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Concerning power consumption, technically probably not, but I suppose I'm referring to home users. Even if you work out all the math for difference in electricity costs, it's not going to make a difference unless you're putting heavy loads on your computer every single day (busy servers, your whole life is gaming, etc). Realistically for home users the difference would only be a few $ per year. Of course it's obvious for data centers that they will save money by paying more for power saving CPU's. For home users the computer is idle most of the time anyway. Reference for cost/CPU wattage: http://www.tomshardware.com/fo... http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2...

I have my primary (1.5tb) drive connected to a 128gb ssd via a Silverstone "hddboost" unit. What this does is clone the first 128gb of your hard drive to the SSD. What you do then is to keep your hard drive defragmented with the OS and program files organised towards the beginning(cached) segment of the drive. When you do this make sure you put your page file to another drive so it and it's continual changes do not get cached to the drive. The bonus of this is that it is seamless, If I have the SSD die I can just replace it and off it goes and keeps working, if i decide I don't want it anymore then I just bypass it and the Windows install keeps working without missing a beat (I've confirmed that this is the case out of curiosity)

  Once you've got all your programs installed and have everything running it seems to keep ticking along quite nicely and provides a performance boost around midway between using a SSD and a platter drive by itself. Now this doesn't help you if you are one of those sorts that just cannot keep well enough alone and continually tinker with your system as changes will have to be re-cached and the boost will be negligible until it has gone and re-cached that first segment of the drive.

I've also got a slightly different system set up for my Steam games drive. Namely a Highpoint 1220 caching controller along with another 128gb SSD. I initially bought this second system to use for my boot drive but as it turned out to be such a massive pain in the ass to set up I ended up giving up and buying the Silverstone device and relegating this to caching my games drive to see how it would go performance wise. After some initial positive results many months ago I kept it on my system as it did improve things noticeably.

Oh and for those that care for such things, other specs for that system include 12gig of ram and an i5 3570, so I wasn't just upgrading one subsystem to the detriment of others.

I would say AMD generally prices their parts competatively. If you are talking about >$300 Intel parts, you are correct that AMD has nothing to offer (I don't count 220W parts as viable, as I'm not in the market for a desk-side-vacuum-cleaner). But at $180 an FX-8350 looks pretty competative vs a $200 i5-4570:
http://www.tomshardware.com/ch...
If you are using efficiently multi-process applications (e.g. video compression), AMD is the clear winner. If you are using mostly-single-process applications (Blizzard games?), Intel is the clear winner.

In my usage, single-process applications tend not to be CPU-bound, or they tend not to be computationally taxing. But YMMV. And some games are obviously highly 1-2 core CPU bound (Blizzard), which is worth considering.

Finally points:
Over clocking: If you are planning on overclocking, the least expensive intel part is $240 (33% over FX-8350). Overclocking won't close the FX-8350 single-threaded performance gap, but it helps.
Heat: The FX-8350 is rated at a TDP of 125W... The i5-4570 is rated at 84w. So AMD is hotter and louder.

Disclaimer: My next system is going to be Intel, primarily because I want the machine to be near-silent, and 125W is hard to work around.
Note: All prices based on Newegg at the time of writing.

Maybe something more like Gigabtyte's Brix Pro, or AsRock's Vision X. Going small comes with a cost, and often requires an external power brick (Mac Mini has power supply built-in), but there are lots of tiny PC's out there.

Don't worry about the fact that Android is the dominate OS - 70% dominate

Closer to 80% now. Apple has dropped below 15%.

Anyway, this whole story is about a rip-off of Google's Street View cameras. http://www.tomshardware.com/ne...

Apple's probably sponsoring the effort as a marketing stunt for their own version of Maps.

Really? You could pay everyone involved in the entire production chain (raw materials to sub-assemblies to final assemblers/packers) a non-slave (AKA 'living Wage'?) by increasing the retail price of an iPhone $4? I find it hard to believe - please explain.

Please explain why you find that hard to believe. Is it because you've unquestionably accepted the "everything is so much cheaper to make in China" line? If cheap labor was always the key to less expensive products, the Industrial Revolution never would have happened. See, for example, GE's experience with their hybrid hot water heaters, where moving the manufacturing back to the US and properly designing it for manufacturability (using information and design suggestions from the assemblers themselves) actually reduced manufacturing costs and improved quality.

