Chomp Chomp & [No] Hyper-threading

I needed some sunlight today, and so, I went out of the apartment to meet up with my friend for a late lunch out at Serangoon Garden Market & Food Centre (SGMFC in this entry). This is the superior food place compared to the [in]famous Chomp Chomp Food Centre that is within walking distance of the previous one.

The superiority of SGMFC against Chomp Chomp comes from three big points:

1. Wider variety of food types for selection;
2. Much more open and airy feel to it;
3. Lack of an ``oppressive'' feel.

For comparison, when my friend and I were at Chomp Chomp, the seating was very claustrophobic, and there was even a police presence---how much more ``oppressive'' can it get? All that seriously undermines the type of good/open food centre that one is more accustomed to in Singapore.

The unfortunate thing is that SGMFC seems to be too much of a mouthful to remember, and is often incorrectly referred to as ``Chomp Chomp'', which was why when my friend suggested that we ``met at Chomp Chomp'', I counter-offered just waiting for him at the bus stop at the circus instead, since all the buses that entered that general region would end up stopping there. As it turned out, it was the right choice, since he really had meant SGMFC instead of Chomp Chomp after all.

We spent some time trying the different foods at SGMFC. I had some kway chap, some beef hor fun, some ming jiang kueh, and some soya bean drink with dessert of grass jelly with attap seeds. We then walked about the roads just seeing what was available, including entering the myVillage mall off Maju Road. The last time that I was at myVillage was nearly ten years ago, when I was much more active in the Singapore Geocaching scene. The place felt much smaller than I had remembered, and I think it was partly due to how the roof-top garden was cordoned off for whatever reason.

All in all, it was a nice couple of hours outside of the apartment.

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In the first month of my sabbatical, I have basically come up with some kind of rough routine for myself to ensure that it is both productive and restful for me. Roughly speaking:

1. No zero days---I need to do something each day.
2. Weekly, attend church services.
3. Daily devotionals from Bible in One Year 2020 with Nicky Gumbel---am already on Day 285
4. Daily reading from my reading list.
5. Daily, either play some music, or play some video game.
6. Daily, try to write something, either a piece of music, a poem, a story, a computer program, or a blog entry.
7. Weekly, get out of the apartment to do something different, or meet up with someone.
8. Keep to OMAD for at least five days each seven-day week.

I think that is a pretty good set of activities to keep me going.

The thing about sabbaticals, I feel, is that there is a need to get some manner of new stimulation back into one's life to ensure that there is actually some thing that can lead to change. As an old programmers' adage goes, insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results. If doing the same things were making me happy, then I think there would be no need for a sabbatical in the first place.

Doing new things for new stimulations isn't the same as running away from an old life though. It has all the hallmarks from running away from an old life, but is different in the sense of the intention---it is not about running away from an old life, but discovering how to run towards a new life. For me personally, this is really about how to reshape my new life such that it is more Christ-centric.

``Hol up MT,'' one might begin, ``I thought you weren't the religious sort. Why are you starting to talk about this `Christ-centric' thing like you are one of those fundie-goons? Have you lost your marbles?''

No, I have not lost my marbles. One of the things that I have realised over the past fifteen years or so is that greed is the one big reason why things are the way they are in the world today. But to overcome the basic nonsense that is greed requires a different perspective, a different 座右铭, or motto for those of us who are not so conversant in Mandarin Chinese. There are many different ways of creating/finding/discovering such a motto, but for me, the idea of leading a Christ-centred life-style is the one the makes the most sense.

Am I disdaining other people's beliefs? No, you are free to think what you want. I know what I believe in, but it is not my place to force what I believe in on you, even though I may think that you are wrong. Belief is about faith, and faith is not science---the evidence behind faith is qualified through personal experience and third-party testimonies of experience and not quantified through repeatable and falsifiable hypotheses through the Scientific method. Faith is not something that is debatable, principally because faith defines the axioms from which all other reasoning (via regular logic) stem from.

Thus, to ``debate'' about faith is an impossible and unproductive approach---by definition, we can already have issues with agreeing with what are the basic tenets (axioms) that are innately true, and proceeding from there would just be a terribly angry waste of time by all. But I digress.

The reshaping of my new life through the filling of the emptiness within from the rejection of greed is one of the key reasons behind the need of a sabbatical. Mayhaps all that has happened thus far (the break-up of a five-year long relationship, the strong ``push'' factors out of my previous job) are mere pointers leading to this moment where I start to really think and meditate about what it is I want out of my life.

After all, I have been surviving on ``magical coincidences'' for too long, I think. Eventually, luck can and will run out, and at that point, what happens? But I will leave that discussion for another time.

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In other news, I have decided to turn off hyper-threading on Eileen-II. Recalling the specifications of Eileen-II, she sports an Intel i7-10750H processor (6-core, 12MB cache, up to 5.1GHz with Turbo Boost). With hyper-threading on, that 6 [physical] cores appear as 12 [logical] cores, which, in theory, improves the overall throughput by reducing the idle time on each of the cores. So in cases where there are a lot of ``light'' threads that need to be run, hyper-threading can be a good way to squeeze out some extra level of performance.

It all sounds great, but I had been carefully monitoring the temperatures of Eileen-II while I was running The Outer Worlds. The GPU temperatures are generally alright (sub 80°C), but the CPU temperatures were ridiculous (staying at 95°C, spiking to 100°C where the turbo-boost from 2.6GHz to 4.7GHz was throttled back to about 3.5GHz sustained). Bear in mind that I am operating Eileen-II in a semi-open air apartment in hot and humid Singapore with no air-conditioning. Excess thermal energy is a big deal---running components that hot for too long is a great way to get the effective life span greatly reduced.

Anyway, I did more reading up, and realised that the hyper-threading model was not the right computation model for the types of loads that I was throwing at Eileen-II. I don't have a tendency to run many small tasks which use many threads---I tend to throw one or two heavy tasks at once instead. And since I actually have six physical cores (as opposed to the two physical cores of Edythe-III, hyper-threading is not a good trade-off.

With hyper-threading turned off, I was getting much lower CPU temperatures (about 80°C now), and not much change in GPU temperatures (still sub 80°C) while running the same The Outer Worlds. That's a big win for me.

I did not notice any slow downs or anything. That's also a big win for me.

And thus, that is my current set up for Eileen-II.

I don't have anything else to add for now, and so that's all for today. Till the next update, I suppose.