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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Prediction is a hard problem when coupled with caches. It relatively easy to say that no speculative instruction has any effect until it’s confirmed taken if you ignore caches. However caches need to fetch information from memory to allow an instruction to evaluate, and rewinding a cache to it’s previous state on a mispredict is almost impossible. Especially when you consider that the amount of time you’re executing non-speculative code on a modern processor is very low.

    Not having predictions is consigning yourself to 1990s performance, with faster clocks.





  • wewbull@feddit.uktoLinux@lemmy.mlNew Release OBS Studio 30.2
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    3 days ago

    A codec is a module that encodes and decodes (COder/DECoder…CoDec) information into a format. That format might be H.264 or VP9 or whatever.

    So yes. NvEnc is a codec, or at least, it is when partnered with the hardware decoding also. It’s a codec for multiple formats.




  • The AI numbers are pretty solid. Papers published on Hugging face list training times and platform and convert that into CO2. Those will be full load for weeks/months across arrays of GPUs.

    In this case, I don’t see why you’d need that kind of hardware for this application. You might be right that it’s not running at maximum load. If so, then somebody has been mis-sold the hardware. Whatever you’re doing it will be at a consistent load though. They are always doing the same thing.









  • Weirdly, I think it all got me my first job. I interviewed at a graphics card manufacturer and the interviewer placed one of their cards on the table and said “tell me what’s on that card”.

    I picked it up and pointed out all the components because I knew them all by their part numbers that were written on them. I hadn’t seen them before, but I knew they were options in XFree86. Then add in that the regular array of chips was likely VRAM and the chips with the same logo on them as was above the door where the companies own video processors.

    I didn’t know how any of it worked, but he didn’t know that. All he saw was a fresh graduate that just effortlessly identified some quite esoteric components of a design he’d personally made.


  • The thing that sticks with me is video card support. Back then (before Nvidia, 3dfx, etc) you had VGA cards that had one of a number of chipsets on, but it would be paired with a video timing chip and a RAMDAC. Buying a card required knowing which combination of parts it used and which combinations had support in XFree86. Then writing the configuration required knowing the video timings supported by your monitor. Not just frequencies, but blanking periods and such like.

    EDID solved that last problem.