Cell or smart phone manufacturing is heavily automated. Only a tiny amount of assembly is done manually. Moreover the amount that is done manually is largely the result of sloppy design practice that's tolerable only because Chinese labor is so cheap. The price difference is explained here. That's the manufacturing cost. Obviously there is markup along the chain, but for a small amount of increased cost like that, it's mostly a matter of bargaining power and how much the designer/manufacturer/distributor feels they can get away with.

As for your "entire production chain (raw materials to sub-assemblies to final assemblers/packers)", you don't seem to understand how the supply chain for cell phones works. Raw materials and their processing is done all over the world - most is not done in China. The same is true for component manufacturing, and the components account for many times the cost of the labor.

While I applaud AMD for their initiative there have been tests that show a drop in quality of GPU encoded H264 vs a CPU/software solution.
For details check out: http://www.behardware.com/articles/828-27/h-264-encoding-cpu-vs-gpu-nvidia-cuda-amd-stream-intel-mediasdk-and-x264.html and http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/video-transcoding-amd-app-nvidia-cuda-intel-quicksync,2839-13.html

You know, if you look at their performance numbers, as well as those for reliability, standards compliance and memory footprint, they come in second-to-last, with Opera last; of course, when you compare IE to the chromium-based Opera Next, and not plain Opera, then IE still is 2x worse than the others.

Tom's Hardware has a good rep, right? not a shill review site? I think it is like Anandtech.

http://www.tomshardware.com/re...

Results start on page 4. ie10 doesn't blow away everybody else, but it's middle of the pack on most metrics and best or near best on some metrics. notably, there's no consistent winner across the board, it's not like any one browser is the king.

before it used to be 2x worse than the others!

It is as long as system bus is not the bottleneck.

It is not more efficient, it is just not less efficient. You stated that it was "vastly suboptimal" so explain how. You also said it was "far more efficient to have a powerful GPU with its own fast dedicated memory than have it share memory and die with a CPU" so also explain how.

Right now and for foreseeable future, it is not. Raw GPU performance limits most games

citation. even some of the highest end games are not limited by raw gpu performance, many of them are bottlenecked to a degree by buffer copies from system memory to gpu memory.

and a few exceptions are limited by raw CPU power

wrong, see Skyrim and Starcraft for example.

There are effectively no notable games on the market as of typing this that are constrained by RAM speed or system bus of any decently modern PC.

wrong. see above.

ultimately developers attempt to code around the inelegant and inefficient situation of un-unified processor/memory architectures.

Show me which games are CPU memory speed constrained.

You won't be able to for a very simple reason. There aren't any.

So obviously you arent even reading:
Which is why you see significant performance benefits in games like F1 2012 with higher memory bandwidth systems

And to disprove that your unfounded assertions that there aren't any and that essentially all of them are constrained by GPU in the first place, and those few that are in fact CPU constrained are not constrained by CPUs memory bandwidth but actual CPU speed here is an article demonstrating that you are wrong.

Two out of five game tests, F1 2012 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, showed us that that both bandwidth and latency can influence frame rates significantly. Both variables appear equally important, too. We might have guessed we'd see the results we did; after all, both titles are already known to be less graphics-bound than the others.
Does Memory Performance Bottleneck Your Games?

NVidia had a similar problem with GPUs

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-failure-g84-g86-settlement,11400.html

My Asus G1S had to be fixed twice. The second time it came back with a new motherboard with an 9500M GS replacing the 8600M GT. So Asus had actually done a board revision to switch the GPU. Even more remarkably this was only about a month before the warranty run out.

Most other comanies would have just kept handing out doomed 8600M GT boards until the warranties run out on the machines.

What made you think they don't? They have multiple CPUs that are just CPUs including the best CPUs under $110 according to Tom's Hardware. I have built several with both and can say they are nice chips, in fact I've started using the FX 4 and FX 6 pretty exclusive now that the Phenom IIs have thinned out.

That said your best steal on a "quad" would be the Athlon X3 455, it looks like nearly all of those were perfectly good Propus quads with just a core disabled and they can be had for crazy cheap. There is even several dealers on eBay selling "pre-unlocked" 455s where its been tested and guaranteed to unlock for less than $50 shipped, can't beat that.

