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Intel Moves Up 32nm Production, Cuts 45nm
Vigile writes "Intel recently announced that it was moving up the production of 32nm processors in place of many 45nm CPUs that have been on the company's roadmap for some time. Though spun as good news (and sure to be tough on AMD), the fact is that the current economy is forcing Intel's hand as they are unwilling to invest much more in 45nm technologies that will surely be outdated by the time the market cycles back up and consumers and businesses start buying PCs again. By focusing on 32nm products, like Westmere, the first CPU with integrated graphics, Intel is basically putting a $7 billion bet on a turnaround in the economy for 2010."
Or at least, if the economy *doesn't* turn around by 2010, that the shitstorm will be so bad at that point they don't care.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
a 7 billion dollar bet? thats peanuts! wake me up when someone makes a 1.5 trillion dollar bet on the economy.
After dealing with intel's op code hell, all I can say is that whoever comes out with a better method of recording op codes and their uses than the labyrinthine intel and amd manuals will become my patron saint.
But seriously is there any good x86 op code references out there?
No, not every application needs to be written to operate on X number of cores, operating systems and virtual machines (Java, .NET, etc.) need to allow the applications to run on multiple cores, regardless of development/other factors.
...possibly dynamically updating the software on a per-machine/core# basis to set the number of cores for the software to run on tailored better for that user's processor in a more HAL-like manner..
There, fixed it for... me.
But how much of that is the need for raw power VS the problem of really crappy code? I surf and watch Youtube just fine on a 1.1GHz Celeron, but that is because I'm using Win2K. If I was to try ANYTHING in Vista on a 1.1GHz Celeron with 512MB of RAM I'd probably commit suicide out of frustration just waiting on the damned thing to boot to the desktop!
The point is when I got into computing ( and yes I'm old, dammit!) programmers squeezed every bit of performance they possibly could while using as little resources as possible. Why? Because they didn't have multicores with craploads of RAM to waste. But now I have noticed the software has taken on the SUV model of not caring how crappy the resource suckage as long as you can add more crap to it. That is why I am hoping that this trend towards Netbooks ends up with programmers looking at performance again. There is NO reason you should need a freaking dual core to watch Youtube! Coders need to learn to write efficient code again instead of expecting Moore's law to do the heavy lifting. Because with the economy in the toilet and prices likely to go no where but up when it comes to energy we could all use more efficient machines instead of simply filling up the cycles with ever more bloated code.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I believe that they still have a slide rule as standard issue equipment on NASA space missions. It's hard to argue with the cost associated with adding an additional layer of fault tolerance... If it could, in a pinch, be used to plot a survivable reentry or a similarly life saving task when they sent the first rockets to space it can still serve the same function today. Sort of like the saying, "an elevator can't break, it can only become stairs."
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
space travel is mathematically dead simple
Welcome to Slashdot, one of the few places where rocket science is considered simple.
The Apollo computers only had to cope with up to a few thousand kilobits per second of telemetry data and the like. Decoding a high definition YouTube stream means converting a few million bits per second ...
I hope you know that a thousand kilobits IS a million bits (give or take if you refuse to say kibibits).