[SGVLUG] Linux Sonoma (Centrino) Support

[Dustin]

On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Chris Smith wrote:

> Not entirely true. The Sony ones and a few others have some wackiness
> in them, and a number of Centrino laptops still include their own
> Broadcom based wireless, just to annoy us Linux folks.

OK, that's very good to know, thanks.  I find researching laptop hardware 
more annoying and difficult than desktop hardware, so every little bit 
helps.

Hmm, I thought Sony Vaios were fairly well liked among Linux folk?

> I think the big thing, that Intel failed to be properly prepared for,
> was the total failure of the Itanium to take market share by now. The

Whether true or not, and putting on my most prejudiced hat, I always like
to imagine that the big mistake was in thinking that the purchasers of
high-end servers somehow care about that amusing company that makes those 
little chips for home computer toys. :-)

Not really fair, since Intel has aproximately bottomless investment
dollars and purchasers tend to go where the value is, but I still like to
imagine it.

> Pentium-4 was meant to be a stop gap, geared specifically to evolve in
> such a way that it'd drive up the volume of things that the Itanium
> needs to be a good CPU (namely way more bandwidth, and software that
> tries really hard to avoid being impacted by latency). When the P-4
> was originally announced, the buzz from Intel is that it'd *never*
> make it in to laptops, that the P6-core would own that space until
> Itanium had enough market share to consider designing an IA64 mobile
> chip.

I had never heard that story, and particularly that Intel talked of Itanic 
for home users and laptops.

Hmm...isn't Transmeta's architecture also VLIW under the hood?  Was there
some connection to closing the door that Transmeta was trying to slip
through, or did they just both listen to the same academic fashion for
VLIW (huh, wonder what the fashionable kool-aid is nowadays--cell maybe)?  
You could run a field of Crusoes on the power requirements of one Itanic,
though, so maybe not.

> Hehe. Keep in mind that since the PPro, Intel chips haven't executed
> x86 ISA instructions internally. They've always been translate, then
> execute (same goes for AMD basically).

Yeah, I know, though I didn't recall precisely when that started
happening, but I have a bitter memory and devilishly small forgiveness for
the "memory model" madness of overlapping memory segments.  Imagine my
confusion at trying to figure out why the Turbo-C compiler needed to
choose a segment model after learning C on DEC hardware, where memory
management wasn't designed by lunatics (yes, I know why they chose
it--lunatics anyway).  Revenge is a dish best served cold--20 years later.  
:-)

Hmm, interesting question--if you sheared off the translation layer and
made a chip that really did just execute it's native underlying
instructions, what would you get?  How many transistors and how many watts
would you save?  I'm not enough of a hardware guy to know.

Way back when, my uninformed preference was for Motorola, then Alpha, then
PPC as the only competing ISA left standing.  The latter is still true,
but we have to wait and find out if game machines are more influential now
than desktops. :-)

Mmmm....Alpha. :-)

> I actually have a dual-PPro machine from the "good ol' days". Those
> things were fantastic for running Linux. ;-)

I seem to recall something like that.  If all that cache wasn't so
expensive...all that L2 cache seems to be a strength of the P-M, too, so
there's more continuity for ya.

Must be easier to write high-performance code for than the P4, too.

> > I didn't realize that.  I thought that was something else (like a "mobile
> > Athlon 64" or something) and the Turion was a more extensive re-working.
> 
> The Turion line is supposed to be a better than AMD's original mobile
> Athlon64 efforts.

The slim info I could dig up suggested that a Mobile Athlon was 
essentially a desktop replacment chip for laptops that would rarely be 
without wall power (or not very long, at any rate :-), and really went 
head-to-head with P4's in the same class of machines, while the Turion is 
supposed to actually compete with the P-M.  And that it doesn't seem to be 
there yet, unfortunately.

> Yeah, anyone who says the Althon64 was "much" lower powered than the
> P4 hasn't been in the low-powered chip space much. Sure, it has an
> advantage over the P4, but it's a gas guzzler compared to Pentium-M or
> its predecessor, the PIII.

Well, I don't rightly remember but I think my Athlon XP dissipates
somewhere in the low 3-figure range, which is probably more than for an
equivalent P4 but not very close to a Pentium-M at 25 or 35 W, let alone a
Crusoe at some ridiculous figure like 1W.

> ...More importantly Intel's Centrino chipset
> does a great job managing power beyond the chip. AMD is catching up in
> this space, but they are unfortunately quite a bit behind.

That was my impression--still a great time to buy AMD for the desktop, but
not for the laptop.

Dustin