Thursday, February 16, 2006

 

PC Death @ Vik

My trusty desktop just turned into a rusty desktop. Perhaps it has had a CPU-attack, having seen an older PC being eviscerated to form the body of a forge. Whatever, it now steadfastly refuses to boot off HD - so I'm running off an Ubuntu Live CD at the moment ( a good trick if your PC is down). See http://ubuntulinux.org.

I'll try a reinstall using Ubuntu and see if I can't revive the PC. All files are being copied off onto the server, just in case...

Vik :v)

Comments:
If you can make it hang on till the third quarter of this year you should start seeing Linux machines built around the Sony/Toshiba/IBM "cell" cpu.

That chip clocks in at about 45 times faster than the best Pentium chip and shouldn't cost more than US$100.

I'm making my Wintel system last till then and then I will switch over to Linux and the "cell" architecture. I've had a gutfull of both Intel and Microsoft and will only keep them on board for legacy work thereafter.

The collusion the Intel and Microsoft did to make it impossible to build up your own PC from parts in order to protect the media companies was just more than I could stomach. :-/
 
I'm looking forward to the Cell too. The nice bit about them is that they do multi-processor communication very effectively. The IBM guys have Linux running beautifully.

The actual "cells", 8 controlled by a PowerPC core, are not hugely useful as yet, but that'll change. The price is a bit high too, but IBM are doing some impressive strained silicon work which should decrease the cost, lower power consumption, and increase speed quite dramatically. I think Apple chose the wrong time to jump ship.

Do you think there will be an ATX board, a PCI plug-in, or something different?

Vik :v)
 
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