Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by phire 1812 days ago
By this proposal's logic, it would make total sense for processes on a boosting CPU core to report more than 100% cpu usage.
3 comments

“Military power “ seems to fit perfectly…

> The etiology of military power is from War Emergency Power (WEP) which in the WWII era was a higher than normal rating power (i.e. >100% rated power) setting on an aircraft engine. Such power settings were approved for short durations (typically 5 minutes or less) such as takeoff and battle maneuvers.

> The term was quickly shortened to military power.

Please let's not add yet more military fetishizing to IT. "Military power" should refer to things like military engines, not totally unrelated electronic performance boost modes.
IT overlap is mostly because computers and the internet are military technology. Mainframes, IC's and the transistor itself were bankrolled by US military money.

The internet and GPS, the core technologies of our time, are both direct descendants of the US military.

You may not like it, but the entire IT and tech field are built on US military tech

Civilian and military engineering history are intertwined. The tech transfer doesn't go one way only.

In ancient times both mercantile and military incentives propelled the design of ships. Is fair to say the whole ship building field built on military tech?

You're just picking a point in time and calling that the beginning; every one of those things is based on previous tech with no military background.

Even if it were true that in the distant past a thing had a military application/funding, there's no reason to use their terms for new things which aren't military in nature. No commercial liner calls it's full speed "military power". It's just cosplay at this point.

If you go far enough back all of our technology arises from fire and the wheel.

There's plenty of room to debate how much of our technology came from the military, but I don't think naming is a big deal.

Take the word "screen" for example. The original meaning was a partition to protect from heat. Many of these were fabric, and led to "magic lantern" shows done with shadows. The word was repurposed again for the projection era. And yet again for tube TV's and beyond.

If you told somebody from 100 years ago to look at the screen they would have no idea what you're talking about because the original meaning is lost.

That's why I don't think it matters whether we use military terms for computer stuff. It doesn't have its original meaning anymore.

> I don't think naming is a big deal

Good, we agree, no more tacti-cool cosplaying in IT.

"Overdrive"
Turbo. I miss the old turbo button, even when it didn't actually do much of anything.
turbo actually slowed the cpu to 4.77 MHz (the speed of 8086/8088) because early programs's timing logic were based on 4.77 MHz clock frequency
This used to be the case -- XP era had it report as a percentage of the target frequency, so an Athlon XP would usually run at 110%. This is confusing to people who believe 100% is the maximum.
"these go to eleven!"

https://youtu.be/hW008FcKr3Q

Linux control groups and systemd CPU quotas use values larger than 100% for denoting more than one CPU.

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.res...

> The percentage specifies how much CPU time the unit shall get at maximum, relative to the total CPU time available on one CPU. Use values > 100% for allotting CPU time on more than one CPU.