Itanium was expensive, had very poor backwards compatibility, had poor performance on existing software, required a complex compiler and intricate coding, and was notoriously finicky to get up and running. Even now, the only advantage that the article offers for Itanium is its gigaflops performance running a heavily-optimized floating point benchmark on a 4,096-processor system. I doubt if a line if forming to buy one, based on that.
Based on what it offered to the IT industry, the Itanium got way more respect than it really deserved. If anyone other than Intel had tried to sell the world on the Itanium, they would have been laughed at for decades.
Gerstner pulled the plug on new resources going into OS/2 in April,
1996 at a time when OS/2 still had a small, but significant market
share and was on the verge of releasing the much-improved v4.
OS/2 was still selling a lot of licenses for v3 at the time and was a
profitable business activity for IBM, although it would have certainly
been much more profitable with a larger market share. IBM's OS/2 group
still went ahead and released OS/2 Warp v4 in August, 1996 but it was a
'stealth' release that the IBM corporation was obviously no longer
behind. There was no business reason for Gerstner to pull
the plug on OS/2. You can hear Gerstner describing his decision
to end new OS/2 development in an.mp3 file enclosed within this
zip file.
AMD is not going to lose any customers by doing all of the legal stuff and they might actually win some money in settlements and free publicity. AMD should have sued Intel 4 or 5 years ago. I don't know why they waited so long.
We're always hearing about countries (Brazil, Germany, Finland, USA, EU, DOJ, Norway, etc.) that are going to "get tough" with Microsoft but they always wind up closing their mouth and quietly shuffling away to cut new some purchase orders for their local Microsoft distributor(s) once the Microsoft guy pays them a visit...
Microsoft guy: If you do that BAD thing, it's going to make Bill very, very angry.
Government person: What do we care?
Microsoft guy: If Bill gets angry, he won't let you use Windows any more.
Government person: Uh-Oh! That WOULD be very bad. Hey, just tell Bill that we'll forget the whole thing, then. As a favor, though, could you ask him to play nicer?
Microsoft guy: Hey, you got it. We did the same thing for John Ashcroft.
If Cringely's right, Dell would have to be a part of a merger between Intel and Apple since Intel would never screw over it's biggest and blueiest customer by going into competition with them. So with Intel, Apple, and Dell on one side, that leaves Microsoft, AMD, and HP on the other side in a war for the future of the PC business. Guess who will win? No way to know, of course, but maybe it's time to buy some AMD stock...
People have speculated about why Steve Jobs picked Intel and not AMD
such as maybe AMD can't supply enough chips, maybe Intel gave 'em a
better deal, maybe Intel chips perform better, whatever. There's
no reason to speculate though because Jobs comes right out and tells us
in this
story, thereby demonstrating that he is not familiar with current
x86 hardware. Says Jobs:
[begin excerpt]
"The move is being made because Intel has "the strongest processor road
map by far," Jobs is quoted as saying in a statement released as the
keynote got under way.
"As
we look ahead, although we've got some great products now, we can
envision some amazing products we want to build for you. And we don't
know how we can build them with the future PowerPC road map," Jobs said
during his keynote.
The problem with the future PowerPC
chips is performance per watt, Jobs said. Intel's chips are far ahead
of IBM's when it comes to delivering performance without
consuming a lot of power, a quality that is very important to Apple's
future products, he said."
[end excerpt]
Jobs is looking for better "performance
per watt" and picks Intel over AMD which was not a very smart decision
on his part. Apparently he is unfamiliar with the newest
AMD 'venice'
core and the derivative 'Turion'
AMD mobile chips which offer better performance than the Pentium M with
less power consumption.
No, not at lunchtime...AMD is getting pounded into the ground by Intel
like a tent stake in July. AMD might be turning out some pretty
good products but no one is buying the high-end AMD stuff and the
Intel-Apple deal is another example of a computer maker turning their
back on AMD's excellent products. Dell, Gateway, Sony, and
IBM/Lenovo are already 'Intel only' oems. HP still sells AMD but
only for a few models. The result is that AMD is not not
making any money selling cpu chips and it is only a matter of time
before they have to fold their tent and leave the field to Intel.
Sure, the AMD flash memory business was a loser for them recently but,
according to
the article, the cpu sales were only $750 million for Q1 2005.
