# Dual-Core support



## logicology (Jan 6, 2009)

Does the TiVo Premier software include dual-core support yet?


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## Gary-B (Jun 4, 2009)

Not yet, but the Elite does....so the premier might be next.

"And a nice surprise, it seems the Premiere Elite has enabled the second core. Compare these lines from the kernel on a Premiere running 14.8 to a Premiere Elite running 14.9:
14.8: Linux version 2.6.18-5.1 ([email protected]) (gcc version 3.3.4) #1 Wed Mar 16 02:53:03 PDT 2011
14.9: Linux version 2.6.18-5.1 ([email protected]) (gcc version 4.2.0) #1 SMP Wed Sep 21 18:32:42 PDT 2011
SMP is Symmetric Multi-Processing, which means multiple cores are enabled."


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## hungarianhc (May 31, 2007)

I think there are two hopes here...

1) that the second core gets enabled

2) that the second core adds enough CPU power to actually make the HDUI usable. I'm skeptical...


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

hungarianhc said:


> I think there are two hopes here...
> 
> 1) that the second core gets enabled
> 
> 2) that the second core adds enough CPU power to actually make the HDUI usable. I'm skeptical...


If the Elite does have the second core enabled then maybe that is part of the reason the HDUI is faster. Even when I was reading/writing seven concurrent HD streams(4 recording, 1 transfer to the elite, 1 transfer from the Elite, and watching a previously recorded show), the HDUI on the Elite was noticeably quicker than the Premiere.


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## andyf (Feb 23, 2000)

I currently find searching for shows and setting up SPs to be noticably slower than my Premier but that may be well because the system is newly setup and still doing alot of indexing. I agree that other parts of the HDUI seem faster.


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## jfh3 (Apr 15, 2004)

... and the SDUI on the Elite is faster than on a Premiere. Don't know if that is second core, more memory or a different processor.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

More memory could be a contributing factor there as well. If they can cache more data in RAM, rather then reading it from the disc, that could significantly improve the feel of the UI.

So I wouldn't get my hopes up that the Premiere will see a marked improvement in UI speed when/if it gets 14.9.

Dan


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## Drewster (Oct 26, 2000)

Woudn't the HDUI be bottlenecked at the Flash DSP?


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Not necessarily. The UI itself is Flash, but it's populated by data which is read from the hard drive, stored in RAM and then processed by the CPU. So the "bottleneck" could be any one, or all, of those things.

Dan


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

aaronwt said:


> If the Elite does have the second core enabled then maybe that is part of the reason the HDUI is faster. Even when I was reading/writing seven concurrent HD streams(4 recording, 1 transfer to the elite, 1 transfer from the Elite, and watching a previously recorded show), the HDUI on the Elite was noticeably quicker than the Premiere.


If it were about 400% faster UI when it comes to the Premiere non-Elite, I might consider switching to the HDUI. I am highly skeptical...


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## brentil (Sep 9, 2011)

Dan203 said:


> Not necessarily. The UI itself is Flash, but it's populated by data which is read from the hard drive, stored in RAM and then processed by the CPU. So the "bottleneck" could be any one, or all, of those things.
> 
> Dan


Exactly, and adding more RAM and enabling the 2nd CPU eliminates a lot of those issues. With the larger RAM you can store more of the data instead of continually reading/writing to the drive, the 2nd CPU allows for IO tasks like reading/writing to the drive to be done more efficiently while other tasks run on the other core, the 2nd CPU also allows the UI to run on a core by itself while everything else is processed by the other core.


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

brentil said:


> Exactly, and adding more RAM and enabling the 2nd CPU eliminates a lot of those issues. With the larger RAM you can store more of the data instead of continually reading/writing to the drive, the 2nd CPU allows for IO tasks like reading/writing to the drive to be done more efficiently while other tasks run on the other core, the 2nd CPU also allows the UI to run on a core by itself while everything else is processed by the other core.


