Havoc 4, Mono, Stability

@Peggy - if you ever lose a skin just give me a yell and I'll be happy to replace anything that goes missing.

What nice sorts of things would you like to see done with scripts that run 3 times as fast and whatever benefits you think mono would bring?

Very true chip. It's best you take some time to not use photoshop (i know how hard it is, being a artist myself), and explore second life, do the things we all do and see how buggy SL really is. If you honestly haven't seen even 1 bug then your really not using SL that much. Heck we even have bugs and glitches at login... How did you not see that? lol

I know I've fixed or replaced stuff for you before, Usagi, so you know what to do Give me a shout in world and let me know what it was and approximately when it was purchased so I can check the records.

Sim crossing

The annual Hot Chips conference for microprocessor and other chip designers is going on this week in Silicon Valley, and one of the hot--or rather, cool--new vendors showing off its new chip is a company called Tilera.

The company, which is based on ideas from research performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has created a 64-core processor called the Tile64. This chip has a whole new instruction set architecture that, Tilera hopes, will shake up the appliance business soon and maybe the server market some day.

Tilera was founded in Santa Clara, California, in October 2004 and has been operating in stealth mode since that time; the company's research and development is still done in the tech corridor outside of Boston, in this case in Westborough.

The Tile64 processor that is being announced today is based on an MIT project called Raw, which was funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm of the US Department of Defense.

The Raw project, which was initiated in 1996 and which delivered a 16-core processor connected by a mesh of on-core switches, delivered what was in essence the alpha version of the Tilera64 chip in 2002. One of the key components of that Raw project was the compiler technology that could harness the multicore architecture of the processor and the integrated switches that linked them together.

Anant Agarwal, who worked on the first MIPS RISC processor at Stanford University in the 1980s and who had created a 32-node mesh-based cache coherent processor at MIT in 1994, had tackled many of these problems.

The team that created the Tile64 processor includes techies who worked on Sun Microsystems' Sparcle and Digital Equipment's Alpha RISC processors, too, as well as networking systems from Cisco Systems and supercomputers from Hewlett-Packard and the long-since defunct Thinking Machines (also an MIT spinout).

Both DARPA and MIT have spent tens of millions of dollars investing in the research that has culminated in the Tile64 processor. According to Bob Dowd, director of marketing at the company, Tilera has closed two rounds of venture capital funding to get the $40m necessary to get a finished product, with a broad future roadmap, to market in 2007.

Bessemer Venture Partners, Walden International, Columbia Capital, and VentureTech Alliance have all kicked in venture funding; the latter organization is the venture arm of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Tilera's chosen foundry for the Tile64 chip.

The Tile64 chip is not based on any existing processor cores and their associated instruction sets, but rather is a new core developed from the ground up to take advantage of mesh networking on each core to create a large pool of compute resources that can be dedicated to running a single instance of Linux and its applications or carved up on the fly into virtual Linux images, each isolated from other virtualized slices.

The Tile64 core is a 32-bit design, which uses RISC and VLIW concepts, rather than the 64-bit designs used on modern RISC and X64 processors. The core can do three instructions per clock cycle, and the chip's speed ranges from 600 MHz to 1 GHz.

The Tile64 chip has 64 KB of L2 cache as well as L1 data and instruction caches that are 8 KB in size each. The switch that is at the heart of the Tile64 processor actually implements five different mesh networks--one each for memory access, streaming packet transfers, user data network, cache misses, and interprocess communications.

Less lag on my (usually) trusty but tired class 4 home sim?

I'm not as excited about as doing new stuff with faster scripts as I am hopeful that LL is sorta stalling on new LSL features until Mono gets to the grid. Switch/case (and not just for ints!), better string parsing support, built-in functions for common things like color name to color vector, etc, etc, etc. I don't expect to ever write real OO code with LSL but they could do some not-too-hard things that would make life easier on scripters.

As for Havok: if it's more effecient, I'm for it. Slow-moving vehicles haven't worked well since very early this year.

Scripts 3 times faster, hmm seems a waste of time, 10 times would be worth the trouble.

I seem to recall that the Mono prototype speeds up scripts by a factor of 150.

To look at that the other way around, any contribution of scripts to lag would go down by a factor of 150...

[14:40] Cory Linden: As long as we’re on libSL, one of our devs has used it pretty extensively in testing Mono. We’ve had several full up tests of Mono
[14:40] Cory Linden: running on grids and things are looking very good. Because the Mono project is still dealing with some security issues and we’re finding
[14:40] Cory Linden: memory leaks both in our changes to Mono and their code, we’re moving slowly and carefully. Novell/Ximian have been really helpful, so
[14:40] Cory Linden: we’re making decent progress. There are some technical changes we still need to make in particular, we’ll need to compile Mono on the
[14:40] Cory Linden: server side which requires a distributed compilation service to be running on the grid (yay, backbone!) but I expect that we will begin
[14:41] Cory Linden: testing Mono on the main grid in Q1/Q2 2007. The process there will be to have places on the grid where you can bring scripts and
[14:41] Cory Linden: recompile them into Mono for testing. That will let you report broken scripts to us. Since Mono tends to execute LSL about 600 times
[14:41] Cory Linden: faster, I expect that there will be some interesting borkage around carefully timed scripts.
[14:41] Cory Linden: Babbage has talked about the implications of Mono extensively, but it’s important to remember that the sequence will be:
[14:41] Cory Linden: 1) Start allowing compilation of LSL to Mono/CLI. Test existing scripts like crazy. (Q1/Q2)
[14:41] Cory Linden: 2) Think about ways to include other languages (Q more than 2)

LL doesn't have it easy rebuilding a system on the fly that was basically a "Hey, let's see if we can do this cool thing and pull it off!" I don't think they initially expected it to take off the way it did, although they were probably hoping for that. Obviously their original code was "rough" to put it nicely. Since they were operating on a shoe string, they took spare parts from the bargain basement and threw them together.

Now they're trying to fix it. It's kind of like trying to change a flat tire while you're driving down the highway at 60mph. They're having a rough time of it, and as passengers, we're feeling it too.

I'm not saying we should have any sympathy for LL (they knew what they were getting themselves into), just a little understanding.

This part of your post reminded me of something I posted a long time ago with a reference to the Wright Brothers. The context of my post wasn't quite the same... I was responding to the thread's topic of whether or not folks who were using SL for income "got what they deserved." But the analogy fits with what you were talking about here.

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Salazar

Hard to keep from laughing at a post stating that sculpties are essential to the growth SL. Just how is an out side of SL program created texture that replaces inworld building skills 'essential'??