On Wed, 30 Jun 1999 21:27:26 GMT, Glen Berry wrote:
>I'm impressed by all these technical quotes you have been using
>recently. (There was one about the Microsoft compiler as well.) Tell
>me one thing, do you have all these memorized?   :)

No, just good references.  I have the Intel Developers' Insight website on 
3 CDs, including all of the tech ref books.  Absolutely free from Intel, they 
even pay the shipping.  Get yours today.

The VC6 quote came from the readme in the service pack, which is ensconced on 
the network fileserver here.

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On 30 Jun 1999 17:44:35 -0400, par### [at] fwicom (Ron Parker) wrote:

>No, just good references.  I have the Intel Developers' Insight website on 
>3 CDs, including all of the tech ref books.  Absolutely free from Intel, they 
>even pay the shipping.  Get yours today.

I have a few older copies of those CDs myself. They *are* packed with
helpful information. I've heard that Intel will even ship some of its
documentation in book form, free of charge. I haven't tried that yet,
but I probably will in the near future. Paper documentation still has
some advantages over CD-ROM.

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Glen Berry wrote:
> 
> On 30 Jun 1999 17:44:35 -0400, par### [at] fwicom (Ron Parker) wrote:
> 
> >No, just good references.  I have the Intel Developers' Insight website on
> >3 CDs, including all of the tech ref books.  Absolutely free from Intel, they
> >even pay the shipping.  Get yours today.
> 
> I have a few older copies of those CDs myself. They *are* packed with
> helpful information. I've heard that Intel will even ship some of its
> documentation in book form, free of charge. I haven't tried that yet,
> but I probably will in the near future. Paper documentation still has
> some advantages over CD-ROM.

  Most IC manufacturers will provide free literature, cross reference
guides, and data books to engineers upon request. My bookshelves and
for that matter my desk top are buried by them.  Many also provide
free application notes for specific IC's usualy obtainable online or
through faxback systems. If you really wanted to see the architecture
and application data for the P-III they probably have the data online
somewhere. See my bookmarks for links to companies that provide this
data free of charge such as Motorola and National Technologies.

Note: I have never personaly obtained free data from Intel and their
      policies may differ from my own experience with other reputable
      IC and component manufacturers.

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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Ken wrote:
> 
> Glen Berry wrote:
> >

Yeah!  I'm impressed too.  I'm also pissed because i never got this VC++6
service pack.  None of those Q* numbers show up in my database.
I do have 3 copies of Windows2000 though, so i guess i should be happy.

> Note: I have never personaly obtained free data from Intel and their
>       policies may differ from my own experience with other reputable
>       IC and component manufacturers.

I used to get big black Intel books quite often.  About the time of the 80386
though, they started a policy of "The bigger the chip, the less docs".
The data was great except the (printed) sample code which would inevitably 
contain symbols like frodo, bilbo, etc., very hard to follow.  I'm sure that 
is against corporate policy now.
Pulling errata from them though is impossible.  My company once bought 5000
82380 FIFOs, when Intel knew the pieces of carp were broken. (same chip as 
used in the 3COM 3C507, a network card not supported by the Linux stock kernel.)
And of course they denied the two big Pentium bugs until forced.

I still have my big yellow TI 74xx book (hardcover!)

dik

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On Wed, 30 Jun 1999 20:53:08 -0400, Dick Balaska <dic### [at] buckosoftcom>
wrote:

>Yeah!  I'm impressed too.  I'm also pissed because i never got this VC++6
>service pack.  None of those Q* numbers show up in my database.
>I do have 3 copies of Windows2000 though, so i guess i should be happy.

We have far too many copies of Win2K.  One thing I thought was stupid,
though, was that Beta 3 wouldn't let you upgrade from Beta 3 RC0, but
Beta 3 RC1 would.  And Beta 3 would let you upgrade from Beta 3 RC1.
So I got to do two installs in one day when I skipped RC1.  Oh, joy.

The VC6 service pack is available for download from
msdn.microsoft.com.  It's not small, though.

>I still have my big yellow TI 74xx book (hardcover!)

I have one of those, too, but not in hardcover.  I hate TI's website,
though - I can't figure out how you're supposed to look up a TI chip
for which you know the number but not the function.

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Ron Parker wrote:

> >I still have my big yellow TI 74xx book (hardcover!)
> 
> I have one of those, too, but not in hardcover.
 I have too many of those :)

>  I hate TI's website, though - I can't figure out how you're supposed
> to look up a TI chip for which you know the number but not the function.

 I think the nomenclature used in the entire electronics industry is long
over due for a change. None of it ever really made since and there are
too many systems in use by different manufacturers. Having some of the
distributers cross references help because you simply look up the numbers
without worring about who manufactured it and the crossed numbers points
you to the right family of chips. I love both NTE and Philips ECG for
this. IC master is good to if you can afford it.

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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On Wed, 30 Jun 1999 20:53:08 -0400, Dick Balaska <dic### [at] buckosoftcom>
wrote:

<snip>

>I still have my big yellow TI 74xx book (hardcover!)
>
>dik

I recently finished the download of Motorola's discrete elements
docs... took me about a month or so (630 Mb, about 550 of which in
PDF) but it was worth it -- I now have the thing burnt on CD,
platform-independent (html + pdf) Next month I'll get the other half,
processors and EC's.


Peter Popov
ICQ: 15002700

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Ron Parker wrote:

> The VC6 service pack is available for download from
> msdn.microsoft.com.  It's not small, though.

They never are...
I'm usually only a couple weeks behind to get the CDs. hmm.
Maybe they were stuck together with that big batch of
Back Orifice CDs that got tossed near the pile of
"M$ CDs that i'll never use, but paid too much money for
to throw away". (Visual Basic for Alpha; now there's a hot title)

dik 
(apologizing for going way off topic)

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Anders Haglund wrote:

> The basic 3D operations are the same, like matris and vector operations.
> And if I  remember right the p3 have instructions just for those kind of
> operations. But to use them would require a rewrite of the matris and vector
> code used in povray, i't can't be done by just setting the compilator to
> 'P3 optimize'. Anyway, to rewrite the code shouldn't be too hard but I don't
> think the speed increase would be very big.

	How do we say this. 

	An important thing to learn in the computer business is that the
same words can mean entirely different things depending upon
context. It is the same in common english, there are the valves
on your water faucets and there are the valves at Hoover Dam.
Same word, same idea, radically different in implementation. 

	For example, vector simply means an ordered set of numbers.
Compare a color vector with a translation vector. Both are
vectors. And there are many other ordered sets. Technically our
number system is a vector as it is an ordered set of units, tens,
hundreds, etc. Simply because it says it manipulates vectors does
not necessarily mean it applies to all vectors. Without spending
much more time, a matrix is an ordered set of vectors. You can
look at a color map as a matrix. A transposition matrix is
something quite different. (And next we study TENSORS! "That's
not my department, says Wehrner von Braun.") 

	Lets say there are no problems at all with what you suggest. The
results of the P3 instructions are dumped directly to the screen.
Now if possible your best image would be limited to doing a
screen capture, as is, not resized as in a window. 

	If that problem could be overcome the instructions are designed
for a Doom/Wolfenstein-like input of objects and the manipulation
of those objects. It does not create the objects. Creating the
objects is exactly what POV does as its most fundamental
function. There is freeware around for creating your own
whatevers for the games. Get some and look at your limitations. 

	Now if you want to use the instructions themselves and can
redirect them to a screen buffer that is fed to the screen (that
is why it updates per line and not per pixel - 1.0 DOS users may
not have noticed this) then, as another as noted, speed is gained
by single rather than double precision. Single precision should
be only of historical note for every reason. 

	But then why not use the floating point package built into the
P3 instead? Same processor, same speed UNLESS they MMX
instructions cheat by being less precise? 

	Someone may implement a faster algorith but as time goes by
faster algorithms become fewer and farther between and the
improvements become less and less. At some point the algorithm
hunters go on to more profitable pastures. 

	In the last year Intel went from 333MHz to 500MHz. Processing
floating points increased proportionately. That is faster
progress than the algorithm hunters have mede in a couple
centuries. 

-- 
<blink>-------please--don't-----------------</blink>

http://www.giwersworld.org/artii/
http://www.giwersworld.org/artiii/

Finally up on 99/06/22 updated 06/30

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On Thu, 01 Jul 1999 02:15:02 -0400, Matt Giwer wrote:
>	But then why not use the floating point package built into the
>P3 instead? Same processor, same speed UNLESS they MMX
>instructions cheat by being less precise? 

There would be some utility to the SSE instructions if they weren't 
single-precision.  The utility is obvious when you break apart the
nested acronym: SSE stands for Streaming SIMD Extensions.  SIMD,
of course, stands for Single Instruction Multiple Data, which tells
us why SSE would be nice if it had some precision to it: it can do
multiple operations at once.  In the case of the single-precision 
stuff they've implemented now, it can do four floating point adds,
multiplies, etc. at the same time.  Think how fast this would make, 
say, a dot product or a normalization.  It could be used now for
color calculations, since they're single-precision, but they're 
such a small part of what POV does that I'm not sure it would help 
enough to be worth the trouble.

One could try making a single-precision-only version of POV and then
putting SSE or 3DNow! instructions into it, but I'm inclined to believe 
that output quality would suffer.

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