Maybe.... but only if you spend >$500 on the video card.

According to Tom's Hardware guide in 2006 they were recommending the Radeon X1950 XT in the $270 range. For the $340 range they suggested dual X1950 PROs or dual GeForce 7900 GS. For $460 they recommended the Geforce 8800 GTS.

The 8800 GTS is the minimum requirement for Assassin's Creed Liberation and is below the requirement for Batman Arkham Origins. So, maybe a dual 8800 at $920 would do okay.

Informative? Really? Because I have to throw a "Citation needed" here as from what I've seen Silvermont is merely Saltwell with some OoO bolted on to try to fix how long certain macro-ops took to go through the pipeline.

I've checked a dozen articles and NOTHING about the new Atom being based on i7, in fact if true this would reverse almost 30 years of history as Intel has always been VERY protective of its top o' the line chips and sells low end chips highly crippled.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Android-Rooted-best-apps-superuser,18313.html
Users who have rooted are comparatively very less, so it's an uphill battle if you're trying to make money from your apps that need root.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/

I understand that the reviewer was restricted by the ultra-low price point set by his employer, but the result is that this is a really poor selection of SSDs, many of them obsolete, and is not particularly reflective of the market today. For instance, he reviewed the Crucial M4 (release date: early 2011), but not the newer Crucial M500, which according to reviews has both RAID-style NAND redundancy and a bank of capacitors to protect against power failure. The M500 isn't even all that expensive on a per-GB basis, though it isn't available in the ultra-small sizes the reviewer apparently needed because of his very limited budget.

There are other, even more glaring, omissions. No mention of any Samsung drive? Nothing from SanDisk? These are two of the biggest SSD vendors, and both have a good reputation for reliability. Leaving out their products makes this roundup almost worthless.

The SSD market is advancing so fast that reviewing drives over 2 years old is going to give an extremely misleading impression of the current state-of-the-art.

The Hour of Code was teaching the outdated, sequential type of programming

Sequential code may be inadequate for advanced programming, but it certainly isn't "outdated". As a professional programmer, 90% of my code is purely sequential. Even parallel code has sequential blocks, and parallel programming skills can only be built on a solid foundation of basic understanding of sequential processing. Arithmetic skills are not enough to do calculus, but that doesn't mean arithmetic is "outdated".

But arithmetic is outdated. Computers are just way better at arithmetic, and very few people do arithmetic manually in their jobs. Kids get entirely the wrong idea about math, spending all that time on brittle algorithms, and you get the wrong idea about sequential programming due to the abundance of undefined behaviors. The trouble is that we don't have a consistent way to teach something better.

Just like I had to partially unlearn the least-significant-digit-first arithmetic to learn everyday, useful arithmetic, I also had to unlearn BASIC's strictly sequential programming to learn modern, functional programming. Everybody who works with new ideas is familiar with how long they can take to become common. I, for one, am curious about what would happen if kids were taught category theory and explicit control of side effects from the beginning, instead of being introduced to it much later as a bizarre branch of higher math.

That computers emulate sequential operation with barriers, careful analysis of memory dependencies, and a single program counter (or is Intel up to 30 program counters now?) is just an implementation detail. The computer science doesn't depend on having an exact sequence, and some asynchronous computers or flow-based computers might not need the program counter. I'm not sure how to build it, but it feels like it should be possible. Multithreading sequential programs is turning out to be a bust. Except for embarrassingly parallel problems, very few people can reason about them effectively. We need people to discover and learn new ways of handling concurrency.

Anywhere from a few 100s of IO per second to 10-20k on sharded master-master DB pairs running mostly OLTP workloads, continuously, for two years. The few duds that had failed did so completely independently of IO so your statement is irrelevant to the failure rate.

I agree the sample size isn't massive, but with SSDs we essentially replaced thousands of SAS drives with a few hundred SSDs. So yeah, it is pretty relevant from a statistical point of view that a single Fusion IO card or a few hundred Intel SSDs could replace an entire datacenter worth of disks (No joke). Also, since obviously my opinion doesn't matter, check out Softlayer, who ran thousands in production and saw a 1-2% failure rate (and this is on older drives).

