB drive and
I can get a larger SSD replacement for under $200.

Do an image backup NOW. I use Acronis True Image Home ($50) but there
are free image backup programs available.
http://dottech.org/6194/7-free-software-to-imagebackupghost-your-computer-free-alternatives-to-acronis-true-image-norton-ghost-etc/
You will get errors along the way, but you disable error checking in
the software. Install a new drive in the machine, restore from the
backup image, and you should get most of the drive back. If it
doesn't boot, do a system repair. You might have to fix a few things,
but what I've found is that it's much less work that loading from
scratch. Get the backup before it's totally dead.

I'm thinking this
will let me continue to use this machine for another year or two until
Windows 8 is acceptable.

Windoze 8 is in my never humble opinion a bad idea. I'm sticking with
XP.

I've always wondered why the hard drive or the OS doesn't automatically
take the bad sectors out of service. It's not like rotating media
doesn't develop problems with age.

It's not the operating systems job to do that. It's a hardware issue
best handled by the firmware on the drive. That's how the SSD drives
work. You can monitor and control the process, but the actually bad
and alternate tracking is done by the drive itself.

I tend to just copy the parts I know are important. I'd like to do
regular image backups, but as I said above, the software finds corrupt
files (or actually errors while reading) and stops... I think it is
EaseUS I have tried using. It appears to have installed a dual boot
Linux partition on my hard drive.

Acronis True Image and I think Clonezilla can ignore drive errors and
will not stop. What does *NOT* work a
1. Image backups that run from the Windoze OS. Acronis and others
have this feature. It's slow, not reliable, and has screwed up badly
for me in the past. Use a flash or CD boot disk.
2. Restore to a smaller drive is sometimes problematic. Some image
backups will refuse to restore to a smaller drive.
3. Restore multiple partitions individually. I don't know why, but
some programs seem to have problems allowing me to decide exactly
where on the drive to restore diagnostic and boot partitions. I
usually have to restore it the way it likes, and then use Gparted to
fix the mess.

Get someone to port the packet stuff
to Linux or even Andriod. Life is too short to waste on Windows.

It's been done long ago.
http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Software/Linux/
http://www.arrl.org/ubuntu-linux-for-hams
http://shackbox.net
http://www.linuxjournal.com/ham (see links near bottom of page)
I've tried some and am not thrilled with the results. The PC software
is generally better.

There various weather stations already running on Rasberry Pi. I
haven't had time to look at them. Of course, I could try it this way:
"Raspberry Pi emulation for Windows "
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rpiqemuwindows/

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

On Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:28:35 -0400, ToolPackinMama
wrote:

Any of you like Windows 8? I feel zero urge to install it.


Yes, I like it fine, best of both worlds, Win 7 and Win 8 all in one
with classic shell./
I use both intrefaces as required, Like the speed and features, Like
learng new OS's ( I'm 80), keeps me young and informed.

Regards, Rene

On 4/23/2013 9:18 AM, Andy Valencia wrote:
writes:
I've always wondered why the hard drive or the OS doesn't automatically
take the bad sectors out of service. It's not like rotating media
doesn't develop problems with age.

I was under the impression that modern drives not only take bad sectors
out of service, but attempt to copy failing sector to new locations
and transparently remap the storage location. This process might be
what your drive is doing when your system locks up.

If that is what is going on, it would have either fixed itself by now or
eaten up the entire disk. What happens if the sector just can't be
read? I seem to see the problem on the same files repeatedly until
something happens that relocates the file. Sometimes I have to delete a
data file and recreate it to get a program to work.

--

Rick

On Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:22:29 -0700, Jeff Liebermann
wrote:

If you have an S.M.A.R.T. utility available,
you can get a clue as to how your hard disk is doing. For Windoze, I
use:
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
Be sure to have it generate a report for human decodable diagnostics.
For Linux, it's smartmontools or others:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/S.M.A.R.T.

I forgot to mumble something about the manufacturers diagnostic
utilities. Both Seagate and Western Digital ahve programs that you
can run to determine if the drive is failing:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=613&sid=3&lang=en
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

On 4/23/2013 4:37 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:22:29 -0700, Jeff
wrote:

If you have an S.M.A.R.T. utility available,
you can get a clue as to how your hard disk is doing. For Windoze, I
use:
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
Be sure to have it generate a report for human decodable diagnostics.
For Linux, it's smartmontools or others:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/S.M.A.R.T.