We have talked about this to death in the past in other threads. Most of the slowness of the Premiere's HDUI is resting on Flash and the bad design of trying to pull info from the Internet interactively. If Flash is not multithreaded, the additional core would do little to improve the most important aspect of speed- the user interface. The rest of the tasks the Premiere has to do are not very CPU intensive (like I/O or "recording"). And even if they ARE threaded, it will likely have minimal impact, overall.

Note that I said "IF"- I don't know that Flash is not multithreaded, we are assuming it is not. It would be a very pleasant surprise if that assumption is wrong (or has been recently made wrong).

I also doubt they are going to totally redesign the Premiere HDUI so it works from local objects instead of fetched objects. There is plenty of disk space and idle time on the Premiere that it could download any data of interest on at least the programs it has ALREADY recorded; maybe even for everything in the guide. It is more possible they could delay the fetching of live data until the user requests it, not just scrolling through things.

Having more RAM doesn't increase performance much (or at all), unless it already had too little RAM to begin with. Linux does a very good job at memory management. Again, without more data, it is hard to know what the situation is.

All that said, I am sure all of us would love any type of speed and stability improvements that could be mustered.


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## brentil (Sep 9, 2011)

That is both true and untrue about a 2nd core not helping with Flash being threaded or not. Yes if Flash is not threaded it will not see a speed boost from multiple cores directly from that. However... currently all CPU based tasks share the one core meaning the HDUI, Flash runtime it runs on, network, storage IO, OS functions, SQL storage/querying, and everything else going on that requires the main CPU. Lets say at most those functions require 25% of the CPU ignoring the HDUI portion (as Flash is a CPU beast) that means you at most have 75% of the CPU left for the HDUI but we know it wants more as it's running so freakin slow under demand. Under load you could easily demand more than 25% of 1 CPU just in network requests, SQL querying, memory interfacing, & drive IO requests which this CPU contention then results in someone sacrificing for another to run but they all still need to run to complete the one task, showing you data. When you have multiple cores you can lock the Flash's runtime to have an affinity for a single core forcing it to always run on one core eliminating and issues that might arise from the OS attempting to move it across CPUs in essence giving it its own 100% of a single CPU. You also then allow all those other tasks that were fighting with Flash to run on the other CPU and when Flash isn't slaughtering the one it has affinity to the system can thread its resources across both CPUs speeding them up as well. This then allows the drive IO, memory IO, network IO, and SQL data to be done as needed and not stalled when Flash is gobbling CPU cycles.

The same with memory too. If there is enough data to load into RAM then there will be a benefit. On a 512 MB system only about 256 MB of it is for the OS runtime which is then shared by the OS, Flash, SQL, IO cache, networking, etc. The largest data consumer of those will be the SQL database wanting to reside in memory. It stores the guide data, thumbs data, recorded show data, scheduled recordings data, upcoming shows data, etc. If all of that data on a well soaked TiVo exceeds even just 50 MB it could likely not completely be loaded into memory, let alone cached queries of frequently used data. If the entire SQL database could be loaded into memory this would drastically reduce data loads from it as well increasing HDUI responsiveness.

I've done a lot of phone and embedded system development over the years so low power CPUs with limited RAM are not a new design concept I've had to deal with in terms of performance tuning.


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

crxssi said:


> Most of the slowness of the Premiere's HDUI is resting on Flash and the bad design of trying to pull info from the Internet interactively. If Flash is not multithreaded, the additional core would do little to improve the most important aspect of speed- the user interface. The rest of the tasks the Premiere has to do are not very CPU intensive (like I/O or "recording"). And even if they ARE threaded, it will likely have minimal impact, overall.


The hope would be that, even if Flash is not multithreaded, it could made to run alone on one processor while everything else is run on the other one. As brentil says, that could be a big improvement.



crxssi said:


> I also doubt they are going to totally redesign the Premiere HDUI so it works from local objects instead of fetched objects. There is plenty of disk space and idle time on the Premiere that it could download any data of interest on at least the programs it has ALREADY recorded; maybe even for everything in the guide. It is more possible they could delay the fetching of live data until the user requests it, not just scrolling through things.
> 
> Having more RAM doesn't increase performance much (or at all), unless it already had too little RAM to begin with. Linux does a very good job at memory management. Again, without more data, it is hard to know what the situation is.