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-6.html.

The spinning disks saw pretty much the same failure rate after a year and a much higher failure rate after the 3rd year.

So logically, if you replace 5000 HDDs with a 1% failure rate with 500 SSDs with a 3% failure rate, you've just saved a ton of maintenance, increased your performance by an order of magnitude, and even reduced power usage in the process. That said, I stand by my original statement that if you're not using SSDs in 2013 you're just wasting your time.

If you don't play games, why do you care about 3D performance?

Photoshop, for example? Or anything using OpenCL?

THe issue is the thermal paste, as well as chip manufactors lower mhz clock speeds until yields improve.

It is a standard process for all chip makers. What AMD did was pick the best of the best where yields would not make sufficient defect free chips at that speed for the demo.

As chip makers increase production and yield quality increases then the speed goes up as well. Notice Tom got closed if not matching the real demo with these tricks.

So these were not botched demos at all! However, you do need to void the warranty and apply elbow grease or water cool them and you will gain the same performance.

This was a bug: AMD assumed that fans on reference coolers would be roughly the same and, eg, 50% power (PWM) = 50% speed. OEMs sourced different fan motors that would spin slower at a given PWM duty cycle, causing their cards to throttle more often.

AMD has already released a fix that measures fan RPM instead of blindly setting the speed. Retail card fans now spin at the correct (faster) speed and get the better performance.

Toms Hardware covered this pretty extensively a month ago.

The short story is that AMD is throttling clock speeds to hold within a temperature limit. They learned the hard way that 40% PWM does not equal 40% fan speed, especially across all fans the OEMS used. There's a driver fix for that now measures fan speed and adjusts accordingly when in quiet mode that eliminates most of this performance discrepancy (retail cards can now see higher performance in line with review samples).

Remaining differences between cards may be due to different heatsink grease, also already examined by replacing the grease on a retail card for a significant performance gain.

Toms Hardware covered this pretty extensively a month ago.

The short story is that AMD is throttling clock speeds to hold within a temperature limit. They learned the hard way that 40% PWM does not equal 40% fan speed, especially across all fans the OEMS used. There's a driver fix for that now measures fan speed and adjusts accordingly when in quiet mode that eliminates most of this performance discrepancy (retail cards can now see higher performance in line with review samples).

Remaining differences between cards may be due to different heatsink grease, also already examined by replacing the grease on a retail card for a significant performance gain.

Kavari looks good for a budget gaming PC, but I think they are being a bit optimistic about the "dual graphics" feature. This is where you pair the iGPU with a dGPU, to get better performance. AMD has never been able to get this feature to work properly. All it does is create "runt" frames, which makes the FPS look higher, but without giving any visual improvement.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dual-graphics-crossfire-benchmark,3583.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ps4-smash-launch-playstation-4-destroyed-video,25098.html

mini-pcs can be pricey, but there are alternatives that run Linux/XMBC. This is far from a thoroughly list, but they are relatively recent pieces of hardware:
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=85
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/gigabyte-brix-pc-gaming-iris-pro-5200-haswell,24246.html
http://www.itxcanada.com/products/VIA_EPIA_P910_10Q_Pico_ITX_Motherboard_1_0GHz_VIA_Quad_Core_E_Processor-1166-0.html
http://www.ebay.de/itm/Jynxbox-TV-BOX-HD-Amlogic-8726-1080p-XBMC-MELE-F10-PRO-MIC-Speaker-Remote-/400549785064?clk_rvr_id=546961982081

Simple Android Hardware could do the trick and the price is less-expensive:
http://en.mele.cn/products/show/31.htm
http://www.ebay.de/itm/MINIX-NEO-X7-Android-4-2-Quad-Core-2GB-DDR3-WIFI-XBMC-1080p-Rii-mini-N7-Remote-/400566821009?pt=Netzanschluss&hash=item5d43a4a091
http://www.cloudsto.com/mk902-pc/rikomagic-mk902-quad-core-16gb-flash-dhl-express-shipping-detail.html

Most inexpensive android ARM-based hardware do not have gigabit ethernet on the hardware because the SOC's can't achieve more than 470~Mbps..
Intel/AMD motherboards are true-Gigabit ethernet. Gamers would tend to agree this is important for network gameplay. Gamers also tend to purchase PC-Hardware because you can buy gamer-specific optimized network equipment to give you a competitive edge when playing. It's take it or leave it with consoles unless you do mod it yourself. Oh wait, Sony doesn't make open-hardware, so the consumer will go for the open-hardware. It's important to have gigabit ethernet if you intend on running any kind of web server/mail server on your open software system in order for it to be an optimal experience for the user while not costing a fortune for a general-purpose hardware rather than single-purpose game-console appliance hardware. The other added advantage about pc's and mini-pc's over android devices and consoles is that you can create content with them rather than simply consume content with them. Keep in mind content is not king. The consumer is.

From what I remember slashdot was a place to talk about stuff related to linux. The word "slashdot" and the logo /. have to do especially with Linux/POSIX stuff. Since when does Slashdot plug Sony hardware especially when it's not Linux friendly any longer? Oh yeah since Slashdot is owned by Condé-Nast and needs to generate revenue for its patrons; let me guess Sony is one of it's patrons?

It's real easy ... pick your budget and your tier will follow.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

Chart for the lazy.

to that 'lean' browser of yesteryear?

Exactly.

The problem isn't just that Firefox is bloated and full of unnecessary crap. Even worse, they keep changing or removing existing features that are actually useful. Every new version now brings more pointless changes that make Firefox just a little bit worse. And no matter how much users complain about all the constant pointless tinkering and the nonstop treadmill of unnecessary changes, the response from Mozilla is always the same. A thinly veiled Fuck You We Don't Care What You Think.

Their response is more along the lines of if you don't like you can customize it anyway you like. My Firefox is functionally and aesthetically pretty similar to Firefox 2.0. A clean install a of Firefox uses less than 100mb of RAM when first launched. It was very close second to chrome in Benchmarks. There are enough plugins out there you can get the functionality/aesthetics you want. It just might require a bit of tinkering on your part.

The HD2000 series from 3 generations ago already beat your 8800GT. The current Iris 5200 sits between a GeForce 9800 and a GeForce 280 in terms of performance.

You sure? Got any benchmark comparisons? I'm honestly curious because the comparisons I've seen don't jive. For example:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

That page shows the HD 2000 on par with cards like Nvidia FX 5800, or ATI X1400.
HD 3000 is shows around Nvidia 6600 GT, or ATI X1600 PRO.
HD 4000 is shows around Nvidia 6800 GT or 7600 GT, or ATI X800 XT or HD 3650.
The HD 2500, HD 4200, HD 4400, HD 4600, HD 5000, Iris 5100, and Iris 5200 are not listed there.

I know that's not a benchmark, and I was curious, so I looked up some random PassMark G3D scores:
PassMark - G3D Mark
4255 Radeon 7870
4116 GeForce GTX 660
1677 Radeon 5770 (came with mac pro in 2012)
1572 GeForce GT 750M (what's in macbook pro 15" now)
1288 GeForce 640
922 Intel Iris Pro 5200
757 GeForce 8800 GT
718 GeForce 9800 GT
711 Radeon HD 5570
654 GeForce GT 240
632 Radeon HD 2900 PRO
628 Intel Iris 5100
606 GeForce 8800 GTS
599 Intel HD 4600
598 Intel HD 5200
544 Radeon HD 4670
515 Intel HD 5000
490 Intel HD 4400
487 GeForce GT 335M
477 Intel HD 4600
476 Radeon HD 7550M
461 Intel HD 4000
306 Intel HD 3000
216 GeForce 7900 GS
208 Radeon HD 7340

The Iris Pro 5200 looks alright, but it's far from common (the MacBook Pro is the only line I can find with one in a laptop), and I really doubt an HD 2000 is going to compare at all with an 8800GT. The above benchmark isn't the greatest, but it should get the ballpark right.

