Slashdot Mirror

No, Lightpeak is Intel, Thunderbolt is Apple

Light Peak was the code name for Thunderbolt which was developed by Intel and Intel owns the full rights to the trademark. It uses an Apple developed connector and Apple was the first ones to put Thunderbolt on their machines but it is unambiguously an Intel owned technology.

Intel developed Lightpeak, Apple simply purchased the technology and named it Thunderbolt, hence Apple owns the trademark on that one.

Apple transferred the Thunderbolt trademark to Intel about two years ago.

If you want to use IEEE1394, you need to pay... Apple.

As well as 9 other corporations that hold essential patent rights to the technology in IEEE1394.

Waiting for the inevitable mod-down by Apple fanboys who dont like the truth.

Since virtually all your facts are wrong you might consider taking a less adversarial tone.

Huh? The front-side bus hasn't existed in years. AMD abolished it way back in 2003 when they moved the Athlon 64's memory controller on-die. Intel did the same thing with Nehalem in 2008.

Perhaps you just meant that there isn't enough memory bandwidth to use the GPU to its full potential with games? The good news is that AMD's upcoming Kaveri will have GDDR5 support, with a homogenous memory architecture similar to the new consoles.

Since AMD drivers are total garbage, why bother?
Might as well stick with a card I can actually use.

Yeah, shill on.
Windows Drivers are decent nowadays. OpenCL works better on AMD in my experience (some __constant memory bugs were just fixed recently for nvidia, see here: http://bloerg.net/2012/07/19/heterogenous-computing.html ). The Tomb Raider hair benchmark, which worked with DirectCompute better on AMD than nvidia also shows that for nvidia only CUDA is the prime citizen ( http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/3/6/tomb-raider-amd-touts-tressfx-hair-as-nvidia-apologizes-for-poor-experience.aspx ).
FGLRX is ok too, but lags behind nvidia, when looking at the support for new xorgs.
If you consider that AMD also provides some open source support, while nvidia provides none, for me the choice between them is a clear one.

Even if it's not clear for you "Might as well stick with a card I can actually use" is a clear flame.

It seems these GPUs can also support 4K single monitor gaming quite nicely even if gaming quality 4K displays aren't quite ready for prime time yet.

"Hey, you may be right: who needs the decades of know-how in building great phone hardware, the global logistical network"

Both Apple and Samsung have better logistics networks and are able to get components cheaper. Nokia's logistic network has been decimated over the past year or two.

"the long-held relationships with operators"

They are reducing the number of operators....

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/if-apple-is-running-away-from-this-strategy-and-samsung-growing-by-opposite-strategy-why-is-elop-try.html

"and sales channels."

http://www.zdnet.com/nokia-confirms-layoffs-pulls-back-sales-channels-in-china-7000000781/

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/6/15/how-to-stop-nokia-channel-boycott-and-save-the-company.aspx

They could have been a brilliant contributer, if they wanted to, but they don't.

Not to diminish Linus's effort, but there is a backstory to his frustration, and nVidia have been given other incentives to become a better contributor.

NVIDIA was approached by one of the leading Chinese CPU teams to use an NV GPU in a pilot school PC project. Linux would run on the Chinese CPU, while GeForce GPU would provide the graphics power. 'Pilot project' in this case means over 10 million PCs in one order, broken down - 100,000 schools with 100-150 PCs each.

To cut the story short, the NV team appeared there, and in very arrogant manner told the Chinese side that they are a large US corporation, and that recompiling the Linux drivers would cost the Chinese a lot of money.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2012/6/21/china-nvidia-loses-face-and-a-10-million-pc-order-over-linux-drivers-and-nres.aspx

They lost the relationship with the Chinese team, who have since approached AMD. The pilot project was worth an initial 250-350 million dollars, with the potential of much more to follow.

The drivers for the GMA500 parts were written by Tungsten Graphics rather than Intel or Imagination Technologies. In a roundabout way other people did write the drivers :-).

No, it's really much slower, particularly in double-precision:
Nvidia cripples GPGPU in Geforce GTX 680
Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012
NVIDIA GTX 680 Reviewed: A New Hope

Only for varying degrees of "capable":
Nvidia cripples GPGPU in Geforce GTX 680
Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012
NVIDIA GTX 680 Reviewed: A New Hope

Given the rumors surrounding how poorly Windows 8 is running on Qualcomm silicon I wouldn't bet on them doubling down on microsoft products anytime soon.