Sometimes (usually?) caching can be added to I/O routines in a way that is transparent to the high-level code (Flash in this case). I/O caching benefits greatly from having lots of RAM, of course. This assumes that Flash is written intelligently enough to use standard I/O routines (for Internet I/O in this case).


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

brentil said:


> That is both true and untrue about a 2nd core not helping with Flash being threaded or not. (...)


I don't disagree with anything you said (plus I already knew that stuff... it is also along the lines of what I do for a living). But I would be surprised if non-UI tasks ever approached 25%, unless it was performing indexing at the time (like from a recent guide download) or resolving programming conflicts for setting up a new recording. Of course, I am just speculating based on past experience with no hard data at all. (Boy would I love to see a "top" screen while the TiVo is under different loads).

But even *if* non UI load were high as 25%, which I still think is too high, then the overall MAXIMUM boost to a single-threaded HDUI would only be 25%. Again, I think ANY improvement in speed is a great thing, but 25% "ain't doing jack" for the HDUI, which in my view is at least 400% too slow in most tasks. I really think it needs a radical re-design.... or, they would have to throw SERIOUS hardware improvements at it (which I think would be a waste, and also irritating, because it would not address the millions of Premieres already out there right now).


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## tvmaster2 (Sep 9, 2006)

wait a second...am I reading here that the hardware/software improvements I was told were "just a few weeks away" when I bought my original Tivo Premiere unit are now NEVER being implemented in the orignal Premiere, but are instead being implemented in something called the "Elite"? Can I send my "promisary" Premiere in for FREE updates?
if this is true, what a farce


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## sbiller (May 10, 2002)

tvmaster2 said:


> wait a second...am I reading here that the hardware/software improvements I was told were "just a few weeks away" when I bought my original Tivo Premiere unit are now NEVER being implemented in the orignal Premiere, but are instead being implemented in something called the "Elite"? Can I send my "promisary" Premiere in for FREE updates?
> if this is true, what a farce


+1:up: That is the kind of negativity I'm used to on TCF!

TiVo Premiere will get the upgrade to 14.9 as soon as the Elite "public beta" is complete.


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

tvmaster2 said:


> wait a second...am I reading here that the hardware/software improvements I was told were "just a few weeks away" when I bought my original Tivo Premiere unit are now NEVER being implemented in the orignal Premiere, but are instead being implemented in something called the "Elite"? Can I send my "promisary" Premiere in for FREE updates?
> if this is true, what a farce


If the changes do not appear on the Premiere in a timely manner, then I think Premiere owners should call for a recall of the faulty product.



sbiller said:


> TiVo Premiere will get the upgrade to 14.9 as soon as the Elite "public beta" is complete.


Pure speculation? Or do you have information we do not?


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## strejcek (Mar 15, 2006)

crxssi said:


> Again, I think ANY improvement in speed is a great thing, but 25% "ain't doing jack" for the HDUI, which in my view is at least 400% too slow in most tasks. I really think it needs a radical re-design.... or, they would have to throw SERIOUS hardware improvements at it (which I think would be a waste, and also irritating, because it would not address the millions of Premieres already out there right now).


I believe if the TiVo HD GUI did not rely so heavily on an internet connection for basic functionality, speed should be as fast as SD. As it stands now, it waits so long for icons and programming information to download, which is why it takes so long to load.


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## brentil (Sep 9, 2011)

One of the TiVo reps informed a customer who called in about their Elite that the 14.9 software was scheduled for non-Elite devices by the end of the month. Which is not too surprising as it is supposed to enable the streaming features between S4 devices.


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## compnurd (Oct 6, 2011)

brentil said:


> One of the TiVo reps informed a customer who called in about their Elite that the 14.9 software was scheduled for non-Elite devices by the end of the month. Which is not too surprising as it is supposed to enable the streaming features between S4 devices.


I dont think there is any reason to doubt the Non-Elites wont see this software


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## yunlin12 (Mar 15, 2003)

compnurd said:


> I dont think there is any reason to doubt the Non-Elites wont see this software


I'm not unconfused by the non-singular instances of negatives in this statement.


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

compnurd said:


> I dont think there is any reason to doubt the Non-Elites wont see this software


For all we know, it could be a hardware fault that prevents the second core from working in the Premiere.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

brentil said:


> One of the TiVo reps informed a customer who called in about their Elite that the 14.9 software was scheduled for non-Elite devices by the end of the month. Which is not too surprising as it is supposed to enable the streaming features between S4 devices.


In another recent thread a Premiere user showed screen shots of the streaming capability using SW 14.8c.


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## tvmaster2 (Sep 9, 2006)

yunlin12 said:


> I'm not unconfused by the non-singular instances of negatives in this statement.


I'm still trying to figure out what it means...someone, in English please


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## brentil (Sep 9, 2011)

lillevig said:


> In another recent thread a Premiere user showed screen shots of the streaming capability using SW 14.8c.


He is also the only person who can do that, none of the other Elite users have been able to successfully do what he's doing.


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## tvmaster2 (Sep 9, 2006)

smbaker said:


> For all we know, it could be a hardware fault that prevents the second core from working in the Premiere.


then if it's a hardware fault, is Tivo going to send all of us "beta-testers" units with working dual cores that we actually paid for? The sales pitch they gave me on the phone was that the dual core functionality was weeks away and depended on a software tweek.
That was in April, 2010.
I'm not being negative, but what would Brian Boitano do?


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

That can still be measured in weeks.  It seems to me you have put too much credence into what you heard from a CSR a long time ago. They are not bad people, but many times they don't understand what they are being told, or the techies tell them things which eventually don't pan out. Sounds like the latter.

Me, I'll be happy to see whatever performance improvements can come from 14.9. Anyone laying the groundwork for this to be a hardware problem is simply being negative to a degree that is not necessary, as we simply do not know. 

After looking over these threads, my glass is half full.


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## brentil (Sep 9, 2011)

These chips are supplied by Broadcom, these aren't unique to the TiVo so other devices have them too. If there was an issue in the hardware it would have been resolved long ago. This realistically has been a software/programming issue that has gone unresolved until recently. Multithreading is not an easy feature to just turn on and make work. From the Impressions thread we can see they've moved up several versions on the GCC compiler as well as a newer build of the Flash Lite runtime layer as well as a new HDUI itself. Who knows what combination of changes finally made the 2nd code usable.


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## tvmaster2 (Sep 9, 2006)

jrtroo said:


> That can still be measured in weeks.  It seems to me you have put too much credence into what you heard from a CSR a long time ago. They are not bad people, but many times they don't understand what they are being told, or the techies tell them things which eventually don't pan out. Sounds like the latter.
> 
> Me, I'll be happy to see whatever performance improvements can come from 14.9. Anyone laying the groundwork for this to be a hardware problem is simply being negative to a degree that is not necessary, as we simply do not know.
> 
> After looking over these threads, my glass is half full.


If a Tivo rep, REGARDLESS of where in the company they are sitting, sells the product on false-pretenses, then Tivo is responsible. It's not "laying groundwork", and it certainly isn't "negative", it's just business. They made a claim - they need to fulfill it.
And after waiting for 18 months, I'm ready for satisfaction, and a FULL glass.


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

jrtroo said:


> Anyone laying the groundwork for this to be a hardware problem is simply being negative to a degree that is not necessary, as we simply do not know.


My point is exactly that, we do not know whether it's a hardware problem or a software problem. It's unrealistic to speculate that 14.9 will add dual core support to non-elite Premieres. Tivo has given us no indication that it will, as they don't value the user community enough to share their plans.