I'm curious as to exactly what 2 watt processors can compare to a 3.2 GHz P4 from 2003

It's not easy to compare, and I had to jump around benchmarks a bit, but some of the recent SoCs look to be ballpark with the P4.

x86 Atom Z2760 Vs ARM
http://www.notebookcheck.net/SoC-Shootout-x86-vs-ARM.99496.0.html

Atom D510 Vs P4
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/atom-d510-pentium-4-nettop,2649-10.html

Atom D510 Vs Atom Z2760
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/midlow_range_cpus.html

AMD/ATI also has introduced MANTLE Api for lower level access than DirectX which is cross platform. This may turn into a very important API as AMD/ATI have their GPUs in the next generation Sony and Xbox consoles as well with a large marketshare for game developers to target

MANTLE is not on any of the consoles. This articles mentions only the lack of Mantle on the Xbone, but since the PS4 GPU is the same architecture with bigger numbers, it's safe to say it's not on the PS4 either.

Anyway, the problem with Mantle is not mantle it self, but the lack of games that will actually make good and innovative use of that tech. Sure, FrostByte 3 games will support Mantle but for what? So that you can play console games with better graphics? Sorry, good graphics are a great but after a certain point unless you do something never done before, just bigger textures/resolutions/etc hardly improve a game and thus hardly the extra money to keep a high-end pc. The same could be said of many graphics and physics APIs on the PC. I guess it may be worth it if you have the money and really like to invest in eye-candy. For the PC crowd that may sound stupid and kind of a asshole thing to do, but given how the consumer electronics market works, if AMD really wants Mantle to be a truly game changing tech, they could use some of the profits they'll get from the hype to invest on an high-quality exclusive title that does what noone else can do. AMD knows better than anyone else that just releasing good products doesn't guarantee you sales...

It's not being completely ignored. For example, Tom's Hardware made a stink about Radeon 2D performance a few years back, and managed to get AMD moving to fix some performance bugs:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ati-2d-performance-radeon-hd-5000,2635.html

They also replaced the 34nm Vertex 2 drives with 25nm drives, lowering speed and space without changing the model number. They are scum.

Also only the R9 290 and R9 290 X are actually new GPUs. The other are old designs.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-280x-r9-270x-r7-260x,3635.html

I don't know whatever that means that only those got Mantle support.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_(API)

And then again I don't really expect cards based on those to perform like 9 times faster in BF4 anyway.

There's benchmarks to be seen for how various (other) Radeon and Nvidia cards perform atm.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-4-graphics-card-performance,3634.html

Also only the R9 290 and R9 290 X are actually new GPUs. The other are old designs.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-280x-r9-270x-r7-260x,3635.html

I don't know whatever that means that only those got Mantle support.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_(API)

And then again I don't really expect cards based on those to perform like 9 times faster in BF4 anyway.

There's benchmarks to be seen for how various (other) Radeon and Nvidia cards perform atm.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-4-graphics-card-performance,3634.html

My Android is a piece of crap, a 600 dollar mistake I'll never make again.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Android-Smartphones-iPhone-Apple-Google,21043.html

"The research firm's survey, which had over 300,000 worldwide smartphone owners participating, found that consumers are most satisfied with Motorola’s Atrix HD and Droid Razr M. Those devices are followed by HTC’s Rezound 4G and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2. The iPhone 5s rating of 8.23 made Apple's flagship device settle for the fifth spot."

your views differ from others.

I agree, it's obvious they do, but when I struggle with the email client - a basic function (not gmail) then to me it is unusable. I have to keep killing the process, I tried many factory resets, I don't install anything but the updates to the built in apps. I'm not happy at all. I can't transfer files with a cable(MTP crap), it has no SD card so I can't move them that way, the camera and screen is very nice though.
No, I sure as hell don't want an iPhone either.

My Android is a piece of crap, a 600 dollar mistake I'll never make again.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Android-Smartphones-iPhone-Apple-Google,21043.html

"The research firm's survey, which had over 300,000 worldwide smartphone owners participating, found that consumers are most satisfied with Motorola’s Atrix HD and Droid Razr M. Those devices are followed by HTC’s Rezound 4G and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2. The iPhone 5s rating of 8.23 made Apple's flagship device settle for the fifth spot."

your views differ from others.

There were definitely gaming cards in the 486 era. A VLB video card will run DOOM faster than an ISA card. A Tseng ET4000 will run DOOM faster than a crappy Trident.

Not in 1994. That didn't exist yet as a thing.

If you wanted a computer for games the main requirement was a fast cpu, and a soundblaster and well that's it. Take a look at the system req's of the big games of that era:

Privateer - 386DX - 33, 256 color VGA, sound blaster, 2x cd-rom (although there was a floppy disk based version iirc)

Doom II - 386DX - 33, 4MB RAM, VGA, soundblaster

Wing Commander III - 486DX 50, svga, 369kb free conventional, soundblaster

"A gaming video card" was not a requirement, or even a recommendation, or really even 'a thing'. If you wanted any of the above games to play better in 1994, you'd have gotten a 486DX2-66 or DX4. They'd have come with VLB or even PCI video cards -- but you would have only cared that the card used the VLB or PCI socket; it mattered far less what was actually in it.

It wasn't until Voodoo in 1996 released its first PCI card that a 'gaming card' even meant something. And then arrival of the AGP slot and the RIVA TNT, Matrox Mystique, Diamond Monster etc, that things really got going and a gaming card was 'a thing'.

"There were definitely gaming cards in the 486 era."

If by 486 era, you mean the tail end, after the pentiums were becoming mainstream. (The 486 DX4 stuff was released after the first pentium landed after all).

The first Quake was probably the first game that people were starting to think about what was in the video card socket.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/real-thing,45.html

for the lols ^

http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html
Chrome score 463
Firefox score 414
Internet Explorer 10 scores 320(Internet explorer 8 XP users trapped on scores 42)

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera-next,3534-12.html which benchmarks the various browsers extensively gives
Firefox score 326
Chrome score of 326
Internet Explorer 182

Re "inaccurate, wrong and misleading":
The 3g side can be seen as another security option for: power is connected, a computer of interest is networked: ~wake up and authorized administrator commands sent.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sandy-bridge-vpro-core-i7,12353.html

Ooh, Duelling Benchmarks! Can I have a go?

Yes, I have had a currently open bug with FF21.0--that got worse with 22.0.

Where's the bug? Link to it.

And I and the other watchers of the bug I opened at Mozilla will dispute your contention that Chrome uses more memory. Simply not true!

Did you not look at the memory usage charts from Tom's Hardware? Chrome uses more memory than other browsers. This has been my consistent experience as well as Tom's Hardware's as well as most everyone's. Look at another memory usage chart from Tom's. They use Chrome's memory usage tool to measure it. Even Google disagrees with you.

I won't be downloading any new versions of Firefox--nor will I enable automatic updates--until they fix the danged memory leaks that have been present since they began their whirlwind upgrade cycle with FF 4.0.

What memory leaks? If you've found new ones, have you reported them? Significant progress has been made in Firefox's memory usage in the last three years. Do you read the memshrink progress reports? If you don't, maybe you should.

Chrome is a handy replacement for what used to be a reliable friend--Firefox.

Surely you realise that Chrome uses more memory than Firefox. Look at a comparison of browser memory usage with a single tab open and multiple tabs open. If you're happy with Chrome's memory usage, you'll be happy with any browser's memory usage.

I won't be downloading any new versions of Firefox--nor will I enable automatic updates--until they fix the danged memory leaks that have been present since they began their whirlwind upgrade cycle with FF 4.0.

What memory leaks? If you've found new ones, have you reported them? Significant progress has been made in Firefox's memory usage in the last three years. Do you read the memshrink progress reports? If you don't, maybe you should.

Chrome is a handy replacement for what used to be a reliable friend--Firefox.

Surely you realise that Chrome uses more memory than Firefox. Look at a comparison of browser memory usage with a single tab open and multiple tabs open. If you're happy with Chrome's memory usage, you'll be happy with any browser's memory usage.

Replace "FF" with "Google Chrome" and you'll see that Google beat Mozilla to the punch :-) Remember that Chrome is on version 29 (5 ahead of Firefox) and now uses more RAM than Firefox! You've also conveniently forgotten the Firefox ESR release (Chrome has *nothing* like it, so is a complete disaster for corporate use). Also, the performance gap has been gradually closing between Chrome and Firefox in the last year or so. For the first time in a couple of years, Firefox recent actually beat Chrome in Tom's Hardware Browser Grand Prix.

