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The Gigahertz Race is Back On
An anonymous reader writes "When CPU manufacturers ran up against the power wall in their designs, they announced that 'the Gigahertz race is over; future products will run at slower clock speeds and gain performance through the use of multiple cores and other techniques that won't improve single-threaded application performance.' Well, it seems that the gigahertz race is back on — a CNET story talks about how AMD has boosted the speed of their new Opterons to 3GHz. Of course, the new chips also consume better than 20% more power than their last batch. 'The 2222 SE, for dual-processor systems, costs $873 in quantities of 1,000, according to the Web site, and the 8222 SE, for systems with four or eight processors costs $2,149 for quantities of 1,000. For comparison, the 2.8GHz 2220 SE and 8220 SE cost $698 and $1,514 in that quantity. AMD spokesman Phil Hughes confirmed that the company has begun shipping the new chips. The company will officially launch the products Monday, he said.'"
This reminds me of the sign at the local breakfast shop (paraphrased): "Use coffee: do stupid things faster".
Yeah, this is cool, no doubt. How many users actually *use* how much power they already have? I use a lot, but it's mostly dependent on the graphics card.
No sane person actually believed that the gigahurtz race was over. But who cares about it anyway, just more power for a little faster operation.
I muchly prefer a fanless processor.
I was kind of hoping the gigahertz race would end so Microsoft would have to stop making each version of Windows slower than the last.
Remember when in the Mhz number was the most important part of PC advertising ? It did make a difference in the 90s but now people just grab a box and it will be fast enough for their office work anyway.
The common misconception that you should measure a CPU's power using GHz of a processor is one we really need to put to rest forever. That is a bad choice of deciding factor for going with a particular processor, or not. Differences between chips will always be totally immeasurable, so only fools go by chip ratings, IMHO. Customers should read as much as they can and look at final performances and make a decision of whether to buy or not buy.
I would place a much higher reliability factor upon balancing the chip manufacturer's position in the market, their support and services, their overall reputation, their evil factor, and the overall performance of computers that rely on the chip.
A customer should decide on what is really important to them and it should really involve a lot more than which horse looks faster. Sometimes even the slowest damn horse wins the race because of Murphy's Law, which we all know applies to computers.
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I want LOWER POWER CONSUMPTION. This is done by scaling out with more cores. My laptop is going to MELT for fclucks sakes. This is why I buy Intel now instad of AMD for my mobile needs. They have BETTER power "management". Core wars please, not speed wars. SMARTER DESIGNS not BRUTE FORCE.
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...software must be written to make use of all those cores. Dumping low level cache all the time when moving a calculation from one core to another really slows things down unless the software really is optimized. So your wallet would be much better off with a single or maybe dual core anyhow. Like the new 8 core Mac Pro which didn't show much improvement at all over the quad core model. Of course, in the future, software will be written for many cores, but today isn't tomorrow just yet.
Then again, in the same product line, GHz (and perhaps cache amount) is often the only thing that can decide how fast a chip is compared to another.
You are using the GHz info as correctly as possible. There are other mitigating factors that are too ubiquitous for most to comprehend but at the end of the day, you probably won't notice them playing WOW.
In many cases, the true difference is here and here: to confirm, I'm not talking about the overall rates of stock trading, but more so the graph as Google displays what the stocks are doing. Typically the more profitable a company is, the better their product offerings are overall. It's at least a good factor to consider, IMHO.
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Gigahertz race is back on! AMD increases the clockrate of its chips to 3 GHz! Ok.. race is over.
Slows news day? When people announced GHz race is over they didn't mean that they'll only decrease the clockrate didn't they? Both Intel and AMD still bump the clock rate up on further developments of their models, but we should expect that we'll be seeing chips in the range of 1 GHz - 3.8 GHz and no higher than this.
There no effin GHz race.
You'd be surprised how much more _can_ be made with a CPU.
E.g., sure, we like to use the stereotypical old mom as an example of someone who only sends emails to the kids and old friends. Unfortunately it's false. It was true in the 90's, but now digital cameras are everywhere and image manipulation software is very affordable. And so are the computers which can do it. You'd be suprised the kind of heavy-duty image processing mom does on hundreds of pictures of squirrels and geese and whatever was in the park on that day.
And _video_ processing isn't too far out of reach either. It's a logical next step too: if you're taking pictures, why not short movies? Picture doing the same image processing on some thousands of frames in a movie instead of one still pictures.
E.g., software development. Try building a large project on an old 800 MHz slot-A Athlon, with all optimizations on, and then tell me I don't need a faster CPU. Plus, nowadays IDEs aren't just dumb editors with a "compile" option in the menus any more. They compile and cross-reference classes all the time as you type.
E.g., games, since you mention the graphics card. Yeah, ok, at the moment most games are just a glorified graphics engine, and mostly just use the CPU to pump the triangles to the graphics card. Well that's a pretty poor model, and the novelty of graphics alone is wearing off fast.
How about physics? They're just coming into fashion, and fast. Yeah, we make do at the moment with piss-poor approximations, like Oblivion's bump-into-a-table-and-watch-plates-fly-off-superso nic engine. There's no reason we couldn't do better.
How about AI? Already in X2 and X3 (the space sim games) it doesn't only simulate the enemies around you, but also what happens in the sectors where your automated trade or patrol ships are. I want to see that in more games.
Or how about giving good AI to city/empire building games? Tropico already simulated up to 1000 little people in your city, going around their daily lives, making friends, satisfying their needs, etc. Not just doing a dumb loop, like in Pharaoh or Caesar 3, but genuinely trying to solve the problem of satisfying their biggest need at the moment: e.g., if they're hungry, they go buy food (trekking across the whole island if needed), if they're sick, they go to a doctor, etc. I'd like to see more of that, and more complex at that.
Or let's have that in RPGs, for that matter. Oblivion for example made a big fuss about how smart and realistic their AI is... and it wasn't. But the hype it generated does show that people care about that kind of thing. So how about having games with _big_ cities, not just 4-5 houses, but cities with 1000-2000 inhabitants, which are actually smart. Let's have not just a "fame" and "infamy" rating, let's have people who actually have a graph of aquaintances and friends, and actually gradually spread the rumours. (I.e., you're not just the guy with 2 points infamy, but it's a question of which of your bad deeds did this particular NPC hear about.) Let's not have omniscient guards that teleport, but actually have witnesses calculate a path and run to inform the guards, and lead them to the crime. Etc.
Or how about procedurally generated content? The idea of creating whole cities, quests and whatnot procedurally isn't a new one, but unfortunately it tends to create boring repetition at the moment. (See Daggerfall or Morrowind.) How about an AI complex enough to generate reasonably interesting stuff. E.g., not just recombine blocks, but come up with a genuinely original fortress from the ground up, based on some constraints. E.g., how about generating whole story arcs? It's not impossible, it's just very hard.
And if you need to ask "why?", let's just say: non-linear stories. Currently if you want, for example, to play a light side and a dark side, someone has to code two different arcs, although most players will only see one or the other. If you add more points and ways you can branch the story (e.g.
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So again we're pushing down the throttle a hint more instead of shifting into next gear. I mean, ok, I'm not a hardware guru, but could it be that we might get more done with less speed if we managed to get things done more "intelligently" instead of simply "faster"?
How about a bit more than just 8 registers? Maybe a bit more "distributed computing" inside the machine, with more than just outsourcing the graphics to a GPU, maybe a chip dedicated to memory or interrupt handling? I dunno, personally it feels like we're just adding more heat and try to clock it faster than trying to find new ways to speed up processing.
Maybe someone with more background in hardware design can enlighten me why the race for more cores and more Hertz. I mean, I can see the marketing aspect (after so many years, people would buy a 3 GHz processor "old style" rather than a "new school" 2GHz at the same price 'cause it "looks" faster), but is there actually a technological reason why we don't even consider looking at other ways to improve our speed?
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"The Gigahertz Race is Back On"
No, I don't think so. It's just that AMD pushed the clock frequency for this CPU, but that works becuase it was just up to 3 GHz.
Watch me be right when they don't continue to push that generation to clock speeds 3x higher or so like they could in the past.
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future products will run at slower clock speeds and gain performance through the use of multiple cores and other techniques that won't improve single-threaded application performance.
This is misleading. No one gave up improving the performance of single-threaded apps.
All new chips are striving to improve the performance of each core by packing more executed commands per cpu cycle. This is achieved with better branch prediction, concurrent execution of commands that are in principle serial (this is possible as long as they don't depend on each other), and less execution "stages", i.e. more efficient architecture.
We'll see lots of speed improvements in each separate core, and we'll see it via smarter and smarter architecture that adapts to the code being executed.
The reason we've not seen this before, is because this is a very complex task, and upping the GHz seemed easier.
Having a really long pipeline with a high clock speed doesn't make your computer faster. It sounds better in marketing terms though - which is why Intel eventually fell flat on it's face when consumers found out the P4's were crap. If Intel's high clockspeed cpus also performed, we'd still see a mhz war because intel would still be focusing on it in their marketing. Right now it's just on the backburner.
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People say they should focus on multiple cores and not push the clock frequency and whatnot. Thing is, those are not mutually exclusive improvements. The the only real problem if you manage to create faster chips is the power consumption, and consequentially heat generation. Sure, you have to do some science to get it working in the first place, but is there actually a direct disadvantage to having chips run quicker other than power consumption? It doesn't stop you from using multiple cores, or even multiple CPUs, heck you could probably do something cunning where you run 10 minutes on one CPU, as it heats up you switch over to the another for 10 min and let it cool down. The limit to clock frequency is far from attained, the question is only one of economics. What I can see is a drop in clock frequency as they start stacking circuits in 3D as it will be harder to get the heat out of them, then the frequency will scale up again as innovative ways to cool the cpu develops. The only real place I can see the power consumption of a CPU being a big show stopper in itself ( i.e not due to limiting how densely you can pack in it etc ) is in laptops. In a desktop system you can get kilo watts of the socket, and the CPU itself doesn't produce more heat than a few light bulbs. Basically the only thing keeping the frequency down is that there are currently ways to improve CPUs that have not been previously exploited ( multiple cores etc ). Once those start to become unable to give a speed increase ( you only have so many threads etc ) the clock frequency will become important again.
Funny, Intel was chumped by AMD just like this a couple of years ago, why did AMD let themselves get tagged back? Intel woke up in a major way. Can AMD? Doesn't look too good...
I just rebuilt my home server with a Via C7 processor and several segate laptop hard drives (Gotta love 7200rpm laptop drives)
I have plenty of power for zoneminder,web,upnp server, mp3 playback server,SQL etc... and I cut the power consumption by almost 80%!
Cripes the Via processor runs at 2ghz with no fan and deals with Centos quite fast.. In fact it's far faster than the quad P-III it replaced that was sucking up power like no tommorow (Corperate servers at home are a silly thing!)
I dont care about GHZ, I care about power use. 1.8ghz is more than enough for 90% of daily tasks, I want my laptop to last 7 hours and my power bill to be under $300.00 a month.
I still am grinning ear to ear that I have a 2U server that has a terabyte of storage and does everything the last one did but only has a 150watt power supply in it. at normal operation my wattminder shows it is only using 65 watts. Yes that is with all 7 hard drives spinning. It drops down to 15 watts during idle times (well as idle as you can get with zoneminder running)
it uses less power than my Crestron Pro2 home automation processor!
Hell even my old outdated P4 3.0ghz 32bit dinosaur plays Quake4 at full settings just fine as well as editing 1080i video.
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So because AMD is releasing a 3Ghz Operton, suddenly the "Gigahertz Race" is magically back on? Is this some AMD guy trying to win support after the last article talked about their massive operating losses?
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Frankly, I run my laptop (Pentium M, not sure which model) clocked at 600 MHz whenever it's not connected to a power source. It works great, and I really don't see much of a difference.
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Lol 3GHz, we had that when? like 3-4 years ago, if the race was really back on show me a 5-10GHZ cpu on air (not vapo cooled).
if we're back on the GHz race, then what was the race we just left? the multicore-race? doesn't sound snazzy enough.
. The Gigahertz race is not back on. As far as raw speed, we've been around 3Ghz for probably longer then any other 'milestone' speed in the last 12 years.
It seems for all practicle reasons, the speed war is dead and will stay that way baring major change in chip material.
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It may be that AMD is worried because they had an ~650 Million Dollar loss last year. Yet I don't think they're worried to much - they are still well in the game. It would take but one thing to be the top-seller again: Move back to one single socket for all CPUs. And one only.
