http://www.codex.gr/ Latest News of Codex - Stay Tuned! en http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=148 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=148 Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:36:18 +0300 Ok, it is with great sadness that I have to announce that Codex.gr, my company, has officially ceased operations as of a few days ago. Actually it had stopped operations for more than a month, but these days the paperwork was finished. One more victim of the recent crisis... These are the bad news, the good news is that I will continue work on the same field, as I am now employed by Genesi USA Inc to work on ARM and NEON stuff on their product line, the Efika MX which is about to hit the streets! In fact, this very moment I am setting up a compile farm with a few Efikas to build a custom Ubun http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=122 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=122 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:48:55 +0200 Today, I finished the ARM NEON port of the popular open source Eigen math library. Here is the commit log: http://bitbucket.org/eigen/eigen/changeset/e26af7abc0af/ And here are the results of a simple benchmark (doing matrix addition/multiplication of 512x512 matrices): Scalar: $ ./bench_gemm.gcc4.4.1cs eigen cpu 3.84s 0.0699051 GFLOPS (19.27s) eigen real 3.8469s 0.0697796 GFLOPS (19.2648s) NEON: $ ./bench_gemm.gcc4.4.1cs.neon eigen cpu 0.81s 0.331402 GFLOPS (4.07s) eigen real 0.813919s 0.329806 GFLOPS http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=107 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=107 Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:22:40 +0200 Ok, seems most of the stuff has already been sold, thanks for the quick response! The list is updated with only the remaining stuff now. As I gather stuff, I find some new items that might be interesting to some people, I'll post an update as soon as I complete the list. Iterm description Price (€) URL Listed on Status GeForceMX4000 128M AGP Card 5,00 here ebay SOLD DVI KVM Switch 4-port PS/2 + 4 cable sets 80,00 ebay SOLD RaidSonic MB-122ABOX-B 3.5 PATA HDD Dock bay 17,40 here ebay SOLD IEEE1394/Firewire Switch 5,00 N/A ebay PLEXTOR http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=106 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=106 Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:59:16 +0200 I changed my office the past days and due to the relocation, I realized that I had some old hardware that I have no further use of. If anyone feels they have a need for this hardware, here is a list with price quotes, anything that's left after 10 days will go on ebay, so if you are interested on a particular item, now is the time! Update: a couple more items were included, check the bold titles! Iterm description Price (€) URL Listed on Status SHUTTLE XPC SN68SG2 BLACK + AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4800+ 2.50GZ AM2 + 2x KINGSTON KVR800D2N5/1G 1GB PC6400 800MHZ VALUE RAM + LG G http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=101 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=101 Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:11:07 +0200 Never give up if you feel your cause is strong! A while ago, I organized a Market research for new PowerPC system which didn't prove as fruitful as originally hoped, but it generated a lot of interest all around. This inspired Power2People to create a bounty to help the design and production of the board! This led the creation of the "Open Source Hardware Bounty" which I'm proud to announce now! More details on the bounty can be found on the Power2People site (scroll down to the open bounties and check the design steps). Genesi fully supports this effort as it is close to the spirit of their http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=100 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=100 Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:21:23 +0200 I guess the title pretty much sums it up. There were a couple of meetings this week reg. possible investment on this platform - actually the first was with a customer who owes me a substantial amount of money, which I intended to use on the board design/production, but who refused to pay and we will probably go the legal route and it will take probably years until a result comes out. The second meeting was with an investor, a personal acquaitance about funding the board. The number of emails I received was very small and disappointing, esp. since I expected at least 3 times as many. The invest http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=64 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=64 Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:54:33 +0300 The total is now at 95 (c'mon guys :). Let's see at the updated stats: Preferred OS MorphOs AmigaOS Linux Haiku/Other Votes 45 50 17 12 Preferred CPU MPC8610 MPC8640D P1022 -- Votes 60 36 9 -- Preferred price 350-450€ 450-550€ >550€ any Votes 24 37 12 22 So, what we see here: AmigaOS/MorphOS userbase have more or less the same dynamic -I think the AmigaOS userbase is much larger actually, but they are sceptics reg. the board and they already have the SAM, so they are not as "active" as the the MorphOS users. OTOH, arou http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=62 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=62 Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:04:32 +0300 Even more posts here and here! Linux users have started sending mails as well, The total is now at 61. Let's see at the updated stats: Preferred OS MorphOs AmigaOS Linux Haiku/Other Votes 33 27 11 12 Preferred CPU MPC8610 MPC8640D P1022 -- Votes 32 25 5 -- Preferred price 350-450€ 450-550€ >550€ any Votes 15 18 8 20 The stats are a bit different now, especially the OS counters don't add up to the total, as *many*, pretty much everyone sends more than one preferred OS (usually, MorphOS/AmigaOS and some times Linux/Haik http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=60 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=60 Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:46:11 +0300 The reseach continues here, here, here, and in Greek: here and here. So far, response has been a mix of excitement and disappointing comments. In ~24h I received 36 mails. Mostly from Amiga/MorphOS users, I haven't sent out mails to Linux/PowerPC forums/lists, and I intend to do that next. Let's see at the stats so far: Preferred OS MorphOs AmigaOS Linux None/Other Votes 17 16 2 1 Preferred CPU MPC8610 MPC8640D P1022 any Votes 18 5 4 9 Preferred price 350-450€ 450-550€ >550 any Votes 8 12 4 12 Well, ok the results are http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=59 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=59 Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:21:23 +0300 You can find it here and here. I'll blog about progress on this regularly. http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=46 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=46 Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:27:52 +0300 Here's the link to the announcement: http://lists.fixstars.com/pipermail/yellowdog-announce/2009-June/000214.html From the press release: "YDL 6.2 now offers libfreevec, a (LGPL) library with replacement routines for GLIBC, such as memcpy(), strlen(), etc. These routines, which have been rewritten and optimized to use the AltiVec vector engine found in the G4/G4+ PowerPC CPUs, can provide for up to 25% increase in application performance." I would like to thank Fixstars and the YDL people for mentioning libfreevec, and I hope more distros follow suit! :) Konstantinos Margaritis Codex li http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=40 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=40 Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0300 Well, here I am, in London and I think this clip is a really matching tune: Speaking of matches, the project I'm working on is for a UK company which does data mining for Banks, Insurance companies, etc. I can't disclose much more, save that I was chosen to do exactly what I'm good at: software optimizations! It's been a while since I've been here (2004 iirc) and it's good to be back again and feel the London vibe... http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=39 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=39 Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0200 The past days I've been playing with OpenEmbedded, as part of a new project that will take the (local) market by storm :) The details of the project will be kept secret for now, but suffice to say, it's going to be an embedded product, based on OpenEmbedded and ARM (though initial tests are happening on an EFIKA/powerpc). I have to say, I've played with all sorts of custom distribution software, from Debian, Gentoo, LFS, etc. OpenEmbedded appears to be the best yet and the name is even misleading. It's not restricted to embedded stuff -though it was designed with that in mind and the suppo http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=38 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=38 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0200 Well, some times one has to make hard decisions and abandon a sinking ship. In our case, it's the PowerPC and AltiVec technologies. Freescale has (unofficially) abandoned the e600 core (which includes AltiVec) and is refocusing on multicore and QorIQ CPUs (which I hope it serves them well and it helps them repay that huge $10B debt). IBM on the other hand, is probably ready to sell the complete Semiconductor department, so unfortunately the PowerPC future does not look too good, if it has a future at all. In forums and elsewhere, I have strived to prove the superiority of PowerPC architect http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=37 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=37 Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0200 2009 ist nun da und unser Team schaut sich nach neuen Projekten um! Frisch und frech, sind wir für Sie da, um Ihre besondere Ansprüche zu verwirklichen! Wir freuen uns schon auf diese! Prosit!! http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=45 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=45 Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:57:54 +0300 We at Codex are very proud to sponsor an open source project like kyuba/dev9 which when finished -which won't be far off in the future actually-, it will revolutionize Linux (and probably other OSes as well)!! Kyuba is a rewrite of einit, made again by the same dedicated and knowledgeable coder, Magnus Deininger. Anyone who has used einit before will tell you that it has changed their idea of boot times and system efficiency. A beta einit version was able to reduce boot times more than 100%, from 55s down to 20s on a powerbook G4 and even down to 7 SECONDS on an Athlon X2!!!! And that was a http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=44 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=44 Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:50:06 +0300 Minor but important upgrade of libfreevec, get it here! http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=36 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=36 Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 +0300 This Friday (Jun 6, 2008), I gave a talk (in Greek) at the University of Peiraeus about "Software Optimisations, SIMD and the Cell BE". The flyer is here and the official page of the event is here. Live streaming of the talk (in Greek) was provided, and soon the videos will be available online (I'll post the URLs when ready). You can find the slides at the event page or here (in PDF/OpenDocument Format). http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=35 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=35 Sun, 04 May 2008 00:00:00 +0300 The post on the Eigen2 mailing list says all. In my continuing effort of AltiVec optimizations in core libraries/components of Linux, Eigen2 was relatively easy optimized for AltiVec. Eigen is used in KSpread2 (part of KOffice the KDE Office suite) soon to be released. This would mean that all kinds of math would run much faster on KSpread. UPDATE: With some extra altivec hacking, I managed to get down from 11s for 4x4 matrices down to 4s (scalar does 14s, 40M loops), and from 11s down to 4s for 80x80 matrices (4k loops)! Considering that this is a generic framework, able to handle any kin http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=34 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=34 Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0300 Well, at least for ppc it is. Glibc ppc support is very minimal, and anyway, most functions in glibc are slow (reference implementations doing per-byte processing). Where there are any optimizations, they exist only for x86/x86_64. PowerPC optimizations exist only for very few functions. While these are the most common ones, still, ppc units such as AltiVec are left unused. I intend to (try) to change that. But more about this later. http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=33 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=33 Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0300 I just finished this routine, and I'm really proud of it: http://www.freevec.org/function/inverse_matrix_4x4_using_partitioning Apart from beating the scalar version, I actually managed to beat the matrix inversion routine by the cellperformance.com guys who are really good at this stuff! Anyway, things are progressing steadily and soon I'll be able to just incorporate all these functions into bigger projects like Mesa 3D and Blender. Most of the code is being submitted into the SIMDx86 repository as well. http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=43 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=43 Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:10:03 +0300 Shortly after libfreevec 1.0.3 was released, we are pleased to announce the release of benchsuite 1.0.2, the software used to test and benchmark libfreevec. Though it was used to develop and test libfreevec, it's quite generic and should be easily adapted to pretty much any type of C functions in a library or standalone. The data is saved in a SQLite table, so that it can be easily modified for any use. The pretty Google graphs in http://freevec.org/functions have been created using data generated from this package. Get the software here. http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=42 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=42 Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:40:05 +0200 After long hours of testing and debugging, CODEX releases libfreevec 1.0.3, get it here! For benchmarks, check http://www.freevec.org/functions http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=32 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=32 Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0200 Ok, it's official, I started working on SIMDizing 3D code: http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=10160#10160 First stop is this library SIMDx86, which is ok, but apparently it has some limitations that will force to fork it or in any case change it in a fundamental way to be able to reuse it in other projects. Instead of copying and pasting the same code in many apps, I'll just provide the optimizations in this (or in a derivative) library and just change the code to use it. Prospect packages are: Mesa/OpenGL Blender (already started on this one) Ogre3D ODE Other? This way http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=31 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=31 Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0200 Well, the holidays are over, not that we really got in the spirit of the holidays anyway, as we were all sick here, my wife, the baby and myself. But at least, we don't have any excuse to stay away from work :-( Well, libfreevec is almost ready for its first beta release 1.0rc1. Only memmove() is left for testing/fixing and we're ready for release. After that, the plan is to focus on the Blender port to Cell, port libfreevec to 64-bit (G5/Cell/Power6, it works already with adequate results but no 64-bit optimization has been done) and start talking to people to integrate it to glibc or othe http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=30 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=30 Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0200 Well, its Christmas at last!!! Codex will be a snow sports / shopping / attending dinners etc. kind of company as of now. Till uhm... let's say January the 4th, shall we? :-) Merry Christmas to everyone, and good business to you! - "In 2008, we will work hard to finally find a spot for these two bonsai trees over there..." - theodore karkoulis http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=29 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=29 Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0200 Ok, I've just finished the initial port of libfreevec to Cell. Both freevec and benchsuite run fine with no problems, but of course performance is not great. It's good, even now it's better than glibc, but it can get much better, I've done nothing specific for the cell/64-bit features. Stay tuned... http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=28 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=28 Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0200 ... is certainly very user friendly. Does it give you the intalling/configuration power during install that linux is supposed to give you though? We'll find out soon i guess... 70% of the configurability (and 10% of the errors) of the Debian installer would put it quite high on the rank list. so far everything is graphical, tidy, and i got loads of progressbars and that sort. (not too much of a progressbar person myself really, but oh well) ... and even more progressbars were in store for me :-) - First bad thing i've noticed: I do NOT want X, GTK, Fonts (lol?), and other packages related http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=27 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=27 Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0200 ...simply becaude Gentoo/Debian/Ubuntu all need tweaking to work with cell programming, and IBM's tools only run in rpm based systems (Fedora for instance) by default. Therfore, YDL it is. Im not too happy about that, my preference would be gentoo/debian, but we'll use those as execution platforms via the live cds to test our code, rather than devel platforms. not to mention the option of cross-compiling, in the future though. First, the ps3 needs to be tested with success. So far we managed to run some tests but although they open threads for the diff SPE's and bind them to an available s http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=26 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=26 Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0200 gentoo on the new ps3, easier to install than on amd64 or apple. compiling world now, i think it saw the 6 spe's but failed to load a module of some sort, but cant really deal with it now, too tired - 3 am here looks great though :-) http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=25 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=25 Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0200 I just placed the PS3 order, we should have it here in a couple of days! Can't wait to start playing with CELL :-D http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=24 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=24 Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0200 ... and everything starts looking like it should! Our site looks great, our new logo is awesome, thanks to Theo :-) , our projects start picking up pace, project/subversion/drupal integration is completed, . Soon we'll get our brand new Playstation 3 and we can start doing really cool things with CELL programming! Tally-ho! http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=22 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=22 Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0200 Winter in Greece! Winter, believe it or not, is always welcomed here because it signifies: more food, more wine, more indoors activities (such is eating/watching movies/ordering pizza/going out for coffee or drinks). Plus we really really - and i know you dont believe this - cant take any more summer. When you have summer from April till Late October, you really want it to end. Of course, winter time is mountain time. Everyone is waiting for friday 6pm, when they'll stuff the car with more clothes than needed, make as many "Frappe" coffees as the people in the car, and set off to the mounta http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=41 http://www.codex.gr/?pageID=bg::17&blogItem=41 Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:42:39 +0200 you can get a glimpse here: