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To add: Hit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS_5D_Mark_II and scroll down to the very end, then click "show" to expand the "Canon EOS digital SLR timeline". This is an incredible collection of information that I can't figure out how to link directly.

The direct link is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Canon_EOS_digital_cam... You can get to it by pressing the `V` in `V T E` at the top left of any tmeplate


Because it's transcluded in (into?) a lot of those cameras' pages.

It's absolutely wild to me that this function would be so important as to justify all the time and effort to create not just two, but six entirely different ways of solving it.

The first one seemed perfectly adequate to me. But I guess that's why I'm not a Canon engineer.


I haven't used all of them, but I have used both the 9 point and the 45 point types, and the difference is massive. The 45 point was far, far more tactile and responsive. I don't mean speed of autofocus, but the actual way that the points sit over top of the viewfinder and light up, it's hard to explain. I'm sure part of that is software, but owning an older model and then trying out a newer one in the camera store in like 2013 really was eye opening, it blew my mind. The 9 point feels like a toy.

On the other hand in actual usage i don't think that they are really that different. It's useful for sports/wildlife for focusing closest moving target (and speed of AF on these cameras was not that quick so you were hunting focus anyway). Otherwise selecting some offset autofocus point is pretty niche. With more static subjects majority of photographers would use the single middle point, focus and then recompose.

It's only with advent of smart focusing of mirrorless cameras with people/faces recognition where there is a big difference.


I started to write a stupid comment about how insanely fast the focus on the EOS R5 C is- only to remember it’s a non reflex !

The difference in focal time between my 5D mkii even with the best lenses, and the R5 C with a cine servo or vcm is insane. The R5 feels instant and only ever searches if it’s been locked to an inappropriate point.


For most stuff it's not a huge deal. Keep in mind however that for years the latest and greatest pro camera bodies were going to people getting photos at the Olympics and things like Formula 1.

Getting something or someone flying through the air at high and unpredictable speed perfectly in focus is pretty impressive


It sounds like they didn't do a good job of putting the DIMM version in the hands of folks who'd write the drivers just for fun.

The read path is sort of a wash, but writes are still unequalled. NAND writes feel like you're mailing a letter to the floating gate...


Isn't this addressed by newer PCIe standards? Of course, even the "new" Optane media reviewed in OP is stuck on PCIe 4.0...

No; the issue with the DIMMs wasn’t drivers. The issue was that the only people allowed to target the DIMMs directly were the xeon hardware team.

There was a startup doing good work with similar storage chips that were pin (BGA) compatible with standard memory. Not sure what happened to them. That’d be easier to program than xpoint.

As for the new PCIe standard (you probably mean CXL), that’s also basically dead on arrival. The CPU is the power and money bottleneck for the applications it targets, so they provide a synchronous hardware API that stalls the processor pipeline when accessing high-latency devices.

Contrast this to NVMe, which can be set up to either never block the CPU or amortize multiple I/Os per cache miss.

Companies like NVIDIA are already able to maintain massive I/O concurrency over PCIe without CXL, because they have a programming model (the GPU) that supports it. CXL might be a small win for that.


Interesting perspective re CXL synchronous API. Wouldn't things like OOO execution and speculation help with that? And anyway the latency is supposed to be comparable to NUMA latency, is that really such a deal breaker?

Exactly. I happen to have all AMD sitting around here, and buying my first Optane devices was a gamble, because I had no idea if they'd work. Only reason I ever did, is they got cheap at one point and I could afford the gamble.

That uncertainty couldn't have done the market any favors.


My kingdom for a MicroSD card with Optane inside. My dashcam wants it soooo badly.

Its not Optane but there are SLC microSD cards!

I have a few of them, and yes, they're worth every penny!

(For posterity: Mouser and Digikey et alia carry these things and let you search/filter by cell type. They're not cheap.)


For some reason, there was a whole series of brassica oleracea memes going around in 2020 (does that make it a meta-meme? or is that the meme itself, and the images are just instances of the meme?), and they're still wonderful.

Just image-search "brassica memes" at your favorite engine.


And pickup trucks, for some reason.

Slight difference - truck nuts are a crass joke. Comfort nuts are supposed to be a psychological crutch for a dog. The owners actually believe the dog has an issue in the same way that some circumcised humans do.

Thank you!

In the alcove on the right, I think I'm seeing 66-blocks, breaking out the phone lines that must be routed to each machine. Two blocks stacked, each with a fanout of wire on the right side.


My kingdom for a MicroSD card with Optane inside.

You know what they say. Man with one clock, always knows what time it is.

Man with two clocks, never quite sure...


This is my motto (data engineer frequently dealing with "but this source says...")

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