The lack of extensions on Android Chrome is utterly appalling, which is why Firefox on Android basically destroys Android Chrome. Now if Mozilla could fix the dodgy graphics issue with Firefox on the Nexus 10 (pages often half-rendering and needing a screen rotation to render them properly!), then I wouldn't have to double-rotate my tablet so often :-)

The Vertu luxury brand phones use Nokia HW platform, and switched to Android apparently without much work. Nokia Android phone was speculated early this year.

Typical IOPS on a 7200 RPM HDD is around 80. Typical IOPS on a garden variety SSD is 80,000. We'll be generous and assume linear speedup for the four HDDs, which gives us 320 IOPS, or 0.4% of the performance of a single SSD.

Great. Thanks for, like so many other people in this thread, pulling out a near meaningless benchmark figure*. As others point out, you might see 1000x the IOPS but real world results are more on the order of at most 5-10x speedup (a look at some of Tom's Hardwares HDD vs SDD seems to confirm it with adding music to WMP on HDD and on SDD and Gaming on HDD and on SDD). Why is that? Obviously because most applications and activities don't involve randomly accessing 4K files/sectors scattered all over the storage device. File systems are heavily designed to avoid fragmentation and most file accesses are linear and of considerable enough size that actual streaming performance is more critical. Hell, ReiserFS (both in synethic and real benchmarks) has shown that just having the file system actually intelligently deal with smaller files (NTFS does this with the MFT, AFAIK) nets most of the same benefits.

So the other point would be something about whether four HDDs would see a linear performance increase and see the 3x increase and start to approach SDD territory. Honestly, I actually doubt it. And I'm certain in some circumstances SDD would still heavily blow away what even a large stack of HDDs in RAID1 could do. But in most real world circumstances, the difference would be pretty damn negligible, except probably noticing how slow big file copying can be.

*Yea, I know this isn't an actually meaningless figure. It gives you some idea of just how much better random access to files will be. And if you have a specific workload that deals with lots of non-cached random files or sectors in large files, I can certainly see some clear benefits to SDD. But, honestly, coupled with things like caching, lots of RAM in system now days, things like Superfetch, and having just limits on just much data can actually stream over SATA, SDD isn't worth it to me or a lot of people--but then most people aren't going to do RAID at all and SDDs main benefit would be the no-moving-parts and lower power usage for portables. If you're one of the exceptions and can afford the massive extra cost, good for you.

Typical IOPS on a 7200 RPM HDD is around 80. Typical IOPS on a garden variety SSD is 80,000. We'll be generous and assume linear speedup for the four HDDs, which gives us 320 IOPS, or 0.4% of the performance of a single SSD.

Great. Thanks for, like so many other people in this thread, pulling out a near meaningless benchmark figure*. As others point out, you might see 1000x the IOPS but real world results are more on the order of at most 5-10x speedup (a look at some of Tom's Hardwares HDD vs SDD seems to confirm it with adding music to WMP on HDD and on SDD and Gaming on HDD and on SDD). Why is that? Obviously because most applications and activities don't involve randomly accessing 4K files/sectors scattered all over the storage device. File systems are heavily designed to avoid fragmentation and most file accesses are linear and of considerable enough size that actual streaming performance is more critical. Hell, ReiserFS (both in synethic and real benchmarks) has shown that just having the file system actually intelligently deal with smaller files (NTFS does this with the MFT, AFAIK) nets most of the same benefits.

So the other point would be something about whether four HDDs would see a linear performance increase and see the 3x increase and start to approach SDD territory. Honestly, I actually doubt it. And I'm certain in some circumstances SDD would still heavily blow away what even a large stack of HDDs in RAID1 could do. But in most real world circumstances, the difference would be pretty damn negligible, except probably noticing how slow big file copying can be.

*Yea, I know this isn't an actually meaningless figure. It gives you some idea of just how much better random access to files will be. And if you have a specific workload that deals with lots of non-cached random files or sectors in large files, I can certainly see some clear benefits to SDD. But, honestly, coupled with things like caching, lots of RAM in system now days, things like Superfetch, and having just limits on just much data can actually stream over SATA, SDD isn't worth it to me or a lot of people--but then most people aren't going to do RAID at all and SDDs main benefit would be the no-moving-parts and lower power usage for portables. If you're one of the exceptions and can afford the massive extra cost, good for you.