I forgot to mumble something about the manufacturers diagnostic
utilities. Both Seagate and Western Digital ahve programs that you
can run to determine if the drive is failing:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=613&sid=3&lang=en
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

Thanks a lot for the tips. I don't want to rock any boats until I get
my order out the door in a few weeks, but after that I will try some of
this stuff.... or just break down and get a new laptop. The HD is a
problem, but 3 GB is also a problem. lol

--

Rick

In article , rickman wrote:

Most SSD's have such an algorithm and more. What it does is detect
errors, and reassign alternate blocks in its place. When access time
to any block on the drive is the same, such a system makes good sense.

Do they do that with rotating media? I have a problem with my laptop
where it occasionally looks like it is locked up. If I wait long enough
it returns. Usually it is one or two programs that stop, but if I try
to use other programs they can all end up halted. Eventually it returns
to normal operation. The cause seems to be a disk access that ties up
the interface without moving much data as indicated by the Resource
Monitor. The blue line maxes hard at 100% with a low erratic data rate.
When I looked up what the blue line is, it appears to be the disk
interface usage. This says to me the drive it trying to read a sector
which is bad and continues to reread it for some time before it either
gets the data correctly or finally fails.

Yes, hard drives do try to "spare out" bad sectors when they can.

In general, if the drive has trouble reading a sector (has to make
multiple retries to get bits good enough for the Reed-Solomon error
correction to work) it flags the sector as "pending reassignment".
The next time you write data to the sector, the drive will (typically)
write it and read-confirm it, and repeat this several times. If it
writes OK each time (i.e. each write results in an easily-readable
sector with a low bit error rate) then the sector is taken out of
"pending reassignment" status.

Otherwise, the drive writes the data into a spare sector nearby (some
spares are reserved in each zone of the platter), and updates some
nonvolatile admin information to say "Hey, the data address for sector
#NNNNNN is actually in spare #QQQQQQ." From that point on, all reads
and writes to the flawed-out sector will be diverted to the spare (at
the cost of an additional seek or two).

High-level "disk management" software will sometimes try to stimulate
this process by reading through the whole disk, looking for delays
during reading, and writing the delayed data back in-place (assuming
it read correctly). This can "push" your data from the failing
sectors to the spares, and make it easier to access.

That being said... if a drive gets to the point of having to reassign
sectors in this fashion more than *very* occasionally, you should
replace it. Soon. In my experience, a drive which has enough
internal damage, degradation, or contamination to start losing sectors
more than once every few months is going to die fairly rapidly, and
cannot be trusted. It sounds as if your drive has reached that point.

If you have a S.M.A.R.T. readout program you can retrieve the health
information from the drive, and look at the "reassigned sector" and
"pending reassignment" counters. On a good drive these really should
be zero.

On each of my systems, I run a S.M.A.R.T. readout every day or so, and
a full surface scan about once a week. Doing so has saved me from
serious trouble... I got an indication that some sectors were becoming
unreadable well before the drive really went south, and was able to
order and install a replacement in time.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

On Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:45:38 -0400, Paul wrote:

George Herold wrote:
On Apr 20, 5:33 am, "Skybuck Flying"
wrote:
Hiya George,

Building a good gaming rig is not easy, I tried myself, and you can google
for the results, it was a pain in the ass.

Problems faced: overheat, dust collection.

Having said that.

The latest and greatest graphics card is the nvidia titan. Even a super
computer was named after it.

However one would have to make sure the power supply can handle it and
perhaps the motherboard as well.

The titan probably gets hot though, so a passively cooled graphics card is
interesting too though they not as powerfull.

Perhaps a mid range card is safest.

Also a good case is needed for ventilation.

You mentioned upgrading an old desktop and then you mention buying a new one
?

I am a bit confused about that.

If truely upgrading have to be carefull that all components can handle it.

If buying a new one, perhaps being a computer from a specialized gaming rig
company is an idea.

Perhaps they can throw it some nice water cooling... or just a decently
designed air cooled PC.

It all depends on the budget

Minecraft is probably not the most demanding game but you also mentioned
overheat of laptop... so you are familiar with the overheat topic

Dell is probably crap, HP is probably crap too... a little bit less crap
though just cheap... at least my mothers HP still running barely... it
little used though... my sister bought a Dell it died

All computers seem to die lately

1.) should I buy from Dell? (I've used them in the past.)

If you lazy perhaps yes, or give Alien Ware a try or so - they
selling gaming rigs if I am not mistaken

2.) Which operating system. I was thinking of win8... but now you've
all made me nervous, but I wouold like some newer version of windows
(running XP at home and work.) moslty becasue the kids will be using
the newer version in school. So maybe Win7?

Perhaps wait a bit for the new windows 8.1 operating system.

It would suck having to buy windows 7 with all those services packs and
patches... it would be patching 2 days at least.

Also it's on the way out so not really future ready ?! More and more games
will start focussing on windows 8...

3.) How much memory? I figured 8 or 12G.

It's a bit overkill but always good to have more.

Even my system with 4 GB ram only uses 3.2 and it works fine.

If you want to be future proof get 8GB otherwise spent the money on
something else.

4.) Do I need the fancy graphics cards for gaming? (My thought was I
could let my son pitch in for a better card if that's needed.)

Yes for good gaming a graphics card is needed/essential.

I see more and more games using CUDA, so getting an NVIDIA card would be
wise plus I am a slight nvidia fan so I may be biased

I hope to have been of some help, trust me it not easy

Bye,
Skybuck.

Thanks Skybuck, At the moment I'm eyeing an older machine here at
work. Maybe I can just upgrade to a better video card for my son.
It'd be useful for him to get his head inside hardware of a computer
too...

George H.

If you're going to use Windows 7 or Windows 8, there should be
a downloadable "Upgrade Assistant" or "Upgrade Advisor", which
will note any issues. These generally require some version of
.NET to be installed, so if they don't run, that would be
the reason.

W7UpgradeAdvisor (to check existing apps).
"make sure .NET Framework 2.0 is installed..."

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downl...ion.aspx?id=20

Checking whether W8 will work. Not sure what version of .NET
this one needs. (Programs without .NET detection, die with a
"mscoree" dependency, for software that is too dumb to check.)

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/w...e-to-windows-8

To run Win8 x32 or x64, first, you need a processor of the
appropriate instruction set. If you wanted to run the x64 version
(machine has more than 4GB installed), then the processor would
have to support the x64 instructions. (Microsoft doesn't allow
desktop OSes to use PAE in a way that extends past 4GB, for program
usage. Only drivers can use PAE on x32, above 4GB.)


Actually the problem is the drivers. 32-bit WS has supported LME
(Large Memory Enabled) drivers for quite some time - and still does.
Basically LME driver support was so horrible for workstation-type
hardware, that it got turned off. Which had the added simplification
of not adding a third type of driver needing to be supported in
consumer space.

But other than some type of bank switching (AWE in Windows), 4GB is a
hardware per-address space limit on x86-32.


The next requirement for Win8, is the CPU must support NX/XD.
That means the processor must be more modern, than the last P4
processors they'd made. The P4 I have, doesn't have XD, so I
can't run Windows 8. I could probably run Windows 7 x32 on it.
On the AMD side, probably an S939, AM2 or later would be OK.
The advisor software from Microsoft should be able to figure this
out.


I can't give you an exact count, but the latter Prescott P4 spins
supported NX.


If you had some old P3 machine, then that probably wouldn't be
a good candidate.

Windows 7 could benefit from having around 2GB of memory. That
would be a comfortable starting point. It will run on less than
that, but with slight performance impact. More than 2GB, you'd
probably be better off with an x64 OS.

An x64 OS install, won't run 16 bit software. That might include
the installer from some of the older games. If you have some
crusty old games in your collection, that might be a potential
issue with an x64 OS install. If the games are 2013 releases,
there should not be a problem.


If you're using Windows, the "Pro" versions of Vista/Win7/Win8 allow
you to use XP Mode, which is a canned 32-bit XP VM, for both 32 and 64
bit versions of the OS. You can do the same thing with a bit more
effort on other systems.