You can find an ARM vs x86 power consumption at:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/5/19/the-coming-war-arm-versus-x86.aspx?pageid=6

"The chart below contrasts power consumption between the Intel Atom N450 and the ARM Cortex-A8 while running miniBench. The power curves were generated from system power usage adjusted downwards so that idle system power was discarded. For the Atom, idle power was 13.7W with the Gateway netbook’s integrated panel disabled while the idle power for the Pegatron system (ARM Cortex-A8) was only 5.4W."

Oh man that's bad, and after WD got stuck with a 525 million dollar arbitration loss to Seagate last month. frankly i just hope WD survives getting a big one two punch like that, as I'd hate to see a world where all you had for HDDs was Seagate.

I might be wrong

You are wrong:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/Data/2011_11_1/PHOTO-Horrific-Images-of-Flooded-Western-Digital-Factory/WD_FloodB_689.jpg

http://www.innovationpov.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/HDD-Production-Equip.jpg

I might be wrong, but I feel, really feel like the flooding wasn't that big factor

but rather its great excuse to jack up the prices.

I remember similar story about RAM and Taiwan earthquake, when it was found out that damages to facilities were really minimal.

Wish it was a scam... but I cannot help but feel sorry for their loss. Please check out these pics, showing the damage done, I haven't been able to find any newer pics, but the damage is beyond bad.

To address your concerns on this hdd scam, I present pics of from a Western Digital production plant:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/11/1/photo-horrific-images-of-flooded-western-digital-factory.aspx

I couldn't bring myself to look for pictures/video from the surrounding area, but my heart does go out to them.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/7/5/wanna-be-the-ceo-of-nokia-take-the-simple-quiz.aspx

It is a little scary and sad to see the parallels in these two once giants make so many mistakes. Not that they are making the same mistakes but they both clearly have one thing in common: inept top level leadership.

This Top500 comes in handy after these:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/6/24/amd-insiders-speak-out-bapco-exit-is-an-excuse-for-poor-bulldozer-performance.aspx
Following our coverage on AMD's exit from BAPCo and blog post made by Nigel Dessau, we got a surprising call from the person at the heart of AMD which we had to check out. After the end of an eye opening conversation, we started calling our sources in order to confirm if the claims made by an obviously disappointed engineer hold any substance. We talked to our usual sources inside the company, as well as with a number of sources at their key partners and customers. The odd part was that all of our contacts said the same thing - the story checks out. Thus, we bring you the modestly edited version of our conversation, filed with comments.

AMD's BAPCo Exit is a Smokescreen
First and foremost, we started the discussion over the blog Nigel Dessau, AMD's Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer wrote, stating clear reasons why AMD decided to leave the BAPCo and why AMD considers SYSmark 2012 an invalid benchmark.

"When I read Nigel's blog and saw the press release from BAPCo it made me sick because our CMO talks about transparency and honesty and it's all smoke and mirrors. At the end of the day, we actively had internal teams and external organizations hired to promote/discredit SYSmark. Not because it was inaccurate, but because it is accurate. Back in the original Athlon 64 and Opteron days, when we were winning in SYSmark we were heavily promoting it in the public sector, who in turn used it as a benchmark on which they based many of their purchases on. It was us who actually got BAPCo and SYSmark inside several government tenders to win orders measured in tens of thousands of systems. SYSmark was used to show how our K8 processors were beating Intel's NetBurst."

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/why-did-amd-quit-bapco-board-poor-bulldozer-performance-on-sysmark-2012-or-intel-bias/6230
The latest dust-up in the AMD-versus-Intel never-ending conflict concerns BAPCo, a consortium of tech companies that releases a set of benchmarks, including, most importantly, SYSmark. This week, AMD quit the BAPCo board, and speculation over why has run rampant ever since.

Officially, AMD claims that the latest version of SYSmark, the just-released SYSmark 2012, fails to keep up with current computing trends and ignores the increasing role the GPU plays in computing tasks. Since AMD is trying to differentiate itself from Intel by boosting the GPU in its new chip designs, SYSmark’s reliance on just the CPU, in AMD’s opinion, doesn’t reflect everyday computing performance.

That’s the official word. But conspiracy theorists think there’s more to the story than just that. Most sensationally, Bright Side of News has run a piece with startling claims from “unnamed sources,” most notably that AMD decided to pull out of BAPCo because its forthcoming Bulldozer chips delivered underwhelming performance on SYSmark 2012, and that the company has spent resources toward surreptitiously undermining BAPCo through negative PR campaigns. According to the piece, AMD’s paranoia about SYSmark is related to the benchmark’s role in securing government contracts and the chip company’s fear that it won’t win new contracts with poor SYSmark 2012 results.

Coincidence?

Maybe. I've only somewhat-recently found myself occasionally wanting more than 512MB on a graphics card; perhaps I am just insufficiently hardcore (I can live with that).

That said: If 512MB is adequate for my not-so-special wants and needs, and 2GB is "just too small" for some other folks' needs, then a target of 8GB seems to be rather near-sighted.

The most awesome upgrade I ever had was when I went from EGA to a Tseng SVGA card with 1 MB memory. The next awesomest was when I upgraded from a 4 MB card to a Riva TNT2 with 32 MB. Every time I upgrade my video card there's less shock and awe effect. I'm willing to bet that going from 2 GB to 8 GB would be barely perceptible to most people.

I think the top graphics cards today have gone over the local maximum point of realism. What I have been noticing a lot lately is the "uncanny valley" effect. The only upgrade I'd seriously consider today would be to absolute lifelike perfection, anything less isn't worthwhile.

Probably the next step in graphics cards will be real time ray tracing, I think that would be the next line of development that would justify an upgrade.

This article explains: Coup at AMD: Why was Dirk Meyer Pushed Out? Quote:

"Remember, Dirk Meyer's three deadly sins were:

1) Failure to Execute: K8/Hammer/AMD64 was 18 months late, Barcelona was deliberately delayed by 9 months, original Bulldozer was scrapped and is running 22 months late.

"2) Giving the netbook market to Intel [AMD created the first netbook as a part of OLPC project] and long delays of Barcelona and Bulldozer architectures.

"3) Completely missing the perspective on handheld space - selling Imageon to Qualcomm, Xilleon to BroadCom."

There is a comment at the bottom of this poor-quality article in the Inquirer that says Dirk Meyer "was the lead engineer who designed the Athlon, Opteron and the DEC Alpha. Let's not forget that from 1999-2006, AMD actually had better processors than Intel, and this was due to Dirk Meyer's technology."

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/10/coup-at-amd-dirk-meyer-pushed-out.aspx It seems that that the selling off of their mobile business and the success of Tegra is behind this.

See http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-appts-seifert-2011jan10.aspx

Some very interesting analysis can be found at:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/10/coup-at-amd-dirk-meyer-pushed-out.aspx
"Remember, Dirk Meyer’s three deadly sins were:

1) Failure to Execute: K8/Hammer/AMD64 was 18 months late, Barcelona was deliberately delayed by 9 months, original Bulldozer was scrapped and is running 22 months late -I personally think this is not true; Dirk Meyer was AMD's CEO from July 18, 2008 until January 10, 2011; he could not be responsible for K8 nor Barcelona, however Bulldozer...-
2) Giving the netbook market to Intel [AMD created the first netbook as a part of OLPC project] and long delays of Barcelona and Bulldozer architectures -this is interesting, after Intel has a serious failure with the Pentium 4, it's mobile division is the one who changes everything with Intel Core 2, designed from a mobile perspective-.
3) Completely missing the perspective on handheld space - selling Imageon to Qualcomm, Xilleon to BroadCom -I think this is the key; no one expected this market to be as successful as it is at the moment-"

"They are also a quarter of the speed."

Apparently you are talking about clock speed, but 2 GHz or 2.5 GHz is not slow compared to the Intel Atom. The speeds are equivalent.

While a 96-core system will run Crysis!

What's the resolution on this thing?

Took me a bit of googling, but I found this:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/1/10/pixel-qi-is-alive-at-ces.aspx

"Ryan explained that Windows treats Pixel Qi’s 3qi display as a 1024 x 600 pixel screen, it’s actually a 3072 x 600 pixel screen. Those extra pixels help make the text easier to read if you’re using Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, or a number of other languages. For Chinese, Pixel Qi is working on higher vertical and horizontal resolutions."

1024 x 600 is practically useless these days. How do they get the 3072 number though? Is that because each pixel technically contains an individual red, green, and blue sub-pixel?

Speaking of cores, there's a 2U server with ninety-six. How would 2016 cores in that same 42U rack sound?

Silly question I know, but reading your post just makes its title look all the more ironic.

Hardware and legacy-OS "fragmentation" exists today in the iPhone ecosystem - nearly half of iPod Touches are running older systems, and there are already iPhone owners who will never be able to upgrade to OS 4 (even the beta). It's obviously greater in Android due to the larger choice of hardware and more rapid OS releases. Some may prefer a slower-moving target, but the monolithic, our-way-or-the-highway approach that's required to achieve this has too many well-documented disadvantages to be suitable for everyone.

[Backwards compatibility] sounds like an unlikely situation in the android world

That's just plain uninformed. No APIs have been revoked or broken; the only 1.0 apps that don't work today are the ones that did naughty, undocumented things - like any other platform. In fact, Android's VM model, excellent API version management and Marketplace manifest model make it easy to allow apps to run on any version of Android they can manage, or to target the app at whatever specific set of hardware features are required, making forward compatibility far less of an issue that for e.g. Linux or Windows (can't speak for iPhone OS personally). And Rubin points this out.

Um? Right. Get at least one or two facts straight before claiming to know something about the industry.

So #1 amd has reached the top end of the quad core, the new x6 matches them for most everything.

#2 AMD does and has had higher yields than almost every other single manufacturer in the business, not just Intel, everyone. Coupled with this the fact that their current manufacturing deal means they don't pay a single dime for wasted silicon and who the hell do you think is going to win the price war again? Intel was taking losses on certain chips not so long ago just to compete with *AMD* in the price war, not the other way around. AMD for almost 2 years with the Athlon 64 series was winning both performance and pricing. Intel was selling more expensive chips that didn't perform as well.

Oh, and heres a recent source for most of that. I thought I was going to have to go back a little ways, maybe into 09 to get something, but apparently AMDs manufacturers are outdoing themselves yet again so we don't need to worry about that.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/3/17/globalfoundries-produces-zero-defect-wafers2c-10025-yield.aspx

The article ends with "Interestingly, though, only one company has the technology and IP needed to integrate a highly parallel GPU into a CPU... and that’s AMD." Although I like AMD and would surely like to see them getting a revolutionary "fusion" product out before anyone else, one has to ask whether the authors have looked under the hood of Intel's Clarkdale and Arrandale core i5... This shows Intel's rapidly catching up, and a neck-to-neck race may arise between their Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer. Not to mention the stubborn rumors that Nvidia's itself is developing x86 technology...

Here's some background for those of us that have been living in a cave:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/4/15/amds-next-gen-bulldozer-is-a-128-bit-crunching-monster.aspx
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/future-3d-graphics,2560-9.html

I believe this is the remnants of Intel's failed Larrabee chipset which was supposed to compete with Nvidia and ATI.

A nice article on the story behind Larrabee and it's failure:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/10/12/an-inconvenient-truth-intel-larrabee-story-revealed.aspx

Here is an article scrounged up by a quick Google search that re-iterates what I read in the WSJ.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/5/27/intel-nehalem-ex-xeon-spells-the-voice-of-doom-for-itanium.aspx

AMD commercial server CPUs are named after Formula 1 racing tracks. Their server platforms are named for Ferrari facilities. Their desktop processors are named after stars, and the desktop platforms after constellations. Cite.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/12/2/intel-larrabee-finally-hits-1tflops---27x-faster-than-nvidia-gt200!.aspx

way faster than amd's or nvid's hottest....

It's very likely that Nintendo will use NVIDIA in their next generation handheld console. http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/10/13/nvidia-tegra-wins-contract-for-next-gen-nintendo-ds.aspx

But... it's too early for that. It think this 4" screen DSi is probably just that: DSi with a 4" screen. My dad and my uncle both like the DS (particularly chess and puzzle games on it) but they have trouble seeing the tiny things on the tiny screen, the larger screen would definitely help. They should call this the "Geezer Edition DSi".

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/10/arm-fills-out-cpu-lineup-with-cortex-a5.ars

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/10/21/arm-announces-cortex-a5-for-the-next-15-billion-cellphones-and-mids.aspx

Wrong.

The article does not mention it, but the article I originally read about it mentions that AMD has a 128-bit processor code-named "Bulldozer."

As a followup, how long until we see a netmainframe?

This particular one would probably evolve into a "netcluster". See: 1 instant-on Linux/ARM, 1 Linux/ARM in the network controller, 1 Linux/GPU in the videocard, and 1 Linux inside the BIOS.

Oh, and I forgot the dual-core Atom running Windows.

Apple and other OpenCL partners are undoubtedly looking forward, beyond SIMD, to the coming generation of MIMD capable GPU such as the nVIDIA GT300.