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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.

It is not an overclock but the ability to adjust the "spare area". This is the percentage of flash on the drive that is not exposed to the user and is used for garbage collection, write acceleration (by having pre-erased blocks), reduction of write amplification, etc. You can emulate more spare area on drives already if you take SSD and format it to less that it's full capacity.

This is the SSD equivalent to short stroking a hard drive.

It's worth noting that the higher performance and enterprise level drives already have much more spare area but that results in a tradeoff of capacity for performance. They are just going to let you set this slider between consumer level (maximum capacity per $$$) and performance level (higher performance but less capcity).

If you read this, making sure to click on the first see full content link you will see where the GP was going with this one.

I like the idea of an all-in-one computer, but making them look like a monitor (with a stand and such) is a waste of the form factor.

Units that are designed to resemble tablets, with no stand or a retractable stand, can be used in more variety than units like this Dell be advertised by the article.

Take a look at Lenovo's Horizon 27 inch or Sony's Vaio Tap 20.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ideacentre-horizon-27-review-all-in-one,3564.html

http://store.sony.com/p/Sony-Desktop,-20-inch,-Tap-20,-VAIO-Touch,-VAIO-Desktop,-Core-i5,-Windows-8,-3rd-gen-Intel,-touch-display,-all-in-one,-touchscreen/en/p/SVJ20217CXW

Both can be laid flat, the Lenovo unit can be angled well by it's strong spring stand from 90 degrees down to 5 degrees of the desk making it comfortable to lean over and use to draw. It also comes with a suite of games that can be played while it's flat, from board games to billiards or air hockey.

I think all-in-ones should be going this direction. The instances where they will be used typically in this form factor will not require their screen site to get larger and their performance is easily enough to handle almost anything typical these days, so the disadvantage of not being able upgrade individual pieces of the hardware (screen or internals) is moot.

Just like Steam, the customers happily accept being branded with a hot iron as long as they're also given a carrot.

While I agree broadly with the main thrust of your argument (they should really stop fraudulently advertising that you 'own' digital products when you so clearly don't) I think your characterisation of Steam users here is inappropriate.

For a majority of Steam users, I believe, it is a simple matter of economics and convenience. The benefits can be rather compelling :-

1) During periodic Steam sales, the games could be substantially cheaper than a retail box. Sometimes up to 75% or more.
2) You can DL the game and play it on the same day.
3) You dont have to physically travel to the store.
4) You don't have to hunt for and patch your own games.
5) You don't have to deal with harassed sales staff on release days.

Most Steam users I believe, have done up the sums and are willing to give up the privilege of owning their games for these benefits. It is a choice they make. For those who insist on owning their games, as in the old days, they can still buy retail boxes. That is also their choice, a different choice but a no less valid one based on their personal values.

If you are concerned about the dilution of the First Sale Doctrine and ownership rights generally, I agree that it is a concern. As individual consumers however, when it comes to non-essentials like games and entertainment, we always have the power to vote with our wallets. The most recent example is the furor over the drm of XBoxOne which eventually caused MS to reverse their policy.

but they really should focus on making a browser for the desktop that doesn't run like utter shat.
I know reality doesn't sink in easily in nerd's minds but the firefox team doesn't give a flying fuck about tech savy users and ranting about it won't have any effect at all. The only viable routes at this point are :

1 - use a different browser (and no Chrome is not the answer)
2 - take the firefox source code and fork it. Forget about chasing the latest useless shiny and start fixing serious bugs and revamp the UI so that it caters to the tech savy user first (and by restriction to the lambda user as well). In other terms revamp Firefox so that it gives back the browser experience to the user.

For christ's sake, people forked Gnome, is there nobody at all that can fork Firefox and fix it ?

This. Fork Fx at 3.6, patch in the security patches, and ship it.

I can feel your pain. I Do find this technique of replying to yourself quite exciting, While attaching the product, without providing any substance. Here is http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera-next,3534-12.html a comprehensive comparison' Fastest Browser is Firefox.

Looking at what has happened since the new releases. I am personally enjoying the fact that features get delivered to me sooner like Isolated Plug-ins; WebM playback; Hardware Acceleration; Do Not Track...The List really does go on and on. The reality is though the UI has actually changed very little...and power users get advanced features like about:config; bout:memory; about:cache, as well as a whole plethora of plugins to play with. Its the reasons why I prefer it to Chrome...A none too shabby browser itself (http://gs.statcounter.com/ wow look at its adoption in spite of Internet Explorer monopolistic bundling)

The bottom line is Internet Explorer is behind, they are doing their customers a disservice by including it at all, as alternative browsers continue to provide a faster; safer; experience.

I was assuming that your power budget wouldn't allow dot-matrix printers, so you would want some sort of inkjet. The discussion of dot-matrix printers is persuasive... those things really are durable, and cheap to operate.

If the power budget just won't allow dot-matrix, we are back to inkjet. I did some Google searches, and found this interesting discussion:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/2139-69-which-printer-cheapest#10472794

So, with a non-chipped inkjet cartridge and some refill kits, your consumables costs will be quite low, and your power needs should be lower than other kinds of printers.

The recommended printer from that link, the Canon MP280, is a multifunction device that also works as a scanner. If those things can hold up in your environment, they might be useful as more than just output devices.

A comment about inkjet printers. Some inkjet printers have the print head as actually part of the cartridge, so replacing the cartridge replaces the print head.

HP has always done this; an HP inkjet cartridge is basically a sponge full of ink, inside a plastic shell, with a printhead on one side. The printhead is a silicon chip that includes little heaters, which boil the ink to make a puff of steam that throws one droplet of ink out the print head. I love the simplicity, and I love that replacing the cartridge gives a fresh clean print head. But HP has been a pioneer in shrinking cartridge sizes to give you less ink, and I'll bet every current HP model has a page-counting chip. So perhaps the perfect printer for your needs would be an old HP inkjet printer, using one of the old cartridges (no chip and higher capacity), but I would prefer a recommendation for something you can buy new.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkjet#Head_design

I did some more Google searching, and there are ways to reset the counters on inkjet cartridges, so maybe you can do that.

TomsHardware performed a thorough review of a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Hard Drives. I recommend reading it.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/momentus-xt-750gb-review,3223.html

Their conclusion:

"Really, the only time Seagate's Momentus XT slowed down drastically compared to an SSD was when we installed the operating system and applications. Once everything was fully loaded, however, performance rapidly improved as the drive's software algorithms pulled the most frequently-access data into flash, bestowing very SSD-like qualities to it. At that point, it was frankly hard to tell the difference during most common tasks. "

The radar plot at the end shows the mix of compromises, and the performance suggests it's worth a look if you're otherwise buying large capacity.

But I wonder how many other folks have very expensive hardware like this that will probably never be upgraded to run on anything other than XP.

Expensive like ... what?!? Are you kidding?

Yeah. Like the Sony PS4.

VGLeaks reports that the operating system used on Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4 is called Orbis OS,

http://www.vgleaks.com/some-details-about-playstation-4-os-development/
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/FreeBSD-Linus-Orbis-OS-PlayStation-OtherOS,23254.html

When in their web interface they conflated Usenet groups with their own Google Groups.

Ya that sucked, not sure when but they also removed headers so you can't track a post anymore.

Then there's http://www.tomshardware.com/ who uses Usenet groups as their forums, I've got thousands of post
there and not even a member.

His issue was that he was dropping the next key down before releasing the previous key, which tended to result in doubled characters for the first key. He was a very fast burst rate typist.

This is a good read related to that: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mechanical-switch-keyboard,2955-5.html

USB has technical limitations on N-key-rollover. Some are limited to only 2 simultanious key presses, some 3, some 6.
PS/2 can technically handle unlimited simultanious key presses, and there are a variety of keyboards that can make use of that.

Personally, I recommend the Das Keyboard. It supports both USB and PS/2 interfaces, 6KRO in USB and NKRO in PS/2, mechanical key switches (depends on the model, but Cherry MX or Red etc), and very low latency (2-5ms). On the downside, it costs money - significantly more than an average keyboard.

