Monthly Archives: July 2009

Sad git thought

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I have been reading some bits on the Intel Website.  (Whoever said we never click on the Google Ad words?)  An interesting topic with two points:

  1. We used to think of IBM mainframes and MIPS (Millions of instructions per second).   Then PCs came along and it was the clock speed.  This got irrelevant when Intel got the chips to do more and more in a CPU cycle.  Then came along duo chips and quad chips.  The word now is BOPS  – Billions of Operations Per Second.  So a Quad Core Intel chip Xeon E5345 can execute 153,500 BOPS, or 153,500,000,000,000 instructions per seconds.
  2. This chip that executes at 153,500 BOPS consumes 335 Watts.  That’s a lot of power, but compare that with a single core Intel processor which executes at 33,115 BOPS and uses 323.4 Watts.  Yes a 4.47x improvement in instructions per Watt.  Yes global warming and power consumption are now big issues in the compuer industry. 
  3. Now I see there are some CPUs with 6 cores,  are these called  Sex-Core?  At 2,700 dollars, I will have to wait a while. 

Goodwood festival of speed

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Near Miss

Near Miss

Red Arrows

Red Arrows

Sunday we went to Goodwood to meet Rosemary’s niece Anne, her partner Peter, and Anne’s son, ie R’s great nephew, Colin. They were over from Canada on holiday and visiting various relatives. Robert (Anne’s brother & hence Rosemary’s nephew) and his lady Kirsty were there in attendance. Goodwood was running the Festival of Speed. This is a three-day event of cars and bikes hill climbing and vocalising their engines.  (Many engines sounded to me in need of going into a garage pronto, but I was informed that was not the case.)  Very clever “sculpture” in front of Goodwood House itself.

Red, White and Blue

Red, White and Blue

Red Arrows

Red Arrows

There were many stands, and many cars that motor heads could drool over. (There were also quite a few old sheep dressed as lamb, which weren’t worth drooling over.) Celebrities were around, Jenson Button and Chris Evans to name two. The Red Arrows performed for the crowds.

On the way back we stopped off at Biceser village for a set meal at Carluccios. Quite reasonable value thee course meal for two and a couple of glasses of wine for £35 including tip.

There is a car up there

There is a car up there