On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 6:46 AM, Eugen Leitl <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Few ns are effective eternities in terms of modern gate delays. > I presume the conversation was about synchronization, which > should be avoided in general unless absolutely necessary, and > not done directly in hardware. > Synchronization always has bounded error tolerances - which may differ by many orders of magnitude, based on application. Synchronized audio-video, for example, generally has a tolerance of about 10 milliseconds - large enough to accomplish it in software. But really good AV software tries to push it below 1ms. Synchronization for modern CPUs has extremely tight tolerances (just like everything else about modern CPUs). But you should not only think about CPUs or hardware when you think 'synchronization'. You say 'synchronization should be avoided unless absolutely necessary'. I disagree; a blanket statement like that is too extreme. Sometimes synchronized is more efficient even if it is not 'absolutely' necessary - it reduces need to keep state, which has its own expense. It Depends. In any case, the conversation wasn't even about synchronization (which means "to CAUSE to be synchronized"). It was simply about 'synchronized' - whether things can happen at the same time or rate (which often has natural causes). And synchronization is never about clocks. It's the reverse, really.
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