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AMD/Linux vs Intel/Microsoft



 
 
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  #52  
Old January 13th 04, 05:23 AM
Douglas Siebert
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Tony Hill writes:

1) Microsoft still needs Intel for sales as Intel still has a
veritable monopoly on consumer systems although they would very much
like this not to be the case very soon. So a bone was kicked in hte
direction on Intel to allow them to claim 64 bit Windows on Itanium.


Intel needs Microsoft much more than Microsoft needs Intel.



Why do you say that? It isn't as though Microsoft can suddenly drop support
for Intel CPUs and support only AMD. The cross licensing between Intel & AMD
goes both ways, so AMD can't create incompatible instructions that give them
any more of an advantage than MMX/SSE/SSE2 gave Intel when they were briefly
the only ones who offered it. Microsoft surely can't start supporting say
PowerPC and get anywhere with it today. In the early 90s the ACE platform
was more of a worry when the PC didn't have much home market penetration.

OK, Microsoft can quit supporting IA64, but IMHO the ship has pretty much
sailed on that one being a mass market for Intel in the Windows world
anyway thanks to AMD forcing Intel to do 64 bit x86.

Intel could certainly retaliate by doing things Microsoft doesn't want and
effectively prevents them from doing, like doing their own software (media
players, etc.) giving x86 full virtualization capability, or throwing 100%
support behind Linux instead of the half assed support they give now. (If
anyone argues it is 100% now, where are the Centrino drivers a year after
the intro of that platform?)

--
Douglas Siebert

"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning,
that's as good as they're going to feel all day" -- Frank Sinatra
  #53  
Old January 13th 04, 06:11 AM
stacey
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Douglas Siebert wrote:

or throwing 100%
support behind Linux instead of the half assed support they give now. (If
anyone argues it is 100% now, where are the Centrino drivers a year after
the intro of that platform?)


Yep that is sad but Intel does seem to be getting behind linux of late? At
least they are anti-SCO which can't please MS.


--

Stacey
  #54  
Old January 13th 04, 03:12 PM
THX1138
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Tony Hill wrote in message t.com...
On 12 Jan 2004 06:44:30 -0800, (THX1138) wrote:
My own observation is that it comes down to politics more then
technology.
Microsoft promised support to AMD for x64 when it came out and pulled
back at the last minute for two reasons.


They haven't really pulled back so much as delayed. That is hardly
anything new for Microsoft, I can't even remember the last time they
shipped something on time! The 6-9 month delay is fairly standard for
their products, no need for any conspiracy theories there!


Still, Don't you find it interesting that MS was able to come up with
a 64 bit implimentation of Windows that happens to only run on
Itanium?


1) Microsoft still needs Intel for sales as Intel still has a
veritable monopoly on consumer systems although they would very much
like this not to be the case very soon. So a bone was kicked in hte
direction on Intel to allow them to claim 64 bit Windows on Itanium.


Intel needs Microsoft much more than Microsoft needs Intel.

2) Microsoft is in the process off revamping everything around Rights
Denial
( NGSCB or Palladium if you will ), Microsoft DRM, etc. and really
wants this so that it can pander to the likes of the music and movie
monopoly slobs at the expense of it's customer base who you get the
feeling that they think are stupid enough to believe that it's for
their benefit.


Minor FWIW, but NGSCB/Palladium/La Grande/name-of-day actually DOES
have some very beneficial aspects to it. The DRM stuff is really only
one small portion of the whole deal, but of course it's the ONLY part
that ever gets any coverage in the geek-sream media (I don't think any
of it gets coverage in main-stream media : ). The ability to run a
service in it's own 'sandbox' of a sorts is a very good thing from a
sever security standpoint.


This is very true but you know you are being obtuse if you think that
is what is driving this.

Intel ( AMD ) and especially MS don't give a wet fart about server
security because if they did they would have had at least 10 years to
fix the problem. They only care about money and security wasn't part
of the deal.


Of course, the goal of the DRM stuff is most certainly not to help the
users, but rather to attract the media companies to release their
wares using Microsoft DRM. What better way to keep people using your
product than to REQUIRE the use of your product to view certain
content?

competing against. I think it's interesting to note that both AMD64
based chips and Itanium and all future Intel processors support the NX
( No execute ) register. This is one way to allow NGSCB to lock out
"illegal" applications and for Microsoft and others to control the
list of legal applications that can run in the processor. Do you


What in the hell are you talking about? First off, the NX bit is just
that, a bit in the page table. It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with
applications! It does exactly ONE thing and one thing alone, it marks
pages in the page table as executable or non-executable. This is a
feature that is implemented in many (most?) other architectures out
there but has been sadly lacking in x86 (err, it's implemented in
IA32, but only in a rather ass-backwards manner that can not be easily
used by most operating systems).

