Not everything I say is CPd form Wikipedia. Some things are just hard to explain to idiots in more than one way. Of course, some idiots won't accept the truth no matter HOW you explain it to them because Lord Redmond likes the registry.

I don't remember any of their songs having to do with ribs

The objective of tech support isn't to try to show up the person asking the question. The OP was asking a pretty simple speed question, so getting into a discussion about ops and micro ops really wasn't warranted.

As for whether or not Kerrigore knows how processors work, I'd say he knew enough to answer the OP's question on terms the OP could understand, which was the goal here. Does he know more? I'd say probably not, but that doesn't mean he's not a "computer specialist" in the sense that he could provide front-line support to people who know nothing.

To use Sixen as an example, Matt, you know as well as I do that he probably couldn't pass any pro-level Cisco or MS exams, but he's still fine at troubleshooting and providing software/network support to people. All that's required is ambition and good self-learning skills, and you can write your ticket in this industry. You know that.

For myself, as far as front-line tech support is concerned, I'd say my background has made me worse at it if anything. When you support one of the largest WANs in the country, a single computer's connection to a $50 L3 switch and a modem feels small, and I find I'm getting a little more jaded each time I have to explain DHCP or NAT. What they need is someone to guide them by the hand as a child and walk them through their little web interfaces and Windows GUI, and I just don't have the taste for that stuff anymore, not out of conceit but out of boredom. Now I mostly just look for problems in that forum that I find interesting, but there aren't many.

I think that's the problem with both of us Matt; The IT industry is led by ambitious self-learners, and those aren't the kinds of people who like standing still, supporting the same products in the same ways that quickly become simple and obvious. About two weeks ago I fixed a broadcast storm created by someone who I then called a moron for throwing portfast onto every access port without a thought (three switches were linked without trunking, thus portfast created a loop), but I later apologized; You can't fault someone for not knowing what you've taken a long time to study, and they're not moronic for not knowing it. I've been forgetting that lately, and I think you have too.

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Q u o t e:
Not quite. For example (and I'm just giving you what came to mind first), some SPARC servers have only 8 cores but can handle 128 threads. That said, I'm not a SPARC advocate, of course.

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I stated I was ignoring simultaneous multithreading(SMT, also known as HyperThreading).

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Q u o t e:
There's a lot more to processor architecture than a clock speed--and there's a lot more to application performance than processor architecture.

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Since I was comparing multicore and monocore performance, I thought it'd be implied that I was talking about two otherwise identical chips.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(band)



In a word, yes.

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Q u o t e:

I see. I thought I caught that, but I guess I didn't mark it. It doesn't matter. I'm not actually able to focus on or care about almost anything in this thread.

Topic change?

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Anything exciting happen on the internet over the weekend?

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Q u o t e:

The objective of tech support isn't to try to show up the person asking the question. The OP was asking a pretty simple speed question, so getting into a discussion about ops and micro ops really wasn't warranted.

As for whether or not Kerrigore knows how processors work, I'd say he knew enough to answer the OP's question on terms the OP could understand, which was the goal here. Does he know more? I'd say probably not, but that doesn't mean he's not a "computer specialist" in the sense that he could provide front-line support to people who know nothing.

To use Sixen as an example, Matt, you know as well as I do that he probably couldn't pass any pro-level Cisco or MS exams, but he's still fine at troubleshooting and providing software/network support to people. All that's required is ambition and good self-learning skills, and you can write your ticket in this industry. You know that.

For myself, as far as front-line tech support is concerned, I'd say my background has made me worse at it if anything. When you support one of the largest WANs in the country, a single computer's connection to a $50 L3 switch and a modem feels small, and I find I'm getting a little more jaded each time I have to explain DHCP or NAT. What they need is someone to guide them by the hand as a child and walk them through their little web interfaces and Windows GUI, and I just don't have the taste for that stuff anymore, not out of conceit but out of boredom. Now I mostly just look for problems in that forum that I find interesting, but there aren't many.

I think that's the problem with both of us Matt; The IT industry is led by ambitious self-learners, and those aren't the kinds of people who like standing still, supporting the same products in the same ways that quickly become simple and obvious. About two weeks ago I fixed a broadcast storm created by someone who I then called a moron for throwing portfast onto every access port without a thought (three switches were linked without trunking, thus portfast created a loop), but I later apologized; You can't fault someone for not knowing what you've taken a long time to study, and they're not moronic for not knowing it. I've been forgetting that lately, and I think you have too.

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Oh I agree, my quarrel was with the redundent reiteration of the obvious where it is not needed as a sufficient answer was provided in the first reply; bringing up his (Kerrigore's) limited understanding was just a reminder of this. I have no problem with people who work in the the user-land side of IT, hell I have lunch with a few, but people who blindly parrot information and even opinions for ... god knows what reason (Blowhard comes to mind), well they're just silly.

Sixen's great at what he does -- puts the Indian techies to shame -- even if he still doesn't want to believe that ICMP timeouts aren't definitively "packet loss" :)

Well yeah I can understand that, being forced to work in a domain you've superseded in complexity long ago would be very tedious as there's no challenge; I knew this well when I took a web developer job, very boring, left as soon as my contract was over.

True, it isn't their fault and nor should it be, the people I can't deal with are those who are out to project an impression of understanding yet end up making horrid mistakes and failing to take responsibility for them. That aside, people have a tendency to shun what they feel they've advanced from or shed some perceived fact about themselves; you see this alot in religion.

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Q u o t e:

By ops I figure you mean opcodes, and by uops I figure you mean processor states (micro-ops, also a note: a mu is not a u), yes? In other words, you're talking about microcode?

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Did you really need to have that clarified?

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Q u o t e:

I'm just learning this stuff now; what do you expect?
I was curious, not trying to show off.

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Fair enough then.