AMD's market share for Q1 2005 was 16.9 percent of a worldwide market of
approximately 120 million units. That
means that AMD's average selling price was only about $37.
Obviously, AMD is selling mostly the ultra-cheap low-powered 32-bit
Semprons and only a
relative tiny handful of the high-powered 64-bit $200+ units. AMD
has some excellent high-end chips are but no one
ever seems to actually buy them in the kind of volume that might allow
an innovative company like AMD to survive in business.
...other than "tech columnists" that is. The entire world has pretty much seen about all there is to see in Windows so not much excitement there. Presumably fewer people have seen Mac but they can go down to their local outlet and check it out anytime they get the urge. Either way, this hardly seems like a 'war' between Windows and Mac. The Mac users I know don't care in the slightest who else likes it. Same for Windows users.
When TFA author says: "It's not just me, either; it's a running sardonic joke among tech columnists that you can't even USE the word 'Apple' or 'Microsoft' without getting hate mail from somebody or other." he is probably making the whole thing up. For one thing, do tech columnists really get together and tell 'running jokes.' I doubt it. Most of them seem as serious as a heart attack and for sure they never talk to other fellow tech columnists so that they won't inadvertently give away any ideas for their next article to them.
And then TFA author says "Interestingly, very few of you responded to that column..." but then gets missed by the cluebat and goes on to give his handful of readers a second dose of snooze.
How many times has the The Inquirer been sued? Never, as far as you or anyone here knows. Your comment suggesting that the truth is otherwise, without providing any information to back it up, smells of FUD. Also, I've found their news to be pretty reliable over the years.
Microsoft can claim that Google is going down but that cannot take away from Google has given us...a powerful search engine that makes the internet work. Before Google, there were 'search engines' like yahoo, excite, altavista, etc. that were just not up to the job. Google recognized the need and developed the software and hardware to provide the search tools that we now all take for granted every day. Maybe you see where I'm going with this. Google has given us something of value, and that's what business is supposed to be all about, right Mr. Ballmer? So what does Microsoft propose to give us as an alternative? A better Google? Well, perhaps Microsoft is trying but their efforts to date haven't been much of a threat to Google. Mostly, the Microsoft 'strategy' seems to be twofold: 1) Attempt to provide capability comparable to Google, and then 2) Get rid of Google. The Microsoft motivation seems to consist of equal parts greed and envy. Greed for the buckets of money that Google is justly bringing in and envy for the acclaim that Google receives worldwide for their contribution to the internet. Hey Microsoft! When was the last time that your motivation for doing something was to make something new and better than what we are already doing? Maybe 'Excel 2?' If you produced something new and better than Google, you wouldn't need to try and talk them out of business.
Would you recommend Computer Science to your kid?
on
Johnny Can So Program
·
· Score: 1
Would you tell your kid to major in computer science? He or she would likely spend a lot of money and several years at a good university learning to be a software engineer. After graduation, though, when they went looking for a job they'd be competing against experienced people from (and in) other countries who would be willing to work for half of what your kid was looking for as a starting salary to pay his rent, buy a car, and pay off his college loan. You should tell him to be an English major and maybe help write documentation.
We are in a time in US history when 'American' corporations have absolutely no sense of national identity and are happy to conduct the key parts of their 'business' in foreign countries using foreign labor with American technology, supported by the American government, and operating under American laws which allow a corporation to be considered as an American citizen with unrestricted access to American markets. Other countries have figured all of this out and are reaping enormous benefits. Foreign workers benefit from improvement in wages and development of their skills through experience. Foreign countries benefit by getting investment in state-of-art manufacturing facilities in their countries and jobs for their citizens which raise their standard of living, as well as an increase in their tax revenues and balance of payments with the US. The 'american' corporations benefit from lowered costs in the short term and improvements in their profits. The US government benefits with foreign-manufactured consumer goods offered in the US at a lower price which lowers the cost of living and keeps inflation down. The US consumer benefits from lower prices.
Of course, in the longer term, there are some losers. The US government loses income tax revenue from jobs that no longer exist, the US standard of living declines as real wages are lowered, american workers end up working in low-value jobs rather than higher value jobs with a consequent lowering of demand for skilled workers (such as computer science majors) and the manufacturing base of the country becomes eroded and weaker.
