counting sand

 This is more of a note, not a blog entry, unless you happen to care that some of your interrupts are negative in windows.

My soundcard has no negative interrupts. Six months from now, if I changed it, I'd wonder why it busted. But my handy-trendy video-card was going "Negative-interrupts whut??" So I told it to change over. It didn't help 3dmark, but whatever, I'm more trendy now.

If this had been an actual blog entry, I'd be expounding upon the question, 

"what is an interrupt?" and since I don't know off the top of my head, I'll skip that.

Interrupts used to be scarce, and shared.

Sharing causes problems.

The difference between the CPU feeling something needs attention (like if you hear a noise)

in 1995, and today, is the part I'm unclear on, but maybe I'll figure it out one day and type it up.

I mean, you've hired a secretary/receptionist, and she keeps the long line of hoi-polloi people at bay and sends one on through to your office, that hasn't changed, has it?

Her name happens to be "Interrupt controller" Or maybe Microcontroller (is that like a biggie thing as big as your computer-case called "Micropic?"

Micro-pic stands for micro-programmable-interrupt-controller" and I shudder to think how big, how gargantuanly huge, it was before "Micro".

before my time (but yeah, pretty close)

The different hardware devices in any computer request time from the Boss, who checks in with his secretary at regular intervals to see what's on the agenda.

But the analogy falls flat when you have several bosses/cpu-cores, many more supplicants/clients, and wtf did they improve? Oh yeah, many more offices that the clients can line up to, 

kind of like the DMV (I think).

An electrical signal triggers a response from the CPU "What?"

And a register in the interrupt controller said "7" or "9" before, in front of a line of numbers ("9" then "3" then 5", etc)

And NOW it says something like "Hello. I have a message from the network for "Cathy"

They invented "Message (yada something) Interrupts" ("signal," prolly)

and they improved it to be more informative to different cores in a CPU.

PCIE 3.0 is no slouch.

I seem to recall someone telling me, back before time began,

That a CPU could "Poll" endlessly or (more intelligently) relax and wait for an interrupt to occur.

But if the picture below is literally true, wouldn't the CPU be polling an address endlessly?

I don't know.

There. That's it.

Now when I hear the smart guy a couple doors down ranting, I'll know why.

But you shouldn't care, it's just, interrupts have been a problem on PC's forever and some people wondered why they're negative.

Related subjects: If a network card uses MSI (not the brand, the technology), you can tell it to specially talk to certain cores in your CPU, and that's called "Affinity."

A lot of the docs are dated so don't believe reddit.

This subject is about as interesting as "How many eyes has a fly?" so I'm only typing it to remember it tomorrow.

Today my CPU permanently underclocked itself so severely that programs were taking forever to just load up.

Skipping to the happy ending, and totally guessing (Because who knows what tomorrow will bring,) I raised my VDDP a couple millivolts, and changed "PBO Boost" to "Auto" from "Enabled."

Maybe it's like shoving your sleeping partner in bed and telling them something;

 it doesn't matter what you tell them, they're more awake.

O crap. You KNOW about the artificial Mask shortage, it was like Oil, the prices went sky-high. Now Video cards, Motherboards, CPU's are following the traditions of their forefathers.
(what bullshit)
We all hope when Trump leaves, we'll play nice with China (Taiwan) again, and Japan, and Korea (geez)

Postscript: Everywhere you go in my tiny town, people wear masks.

Every night on the news in my tiny town, the Covid-statistics are worse.

It *could* follow, if you were opinionated, that the current prevalent masks are not offering enough protection...but I'm only mumbling, that the stylish ones they have now oughta be replaced with the ones they hand out in hospitals, "N95", but no one mentions n95 (or KN95) masks anymore, they just hand out those tissue-paper ones. Hanes even has useless masks now. How much you wanna bet that they cost as much as N95 masks used to cost?

But I'm only mumbling at the end of a blog no one'll read, I hope (This entry is far from my usual stellar stuff)