I certainly hope it is a software issue and will be fixed with 14.9, but this company as of the last few years has taught me to assume nothing about the product.



brentil said:


> Multithreading is not an easy feature to just turn on and make work.


Multithreading is a separate issue from SMP. SMP can be turned on in the Linux kernel with a simple recompile. Multithreading may require rewriting portions of the application code. A single-threaded app can be run in a SMP environment. One would expect at the very least we'd have an SMP kernel up by now, possibly running a single-threaded flash environment (assuming that popular speculation is correct, and it's a flash problem).

This isn't rocket science, it's not cutting edge research, it is old technology that's been in use for decades. There's no excuse why it should take 18 months to get it working. There's also no good reason why it should be rolled out on a new product rather than fixing the current product.


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

smbaker said:


> Tivo has given us no indication that it will, as they don't value the user community enough to share their plans.


It is not just that TiVo doesn't share their plans, they often/usually don't even share information AFTER they make changes. They never post a list of what bugs are fixed or any lower-level information about updates even AFTER they are released. I guess that would be memorializing the fact that there were bugs, to begin with, in writing. Heaven forbid...


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

smbaker said:


> My point is exactly that, we do not know whether it's a hardware problem or a software problem. It's unrealistic to speculate that 14.9 will add dual core support to non-elite Premieres. Tivo has given us no indication that it will, as they don't value the user community enough to share their plans.
> 
> I certainly hope it is a software issue and will be fixed with 14.9, but this company as of the last few years has taught me to assume nothing about the product.
> 
> ...


Since the Elite can easily handle reading/writing 7 concurrent HD streams(with the HDUI still faster than the two tuner models) they would have had no choice since it needs the extra performance to accomplish this. The Premeire can't handle that many without having issues. So since it isn't enabled in the two tuner models they could wait on it. But with the Elite, there is no way the Elite would work right running what the two tuner models are running.


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

aaronwt said:


> Since the Elite can easily handle reading/writing 7 concurrent HD streams(with the HDUI still faster than the two tuner models) they would have had no choice since it needs the extra performance to accomplish this. The Premeire can't handle that many without having issues. So since it isn't enabled in the two tuner models they could wait on it. But with the Elite, there is no way the Elite would work right running what the two tuner models are running.


How do you KNOW the NE Premiere can't handle recording 4 while playing back one with single core? And with or without the newer firmware? I don't think that is something we can test...

Again, we don't know how much performance improvements come from other parts of the firmware/OS/Flash/UI being changed or updated...


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## rv65 (Aug 30, 2008)

http://matthewfabb.com/blog/2011/09/02/multithreading-in-flash-update/
http://matthewfabb.com/blog/2010/11/11/multithreading-is-finally-coming-to-flash/

Even though the Tivo Premiere/Elite uses a different Flash architecture, multithread support is coming to Flash.


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

smbaker said:


> Multithreading is a separate issue from SMP. SMP can be turned on in the Linux kernel with a simple recompile. Multithreading may require rewriting portions of the application code. A single-threaded app can be run in a SMP environment. One would expect at the very least we'd have an SMP kernel up by now, possibly running a single-threaded flash environment (assuming that popular speculation is correct, and it's a flash problem).


How do you have one thread executed by more than one processor? It might not necessarily be symmetric, but surely use of multiple processors implies use of multiple threads. If SMP is simply turned on in the Linux kernel, then at least the kernel would be multithreaded. Of course, it's the application code that we want to see multithreaded, and Flash.



smbaker said:


> This isn't rocket science, it's not cutting edge research, it is old technology that's been in use for decades. There's no excuse why it should take 18 months to get it working. There's also no good reason why it should be rolled out on a new product rather than fixing the current product.


Given the fact that multithreading has already been delayed for so long and that there is widespread skepticism about TiVo's ability to deliver it, they would be crazy to roll it out to all Series 4 units when they can instead test it in a smaller population of new units which people will expect to have some teething problems anyway.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

crxssi said:


> How do you KNOW the NE Premiere can't handle recording 4 while playing back one with single core? And with or without the newer firmware? I don't think that is something we can test...
> 
> Again, we don't know how much performance improvements come from other parts of the firmware/OS/Flash/UI being changed or updated...