It's quite unclear whether Intel will support this feature in their
upcoming P4 "Prescott" chips or not. One recent third-party report
was quoted as saying that they will, however several other recent
reports have Intel saying that they the Prescott does not support the
NX bit and they have no plans on doing so.

suppose this was the price of admission the Microsoft wanted from the
processor people? I think the Intel got the better end of the deal in
that case.


Both AMD and Intel have included the hardware required for Microsoft's
NGSCB in their new or upcoming processors. Nothing in ANY of this
hardware has any connection at all to locking out applications or
operating systems.


http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/33729.html
MS to intro hardware-linked security for AMD64, Itanium, future CPUs
By John Lettice

If I find it later there is an article on AMD's site that states that
NX IS for DRM...It's a sales pitch for corp types that was link
public.

THX

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

  #55  
Old January 13th 04, 03:27 PM
Ken Hagan
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THX1138 wrote:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/33729.html
MS to intro hardware-linked security for AMD64, Itanium, future CPUs
By John Lettice


Even that article concedes that the NX page protection isn't DRM.

The article hypothesises that because NX breaks some apps, it may
soften up customers for DRM that breaks rather more. You are free
to buy that theory if you like, but I don't. (NX doesn't break
much, for one thing.)


  #56  
Old January 13th 04, 04:15 PM
David Utidjian
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On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 22:20:14 +0000, Kevin Lawton wrote:

chrisv wrote:
| On Sat, 10 Jan 2004 14:39:02 +1300, ~misfit~ wrote:
|
|| chrisv wrote:
|||
||| I'm the customer, ATI. I'm the guy with the money that YOU want.
||| Make some effort to help me out!
||
|| **** 'em. nVidia make some good cards and drivers.
|
| Yeah, I may have to go that way with my next card. I've never liked
| nVidia or it's products all that much, but if their card has better
| Linux support...
|
| These companies must know that there's a lot people who are going to
| be checking-out Linux, and they should be ready. Tux Racer @ 1fps is
| NO GOOD! 8)

Exactly - so vote with your wallet ! ;-)
This brings me back to using Matrox video cards in systems which run a
non-Micro$oft OS - often Linux, maybe something else (BeOS ?).
The high-spec nVidia and ATI cards show their best performance ratings
used on Windoze systems - and the battle for top position seems to change
monthly. This isn't much of an indication of how the card might perform
under, say, Linux as the system for displaying complex 3D graphics is a bit
different. Those top-ranking cards rely on Windoze drivers which have been
carefully written to exploit their features. In a Linux box they might not
seem quite so clever.


The Nvidia supplied drivers for Linux are quite good. I don't have any
recent references but I seem to remember that some of their cards work
*better* in Linux than in Windows.

Matrox have the good sense, decency and

end-user committment to offer
Linux drivers for most of their cards - that is one of the reason why I
use them and recommend them. The other two reasons are image quality and
the ability to drive two monitors (dual head). I even have a system
running BeOS giving a dual-head display from its Matrox card (G400).


Nvidia supplies drivers for Linux for ALL their currently shipping x86
chipsets.

I have systems with Nvidia graphics that are dual head (dvi and vga outs
to a flat panel and tube monitor respectively). I also have systems with
both an Nvidia card and a Matrox card. My dual head Nvidia setup... even
though using one card still does OpenGL perfectly. I get around 2500FPS
from an older GeForce2 GTS card using the Nvidia drivers.

To me, these things are more important than being able to show about
70
fps in the latest games. My eyes posses a feature called 'persistance of
vision' which prevents such speed being necessary - and ceratinly not
worth paying for.


One can get a very decent card from Nvidia for under US$100 and one that
is decent for under US$50. While it would be nice if we could get the
specs from Nvidia or they would completely open-source their drivers I
have no problem with the current ones. The stock XFree86 "nv" driver works
just fine in 2D.

-DU-...etc...
  #57  
Old January 13th 04, 04:23 PM
Bernd Paysan
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Ken Hagan wrote:
The article hypothesises that because NX breaks some apps, it may
soften up customers for DRM that breaks rather more. You are free
to buy that theory if you like, but I don't. (NX doesn't break
much, for one thing.)


Sidenote: The article claims that something like the NX bit is less
necessary for Linux or one of the BSDs. I can't follow that. Linux does use
PROT_EXEC, when available since quite some time (on non-x86 processors back
then). It is possible to patch Linux so that the stack by default is
non-executable. At least one of the BSDs makes this the standard behaviour.
All C code is plagued with buffer overflows, and having a non-executable
stack or heap is only a small improvement. Compromising the stack can still
allow exploits. You can change the return address to jump to some library
function, and an obvious entry point would be a function to mark your code
as executable.