There's lots of other keyboards these days sporting mechanical switches and other rarely-considered features, but if the orig poster wants a quality keyboard that'll last and has low latency, one sure bet is Das Keyboard connected via PS/2. I'm pretty sure the majority of keyboards that go for more than $20 would be fine, and any with the mechanical switches would almost certainly perform well enough, but this is the only model of fancy keyboard I've tested and can thus recommend.

Because its gonna use more power and generate more heat than the CPU alone would do? Unless you are using something LV like one of the AMD APUs but with those the memory bandwidth is gonna be a bottleneck and with the low end discretes frankly you aren't gonna get enough of a boost to be worth the trouble, probably nothing lower than an HD7750 (around $80) would be useful in this situation.

Of course it is an option.

Intel's profits have been sagging for a few years due to the drop in PC sales, which is their core business. They have been unsuccessful for the most part in cracking the mobile device marker despite a lot of effort.

Investors have been pushing management to take some of their world class factories and make money fabbing chips for other companies, something that would have a big impact on their bottom line since their manufacturing technology is a generation ahead of everyone else and therefor would command a premium.

Intel has already signed fab agreements with other companies and it has been common knowledge for a while that Intel and Apple were in talks about just such a deal: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Foundry-manufacturing-Apple-Intel-14nm,21400.html

Not heading in this direction would have caused shareholder revolt.

Neat test but I think the summary could at least clarify that the test system is Windows 8 64 Bit. It doesn't really mean a whole lot to me when I'm running a 64 bit distribution of GNU/Linux.

Why not? Are you assuming that either has lots of OS-specific tweaks that tilt that so much?
In any case, it's still relevant which is faster for average joe out there.

Also the tests are selected by Tom's Hardware as a suite ... some of these tests are fairly meaningless to me and I feel like something like cold start time should be more heavily weighted than, say, hardware acceleration performance. The wait time on start up affects everyone and is unavoidable

I only restart firefox after an upgrade, and that's the only time I close it. I'm sure as hell I'm not the only one.

Is anyone reading this actually using Windows 8?

Regrettable, yes, I've seen lots of people out there with shinny new laptops with win8 installed.

The Browser Grand Prix tests by Tom's Hardware use a different platform with every test. e.g. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/android-web-browser-recommendation,3316.html (Android), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108.html (Mac OS X), and http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129.html (Ubuntu).

Windows gets the lion's share of testing because the lion's share of visitors to the Tom's Hardware website run Windows.

The Browser Grand Prix tests by Tom's Hardware use a different platform with every test. e.g. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/android-web-browser-recommendation,3316.html (Android), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108.html (Mac OS X), and http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129.html (Ubuntu).

Windows gets the lion's share of testing because the lion's share of visitors to the Tom's Hardware website run Windows.

The Browser Grand Prix tests by Tom's Hardware use a different platform with every test. e.g. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/android-web-browser-recommendation,3316.html (Android), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108.html (Mac OS X), and http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129.html (Ubuntu).

Windows gets the lion's share of testing because the lion's share of visitors to the Tom's Hardware website run Windows.

I have Win8 installed, though I don't boot into it often. If you look back on previous Tom's Hardware Browser Grand Prix comparisons, they don't always use Windows. e.g. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129.html (Ubuntu), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108.html (Mac OS X), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/android-web-browser-recommendation,3316.html (Android).

As the Anonymous Coward wrote, like it or not (and I definitely don't like it) Windows 8 probably already has a bigger share of the consumer desktop and laptop market than Linux. So it makes sense for Tom's Hardware to test on that platform.

As for the things that are tested, I think it makes sense to include all of their selected categories for two reasons. First, it can potentially show where the development team for a particular product is or is not expending resources. (e.g. If Internet Explorer 11 improves at the speed of DOM manipulation and nothing else, and DOM manipulation wasn't benchmarked, then it would look like Microsoft had done nothing for the new release.) Second, tracking and benchmarking the specific events that cause a slowdown or the impression of a slowdown in a browser is very hard to do. If Firefox and Chrome both take 7 seconds to load a page and Chrome loads it gradually while Firefox loads 90% in one second and then appears to freeze for 5 seconds and then finishes, most people who were not working with a stopwatch would report Chrome as being a dramatically faster browser.

I have Win8 installed, though I don't boot into it often. If you look back on previous Tom's Hardware Browser Grand Prix comparisons, they don't always use Windows. e.g. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129.html (Ubuntu), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108.html (Mac OS X), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/android-web-browser-recommendation,3316.html (Android).

As the Anonymous Coward wrote, like it or not (and I definitely don't like it) Windows 8 probably already has a bigger share of the consumer desktop and laptop market than Linux. So it makes sense for Tom's Hardware to test on that platform.

As for the things that are tested, I think it makes sense to include all of their selected categories for two reasons. First, it can potentially show where the development team for a particular product is or is not expending resources. (e.g. If Internet Explorer 11 improves at the speed of DOM manipulation and nothing else, and DOM manipulation wasn't benchmarked, then it would look like Microsoft had done nothing for the new release.) Second, tracking and benchmarking the specific events that cause a slowdown or the impression of a slowdown in a browser is very hard to do. If Firefox and Chrome both take 7 seconds to load a page and Chrome loads it gradually while Firefox loads 90% in one second and then appears to freeze for 5 seconds and then finishes, most people who were not working with a stopwatch would report Chrome as being a dramatically faster browser.

I have Win8 installed, though I don't boot into it often. If you look back on previous Tom's Hardware Browser Grand Prix comparisons, they don't always use Windows. e.g. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129.html (Ubuntu), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108.html (Mac OS X), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/android-web-browser-recommendation,3316.html (Android).

As the Anonymous Coward wrote, like it or not (and I definitely don't like it) Windows 8 probably already has a bigger share of the consumer desktop and laptop market than Linux. So it makes sense for Tom's Hardware to test on that platform.

As for the things that are tested, I think it makes sense to include all of their selected categories for two reasons. First, it can potentially show where the development team for a particular product is or is not expending resources. (e.g. If Internet Explorer 11 improves at the speed of DOM manipulation and nothing else, and DOM manipulation wasn't benchmarked, then it would look like Microsoft had done nothing for the new release.) Second, tracking and benchmarking the specific events that cause a slowdown or the impression of a slowdown in a browser is very hard to do. If Firefox and Chrome both take 7 seconds to load a page and Chrome loads it gradually while Firefox loads 90% in one second and then appears to freeze for 5 seconds and then finishes, most people who were not working with a stopwatch would report Chrome as being a dramatically faster browser.

And by "Mozilla's stats" I am referring to their internal benchmarking using Kraken (Mozilla/Firefox), Sunspider (Apple/Webkit), and Octane (Google/Chrome). Mozilla owns and operates Are We Fast Yet.com and has a nice JS performance over time comparing each JS engine.

Do note that this is just JavaScript and not the whole shebang, but these days, they're pretty close. The JS section of Tom's review uses one of these JS tests and has similar results (though they discard its findings). Tom's does conclude that Chrome beats FF handily here.

I'm pretty surprised to see Chrome beating Firefox handily in JS and HTML and memory efficiency and standards and security yet losing overall. Perhaps too much weight was put into the hardware acceleration piece? Perhaps Tom's forgot that FF startup isn't so good when you load lots of addons (as most do)? My reading of those is that Chrome is the clear winner ... and I'm a Firefox fan (for usability, security, and privacy, mostly via addons).

Neat test but I think the summary could at least clarify that the test system is Windows 8 64 Bit. It doesn't really mean a whole lot to me when I'm running a 64 bit distribution of GNU/Linux. Also the tests are selected by Tom's Hardware as a suite ... some of these tests are fairly meaningless to me and I feel like something like cold start time should be more heavily weighted than, say, hardware acceleration performance. The wait time on start up affects everyone and is unavoidable where hardware acceleration is nice but also not something I focus on. Also, why is a topic like "security" included in a "performance" test? I think standards compliance and security should be separated out to their own scores.

Is anyone reading this actually using Windows 8?

You mean the "slow startup speed" that's 2x faster than Chrome? See http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera-next,3534-4.html for what the startup times look like if you actually measure them.

It's not quite that bad. You'll be able to upgrade from RTM to final in-place, but you'll have to reinstall all your apps and desktop applications. If you just wait until the final release, you won't have to reinstall anything. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-8.1-Windows-RT-Public-Preview-TechED-Michael-Niehaus,22985.html

As of 2013, the user can attach arbitrary tags to a file and search by tag as well as filename (e.g. "important"). Turns out MS introduced file "comments" with Win XP, although searching by comment was awkward. Vista improved upon it, and of course Win 7 inherited it from Vista.

Oooh. Are you sure you wanna go there? http://www.themacintoshguy.com/mactips/archive/tip14.shtml

Jan 1997. The feature is older, actually, but I'm too lazy to dig further.

Go look up the spec sheets for Sandy CPUs. Or better yet Google 3570K and VT-d. Surprise! I found out the hard way myself when I built an ESX server and couldn't install, I found the feature greyed out in the BIOS. A quick Google on that model and I realized I'd been had too.

http://ark.intel.com/products/65520

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/356118-28-purchased-3570k-virtualization

So does USB...and serial for that matter. Whether one would want to is another matter. Thunderbolt is a small fraction of native x16 speeds

Apparently someone else who knows more than you thinks it's a good idea.

Could have saved yourself a lot of embarrassment there with a bit of Google work.

Where is your evidence of this?

That it's three 4K displays? My "evidence" is the Apple Mac Pro specs page which says exactly that.

Name one system EVER where you could subtract pixels from one display and magically be allowed to connect another.

You may want to read up on the meaning of the word BANDWIDTH. In fact the total amount of bandwidth dictates the number of displays you can attach via thunderbolt, you can have more displays withe lower resolution. You seriously do not understand how that is possible?

Those aren't specs, it's an ad

It's an ad, with some specs. I see the problem though, it's not that you can't read, it's that you lack the technical depth and understanding of newer technologies to understand what is going on.

I'll let you have the last response since there's no way you can learn enough to write an intelligent reply before the story is locked.

But they'll just take it all away in a year or two with a mandatory software update, citing fears of piracy.

Again.

This is exactly what is going to happen.

For those unfamiliar with the "again" comment; Sony use to have a feature called open platform for PS3. It was a major selling feature when the PS3 came out. But Sony removed the feature and blocked the ability to install alternative OSes on the PS3.

Remember, we are talking about Sony, FAMOUS for DRM, removing paid for features, blocking access, DMCA lawsuits...

I checked, there is no 12 core version of Xeon E5, so presumably to get the 12 cores on this one will use two packages as the last one did.

You need to check more carefully:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Intel-Xeon-Ivy-Bridge-EP-Server,21972.html

It doesn't, and the thing we've noted is they're using workstation graphics, which is good for workstations but bad for those of us who just wanted a high quality, high end PC. I've been happily using my macbook pro but I really want a machine that I can play games on, and that has apple's high quality.

It's not clear which FirePro graphics card is being used (or even if it's one of AMD's standard offerings at all), but reviews show that the FirePro W7000 and W9000 actually handle games pretty well.

As of 2013, the user can attach arbitrary tags to a file and search by tag as well as filename (e.g. "important"). Turns out MS introduced file "comments" with Win XP, although searching by comment was awkward. Vista improved upon it, and of course Win 7 inherited it from Vista.

Doing it with ASICs requires dealing with slimeballs who insist you pre-pay for hardware and deliver months later, if at all.

Maybe you were too preoccupied with greed to get it from the one company that actually DOES have a shipping product(Global delivery in 3Days): Block Erupter Blade
Proven track record with 1000s of units sold already(usb miner and blades)

Remember, more than half the Bitcoins that can exist have already been mined, and it gets steadily harder.

And almost half are yet to be taken, >40% of that within the next 3½ years.

Stealing other people's GPU cycles has a track record of success. But it's hard to do that from JavaScript.

Yet I bet the slimeballs will still manage somehow 1dice9wVtrKZTBbAZqz1XiTmboYyvpD3t

Mining Bitcoins is over. Doing it with an ordinary CPU is hopeless. Doing it with a GPU barely pays for the power consumption. Doing it with FPGA hardware still sort of works, but not for much longer. Doing it with ASICs requires dealing with slimeballs who insist you pre-pay for hardware and deliver months later, if at all.

Remember, more than half the Bitcoins that can exist have already been mined, and it gets steadily harder.

Stealing other people's GPU cycles has a track record of success. But it's hard to do that from JavaScript.

The hardware is almost always sold at a loss. I say almost always, because it's known that Sony and Microsoft have done this with all PS and Xbox releases - I don't know if Nintendo does this. In Sony's case, the last two iterations also helped boost other divisions (via the PS2 at release, being a cheap DVD-player, and the Blu-Ray drive in the PS3), though usually the HW is considered a sunken cost, and the money comes from games.

This is why the price of games hasn't gone down as much as you'd think given the prevalence of DLC and online distribution channels, lessening the significance of store shelf distribution. While previous for previous iterations, it could well be that the hardware was ended up amortizing over the lifespan of the console.

The hardware has gotten beefier and as such, more expensive to produce, especially where custom hardware is used, like the PS3's Cell processor, which shows no indication of being deployed much outside of Sony. It wouldn't be the first time that IBM has failed to drive prices low enough for resellers to price down (See Apple and PowerPC), It's difficult to amortize when there isn't enough external demand to drive down prices, and not all that far-fetched to imagine that the hardware is then sold at a loss for the duration of its life cycle.

This is probably which the PS4 will be a glorified gaming PC (also sold at a loss, roughly half or less the cost of a comparatively-spec'ed gaming PC), commodity parts amortize much more quickly, and are generally more inexpensive right out of the gate, it's a commodity after all, the external demand is already there. Incidentally, think of it, over the course of it's entire life cycle (7 years), Sony has moved 77 million PS3s (as per wikipedia), conversely, HP, Dell and Acer moved 68 million, 43 million and 41 million units respectively, in a single year (as per here. Lots more potential for production costs to be drive down over the lifespan of a system, wouldn't you figure?

Tl;DR version: They're not "buying their hardware wrong", they're selling hardware that doesn't amortize as quickly or easily at a loss to make coin on game sales.

"What's more, the Core-i3 matches the A4-5000 in power efficiency while its HD 4000 graphics completely outpace the APU."

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kabini-a4-5000-review,3518-13.html

While gaming, the 17W i3 is consuming nearly twice the amount of power as the 15W Kabini, at 35W vs 20W. Intel's ULV TDP ratings are an absolute joke.

here

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kabini-a4-5000-review,3518-7.html

Tom's tested them with F1 and Skyrim. HD4000 paired with an i3 beat the Kabini machine in minimum framerate by 50%.

Tom's Hardware has a good-enough gaming PC build for $600.

Tom's Hardware has a good-enough gaming PC build for $600.

Uh, wut?

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-GPU-failure,6248.html

http://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/photos/

Only in theory. In practice, it's going to be better performance with an external GPU than most mobile GPU's.

Bungled my HTML. Here we go again:

" offers 256 MB of Samsung DDR2 SDRAM cache memory", just to re-iterate, SSD makers add RAM cache because RAM cache is faster.

That speed is after the RAM cache is through.

Don't believe me? Another benchmark. That's a random drive that I arrived at by entering "anandtech ssd review" into Google and picking the first link. It's not even the fastest drive in the charts on that page, by far.

The write speed they measured was 317 MB/s. The total amount of data written to the disk was over 100 GB -- so plenty to get past the RAM cache and to the actual SSD. If the 317 MB/s is limited by the RAM and not Flash speed, that means the Flash is even faster.

Don't like that benchmark or Anandtech? OK, here's one from Tom's Hardware. Measured the time do decompress a 50 GB folder. (Again, the RAM cache on the drive and your OS buffer cache (<8GB) isn't gonna save you.) The throughput during that test was ~300 MB/s. You can't get that if you're not writing that fast to the flash.

and benchmark scenarios that don't happen in the real world.

Fine, I'll give you a real-world scenario as best as I can. In a moment, I'll switch over to my Windows box and compile something on SSD and then on HDD. We'll see who wins.

" offers 256 MB of Samsung DDR2 SDRAM cache memory", just to re-iterate, SSD makers add RAM cache because RAM cache is faster.

That speed is after the RAM cache is through.

Don't believe me? Another benchmark. That's a random drive that I arrived at by entering "anandtech ssd review" into Google and picking the first link. It's not even the fastest drive in the charts on that page, by far.

The write speed they measured was 317 MB/s. The total amount of data written to the disk was over 100 GB -- so plenty to get past the RAM cache and to the actual SSD. If the 317 MB/s is limited by the RAM and not Flash speed, that means the Flash is even faster.

Don't like that benchmark or Anandtech? OK, here's one from Tom's Hardware. Measured the time do decompress a 50 GB folder. (Again, the RAM cache on the drive and your OS buffer cache (and benchmark scenarios that don't happen in the real world.

Fine, I'll give you a real-world scenario as best as I can. In a moment, I'll switch over to my Windows box and compile something on SSD and then on HDD. We'll see who wins.

The problem with your approach is that when I have a tablet I want battery life and ease of use. And when I use a PC I want power, and speed! They are orthogonal to each other. As the CAP theorem, says, you can have 2 out of 3, not all three, so choose what you want.

Battery life and speed needn't be orthogonal to each other - a manufacturer could use something like Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa core CPU - low power (and low-performance) cores for use on battery and high power (and high performance) cores for use when docked. So a tablet could be power efficient (and slower) while on battery, but when plugged into a dock, it can become a more powerful, full-featured desktop.

Though it's probably going to need something more powerful than the Cortex-A15 as the high-power core to give a good desktop experience.

Storage is far from solved, let's look at that with your proposed theoretical limit of 1 exabyte and see how that works out. The bottom line is can you buy something like that and use it, it's a little more complicated than buying a bunch of hard drives and sticking them in a several cases and pushing the power button. You've also got to have a lot more drive overhead available to compress all this data to begin with, so you'll need more than an exabyte of working drive space.

Let's start with a company that is well know for making storage arrays. To put this in perspective Drobo in aggregate has sold n Exabyte of storage to /all/ of it's customers. How about backing up this enormous amount of data that you propose is being captured? StorageTek announced the worlds first Exabyte capable Tape drive backup only two years ago.

Now let's look at something from are pie in the sky friends over at DARPA and see what they are doing. It seems they recently announced that they will build a 4 Exabyte system in the for military surveillance. Now let's really go out there and look at marketing for a company claiming to meet the governments theoretical future demand for a really, really large array to be used for data mining and you will find contemplating a 10 exabyte capacity of storage and inquiring what it would costmodel that could meet that demand in the future.

To put some perspective on the logistics of actually doing this look at Cleversafe, they are creating a 10 exabyte array that will be housed in 8 different data centers in 8 different states and use 4.5 million disks.

I think compatibility is more likely for Javascript than most other cross-platform methods. The browser vendors are in a race for performance and standards-compliance. I follow the Tom's Hardware "Browser Grand Prix" tests with interest. The most recent is: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/web-browser-chrome-25-firefox-19,3459.html

For all the billions they make they STILL can't make a discrete (or mobile) GPU worth a crap

HD 4000 is fairly decent for a mobile chip, and Iris from Haswell is looking pretty good from the previews.

Also, OpenCL on Windows, OSX, and Linux.

Ivy Bridge does OpenCL on Windows, Linux support is coming. Performance isn't worthwhile though.

OpenCL is coming (not that there's much point, even their Windows version seems slower than just running OpenCL on the CPU from what I've read), and they're catching up with OpenGL version support. What apps do you use on Linux that actually require the newer versions of OpenGL?

Or, "How many Flying Spaghetti Monsters can we fit in a TARDIS?," which makes about as much sense and has an equal amount of relevance as the speculative, subjective queries you've posted.

You claim that these questions are unreal. Epic Games focused on consoles because of widespread infringement on PCs.

Indeed, because like the page you linked to, they're purely subjective exercises in how particular game companies decide how to deal with a problem they don't seem able to quantify.

In short, without empirical data to back the claims that "piracy killed PC gaming," it's all nothing but hype.