I'm going by when they had steaming enabled. I got 5 or 6 HD streams reading/writing, it worked but it did have issues. And one of the streams, the download was going slow, but it was doing it.


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

L David Matheny said:


> How do you have one thread executed by more than one processor? It might not necessarily be symmetric, but surely use of multiple processors implies use of multiple threads.


It depends on what you mean by "use" and in what context. To utilize SMP requires either multithreading or multiprocessing. I could run a single Flash app in one core, and a different single-threaded app in the other core. The kernel can be background flushing data in one core while the other core is doing computation. I'm assuming the Tivo already makes use of multiple processes, that the Flash GUI is a separate process than the backend core that is handling tasks like recording and scheduling and applying database updates. SQL queries and such are probably executed in a separate process. Even on a single core, these multiple processes already have context switching and synchronization in place. There's already parallelism.

You're right though, if the primary consumer of CPU is just one app, and that app is single-threaded, then one core is going to be idle most of the time.



L David Matheny said:


> Given the fact that multithreading has already been delayed for so long and that there is widespread skepticism about TiVo's ability to deliver it, they would be crazy to roll it out to all Series 4 units when they can instead test it in a smaller population of new units which people will expect to have some teething problems anyway.


Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I think my purchases should be tested and functioning before they're sold to me. That includes the Premiere Elite. If dual core is not ready for prime time, then it shouldn't be rolled out on any DVRs other than people participating in the beta program. Consumers purchasing Elites are not beta testers. Shipping an untested Premiere is how we got into this mess in the first place; shipping an untested Premiere Elite is not the solution.


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## yunlin12 (Mar 15, 2003)

tvmaster2 said:


> I'm still trying to figure out what it means...someone, in English please


The poster said "I dont think there is any reason to doubt the Non-Elites wont see this software"

If I were to replace "I dont think there is any reason to doubt" with "I'm sure that", then we get "I'm sure that the Non-Elites wont see this software"

Is that what he meant?


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

aaronwt said:


> I'm going by when they had steaming enabled. I got 5 or 6 HD streams reading/writing, it worked but it did have issues. And one of the streams, the download was going slow, but it was doing it.


But since that is streaming, and not "recording" or "playing back", you might have hit maximum network overhead. It is not uncommon for 1080i CATV HD streams to be between 15 and 17 megabits. Since we have proven the Premiere network is around 85-90 megabits max, that would be on 4 to 5 streams before saturating the network. If you had any OTA 1080i content, that could climb over 22 megabits for just one stream (rare, but possible). It is no big deal with local "recording" or "playback", however, since that is to the hard drive, which is much, much, much faster.

Plus, again, it is a different version of all the firmware (Linux/Flash/UI/etc), which really could make a big difference.


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## brentil (Sep 9, 2011)

smbaker said:


> Multithreading is a separate issue from SMP. SMP can be turned on in the Linux kernel with a simple recompile. Multithreading may require rewriting portions of the application code. A single-threaded app can be run in a SMP environment. One would expect at the very least we'd have an SMP kernel up by now, possibly running a single-threaded flash environment (assuming that popular speculation is correct, and it's a flash problem).
> 
> This isn't rocket science, it's not cutting edge research, it is old technology that's been in use for decades. There's no excuse why it should take 18 months to get it working. There's also no good reason why it should be rolled out on a new product rather than fixing the current product.


The issue is the core kernel is old, years old. Then on top of that is a system they've worked on for over a decade as a single core system that was then thrust on top of a dual core processor using older OS software. Also there's the fact that the Flash Lite runtime is getting rather ancient now too. If this was running all the newest versions of the core components I don't think it would be an issue, but for whatever reason either be it man hour limitation or hardware limitation this hasn't been done.



rv65 said:


> http://matthewfabb.com/blog/2011/09/02/multithreading-in-flash-update/
> http://matthewfabb.com/blog/2010/11/11/multithreading-is-finally-coming-to-flash/
> 
> Even though the Tivo Premiere/Elite uses a different Flash architecture, multithread support is coming to Flash.


