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AMD Readies "Lottery-Core" CPUs
Barence writes "AMD has announced a radical shake-up of its CPU strategy, in an exclusive interview with PC Pro. The company has revealed that the next generation (codenamed Tyche) will be offered as a single 'lottery-core' SKU, with the number of functional cores in each part left for the customer to discover. 'We know gaming is very important to our customers,' explained regional marketing manager Ffwl Ebrill, 'and we're innovating to bring that win-or-lose experience out of the virtual world and into the marketplace.' Anyone discovering more than ten functional cores could consider themselves 'a lottery winner,' while unfortunates discovering their new CPU had no working cores at all would be encouraged to 'roll again.'"
How about you get the number of cores proportional to the post number? FIRST!
Wait a sec...holding off on this one...
April 1st?
Okay, I know it's a joke, but isn't it kinda true? Grab one of AMD's chips with disabled cores, and it truly is random how many cores (if any) you might be able to unlock using ACC. :P
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
The thing about lotteries is that they defy physics. Take a machine designed to give out specific units of force, and balls designed to weigh the same weight they are prescribed, and you've got a very predictable physical system.
So, how do they avoid drawing the same numbers every time? They let a computer mess up the given statuses... do they use Set 1, Set 2, or Set 3 of balls? Do they put the balls in numerical order? When does the machine start moving?
The thing is... you can't let humans decide these variables because eventually they'll spot the patterns and be able to rig the result. So, they do what the computer tells them to... yep, that's right, your state lottery is just as random as the PRNG at headquarters.
Didn't go over so well. Just ask newegg.
Stop with the April fools posts already!
Coherently funny I say...or insightful lol!
Users discovering no working cores are expected to turn up in person with their cpu and motherboard for a stoning. And not the good kind of stoning.
I got zero.
Actually it would probably work as long as the cpu had enough cores to be worth the cost. I would go for it!
Take a machine designed to give out specific units of force, and balls designed to weigh the same weight they are prescribed, and you've got a very predictable physical system.
Even if it is predictable, it isn't necessarily tractable. The air inside one of those table tennis ball blenders, for instance, is a chaotic system. The "specific units of force" aren't always constant given fluctuations in power supply.
your state lottery is just as random as the PRNG at headquarters.
More likely, the PRNG that dictates exactly how long the machine runs isn't entirely pseudo but instead tied to an entropy-gathering process such as hashing room noise received through the microphone.
What part of "news aggregation" is unclear?
And I lost, it had fewer working MBs than it was advertised. ;/ So this is very real actually.
Ezekiel 23:20
on April First, Taco trolls you!
Those jokes aren't even funny nor interesting.
They are just bad.
Except the youtube 1/4 that thing was good !
Intel got there first, years ago.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
This is what will happen:
Folks will be hording them and testing each one and when they find one with a lot of cores, they will then eBay them at a premium. The rest of us poor slobs will have to settle for the 1, 1 1/2, 1 5/16ths core CPUs while the well to do will get the 2,4,6,8,10 core CPUs.
It'll be great for AMD sales but I see it as hurting them in the long run.
"explained regional marketing manager Ffwl Ebrill"
'Ello taffy boy :P
April first :|
The above comments are the ravings of a lunatic and should be ignored completely.
are naming this after that guy at Penny Arcade.
It is all fun and 1 of April games until someone gets a 0-core processor.
You can't handle the truth.
I mean come on, twelves cores? What happened to 8 or 16?
Oh, I get it. It's probably 16 mebicores.
that was already how they determined processor speed: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/cpu/char/mfg_Rating.htm
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
It's such a completely humorless waste of time. Yes, that's right-Bah humbug.
In a way AMD already does this with the X3. Sometimes the fourth core can be unlocked giving a quad core for the price of a triple core.
Even before multi cores, overclocking provided an aftermarket solution to getting more then you paid for out of a chip. But was dependent on the quality of the chip itself. Binning reduced the random chance by some amount but still left some degree of randomness.
For a moment there I thought I am reading The Onion.
Enough already. It's done to death and not funny.
At least the OMGPONIES joke was fun, since it didn't rely on an endless avalanche of stupid fake news stories.
To whomever decided to add the 'dontruinitwithtags' tag ...
IT WAS RUINED ALREADY WITH THE OTHER 9 GOD DAMN APRIL FOOLS POSTS. ENOUGH ALREADY.