When AMD came out with Socket A it was such a relief to know you are safe to know that your hardware will fit be it in economy, business or first class. If they'd ditch their socket confusion, people would turn to AMD simply for easy of use and system building & maintainance. Who cares nowadays if you're a few Flops slower or not. Ease of use and true upgradability is a key feature that has been entirely dissmissed within the last 5 years. AMD would only need to reintruduce the concept and they'd generate a solid revenue again.
My 2 cents.
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Innovation in the CPU market has been driven by fabrication technology for years. AMD is currently getting pwn3d due to their inability to perfect insulator layer film depositing processes at 45 nanometers. Intel beat them to the punch line with hafnium insulator layers measuring under 10 atoms in thickness and will outperform AMD until they catch up. This is sad considering it is currently delaying AMD 4 core single die CPUs, which will leapfrog Intel performance significantly.
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I think it is actually funny that in order to use Vista without it being maddeningly slow, you will need 4 ghz to have the same performance with a spreadsheet as you would under CP/M with 4 Mhz.
Really says a lot on what happens when you let a monopoly like Microsoft exist, and dictate what utter garbage you will use.
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Bumping the speed from 2.5Ghz to 3Ghz is hardly a return to the Ghz race. This stuff is still based on cold war technology and the limit of cold war technology has been reached. They need a serious breakthrough in interconnect speeds now.
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I see this complaint a lot, and it's a severe misunderstanding of the situation. AMD processors have onboard memory controllers - that means that a Socket AM2 processor (with a DDR2 memory controller) could never drop into a Socket 939 system (DDR memory) anyway - it wouldn't know what to do with the RAM.
Now that DDR2 RAM is pretty standard, AMD only has 2 different sockets: AM2 and 1207 - one is for consumer level systems, and one is for multi-socket systems that need NUMA support like servers. For the moment (the next year or so), these sockets will be pretty stable. Actually, Intel is talking about bringing the graphics controller on die at about the same time that AMD will move to DDR3/FBDIMM next year, so they'll be changing sockets too.
Back in the real world, this doesn't matter enough to effect the market. Most people don't upgrade computers, they replace them. Even for those few people who do upgrade computer components, it'd be time for a new motherboard now if you had an AMD processor old enough to use an old socket - PCI Express and DDR2 are pretty good stuff compared to AGP and DDR.
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After reading the article and many of the responses here on Slashdot I think many of the readers on here are a little off base on what the issues are to many of the problems you proposed that increased CPU performance might solve.
I read many comments about graphic editing. Being that hardly a day goes by where I don't do some graphic editing I think I am qualified to respond to this. The synergy lab at my University, where I am pursuing my Masters in Computer Science, has a Dual Power Mac with 2 Intel dual core 2.66 Ghz CPUs but only has 1 Gigabyte of RAM. At home I have a Dual Power Mac G4 with 2 800 Mhz CPU. I am not trying to argue here that the IBM 970 processors are superior to the Intel, though they may well be (lol), but I have 4 Gigabytes of RAM in my home system. I am way more productive working on my home system due to the increased memory it has. Graphic editing by nature is a RAM intensive process. If I were going to buy a new system that would be dedicated to graphic editing I would first spend my budgeted amount of money on making sure the system had the maximum amount of RAM (16 Gigabytes currently) before I gave any thought to the processor(s) for such a system.
Also, many people mentioned either directly or indirectly processes that simulate AI. I make a point of saying "simulate" because our society has yet to produce any software that can come close to claiming to contain any AI. This is not a problem that can be solved by increased CPU or RAM or any other system resource. The #1 problem that plagues any currently developed program in their attempts to simulate AI is that our society has not developed a strong enough knowledge base of intelligence itself to understand how to write code that gives any acceptable level of simulation of it. If Intel where to release a 500 THz CPU tomorrow there would be no significant increase in real or simulated AI. Though, with enough CPU speed and RAM it might be possible one day to create a tree (data structure) that contains all the possible moves for a game of chess which would allow a computer to play a perfect game of chess this would not be an application of AI, although at one time people believed that chess was an application of AI, we have now realized that this is not the case and if a computer did have the complete tree for the game of chess, a significant accomplishment, it would simply be an application of brute force. I have yet to see any application of AI (again real or simulated) that faced against a human opponent can compete at a level that would challenge the human. Again, this is due to basic lack of understanding and programming skill rather than a lack of processing power. IMHO, that someday man may gain enough understanding and programming skill to not only simulate but actually program AI. When I think of this possibility I imagine it will be one of those eureka moments rather than a slow progression based upon our current study of AI. At best we are currently guessing and hoping that we might stumble on something than can simulate AI and even with all the computing power available in the world I do not believe we would be any further along.
If anything an increase in hardware performance be it CPU, RAM, or whatnot that increase is generally proceeded by more and more inefficient code. Why make your code more efficient when the lack of performance in your programs can easily be overcome by ever increasing system resources?
I remember when one had to upgrade their computer each year to be able to continue to have a viable system. Long gone are those days. I have had my primary system for nearly 7 years now. I will need to upgrade soon but not because my system is lacking in hardware performance but because of the scenario I described above in which programmers continue to use system hardware as a crutch. If some physical limitation were to present itself that prevented the creation of faster CPUs by either increased clock cycles or additional cores then programmers would adapt and we would cont
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AMD may be getting to 3GHz this year, but IBM's going to be at 4-5GHz when it ships its next blade, System p and System i servers later this year or early next year.
... So what's new about this? The older Intel NetBurst processors (which were not as efficent per clock, of course) actually hit 3.7GHz with the 'Dempsey' cpu.
The real story about the clock being turned back on is Intel's 45nm Penryn derived products due in Q4, which have very low current leakage due to high K dialectic metal design. EARLY SAMPLES of these have been shown running at 3.2GHz, so it's anybody's guess how high Intel will be able to push that architecture. (Interestingly, despite being due in late Q2, the AMD Barcelonas have rarely been shown, and even when they are, I understand at only at low clock frequencies (less than 2.5GHz)).
Rumour has it Intel will be releasing the Clovertown quad cores, now at 2.66GHz at 3.0GHz soon too...
As I was saying, you'd be surprised ;)
E.g., we have already played games with _awful_ fortresses, for example, even designed by humans.
Take Fort Moonmoth from Morrowind for example. (Or whatever the one right east of Balmora was called.) Among other pieces of awfulness, it was built right into a hill side. So you could climb up a gentle slope up the hill, and actually rain arrows _downwards_ on the defenders in the towers. Or you could just keep walking over the hill and... find yourself on the walls. Forget about bringing a ladder to storm the walls, it had that hill as a bloody natural ramp onto the walls.
It's a fortress that makes absolutely no sense from a military point of view. It's a waste of stone and manpower. For that matter, it's also a logistics disaster, it lacks the basic services which would be needed in either a castrum or proper defensive fort, etc.
Take the walled towns in Morrowind. They make no bloody sense. They don't even have gates, or ramparts or towers. They can't even keep wild animals out. Seriously.
Plus, what sense does it make to build a city wall, in a world where every mage and their friends can (A) fly, and (B) teleport inside to the fort's chapel? Forget ballistas vs trebuchets, those two problems make the whole fortress obsolete in one go.
This isn't meant as an attack on Morrowind, but just as an illustration of the kind of nonsense we put up with in games. It's not even just Morrowind, anyway. Most cities and forts in games are, simply put, non-functional decor. They are to the real thing, well, what a plastic flower is to a real flower. It looks like one, but doesn't actually function like one, and even the looks are there only as long as you don't look too closely.
So, well, what I'm really trying to say is: I'm sure we could live with imperfections in a computer-generated one too. If it built a wooden palisade in an age of cannons, I'm sure most RPG players wouldn't give that problem a second thought.
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"So because the majority of computer buyers and users don't know what they're buying, then people go with the "bigger number = better computer" theory. And why shouldn't they?"
That is exactly what they believe to be true, more frequently than not. I completely agree that there should be a form of standardization between retail computers to help customers protect themselves, but the computer industry is self-regulating and there is no way to leverage them into being more forthcoming, unless there was a profit motivator for that and we all know that's not the case.
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The CPU race is clearly already focused on multiple cores, not GHz. The next race is going to be in software and I/O. Multithreaded everything. More cache on CPU. Better memory controllers. Faster Bus ASICs and resulting front side buses. Nice machines are targeted for media and science applications....
Wait a second, most x86 has had RISC underbelly since pentium pro. Everyone is multithreading everything. I/O is getting a lot more press. Cache is multiplying. CPU clock is no longer the end all be all. The desktop is opengl. Programmable gfx and audio cards? If I didn't have a calendar, I would swear that we were discussing SGI, circa late 90's. Ahhh, SGI. RIP.
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Hey, how was copper wiring invented? You and your brother fighting over a penny!
Really a thin client is not the way to go. A frontend PC, connected to a big cluster or renderfarm, is.
You set up and preview all the changes that you want, at some low resolution, on the workstation, and then send it off to the farm for all the work that doesn't need to be done in absolutely real time.
This sort of architecture gets used with animation, but I could see it being used for video editing as well (and it sort of is with some of Apple's high-end products if I understand them -- they have some way of using "compute nodes" to do the heavy lifting for some desktop apps). You could do your frame-by-frame editing and produce your EDL while working on a low-res version of the content, say 480p which any decent desktop can handle easily, and then ship it off to a backend system to apply those same changes to the 1080p files. It's not quite as easy to do it with 2D graphics, but you could still preview at low resolutions and then if you thought it might be interesting, dump each change into a queue to be processed offline; you could line up any number of versions and have each one rendered and parallel and then go through and look at them when they're done, and pick which is the keeper and discard the rest. That would let the user keep working on their local machine without tying it up.
Thin clients just aren't "snappy" enough for most people; every system I've used, including VNC and Citrix and SunFire and some proprietary systems, introduces lag -- acceptable for a POS system, maybe, but not something I'd want to use if I was doing intense creative work under a lot of stress, trying to beat a deadline. Every tenth of a second that a menu takes to drop when clicked is one more thing that's going to be aggravating. But there's no sense in doing anything that can be batch-processed on the user's local machine -- dedicate their box solely to interacting with them.
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I've got an LED power graph on my UPS that my desktop is connected to. Back when my main PC was a Dual P3 800, it was common for the graph to be at 2, and when a flash animation in the browser cycled the graph would increase a notch.
Software development is like any other type of engineering: you have to balance Human resources against quality. Sure, Microsoft could have allowed the Office team to spend twenty years designing the applications to run lean and mean, to do everything the hard way. But Microsoft (Microsoft the corporation, not some hypothetical "lazy" programmers) chose to use fewer programmers over a shorter length of time, using development techniques that produce a finished, polished product quickly. You may not like how slow Java or Python are, but you can hash out an Enterprise Beans networked database app or a Ruby-on-Rails system in a fraction of the time that it would take to develop a comparable C++ app from scratch using basic principles. By saving that enormous amount of development time, the work is cheaper and more profitable.
Like it or not, the industrial revolution happened. We can sit around like old men pining for the days of artisans, cottage-industries, and guilds; but the rest of the world wants cheap mass-produced merchandise. And this applies to software every bit as much as it applies to steam engines, cotton garments, or anything else. There will always be a small market for the works of artisans, but the great masses of the people have no intention of going without, simply to satisfy some ridiculous notions about the evils of industrialism and mass production.
Modern software is the way it is, not because programmers are lazy, but because customers want to pay less money for more functionality.
So you're saying "what's new about this" when AMD increases the speed of the opteron from 2.8 to 3.0GHz (up 200Mhz), while you talk about how great it is that Intel's early samples are running at 3.2GHz (up 200MHz from 3.0GHz)?
The 3.0GHz Clovertown quad core is already available, BTW. What AMD really needs to do to catch up is not raise the clock speed 200MHz to match Intel, it's to get their quad core (and beyond) chips out the door. HyperTransport should theoretically allow their chips to scale better than Netburst.
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The 3.0GHz Clovertown quad core is already available, BTW. What AMD really needs to do to catch up is not raise the clock speed 200MHz to match Intel, it's to get their quad core (and beyond) chips out the door. HyperTransport should theoretically allow their chips to scale better than Netburst.
Clovertowns are core architecture, not NetBurst. No one cares how HT helps AMD scale against NetBurst, the issue is how does HT scale against Core 2 and the coming 45nm products. Benchmarks have shown FSB is not necessarily bad.
That should have said Netburst's FSB, which is where Core 2 inherited it's FSB from.
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