Sure, the flash memory business was a loser. But, according to
the article, the cpu sales were only $750 million for Q1 2005.
AMD's market share for Q1 2005 was 16.9 percent
of a worldwide market of approximately 120 million units. That
means that AMD's average selling price was only about $37.
Obviously, AMD is selling mostly the ultra-cheap Semprons and only a
relative tiny handful of the $500+ units. We can rattle on
about how great that new powerful chip is that just came out but no one
ever seems to actually buy them in the kind of volume that might allow
an innovative company like AMD to survive in business.
We can go on here about how great AMD is doing and about how Intel is
struggling but it is not the truth. Intel and Dell smile
every time they read that as they set new revenue and profit records
every quarter. Why does the truth matter? Because AMD is
making some extremely good products that deserve to be selling far
better than they have been. We should be asking WHY they are not
selling rather than just pretending that it isn't so. AMD is in a
business where huge capital investments are needed every year.
AMD's access to capital will dry up if they can't show that they can
make substantial profits from sales of cpus when they have VERY
competitive products. The lender's will ask 'if not now,
when?' and there will not be a good answer. The end result is
that Intel is successfully choking off AMD's air supply even while we
are here talking about how good the latest AMD chip is.
The performance of the AMD X2's is absolutely amazing but...will anyone
really buy them? The big computer companies seem to be offering
mostly P4's at about 3 Ghz using some elderly Intel core. The
newspaper this morning carries an ad from Fry's Electronics offering a
wimpy '2800+ Sempron with motherboard' for $69 and that's the only AMD
thing listed in their ad. Can't be much money for AMD at that
price. It just doesn't look like the desktop computer market
cares much about performance anymore.
AMD might be turning out some pretty good products but they are not
making any money selling them and it is only a matter of time
before they have to fold their tent and leave the field to Intel.
Evolution, or natural selection, is not a 'theory' but an obvious phenomena that we observe around us every day of our lives, on everything from dog appearance to human hereditary conditions to software products. It is equally obvious (to me anyway, your opinion may differ) that the universe, our world, and all life was created by God. If people want to believe, however, that life arose from electric arcs in a primordial soup, that's their choice (given to them by God) and there's no reason to condemn them, punish them, threaten them, or torture them until they 'change' their minds. Faith cannot be instilled with fear, pain, legislation, or peer pressure, although that will never stop unbelievers from forcing other unbelievers to see things 'their' way.
Anyone who is afraid of *anything* that science may discover has no faith, to start with. Science and technology are, themselves, gifts from God that should be used to their fullest.
You could not be more wrong. AMD's share of the CPU
market was only 16.1 % in Q4 2004 based on unit sales and only 9% based
on revenue which makes it obvious that AMD is selling more of the
low-priced Semprons than they are the higher-priced Athlons.
Based on those numbers, Intel is outselling AMD 88% to 9% or 9.78 to
1. As far as company-wide profits, Intel reported net income of $2.2 billion
for Q1 2005 on revenues of $9.4 billion while AMD reported a loss of $17.4
million on revenues of $1.23 billion. Those are the facts and
they also mesh with what you see when you go to an online computer
sales website for Dell, IBM, HP, Sony, or Gateway where there's mostly
Intel-inside models or when you go down to your local computer store
where most of the desktops and laptops will be
Intel-inside. It would be more interesting to talk about
*why* no one buys the obviously-better AMD products than it is to
pretend that it isn't so.
AMD's products are superb and easily surpass what Intel has to offer right now. If the competition were about offering the best products, Intel would be losing by a huge distance. The real contest is about *selling* those products, though, and Intel is winning in sales by such a large margin that AMD is not even in the race. Intel outsells AMD by 10:1 or more. More importantly, most of the AMD sales seem to be of the low-priced and lower-powered 'Sempron' line rather than the higher-priced 'Athlon 64' line. The result is that AMD is scratching to eke out a small profit while Intel rakes in enormous profits every quarter. The best products don't always win the race and this is obviously one of those times. Look at the online websites for big desktop PC manufacturers like Dell, HP/Compaq, IBM, Sony, Acer, Gateway, etc. You will see very few, if any, models at most of those with AMD cpus inside and the ones that you do see will be for low-powered, low-priced models.
Yes, they are somewhat opposite, aren't they? The Xbit review provides some graphs of power consumption and generally finds that the Winchester and Venice core have similar profiles but does not mention how they were able to make those measurements. The Lost Circuits review OTOH provides enough detail on their power measurement procedure to allow someone else to reproduce their results. More importantly, the Lost Circuits information shows just how difficult and time consuming it really was to measure the CPU power consumption with the consistency, precision, and accuracy needed to draw real conclusions. Finally, both reviews provided photos of the "venice" processors but only the Lost Circuits photo accurately showed the new 1.4V core voltage rating. This omission makes it questionable that Xbitlabs even had a true "venice" core for their testing. For these reasons, I put much more credibility on the Lost Circuits results than the Xbitlabs results.
The parent post captures precisely the difference between copyright and patent. SCO is not making a patent claim but a copyright claim. This is the same sort of claim that IBM lost with their PC back in 1982 when Phoenix reverse-engineered the BIOS and sold it to Compaq to allow them to sell an IBM clone. IBM did not hold a patent over the ideas in the BIOS but a copyright and Phoenix developed an alternative BIOS (a variation of which is still used today) that did the same thing but didn't use any IBM code. The courts agreed that the Phoenix BIOS did not infringe on the IBM BIOS copyright and the rest is history. IBM gave a copy of their BIOS source code to every IBM PC buyer in the 'technical reference manual' (I still have mine) so Phoenix needed to establish that they didn't copy any portion of the IBM code which was why they did the locked-in-the-windowless-room thing with their development team but that isn't strictly required for IBM since there is a major difference between Linux with its millions of lines of code and the IBM BIOS with its hundreds of lines of code. If SCO wants to win their copyright case, they need to show that IBM copied their code, nothing more, nothing less.
Yes, the fact that IBM was able to release JFS under open source shows that IBM developed it without any participation from Microsoft. Obviously, IBM could do that then with other parts of OS/2.
Microsoft and IBM jointly developed OS/2 but IBM has gradually acquired the rights to the code they didn't own when the M$/IBM split happened. There is a lot of really good stuff in OS/2, though, that was developed solely by IBM after the big split such as the 'workplace shell' (WPS) desktop, the logical volume manager, and the JFS file system. The WPS desktop is arguably still several years ahead of the windows start-bar/explorer window stuff and could be updated relatively easily, if there was access to the source code, to a 3D implementation that would put Microsoft to shame.
The 'butter flavoring' in microwave popcorn has been linked
to health problems. Might be a good idea to stick with the air
popper or use the old-fashioned oil-in-a-pan-on-the-stove
method.
I started out using the email client in Netscape 2 back in 1996. Then came Netscape 3, 4.04, 4.61, and then the Mozilla suite which I've upgraded a bunch. I'll probably move to Thunderbird eventually. Anyway, each upgrade has been compatible with, and preserved, my earlier emails so that I have nearly 10 years of emails sent and received online which has become a very useful tool, just by itself. I doubt that anyone has done that with Outlook...or if they had, they probably would have spammed all of their friends a few dozen times by now.
AMD looks like it has come out with a nice product in the Opteron 875/275/175 and the upcoming Athlon 64 X2s in June but AMD usually comes out with pretty good products at pretty good prices. Go down to the store or website to buy a new system for your business or home, though, and you will probably be choosing between a P4 running at 2.8 Ghz or a P4 at 3.2 Ghz for your new desktop system. If it's a server, you will probably get some sort of dual-Xeon system because that mostly what's for sale. Either way, you will probably buy something branded by Dell or HP.
AMD has turned out a lot of good products over the years but they never sell very well (fill in your own reason why here) and the new dual-core stuff won't be any different. That's reality.
Microsoft still hasn't patented the idea for toilet paper rolls. Rolls of TP are way better than the old way where the toilet paper was just in a pile on the floor. They might also look into patenting the primary use of TP which would give them some more territory for 'digital rights management.'