I get excited at a glimmer of hope of something to read while I sit here and wait for this batch to run ... only to find out another moronic April Fools post was made ... because 10 in one day just isn't enough.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
AMD's plans to get multi core processors appear as one very fast core? I can't imagine how this could be done (presumably it couldn't and they gave up) but it would have been very useful for me since I voted "Below Average" in the current slashdot poll. Whenever I program a multi-threaded real-time system it always ends up deadlocking in some situation that I can never recreated and it takes me all eternity to work out why.
One very fast core would make things so much easier so I was looking forward to this technology but I never heard anything about it beyond the initial announcement. Did they every publicly say they'd given up?
Isn't there a tech site that sells a daily "Bag of Crap"? People buy it, every day. Sometimes it's full of nice stuff. Often it's crap. People buy it. Because the price is right.
So, same here. I'd go for it. I'd pay $10 for a "Box of Crap" from AMD. It can have anywhere from 0 to 12 operational cores. As long as neither I nor AMD know ahead of time which it is, I'd buy it. I'm willing to gamble my $10 on the yield of AMD's production line.
'course, given their yield, the price would probably have to be higher than $10. They make quite a few usable chips. Lottery tickets are $1 because the yield is so low.
Well if this had been Intel then this would have been believable since they already have a lottery-virtualization core, that is you don't know if your CPU supports virtualization or not even in CPUs of the same generation and family. However this is AMD so this must be an april fools.
This has been Intel's strategy for decades.
A boon for Overclockers really..
No longer are things priced by binning, now every one has an equal chance.
I would seriously buy one if the price was right. I mean I already own a C2D 1.8 I bought on the assumption that I could overclock the thing to 3.2 or whatever, and then was sorely dissapointed when it couldn't take an OC at all. I mean the ONLY reason I bought it was to OC it.
This would fill that niche. You don't have to sort or test them, heck, you don't even need to market them... what are you gonna say... erm we don't know how fast it will run, nor do we really know how many cores it contains... buy one and find out! Sure I will, just price 'em cheap and I would be all over that! (so long as your secretly not binning all the good ones and just selling rejects!)
I dunno, sounds find to me if the price is right. Overclockers everywhere would have a field day posting their finds! Not sure how you would do the package with a possible variable number of cores. I guess your MB would have to be uber compatible with everything...
Yes yes I know it is an April Fools joke. I still want one for fun though! :)
First, I am a fan of AMD and I'm glad they are being creative with how they might approach the market in the future.
But, this "lottery core" concept, if legal, is a very dangerous precedent pawned off to the consumer. Like atm transaction fees, or any financial transaction fees whatsoever, the only reason they persist is because no one has decided to sue for the practice; all those who might afford the lawsuit in some way benefit from the practice or the short changing effect has negligible effect on them to care.
Anyways, bottom line, is this seems to be an attempt to circumvent all consumer merchandise laws, lemon laws and all other business codes of transaction of goods and services with the justification that it's a "lottery system".
AMD get's away with selling defective products, with refusal of refund, what's to change anyone else from doing so? How would you like for to tell you that you either continue chasing the repair costs or buy another one of their cars? Who is going to regulate AMD to make sure they don't pump defective cores to encourage increased sales volumes (thus profit)? Real lotteries, licensed gambling establishments... even financial services like the stock exchange and investment ventures are all HEAVILY regulated, by organizations that are state/government sanctioned and have real teeth and have in the past used their teeth. AMD is simply a business... who is going to regulate them? Is the Nevada Gaming Commission going to govern all the gaming machines that determine which chips are lotto winners? Are they going to come in and close production lines indefinitely until the algorithms are fixed? Are they going to make sure there are no back-doors? Are they going to prosecute whoever if fraud is found? What about all the merchantability laws that protect consumers purchasing goods?
This concept is not new... real lotteries exist. What is new more or less is to expand this as a means justify pawning defective goods off on the consumer as a 'lottery system' based purchase.
I strongly condemn this proposal and I hope to god this is an April Fools joke.
I still like the odds better than my state lottery.
Chris Sheppard
Fermi finally ships today, April 1st.
Wouldn't a better April Fools Joke have Been, "Finally, Windows is now Secure"
Intel was already getting ready to roll out their own lottery-core However there was a bit of public backlash because units leaked out early.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive