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"...Apple certainly pays much less for IBM and Freescale processors than Intel charges for comparable chips. Probably less than half as much on average."

Uhuh, now try to explain the whole quote:

"Firstly, Apple certainly pays much less for IBM and Freescale processors than Intel charges for comparable chips. Probably less than half as much on average. The G5 is a smaller, more efficient chip than the Pentium 4, and IBM has no other customers willing to buy large quantities."

So the price argument is out... Except we are not talking about the netburst/p4 chips which are by all acounts expensive megahurts marchitecture scrotum burning machines when used in laptops. Especially when compared to the g5. We are talking about intel`s pentium III design based yoham`s. These would be an answer to IBM and freescale`s inability to create energy-efficient g5`s. Supply has been good enough for everyone else who makes laptops. So the question is, how long has apple been waiting to do g5 level performance laptops that aren`t hot and noisy? I doubt apple think they will sell many less if the price is a bit high compared to G4 laptops.

This entire slashdot news post is misleading.

Intel's press release is based on the fact on that Computerworld's article claims that Intel is adding unnounced DRM features to their new line of Pentiums. If anyone actually read the article, it does not say ANYWHERE anything about unannounced DRM features. In fact, I would say that the Computerworld article and the Intel press release are saying basically the same thing, with their respective biases present. Honestly, the only thing newsworthy here is that Intel announced the specific DRM implementations in their chipsets.

Lastly, an opinion... DRM is not something I really would like to see implemented on the CPU-level. I don't think "THE MAN" should be controlling what I can or can't do with media that exists on my computer.

That's true of the current models (v20z and v40z) which sun is selling quite well. I remember reading that Sun is AMD's biggest Opteron customer.

Sun is also working on a new line of Opteron servers codenamed Galaxy. These are completely in house designs. Andy Bechtolsheim, who was employee number one at Sun has returned to Sun through the aquisition of Kealia. There's been some talk about the Galaxy line of servers but not much information. Andy seems to be a very smart guy and the type of person you want to be bringing new innovations to the company. When he was at Stanford he built his own workstation so that he wouldn't wait for shared computer time on campus servers. He also worked on the first sun workstations. Like most other Opteron and x86 server vendors, Sun has been positioning their opteron servers as edge of network platforms but their Galaxy class line is rumoured to be for more important workloads that their workgroup ultrasparc servers are marketted at.

The w1100z and w2100z worstations from what I understand, were designed in house. There's a good review of the designs here

...because your computer does not belong to you anymore. It is Microsoft's property now.

Unless you install GNU/Linux!

Oh wait... but an Intel rep confirmed the 945 would help implement Microsoft's DRM at a chip level! AMD all the way!

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23601 The inquirer had an article about this a couple of days ago.

By ATI it seems. Though I can't tell if this article means dual core, or actually two cards in the computer.

It seems only yesterday when someone accused Mozilla of inappropriately bashing Netscape? Never mind the facts, let's just focus on the emotive language.... I'm concerned that people "out there" will interpret Netscape's problems as reflecting on Mozilla, which they most certainly should not.

according to The Inquirer. They'll do the launch at Computex Taipei next week and be officially buyable on June 7th. Pentium D's (D'oh!) will take a bit longer to reach retail. Something about awaiting approval from the fire marshal, I think. Paper launches are blast furnace CPUs are a bad combination, methinks.

Actualy that new file monitoring has been standard on Windows for years. (actually indexed searching has been too MS just borked the UI, for unknown reasons (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20214) Just an odd bit of trivia.

Actually the indexed whole searching for file name has been around forever in the form of locate. Which is of course very fast.

Well, I read about it first over here yesterday.

The Inq has a picture of the flash drive at http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23425.

Not too many but here's some I could find:

The Inquirer
HTML FixIt.Com
PCLinuxOnline

PCLinuxOnline seems to be the original news breaker as both the above articles refer to it.

Perhaps he was being sincere - with interoperable software the bugs in windows are more tollerable.

Xbox is bigger than nintendo cube and posted a profit.
PocketPC has more market share than palm.
IE has ~90% market share.
MSN search traffic is up, google is declining
MSN is the second largest ISP in the world.

Microsoft doesn't know how to fail. They have taken over the PDA market by ousting palm. They will take over cell market. Growth of MSN search engine suggest they'll oust google. Only things i'm not sure about is game consoles, if sony doesn't live up to the hype, microsoft will own that market too.

I think being last out of the gate may really work for them.

A LOT of people are just going to be waiting for the PS3/XBox2 price to drop and/or for a game that they want to be released before jumping to the next gen. If Nintendo prices the Revolution low enough($150 less than PS3) I could see them outselling Sony this time. Price is going to be the biggest factor for me. My XBox1 w/ EVOX already does everything I want in a media PC(without any DRM).

If Microsoft continues to burn money like they did on the XBox1 then I don't see who can stop them from getting another monopoly.

Now it make sense!

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23300

You're a moron.

Here is a monitor that takes two (or actually, up to 4) single-link DVI connections to drive it. They do exist.

He said that many people think that that the Apple display is such a monitor. This is also true.

Next time, read the fucking post before you respond to it.

My father has a lot of guns he aquired in the 40's-60's. All of them have side switch locks, and when the lock is on, the trigger won't pull, PERIOD. I about flipped when I saw this comment about trigger release safeties. I'd never ehard of that (not that I follow gun news at all).

The point of this system is that you can download any BBC content at any time that you like - you don't have to "record" it off of a live broadcast. My understanding is that the BBC is very keen to come up with a cross-platform means playing the stuff (hence their own iMP). The biggest sticking point is that the content will only be available to UK TV-licence holders. See the articles on the Register or Inquirer

Have you ever wondered if all these PR by Sony and MS are exaggerated to a degree where it becomes difficult to take them seriously anymore? I read this interesting article about PS3 and was surprised. Check this out http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23285

"Microsoft pens ID software"> "SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft is building software it says will manage personal data and provide more secure identification in future versions of Windows. Under the cunning plan, the operating system will have ID technology called "info-cards" which are designed to allow users to shop and access services online. However, the technology appears to be similar to Passport and Hailstorm. Hailstorm was binned after privacy advocates complained that it put too much sensitive information into the hands of a single company. ..."

Some day real IBM thinkpads will be collectors items, since Lenovo is outsourcing them to Acer.

I actually thought that this was common knowledge--that Windows Server 2003 with ASPX was faster than Linux/Apache with PHP, or that Server 2003 was generally faster with static content. (I admit, I only glanced over the article, and Adobe Acrobat's search tool is the worst of crap, so sue me if it didn't mention ASPX).

1)ASP (not ASPX) are fairly flaky and recent versions are roughly comparable to, but slower than, PHP4 (not sure about 5), in general.

2) Windows is not very good at creating new processes quickly. This is why CGI (not fastCGI) in the platform is so glacially slow.
Let's have an example. Let's say that you make a dynamic webpage in which all content is generated by a C++ CGI program. Ignoring database access for the time being, since that dilutes the example, on Windows, the website would be MUCH slower than the same website written in ASPX, even though the actual execution time of the C++ program is shorter (assuming a competent C++ coder).
This is because for each request, Windows must create a new process (the CGI program), and destroy the process when the request is complete.
While the execution time is low, the process management overhead dwarfs the actual page runtime, because Windows doesn't do that sort of thing quickly. This is why CGI has long been blacklistedon Windows systems by good web devs, and this is one reason that Apache 1.x was such a dog on Windows. Apache 1.x creates a new Apache process for each request.

Now Linux, on the other hand, creates processes about as fast as it creates threads, which is to say, really damn fast. Apache 1 has always worked just fine on Linux (and indeed most Unix systems) because the overhead of creating a process, while significant, isn't slower than a dead slug stuck in frozen molasses like it is on Windows.
Apache 2.x allows requests to be served by a thread or a process, or a number of processes that each create several threads (any Apache gurus please correct me if any of this is off).
It follows that this isn't a big deal on Linux (because process creation isn't really much slower than thread creation), but is a very big deal on Windows.

Windows has ASPX, which is Microsoft's marketing term for the use of the .NET framework for web content delivery (get it--the 'X' makes it sound cool. Or something). .NET is compiled, and ASPX needs neither process nor thread creation. Like any .NET application, ASPX can run sort of close to native speeds (native + lots of wrapper overhead + generic memory management overhead and such.)

Yet Apache is still back here creating a process or thread for each and every request (note that there are some ways to speed things up. FastCGI comes to mind, but I don't want to get into the gory details that I don't know enough about). This is not the brightest way to do it in terms of performance, but then, Apache appears to have been designed for universality and configurability over raw throughput.

It is unwise to hold the attitude that Apache can't be beaten by IIS, especially when IIS is optimized for one platform--by the vendor of that platform. Apache isn't even the fastest on Linux. Take a look at Zeus webserver. It serves circles around Apache on any platform it supports--including Penguin land.
In fact, Zeus uses a technique called SendFile() which, oddly enough, is strikingly similar Microsoft's own TransmitFile() API. Hmm.

Think of it this way: Apache is to IIS as GCC is to ICC, at least in terms of performance and generality.
Intel's compiler (ICC) consistantly blows away GCC in terms of the performance and size of the compiled code, but GCC runs on just about anything with a CPU, can cross-compile, is free, doesn't pull any PHB evil tricks, and actually compiles things like the Linux kernel without pat

...but you'd think that enough people would eventually get burnt that there would be a collective realization that the software is flawed, and a corresponding push to use other/less-flawed software (as we've seen with even government recommending against using Internet Explorer).

I think it might be that Microsoft's PR guys do a really good job of damage control, and people never fully realize that they're so vulnerable (although there's a chance that they just don't understand that they have alternatives).

* INTEL SAID this morning AMD isn't looking hard enough and several vendors are stocking the machines using the EE chip.

The Inquirer points to an Info Week blog via Silicon Investor that basically says that AMD can't even purchase dual core Intel CPUs to benchmark them against its own offerings -- they're not available for sale anywhere:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23018

I agree that the costs of the AMDs are exorbitant right now as they migrate their production, but if and when they get their fabs worked out, prices could really drop and even things up on that level.

I guess the real concern, though, and some have already noted it -- so what? Until I see an AMD dual core CPU option on Dell.com's various stores, Intel isn't going to be hurtin'.

IronChefMorimoto

Probably more accurate, and definitely more entertaining, is The "Inquirer" at http://www.theinquirer.net/.

Former Register employees.

http://theinquirer.net/?article=22920

Itanium is something different. It isn't related to x86 at all. Intel may have wanted everyone to migrate to the new ISA eventually, but it wasn't an extention to x86.

...Good Lord, I almost shot coffee from my nostrils when I read that line. That's a really horrible example, since Mozilla isn't embedded in the freaking Linux kernel. Not to mention the fact that *nix users are typically not all constaly running around like insane little demigods on their own systems. Even if spyware did make it onto a user profile, it'd be trivial to clean up. Not at all like spyware on a Windows box, which is like a fox in a hen house. You may get rid of it eventually, but often the damage has already been done.

Once a rootkit is in place, the results of spyware scans done fromt he infected system are tainted and cannot be trusted. I've seen things like this in the wild, and even a live distro with captive NTFS couldn't fix it.

More on rootkits: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21326

You can download (not just stream) songs with the $9.95 plan. I have it. This was part of the Rhapsody update the article is about. You just have to deal with the DRM and stay subscribed to play them. As another article explains: Subscribers could pay $10 a month and download as many tunes as they like but have to remain subscribed in order to play them. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22847.

According to various sources (like this one), Windows x64 is supposed to be free as in beer if you have 32 bit license. Wish I could find the link on the MS website.

That crippling with lots of memory is due to what many people describe as a major kludge in the Pentium architecture called Page Address Extensions (PAE). According to Torvalds, "the only real major failure of the x86 is the PAE crud".
Seen here

For those wanting a real idea of how good these things are (compared to other SMP server setups) http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22711 has a good set of links.

Now if only Intel would give us a CPU capable of complete virtualization.

Intel's Vanderpool Virtualization Technology should be coming soon - hopefully a significant step for virtualization support in the cpu itself.

By the way, here is a good series on how Vanderpool benefits virtualization:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21448

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21449

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21450

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21451

Now if only Intel would give us a CPU capable of complete virtualization.

Intel's Vanderpool Virtualization Technology should be coming soon - hopefully a significant step for virtualization support in the cpu itself.

By the way, here is a good series on how Vanderpool benefits virtualization:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21448

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21449

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21450

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21451

Now if only Intel would give us a CPU capable of complete virtualization.

Intel's Vanderpool Virtualization Technology should be coming soon - hopefully a significant step for virtualization support in the cpu itself.

By the way, here is a good series on how Vanderpool benefits virtualization:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21448

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21449

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21450

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21451

Now if only Intel would give us a CPU capable of complete virtualization.

Intel's Vanderpool Virtualization Technology should be coming soon - hopefully a significant step for virtualization support in the cpu itself.

By the way, here is a good series on how Vanderpool benefits virtualization:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21448

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21449

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21450

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21451

Mac OS X 10.5 ... will, quite literally, probably be shipping around the time Longhorn ships.

Yeah, probably even taking into account the fact that Apple said they'd slow the pace of OS releases down a bit after Tiger.

I see more schedule slippage in Longhorn's future-- they can't yank many more features out of it to keep to their timelines, or it'll barely qualify as a service pack.

Per CPU, according to one (admittedly somewhat vague) document from AMD. Also an old example system with 8 slots per processor. And here's a more recent motherboard with an 8+4 configuration: K8D Master 3.

Actually IE6 has now been out for 4 years. And a person should hope that a 4 year old product that is used by millions of people everday should have the bugs worked out if it by now.

Now as far as how to compare them check out this article. It compares security on a very sound premise: If you keep up-to-date with updates how long are you vulnerable. The answer: IE: 51 weeks during 2004, Firefox: 8 Weeks during 2004.

Lets rephrase that; using firefox I was safe from known exploits 10 months last year. If I was an idiot and used IE, I was only safe from known exploits 1 lousy week during the whole year.

Which are you going to choose? Get FireFox!

You're probably thinking of the National Enquirer, an American tabloid devoted mainly to celebrity gossip. This is The Inquirer, a European technology magazine.

TheInq on Intel Paper Launch

What readers of the INQ know is that AMD has been shipping dual cores for months to customers, and they are in the field, and in use. AMD beat its own date by months, but have not been crowing about it. I called the usual suspects, and no one apart from a favoured few OEMs had [Intel Dual Cores] a few days before the launch. Some said that it was no big deal, they expect to sell a few EEs, others were a little more vocal saying that they hadn't even received engineering samples, much less had things to sell.

For this reason, you might actually want to consider one of Intel's new 64-bit Xeon chips [intel.com]. I know that Supermicro offers some boards that can handle up to 32GB with only a single Xeon processor.

If you're hellbent on using an AMD solution, Supermicro is supposedly working on an Opteron board. This should provide a better "server" solution than a lot of the current boards offer.

Actually, if you extend the whole idea of chip multiprocessing beyond two cores, you end up with something like Sun's Niagara which fits up 8 cores onto a single die. What is interesting about this design point is that each of the cores are basic, in-order "5-stage" pipelines that execute a program's dataflow much slower than that of something like a Pentium 4 or Alpha 21264. However, you try to win that back by having multiple cores executing thread-abundant server-class applications.

You could get two dual-cores and stick them in a 2-socket motherboard instead. That's definitely less than 4K since you can get a blade for 3K. Even if it's "not a gaming machine," all-around performance would be impressive if paired with a proper video card. Though, as games tend to be single-threaded, multi-core wouldn't help much in that case.

Shipping is expected within two weeks. The Inq linq.

Can't wait for the Intel dual-core vs AMD dual-core server benchmarks and comparisons. How about a dual dual-core opteron machine vs a quad xeon... haha... man, this is going to get hilarious.

HP was, and still is taking orders for Dualcore Opterons systems:
http://theinquirer.net/?article=22553

According to The Inqurier here Intel's new EE model was scheduled for next month until shortly after it was leaked AMD was releasing dual Opterons this month in NY.

The Intel chip is in my opinion a proof of concept and will have the availability of the original P4EEs. Its also a pointless model, games aren't multi-threaded. AMD however is releasing a CPU aimed at the major multi-threaded market, high-end workstations and servers.

I think you mean "spec" instead of "design". Chip design is not something that is within the realm of MS' ability. Sure they have bazillion dollars and can throw a lot of money at a problem, but designing chips takes talent and vast amounts of people that MS doesn't have and can't hire in time.

The last I heard, IBM was designing and manufacturing PowerPC chips for the Xbox2. In this way, the supplier - vendor relationship is no different than the Xbox. However, this time, the machine won't just be a modified PC with a modified Intel x86 processor. MS can be more specific about what the chip can do. In this way, IBM's relationship with MS is like Apple's relationship with IBM. Both companies tell IBM what they need the chip to do. IBM handles the details like where the memory and controller goes on the die, how the chip handles branching, etc.

Also ATI will make the graphics chips for the Xbox2. This was somewhat foreseable after the MS-nVidia relationship soured. But because ATI now supplies the GPU, there has been speculation that the Xbox2 will not be backwards compatible. nVidia's Xbox chips used proprietary technology that they probably don't want to license to MS and ATI.