Guilty as charged. I confess.
When it's bad out, my grocery getter is a Duramax 6.6L diesel. Otherwise 2 wheels also on the excessive end of performance. For a decade I piled 220k+ on my ice road fiero, studded out to make fools of awd suv's.
NFT5 wrote:. Not too shabby from a 4 cylinder diesel that weighs in at 2800kg? I'm working on ways to get that time down around 5 seconds.
Maybe a Cruz? I'm looking forward to putting one of those in the back of the fiero. I can redo the pcm and ecm, imagine half your weight with all that torque! ...and mid engined to put it down! 50+mpg here I come! That's better than the bike!
Interestingly enough, things like tuning ecm's is exactly why I have some wicked computers. I noticed years ago, on my toughbook that had 5 external doohickeys to hook up to gm, chysler, cat, cummins, bombardier, mercedes...each one more costly than the computer, a few for operations on vehicles that cost more than a house, and these things are destined to be obsoleted. So, years back I chose KVM. It chose debian, it fits with my industrial duty bent. Debian does more for me now that I'm getting a handle on it, A+ I say.
So, running vm's solves the issue. Then I start imagining how could anyone take advantage of 2+ cores and 4GB? In line with the subject here. Like some others have mentioned, I too had dual's with scsi arrays since NT 3.5. Anyone remember a dual 486 Vtech? My NT cad box had dual monitors even! They make toys now? My dual P3's seemed enough forever.
Well, fast forward past the point when a computer could do everything to now when you need a few for different jobs. I go a different direction concerning multiple sbc's, it's not an efficient way to go. I've watch things develop having 5-8 computers on board, to 3, to 2, and every engineer has mentioned we wish we could get it down to one. Basically, once you have a few things (3-4) running that add up to 100W+, a single machine will be more efficient. My system can run a 4 core 4GB vm with ~15W. I won't boast my current specs, but 10 of those don't step on each other at all and run on 90-300W, scaling nicely with load. My 2 extra AMD video cards scale too, some don't and power up too much when not in use.
So not only have I built vehicle systems with power and thermal limits, but I take that thinking to whole home systems too. So overbuild, use a few xeons, castrate the smp, maybe restrict core count or clock to get the load within thermal limits so all fans can fail. Industrial, I expect 7 years up time.
real:
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$ uptime
10:41:32 up 120 days, 19:45, 3 users, load average: 1.36, 1.00, 0.81
stevepusser wrote: research about what's in the heat pipes in practically every computer first...
"Liquid" yes, water no. I built some thing starting with bulk heat pipes that I bend and fit to a custom aluminum case. Once I cracked one and didn't know until run time. It hissed. From the smell it was brake cleaner like perchlorel something..something that wicks well through the fibrous mesh like guts of the pipe, so also, it's not a empty tube with water. Maybe there are types?
Stability is against common sense. With massive complexity you'd expect my systems to be fragile. With kvm on debian and little else running on the host, it is perfectly stable. The vm's might not be, but I haven't taken out a host for a few years now. In one case, a piece of hardware would lock a few bare metal examples often on exit. In a vm, the hardware did the same thing, but I could reset it live, no reboot, much faster.
I can imagine a house server doing much of what a google dumb-terminal, aka smartphone can do. I prefer to keep the info local as well as the processing. So while I use higher end stuff, I use boring video cards, and a flip phone. I don't see extending the life of high end hardware as excessive, I consider more than $100 for a video card or a phone close to stupid. Yes I will hit 256GB of DDR3 long before I bother with DDR4. I haven't seen much speed improvement for a decade. The same job now is simply more power efficient. Old software doesn't use the advanced features so doesn't run much faster in its single thread. New software runs better, faster maybe, multicore, but not on old hardware. So apples and oranges really. So piling everything into one big box works well for me. I lived long enough far out of reach from anything other than a satellite. I appreciate local capabilities where outside links are optional and not required.
Faster? Not really, vm's lie. They can't count time sometimes. I have an xp bare metal monster to compare against. Much like a naked countach with 12 carbs, I can balance those for you! A dual X5687 with 24GB (~21GB pae ram drive) and 4GB amd pitcairn gpu. No vm so far comes close even though they claim to, lie lie lie. But that's a major draw to get the job done, like the countach, so I use a dual core vm that barely moves the needle. It does have a ramdrive too. A common smb available drive for the whole system, is 20GB's for $20-30 a decent deal? I think so.
Overall, I'll be the last guy to brag my i386 vm's use 300MB. It's a false economy. If they used twice, there would be no real impact. It's does what I need and is responsive, or it's not. I'm a pass/fail type, not a A for 300MB, and a C for 900MB. If the F example is 2GB idle, but works perfectly it passes. I might not use it, but not because it uses to much memory, I need it, or not.
Then the end result. There is never a time when anyone can't try something, do something, play something, watch something, where the situation is the computer is 'busy'. Not acceptable. Many sockets, many cores, terabytes, yes, any task can be done full speed while any other task(s) are also in progress. I will find the limits, it's my job. Every limit I find is an upgrade in waiting.
A note on clock control, other than the issue of generation specific factors, the motherboard bios, if complete, often has better controls than in OS user controls. Most Xeon boards I've worked with can limit or extend average clock better than user control. With SMP turned off, non-turbo limited and maybe some cores disabled, a xeon will go to max clock at a pin drop and hold it indefinitely. No lesser setup will match it. Yes, it is just like grocery getting in the duramax. Guilty.