--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
  #58  
Old January 13th 04, 06:10 PM
Kevin Lawton
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Default

David Utidjian wrote:
| On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 22:20:14 +0000, Kevin Lawton wrote:
|
|| chrisv wrote:
|| | On Sat, 10 Jan 2004 14:39:02 +1300, ~misfit~ wrote:
|| |
|| || chrisv wrote:
|| |||
|| ||| I'm the customer, ATI. I'm the guy with the money that YOU
|| want. ||| Make some effort to help me out!
|| ||
|| || **** 'em. nVidia make some good cards and drivers.
|| |
|| | Yeah, I may have to go that way with my next card. I've never
|| liked | nVidia or it's products all that much, but if their card
|| has better | Linux support...
|| |
|| | These companies must know that there's a lot people who are
|| going to | be checking-out Linux, and they should be ready. Tux
|| Racer @ 1fps is | NO GOOD! 8)
||
|| Exactly - so vote with your wallet ! ;-)
|| This brings me back to using Matrox video cards in systems which
|| run a non-Micro$oft OS - often Linux, maybe something else (BeOS ?).
|| The high-spec nVidia and ATI cards show their best performance
|| ratings used on Windoze systems - and the battle for top position
|| seems to change monthly. This isn't much of an indication of how the
|| card might perform under, say, Linux as the system for displaying
|| complex 3D graphics is a bit different. Those top-ranking cards rely
|| on Windoze drivers which have been carefully written to exploit
|| their features. In a Linux box they might not seem quite so clever.
|
| The Nvidia supplied drivers for Linux are quite good. I don't have any
| recent references but I seem to remember that some of their cards work
| *better* in Linux than in Windows.
|
|| Matrox have the good sense, decency and
| end-user committment to offer
|| Linux drivers for most of their cards - that is one of the reason
|| why I use them and recommend them. The other two reasons are image
|| quality and the ability to drive two monitors (dual head). I even
|| have a system running BeOS giving a dual-head display from its
|| Matrox card (G400).
|
| Nvidia supplies drivers for Linux for ALL their currently shipping x86
| chipsets.
|
| I have systems with Nvidia graphics that are dual head (dvi and vga
| outs
| to a flat panel and tube monitor respectively). I also have systems
| with both an Nvidia card and a Matrox card. My dual head Nvidia
| setup... even though using one card still does OpenGL perfectly. I
| get around 2500FPS
| from an older GeForce2 GTS card using the Nvidia drivers.
|
|| To me, these things are more important than being able to show
|| about 70
|| fps in the latest games. My eyes posses a feature called
|| 'persistance of vision' which prevents such speed being necessary -
|| and ceratinly not worth paying for.
|
| One can get a very decent card from Nvidia for under US$100 and one
| that
| is decent for under US$50. While it would be nice if we could get the
| specs from Nvidia or they would completely open-source their drivers I
| have no problem with the current ones. The stock XFree86 "nv" driver
| works just fine in 2D.

So, if you are running an 'alternative' Op System like Linux or BeOS, then
you can get decent drivers to rn your Matrox, nVidia or S3 Savage card no
problem.
Ultimately, won't this just leave ATI 'out in the cold' while
non-Mocro$oft users opt for better-supported hardware ?
Kevin.

|
| -DU-...etc...


  #59  
Old January 14th 04, 12:19 AM
Ilari Liusvaara
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Default

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.advocacy.]
Datagram from THX1138 incoming on netlink socket

If I find it later there is an article on AMD's site that states that
NX IS for DRM...It's a sales pitch for corp types that was link
public.


Either I seriously misunderstand what NX pagetable bit is, or the article
writter has no clue.

As I understand it, the if page has NX bit set, trying to execute code
from that page causes page fault.

In x86, one can simulate that behaviour either by reducing code segment
limit, or playing nasty games with caches, so they are inconsistent in
order to make data references succeed, but code references fail.

-Ilari
--
Nothing's truly free (in price) in this world... There are only
approximations of it. Free (in price) is unattainable idealization.
-- Ilari Liusvaara
Linux LK_Perkele_IV9 2.4.23-selinux1 #2 Mon Jan 5 20:12:55 EET 2004 i686 unknown
9:13pm up 8 days, 0:49, 5 users, load average: 0.06, 0.04, 0.07
  #60  
Old January 14th 04, 12:21 AM
Ilari Liusvaara
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Posts: n/a
Default

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.advocacy.]
Datagram from Ken Hagan incoming on netlink socket

The article hypothesises that because NX breaks some apps, it may
soften up customers for DRM that breaks rather more. You are free
to buy that theory if you like, but I don't. (NX doesn't break
much, for one thing.)


If OS is done properly, the only apps that get broken by NX are
broken already.

-Ilari
--
Never underestimate the capability of computer in temporarily
reducing IQ of person working on it... -- Ilari Liusvaara
Linux LK_Perkele_IV9 2.4.23-selinux1 #2 Mon Jan 5 20:12:55 EET 2004 i686 unknown
9:20pm up 8 days, 0:57, 5 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.04
 




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