Look at the performance ratings for the AMD dual-core chips that have been leaked. Those are based on single-threaded benchmarks and they show a big step up for the AMD dual-core over the single-core at the same clock speed. One other little nit to pick: the AMD clocks do not slow down due to 'cooling difficulties.' Only the newer Intel chips do that. The AMD dual-core chip is supposed to have a max thermal output of only 89 watts which is absolutely amazing, if that turns out to be true when the launch happens on Thursday. We will see. Looks like the good ship Intel is finally, finally, going to take on a little water, which will do them and us a world of good in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Itanium was expensive, had very poor backwards compatibility, had poor performance on existing software, required a complex compiler and intricate coding, and was notoriously finicky to get up and running. Even now, the only advantage that the article offers for Itanium is its gigaflops performance running a heavily-optimized floating point benchmark on a 4,096-processor system. I doubt if a line if forming to buy one, based on that.
Based on what it offered to the IT industry, the Itanium got way more respect than it really deserved. If anyone other than Intel had tried to sell the world on the Itanium, they would have been laughed at for decades.
Gerstner pulled the plug on new resources going into OS/2 in April, 1996 at a time when OS/2 still had a small, but significant market share and was on the verge of releasing the much-improved v4. OS/2 was still selling a lot of licenses for v3 at the time and was a profitable business activity for IBM, although it would have certainly been much more profitable with a larger market share. IBM's OS/2 group still went ahead and released OS/2 Warp v4 in August, 1996 but it was a 'stealth' release that the IBM corporation was obviously no longer behind. There was no business reason for Gerstner to pull the plug on OS/2. You can hear Gerstner describing his decision to end new OS/2 development in an .mp3 file enclosed within this
zip file.
AMD is not going to lose any customers by doing all of the legal stuff and they might actually win some money in settlements and free publicity. AMD should have sued Intel 4 or 5 years ago. I don't know why they waited so long.
We're always hearing about countries (Brazil, Germany, Finland, USA, EU, DOJ, Norway, etc.) that are going to "get tough" with Microsoft but they always wind up closing their mouth and quietly shuffling away to cut new some purchase orders for their local Microsoft distributor(s) once the Microsoft guy pays them a visit...
Microsoft guy: If you do that BAD thing, it's going to make Bill very, very angry.
Government person: What do we care?
Microsoft guy: If Bill gets angry, he won't let you use Windows any more.
Government person: Uh-Oh! That WOULD be very bad. Hey, just tell Bill that we'll forget the whole thing, then. As a favor, though, could you ask him to play nicer?
Microsoft guy: Hey, you got it. We did the same thing for John Ashcroft.
If Cringely's right, Dell would have to be a part of a merger between Intel and Apple since Intel would never screw over it's biggest and blueiest customer by going into competition with them. So with Intel, Apple, and Dell on one side, that leaves Microsoft, AMD, and HP on the other side in a war for the future of the PC business. Guess who will win? No way to know, of course, but maybe it's time to buy some AMD stock...
[begin excerpt]
"The move is being made because Intel has "the strongest processor road map by far," Jobs is quoted as saying in a statement released as the keynote got under way.
"As we look ahead, although we've got some great products now, we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you. And we don't know how we can build them with the future PowerPC road map," Jobs said during his keynote.
The problem with the future PowerPC chips is performance per watt, Jobs said. Intel's chips are far ahead of IBM's when it comes to delivering performance without consuming a lot of power, a quality that is very important to Apple's future products, he said."
[end excerpt]
Jobs is looking for better "performance per watt" and picks Intel over AMD which was not a very smart decision on his part. Apparently he is unfamiliar with the newest AMD 'venice' core and the derivative 'Turion' AMD mobile chips which offer better performance than the Pentium M with less power consumption.
No, not at lunchtime...AMD is getting pounded into the ground by Intel like a tent stake in July. AMD might be turning out some pretty good products but no one is buying the high-end AMD stuff and the Intel-Apple deal is another example of a computer maker turning their back on AMD's excellent products. Dell, Gateway, Sony, and IBM/Lenovo are already 'Intel only' oems. HP still sells AMD but only for a few models. The result is that AMD is not not making any money selling cpu chips and it is only a matter of time before they have to fold their tent and leave the field to Intel. Sure, the AMD flash memory business was a loser for them recently but, according to the article, the cpu sales were only $750 million for Q1 2005. AMD's market share for Q1 2005 was 16.9 percent of a worldwide market of approximately 120 million units. That means that AMD's average selling price was only about $37. Obviously, AMD is selling mostly the ultra-cheap low-powered 32-bit Semprons and only a relative tiny handful of the high-powered 64-bit $200+ units. AMD has some excellent high-end chips are but no one ever seems to actually buy them in the kind of volume that might allow an innovative company like AMD to survive in business.
