>But I'll still say that it way out of scope for this test to
>calculate for this kind of an occurrance.
I agree, and that is exactly my main point..:<b> testing stability of cpu's is way out of the scope of what an ethousiast site like THG can do</b>. you can't turn this into an intel versus AMD match as long as you do not control what is most likely 99% of the variables that might lead to instability (ram, radiation, software,..) What could be within their scope, is testing thermal solutions in a torture test, and maybe how motherboards and power supplies handle this over a lengthened period of time, but not stability of cpu's.
>Where you would have a hard time to shield against
>radiation.
You miss understood that. Hardening is something you do while designing the cpu (ram,..). its not shielding the system with lead, because like you said, that doesn't even work for a lot of particles (not that hardening is 100% safe, but you can gain several, if not hunderds orders of magnitude of resistance against radiation. Still its not without reason the Shuttle has 5 independant computers that "vote" for every decission).
Now all this said, in fact I would be interested if someone took this issue seriously. IT should be too hard to put 2 systems in a radiation chambers and bombard them with particles and see how they cope. By dramatically increasing the odds of getting particle induces errors that might tell you if one system or the other is more likely to suffer from malfunctioning, but that would pretty much only be usefull for highend servers I guess, or maybe for laptops for the folks that travel a lot by airplane. At 10Km the odds increase dramatically. I might even arrange such a testing environment for gamma rays, though I'm not certain its big enough to house a laptop.
>And I'll still say that the chance of an error due to cosmic
> radiation is equal for both machines.
Yes, chances would be equal, but the effect you are measuring is entirely random, unless there would be a very significant difference in radiation resistance, but as mentioned, that is way out of their scope.
>I also disagree on eg: using ECC memory. Because again a
>homeuser wouldn't use this.
It depends what you are trying to achieve with your test. If the aim is: how stable is a todays computer over (say) a few months of running; fine. But if you're turning this into AMD chip versus intel chip, you should exclude any issues that are not related to this, which definately includes factors that are WAY bigger than CPU "stability", like RAM glitches.
>Last disagreement: Heat and power issues isn't as simple as
>you mention them.
I never meant to say it was simple to measure line quality or power delivery to the MB and cpu. Indeed, properly doing so requires some high end equipment, not just rely on what the BIOS tells you. But if you don't do that, again you are not testing how stable those <i>cpu's</i> are.
>PS: CMOS image censors? Man ever since being a kid i've
>wanted a decent telescope but even more a REAL "space cam"
>
😉
CMOS generally sucks for those apps I'm afraid. Leakage is a big problem, for those apps CCD is still superior (though CMOS is catching up). That company makes a lot of sensors for satellites and space flight, but not the ones that make the images like in Hubble
>486 -> With dos / windows 3.14
Window 3.14 ? I think not
😛
= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =