Slashdot Mirror
Intel to Take Online Suggestions for New Chips
hhavensteincw writes "Intel has quietly launched a new online community that it plans to use to take feedback and suggestions from OEMs and end users for new features in its vPro chips and management software. Intel envisions that the community will grow to allow users to get answers from other community members faster than Intel's support group can answer questions."
Next you'll be wanting them to not screw customers by trying to force/coerce/bribe retailers not to sell AMD based PCs.
All they are trying to do is get the general public to do their work for them. The same way MS releases shit incomplete software and gets suckers/users to pay money to beta-test it for them.
Does this mean I can say pretty please and intel will put altivec into their chips so h.264 encoding isn't such a dog?
Get a web developer
*(Cores are process-shrinked versions of the Intel 8088) I'd like to see Intel try making some massively multicore CPU, even if it's just a 64XScale. A joint venture with a company whose name sounds like it comes out of superhero comics would have to be called Super-Duper-Threading.
Intel has nothing to lose by documenting all the instruction sets, architecture designs etc. They have such a big brand name - it doesn't really matter if their designs became public.
It is quite sad that despite their chips being 100s of times faster than a few years ago, so-called 'partners' and OEMs like Microsoft have given the x86 series a bad name - resulting in little or no incremental performance gains for the user community.
Like HP made winprinters and some vendors made winmodems to the customer's ire... and the perennial problems faced by video and audio device mfrs. including big names like Creative... it is clear that the biggest OEM, namely Microsoft determines what customers get to see of "Intel Inside".
The recent thrust towards Open Source drivers for wireless cards from Intel is a very small and incomplete step. Recently at my firm, we talked to Intel for sourcing a 1000 laptops for students joining our colleges. Intel said they would share roadmaps and plans under NDA!!
This is a far cry from 20 years ago when Intel gave out the complete instruction sets and architecture layouts for their 8080; I sort-of remember the Zilog Z-80 did a better job of implementing them. Unless Intel come clean in favour of the truly Open source model, they risk small time players making it big in niche segments - including the biggest niche of them all - the PC market. If not Negroponte, someone else will come out with a non-Intel platform for under $100 and Intel will go down pulling others like Microsoft behind them.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I'd like a chip with a higher clock speed. I'd like a chip that doesn't cause the lights to dim around the house when I power it up. I'd like a chip that doesn't require a heatsink the size of Guatemala and a fan with the power of a small tornado. I'd like a chip that doesn't glow like the surface of the sun if you remove the heatsink.
I've read that the reason Intel / AMD are going parallel rather than increasing clock rate is due to the problem of heat dissipation. Multi-core is great for some apps (web-server farms, simulation), but is not going to speed up most (single-threaded) apps. Dual core is nice. About the time the industry is going from 16 to 32 cores, I doubt most users will care - or bother to upgrade. And if the heat problem is not solvable - that may be a serious marketing problem for chip makers and computer manufacturers.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I'd like to see something like an FPGA onboard with a compiler (or device driver model) that can allow us to take some time consuming things such as CODECs and push them off into hardware.
Give the on board video chips some of there OWN RAM you can use a system like ati hypermemory and nvidia turbocache.
Open up the xeon cpu to chipset links so you have more choice in chipsets like AMD systems do.
Dump FB-DIMMS from xeon systems or make the same chipset with FB-DIMMS or DDR 2/3 ECC. The new xeno chipset with 2 pci-e 2.0 x16 slots should be FB-DIMM or DDR ECC.
Make the new chipsets with all pci-e 2.0 slots not some 2.0 and the rest 1.1 yes the new xeon chip with pci-e 2.0 will only have 2 slots with pci-e 2.0.
Go to true quad-core not 2 dual's linked by FSB.
Dump the FSB and go to the HT bus.
Intel doesn't listen to its own engineers (mm I am posting Anonymous, wonder why?)
What makes anyone think that they would listen to the general public?
At Intel you can fuck up major projects costing millions of dollars and still get to keep your job. However, if you are not on your group's staff and you offer up painful criticism your career is over. And remember you can't transfer out of a group at Intel unless your leaving manager OKs it.
Actually, no, I haven't. What's good, exactly?
We're stuck with basically the same CPU we had 20 years ago, only faster. It's an ugly instruction set that makes writing compilers unnecessarily difficult. It didn't meet (until recently?) the Popek/Goldberg criteria so it sucked at virtualization. The ISA doesn't really matter (I know!) -- so it might as well be one that makes sense, that people will learn about in school, no?
The machine architecture hasn't improved. We've still got the CPU in this corner and the memory in that corner and the von Neumann bottleneck between them, worse than ever. I've heard of some innovative solutions to this, but none that one could actually buy.
I'd love to have features like object persistence in hardware. Before Apple started using USB in their iMac (after which the PC companies started using it seriously), though, you couldn't even reliably hot-plug a keyboard. Why can't I do something as basic as upgrade my RAM while my computer is running? It's not really that hard.
OK, so our CPUs got a lot faster. Great. I'd trade a couple gigahertz for a well-designed computer, thanks.
But in the long term, I think competition can be good for the companies involved, too. (Not in all cases, of course, but in some sectors of the economy.) I think semiconductors is a pretty good example. Imagine if for the last 10 years we had only a single vendor of chips (Intel, AMD, IBM, whoever). This single vendor would feel very little competition, and would thus feel no pressure to innovate. The technology would advance much more slowly. The end result would actually be that people would be replacing their computers every 6-10 years instead of every 3-5 years. So, in short, they actual sell less volume, even if they keep all the volume for themselves, and can charge higher prices. (Higher prices means less volume, too.) Essentially, the frenetic "technological refresh" that we currently engage in is precisely what drives the semiconductor industry. This wouldn't exist without the constant innovation and competition.
It's natural for companies to want to always dominate, since this will always yield short-term gains. However I think companies in a vibrant, competitive sector of the economy can generate more money, overall, than if the competition didn't exist.
(Again, I fully accept that this won't always be the case. For example in established domains where there is a constant demand for a product, being a monopoly is "a license to print money," as they say.)
I'd be quiet about this too if I were Intel. This is a stupid idea. Half your end users (including me) couldn't care less about what chip they have in their computer as long at works. The other half of your end users want the chips in pink or with an integrated LED. Either way a forum like this will just piss people off, because even the good suggestions aren't going to mesh with their five-year development schedule.
I would be happy if they released a motherboard with a user programmable TPM chip. In particular, I am looking for a chip that can be used for general purpose cryptographic functions, that can be reprogrammed with a different (user known) endorsement keys, and that can permanently disable remote attestation and other chip dependent remote and/or configuration based DRM functions.
-Valen
Why not actually enter the GPU market?
I don't mean the current minor onboard garbage they're putting out now. I mean real, high end chips to combat the GeForce 8800 series or the Radeon x2900 series. With their own GPU development department, and their open drivers, they could really blow open the market.
Why not?
Make something with the equivalent power usage of Via's Eden 15000, but faster. Surely Intel has the research budget to accomplish it too.
I want a small, fanless computing appliance that is going to last 20 years or more with zero maintenance other than software. No dust, no noise, no ticking time bomb spinning parts and electrolytic capacitors. Something that will not require me buying a huge solar panel if I want to go that route. If I have data storage needs, USB, firewire or eSATA external hard drive enclosures will suffice.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
The problem with the instruction set is not due to the chipmakers but because there is an awful lot of proprietary software ( in particular windows ) which relies on it. Just have a look at Linux, the BSDs and Solaris. They have all been ported to numerous architectures, but this just isn't possible with a closed source application unless the vendor decides to do it. As a consequence Intel and AMD has no choice but to continue using x86 because so much software depends on it, and it would be suicidal for them to stop supporting it.