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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.
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.
So you're a fan of a fanless processor?
on your oblivion point, IT DOES have incredibly smart game AI. its just the sheer number to preformance ratio means they have to be stupid. On a good computer (cant remember the specs) they setup 2 NPCs and tasked 1 to rake the lawn and another to clip the hedges. They did so, then, they swapped the items needed so the clipping person had a rake and the raking person had clippers. The raker ended killing the clipper for the rake. Another example of Oblivion's AI is in a test, before you could make it to a quest guy who sold Skooma (a drug), the Skooma Addicts already killed him, ruining the game plot by not allowing you to progress. seem dumb to you? Oh yeah, I'm not sure if the second example is actually what happened in game with AI beefed up or just in a section with few NPCs.
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Yeah, and while we're complaining, my $1.5 million Bugatti Veyron gets under 3mpg at full throttle when I expect BETTER DESIGN that uses LESS GAS when we're trying to REDUCE fossil fuel consumption. I can tell you why, BAD DESIGNERS who need to get off their asses and give me MORE HORSEPOWER with LESS FUEL or talk to the hand.