...other than "tech columnists" that is. The entire world has pretty much seen about all there is to see in Windows so not much excitement there. Presumably fewer people have seen Mac but they can go down to their local outlet and check it out anytime they get the urge. Either way, this hardly seems like a 'war' between Windows and Mac. The Mac users I know don't care in the slightest who else likes it. Same for Windows users.
When TFA author says: "It's not just me, either; it's a running sardonic joke among tech columnists that you can't even USE the word 'Apple' or 'Microsoft' without getting hate mail from somebody or other." he is probably making the whole thing up. For one thing, do tech columnists really get together and tell 'running jokes.' I doubt it. Most of them seem as serious as a heart attack and for sure they never talk to other fellow tech columnists so that they won't inadvertently give away any ideas for their next article to them.
And then TFA author says "Interestingly, very few of you responded to that column..." but then gets missed by the cluebat and goes on to give his handful of readers a second dose of snooze.
How many times has the The Inquirer been sued? Never, as far as you or anyone here knows. Your comment suggesting that the truth is otherwise, without providing any information to back it up, smells of FUD. Also, I've found their news to be pretty reliable over the years.
Microsoft can claim that Google is going down but that cannot take away from Google has given us...a powerful search engine that makes the internet work. Before Google, there were 'search engines' like yahoo, excite, altavista, etc. that were just not up to the job. Google recognized the need and developed the software and hardware to provide the search tools that we now all take for granted every day. Maybe you see where I'm going with this. Google has given us something of value, and that's what business is supposed to be all about, right Mr. Ballmer? So what does Microsoft propose to give us as an alternative? A better Google? Well, perhaps Microsoft is trying but their efforts to date haven't been much of a threat to Google. Mostly, the Microsoft 'strategy' seems to be twofold: 1) Attempt to provide capability comparable to Google, and then 2) Get rid of Google. The Microsoft motivation seems to consist of equal parts greed and envy. Greed for the buckets of money that Google is justly bringing in and envy for the acclaim that Google receives worldwide for their contribution to the internet. Hey Microsoft! When was the last time that your motivation for doing something was to make something new and better than what we are already doing? Maybe 'Excel 2?' If you produced something new and better than Google, you wouldn't need to try and talk them out of business.
Would you tell your kid to major in computer science? He or she would likely spend a lot of money and several years at a good university learning to be a software engineer. After graduation, though, when they went looking for a job they'd be competing against experienced people from (and in) other countries who would be willing to work for half of what your kid was looking for as a starting salary to pay his rent, buy a car, and pay off his college loan. You should tell him to be an English major and maybe help write documentation.
We are in a time in US history when 'American' corporations have absolutely no sense of national identity and are happy to conduct the key parts of their 'business' in foreign countries using foreign labor with American technology, supported by the American government, and operating under American laws which allow a corporation to be considered as an American citizen with unrestricted access to American markets. Other countries have figured all of this out and are reaping enormous benefits. Foreign workers benefit from improvement in wages and development of their skills through experience. Foreign countries benefit by getting investment in state-of-art manufacturing facilities in their countries and jobs for their citizens which raise their standard of living, as well as an increase in their tax revenues and balance of payments with the US. The 'american' corporations benefit from lowered costs in the short term and improvements in their profits. The US government benefits with foreign-manufactured consumer goods offered in the US at a lower price which lowers the cost of living and keeps inflation down. The US consumer benefits from lower prices.
Of course, in the longer term, there are some losers. The US government loses income tax revenue from jobs that no longer exist, the US standard of living declines as real wages are lowered, american workers end up working in low-value jobs rather than higher value jobs with a consequent lowering of demand for skilled workers (such as computer science majors) and the manufacturing base of the country becomes eroded and weaker.
Sure, the flash memory business was a loser. But, according to the article, the cpu sales were only $750 million for Q1 2005. AMD's market share for Q1 2005 was 16.9 percent of a worldwide market of approximately 120 million units. That means that AMD's average selling price was only about $37. Obviously, AMD is selling mostly the ultra-cheap Semprons and only a relative tiny handful of the $500+ units. We can rattle on about how great that new powerful chip is that just came out but no one ever seems to actually buy them in the kind of volume that might allow an innovative company like AMD to survive in business.
We can go on here about how great AMD is doing and about how Intel is struggling but it is not the truth. Intel and Dell smile every time they read that as they set new revenue and profit records every quarter. Why does the truth matter? Because AMD is making some extremely good products that deserve to be selling far better than they have been. We should be asking WHY they are not selling rather than just pretending that it isn't so. AMD is in a business where huge capital investments are needed every year. AMD's access to capital will dry up if they can't show that they can make substantial profits from sales of cpus when they have VERY competitive products. The lender's will ask 'if not now, when?' and there will not be a good answer. The end result is that Intel is successfully choking off AMD's air supply even while we are here talking about how good the latest AMD chip is.
The performance of the AMD X2's is absolutely amazing but...will anyone really buy them? The big computer companies seem to be offering mostly P4's at about 3 Ghz using some elderly Intel core. The newspaper this morning carries an ad from Fry's Electronics offering a wimpy '2800+ Sempron with motherboard' for $69 and that's the only AMD thing listed in their ad. Can't be much money for AMD at that price. It just doesn't look like the desktop computer market cares much about performance anymore.
AMD might be turning out some pretty good products but they are not making any money selling them and it is only a matter of time before they have to fold their tent and leave the field to Intel.
Evolution, or natural selection, is not a 'theory' but an obvious phenomena that we observe around us every day of our lives, on everything from dog appearance to human hereditary conditions to software products. It is equally obvious (to me anyway, your opinion may differ) that the universe, our world, and all life was created by God. If people want to believe, however, that life arose from electric arcs in a primordial soup, that's their choice (given to them by God) and there's no reason to condemn them, punish them, threaten them, or torture them until they 'change' their minds. Faith cannot be instilled with fear, pain, legislation, or peer pressure, although that will never stop unbelievers from forcing other unbelievers to see things 'their' way.
Anyone who is afraid of *anything* that science may discover has no faith, to start with. Science and technology are, themselves, gifts from God that should be used to their fullest.
You could not be more wrong. AMD's share of the CPU market was only 16.1 % in Q4 2004 based on unit sales and only 9% based on revenue which makes it obvious that AMD is selling more of the low-priced Semprons than they are the higher-priced Athlons. Based on those numbers, Intel is outselling AMD 88% to 9% or 9.78 to 1. As far as company-wide profits, Intel reported net income of $2.2 billion for Q1 2005 on revenues of $9.4 billion while AMD reported a loss of $17.4 million on revenues of $1.23 billion. Those are the facts and they also mesh with what you see when you go to an online computer sales website for Dell, IBM, HP, Sony, or Gateway where there's mostly Intel-inside models or when you go down to your local computer store where most of the desktops and laptops will be Intel-inside. It would be more interesting to talk about *why* no one buys the obviously-better AMD products than it is to pretend that it isn't so.
AMD's products are superb and easily surpass what Intel has to offer right now. If the competition were about offering the best products, Intel would be losing by a huge distance. The real contest is about *selling* those products, though, and Intel is winning in sales by such a large margin that AMD is not even in the race. Intel outsells AMD by 10:1 or more. More importantly, most of the AMD sales seem to be of the low-priced and lower-powered 'Sempron' line rather than the higher-priced 'Athlon 64' line. The result is that AMD is scratching to eke out a small profit while Intel rakes in enormous profits every quarter. The best products don't always win the race and this is obviously one of those times. Look at the online websites for big desktop PC manufacturers like Dell, HP/Compaq, IBM, Sony, Acer, Gateway, etc. You will see very few, if any, models at most of those with AMD cpus inside and the ones that you do see will be for low-powered, low-priced models.
Yes, they are somewhat opposite, aren't they? The Xbit review provides some graphs of power consumption and generally finds that the Winchester and Venice core have similar profiles but does not mention how they were able to make those measurements. The Lost Circuits review OTOH provides enough detail on their power measurement procedure to allow someone else to reproduce their results. More importantly, the Lost Circuits information shows just how difficult and time consuming it really was to measure the CPU power consumption with the consistency, precision, and accuracy needed to draw real conclusions. Finally, both reviews provided photos of the "venice" processors but only the Lost Circuits photo accurately showed the new 1.4V core voltage rating. This omission makes it questionable that Xbitlabs even had a true "venice" core for their testing. For these reasons, I put much more credibility on the Lost Circuits results than the Xbitlabs results.
The parent post captures precisely the difference between copyright and patent. SCO is not making a patent claim but a copyright claim. This is the same sort of claim that IBM lost with their PC back in 1982 when Phoenix reverse-engineered the BIOS and sold it to Compaq to allow them to sell an IBM clone. IBM did not hold a patent over the ideas in the BIOS but a copyright and Phoenix developed an alternative BIOS (a variation of which is still used today) that did the same thing but didn't use any IBM code. The courts agreed that the Phoenix BIOS did not infringe on the IBM BIOS copyright and the rest is history. IBM gave a copy of their BIOS source code to every IBM PC buyer in the 'technical reference manual' (I still have mine) so Phoenix needed to establish that they didn't copy any portion of the IBM code which was why they did the locked-in-the-windowless-room thing with their development team but that isn't strictly required for IBM since there is a major difference between Linux with its millions of lines of code and the IBM BIOS with its hundreds of lines of code. If SCO wants to win their copyright case, they need to show that IBM copied their code, nothing more, nothing less.
Yes, the fact that IBM was able to release JFS under open source shows that IBM developed it without any participation from Microsoft. Obviously, IBM could do that then with other parts of OS/2.
Microsoft and IBM jointly developed OS/2 but IBM has gradually acquired the rights to the code they didn't own when the M$/IBM split happened. There is a lot of really good stuff in OS/2, though, that was developed solely by IBM after the big split such as the 'workplace shell' (WPS) desktop, the logical volume manager, and the JFS file system. The WPS desktop is arguably still several years ahead of the windows start-bar/explorer window stuff and could be updated relatively easily, if there was access to the source code, to a 3D implementation that would put Microsoft to shame.
The 'butter flavoring' in microwave popcorn has been linked to health problems. Might be a good idea to stick with the air popper or use the old-fashioned oil-in-a-pan-on-the-stove method.
I started out using the email client in Netscape 2 back in 1996. Then came Netscape 3, 4.04, 4.61, and then the Mozilla suite which I've upgraded a bunch. I'll probably move to Thunderbird eventually. Anyway, each upgrade has been compatible with, and preserved, my earlier emails so that I have nearly 10 years of emails sent and received online which has become a very useful tool, just by itself. I doubt that anyone has done that with Outlook...or if they had, they probably would have spammed all of their friends a few dozen times by now.
AMD looks like it has come out with a nice product in the Opteron 875/275/175 and the upcoming Athlon 64 X2s in June but AMD usually comes out with pretty good products at pretty good prices. Go down to the store or website to buy a new system for your business or home, though, and you will probably be choosing between a P4 running at 2.8 Ghz or a P4 at 3.2 Ghz for your new desktop system. If it's a server, you will probably get some sort of dual-Xeon system because that mostly what's for sale. Either way, you will probably buy something branded by Dell or HP.
AMD has turned out a lot of good products over the years but they never sell very well (fill in your own reason why here) and the new dual-core stuff won't be any different. That's reality.
Microsoft still hasn't patented the idea for toilet paper rolls. Rolls of TP are way better than the old way where the toilet paper was just in a pile on the floor. They might also look into patenting the primary use of TP which would give them some more territory for 'digital rights management.'
Look at the performance ratings for the AMD dual-core chips that have been leaked. Those are based on single-threaded benchmarks and they show a big step up for the AMD dual-core over the single-core at the same clock speed. One other little nit to pick: the AMD clocks do not slow down due to 'cooling difficulties.' Only the newer Intel chips do that. The AMD dual-core chip is supposed to have a max thermal output of only 89 watts which is absolutely amazing, if that turns out to be true when the launch happens on Thursday. We will see. Looks like the good ship Intel is finally, finally, going to take on a little water, which will do them and us a world of good in the long run.