The problem is as you said we're running an older Flash Lite which is based off of Flash 9 which has no hardware acceleration in it let alone threading. I would be greatly surprised if our hardware ever runs Flash AIR which is the Flash 10 & 11 versions.


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

brentil said:


> The issue is the core kernel is old, years old. Then on top of that is a system they've worked on for over a decade as a single core system that was then thrust on top of a dual core processor using older OS software.


'Years old' kernels handle SMP just fine. Assuming the blog I quoted below is correct, then they even appear to be running the same kernel version, compiled with a different GCC:



> 14.8: Linux version 2.6.18-5.1 ([email protected]) (gcc version 3.3.4) #1 Wed Mar 16 02:53:03 PDT 2011
> 14.9: Linux version 2.6.18-5.1 ([email protected]) (gcc version 4.2.0) #1 SMP Wed Sep 21 18:32:42 PDT 2011


I'm just not seeing the great technological achievement here that took 18 months. Linux has been running in multi-core environments since before Tivo existed.

If you want to make the argument that some proprietary driver didn't support SMP and that's the holdup, then I might believe that, although I still don't see why it took 18 months to fix. It should have been done before the product was put up for sale.


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## brentil (Sep 9, 2011)

That's my point, the older outdated core components are very likely to have bugs or issues in them that newer versions have fixed. For whatever reason they've opted to stick with the same kernel (which they only seem to change during major version changes like the version 16 software has kernel 2.6.31 in it instead of 2.6.18). So they've had to figure out either ways around the bugs or how to resolve whatever else was going wrong. It doesn't help for them that kernel level debugging wasn't added till a later version of the 2.6.x series. This also isn't some dual core pentium desktop version that gets tons of lovin on the developer scene, it's an embedded MIPS32 CPU. Reading through the kernel & GCC change logs the MIPS comparatively gets very few feature updates or fixes because there are less developers focusing on it now than x86/64 or ARM.

I just don't think it was an "easy" thing. It's not like they didn't know how unhappy we've all been with the speed of the HDUI. If it was as simple as turning the 2nd core back on they would have done it a long time ago. There was some sort of technical hurdle that's taken them 2+ years to deal with.

The thing is though dual core was a technical bullet on the device only if you dug down into that info like all of us have. It's not a selling point on the website so I don't think there's much in the way of recuperation one could demand from them for it not being on (in a legal sense). I however would like an answer from TiVo as to what it was they had to resolve since it did take so long.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

brentil said:


> The problem is as you said we're running an older Flash Lite which is based off of Flash 9 which has no hardware acceleration in it let alone threading. I would be greatly surprised if our hardware ever runs Flash AIR which is the Flash 10 & 11 versions.


The broadcom chip in the Premiere handles flash lite natively so hardware acceleration in the software itself doesn't really matter.


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## tvmaster2 (Sep 9, 2006)

smbaker said:


> ....There's also no good reason why it should be rolled out on a new product rather than fixing the current product.


Exactly.

Tivo doesn't get too many thumbs-ups these days from tech sites like TWIT, Engadget, etc.

De-frauding your customers (which is what Tivo is doing), never works out well in the end.

Fix your problems, and THEN move on to the next, great thing. If you CAN'T fix them, swap-out the trouble-units for working ones.

That's how you keep customers


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

There's reports that the Virgin Tivos have now been updated and are showing a performance boost (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=477168) so that lends some more faith that we Premiere owners might see an update. Well, after everyone else...



brentil said:


> It's not like they didn't know how unhappy we've all been with the speed of the HDUI. If it was as simple as turning the 2nd core back on they would have done it a long time ago.


Unless we're the CEO of a cable company, we don't matter. There are improvements that are trivial to make, like completion of the HDUI, yet they receive no attention.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

tvmaster2 said:


> Exactly.
> 
> Tivo doesn't get too many thumbs-ups these days from tech sites like TWIT, Engadget, etc.
> 
> ...


The Elite is a cable company product using the same hardware except the tuner and moca more or less. The software team surely has continued development of the premiere software throughout the release of the Elite. It is important for TiVo's growth to have a product they can sell to cable companies.


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## brentil (Sep 9, 2011)

rainwater said:


> The broadcom chip in the Premiere handles flash lite natively so hardware acceleration in the software itself doesn't really matter.


That's hardware that natively runs flash, what I meant was the newer technologies built into Flash 10 & 11 that allow graphical hardware acceleration to offload things like h.264 or opengl graphics from the main CPU to your GPU. The newer Broadcom 7125 and cell phone ARM CPUs have this type of additional functionality built in that the current 7413 doesn't have.


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## brentil (Sep 9, 2011)

smbaker said:


> There's reports that the Virgin Tivos have now been updated and are showing a performance boost (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=477168) so that lends some more faith that we Premiere owners might see an update. Well, after everyone else...


That's positive news. There are probably TiVo <Redacted> groups over here running 14.9 already. Would be nice if they opened up a larger opt-in group for 14.9 so we could get some love.


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## steinbch (Nov 23, 2007)

smbaker said:


> ...Shipping an untested Premiere is how we got into this mess in the first place...


Just because the release software was not up to consumer's expectations does not mean it was not tested. I understand your frustration, but some of the comments I see on these boards act as if it's a bunch of 10 year olds working at TiVo. Your statement above is 100% false.


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

steinbch said:


> Just because the release software was not up to consumer's expectations does not mean it was not tested. I understand your frustration, but some of the comments I see on these boards act as if it's a bunch of 10 year olds working at TiVo. Your statement above is 100% false.


If they act like a bunch of 10 year olds, we treat them like a bunch of 10 year olds.

These aren't customers expectations, they were advertised selling points of the DVR. Is it unrealistic to expect that a DVR advertised and marketed as having a dual-core CPU actually enables both cores? That a DVR marketed as having a HDUI doesn't switch back and forth to SD? That my Premiere can boot reliably with the blue tooth dongle installed? Come on, take off the kiddie gloves.

At shipping, the DVR was a disaster. It was plagued by lockups and inability to tolerate Internet connectivity issues. The HDUI was intolerably slow due to caching not having been implemented. I can't believe someone is seriously suggesting the Premiere was well tested at shipping time.



brentil said:


> That's positive news. There are probably TiVo <Redacted> groups over here running 14.9 already. Would be nice if they opened up a larger opt-in group for 14.9 so we could get some love.


Would be even nicer if Tivo would just say "Dual core has been enabled on the Premiere Elite and Virgin Tivos. It will be rolled out to Premieres shortly."


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

smbaker said:


> These aren't customers expectations, they were advertised selling points of the DVR. Is it unrealistic to expect that a DVR advertised and marketed as having a dual-core CPU actually enables both cores?


Does TiVo advertise the Premiere to be dual core? I don't think they ever have on their website.


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

rainwater said:


> Does TiVo advertise the Premiere to be dual core? I don't think they ever have on their website.


I thought it was in the original marketing. Of course, that was a couple years ago and I didn't screenshot it. It was most certainly advertised as having an HDUI though, not half an HDUI or a hybrid UI, or whatever it was that was delivered to us.


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## tvmaster2 (Sep 9, 2006)

rainwater said:


> Does TiVo advertise the Premiere to be dual core? I don't think they ever have on their website.


that's the way it was pitched to me by their customer service rep, because I was waffling on a re-conditioned 'HD' unit, or a 'new Premiere'. The dual-core pitch sold me on the Premiere.
never happened, to my knowledge


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## GmanTiVo (Mar 9, 2003)

Does anyone know the timing of the 14.9 sw release to the Premiers and what subsequent test can/will be performed to verify one way or another if the 2nd core is not onle enabled but doing what it is supposed to do?

Gman


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