No, they're actually based off of GF104, GF106 and GF108. If you read the articles, you'll see 3 distinct chips pictured: A big rectangular one (GF104), a medium sized, square one (GF106), and a small square one (GF108). These chips are all soon to be launched on the desktop as well.
It always strikes me as amusing that religious people who ostensibly don't agree with Darwin end up with lots of kids, while the stereotypical secular humanist strongly believes in evolution but refuses to propagate his or her genes. It's an interesting disconnect between ideology and reality, on both sides.
Sorry, I should have been more clear in my post. I don't understand why Bray didn't discuss HTML5 when criticizing Apple for its walled-garden app store & control over apps on the iPhone, since web apps completely circumvent all the restrictions that Bray ranted on and on about. When he does bring up HTML5, it's only to acknowledge that he doesn't know much about it, and he never manages to connect the dots.
From the article: "The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor" . Somehow he misses that the Web is a big platform on the iPhone, and then goes on to whine about native applications not being as open and free as the web! It's like he totally missed the point of his own tirade: if you don't like vendor controlled platforms, use the Web, it's the first-ever platform without a vendor!
For someone who supposedly thinks deep thoughts about these subjects, he's frighteningly short-sighted.
It's funny - Google is the biggest proponent of using the web to deploy applications of any company that I'm aware of. And Apple doesn't manage, censor, or exert a scintilla of control over web applications. In fact, they support them by ensuring the iPhone remains one of the best deployment targets for HTML applications, keeping their browser up-to-date. Accordingly, I would expect Tim Bray to hold the opinion that developing native apps is a relic of the 20th century, destined to die out soon from natural selection, and persuade people to write web apps rather than rant about Apple's outdated and relictual "walled-garden" app store.
I think Tim Bray's rant on the iPhone is rather ill-considered & rather short-sighted.
I wonder if this analysis took into account CFL's poor power factor. Cheap CFLs usually have a power factor of around 0.5, which causes substantial electrical losses compared to Incandescent bulbs, which are purely resistive (and therefore have a power factor of 1.0). LEDs, on the other hand, have a pretty good power factor.
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/opinion/led-is-the-answer/299821.article
Bush is a Neocon, right? I don't think he'd have much problem with a black guy in the White House - after all, he did seat the first two black Secretaries of State that this country has ever known.
There are plenty of bad things to say about Neocons without accusing them of being racist.
The big difference between Obama and Lincoln is that Lincoln didn't have everything handed to him on a silver platter. For example, his first book deal, the story of which goes like this:
A 28-year-old law student gets written up in the newspapers, then gets a call from a literary agent? She calls him?
The agent then signs this 28-year-old nobody -- whose only credential as an author is student law journal stuff -- with Simon & Schuster. Hello? In what alternative universe does this happen?
He misses his deadline, but that's OK, because he then gets another big contract with a $40,000 advance. At this point, Obama's story is reminding me of another popular book, The Peter Principle.
But the real killer is how, having gotten a contract based on a proposal for a book about race relations, Obama pulls a bait-and-switch, and instead delivers... a memoir.
A memoir! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?? Unless you led the league in RBIs and helped the Yankees win the Series, how the hell does a 28-year-old get away with selling a memoir to a major publisher for $40,000? http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/2008/05/authors-against-obama.html
How do "withdraw unconditionally" and "surrender" differ functionally? I explained how many people see Obama's policies, you responded with a lot of ad hominem attack because you didn't like my word choice...
BTW, are you ready to invade Pakistan? Obama is.
If you think Iraq was a mistake, imagine Iraq + the Hindu Kush + Nuclear Weapons. I can't believe Obama gets a free pass while saying we need our troops out of Iraq, now, but we should consider invading Pakistan.
I could ask you the same question - what compelling reason can you give me to vote for Obama?
To answer your question, McCain is not my favorite choice, but at least I know what I'm getting. McCain has a proven track record in the Senate of important legislation, especially bipartisan efforts such as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Stewardship_Acts (with Joe Lieberman)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_14 (with Ben Nelson)
Clearly, McCain knows how to get politics done, and has pursued many moderate policies in cooperation with the Democrats. I think the country needs more bipartisanship, but still needs strong leadership. McCain is a known quantity that I believe will provide both.
Additionally, his former POW status means he understands the military from a unique perspective, which is essential in today's time of war.
Obama offers the American public the policy of surrender and blame America first. He has no plan for Iraq other than surrender, despite the success we've been having recently.
Obama is a conventional Chicago politician, despite all the hype about change, and people are starting to realize that he's essentially empty. Obama hasn't accomplished anything substantial. Rhetoric (including memoirs) is no accomplishment, and Obama has nothing else significant to point to. Name one important piece of legislation Obama has contributed to. Name a significant accomplishment Obama has had in the business world. Name any significant bipartisan work he has performed. Name a significant project he's headed.
Obama is a blank screen, an empty slate for people to project their "hope for change".
He's not suited for leading a government - he doesn't have the spine to stand up for himself and pursue what he thinks is right. Obama doesn't take responsibility - he's always blaming his staff for his mistakes, or blaming the media for asking tough questions, or blaming Bush.
I am no McCain fan. But Obama is a very unattractive presidential candidate. If you can't see these weaknesses, perhaps you should try to escape your bubble periodically. I think it's actually rather ironic that in this year of years, the Democrats have nominated a candidate who could actually lose.
Actually, the US is using the older definition of Gallon, based on England's 1706 definition of the Gallon. As an interesting aside, that definition relied on approximating pi as 22/7: one gallon was defined to be the volume of a cylinder 6 inches deep and 7 inches in diameter = 6*3.5^2*22/7=231 cubic inches exactly.
England redefined the gallon as the "imperial gallon" in 1824, after the US had gained independence, using a metric inspired definition: 1 gallon = 10 pounds of water. Of course, the US didn't follow suit with the new gallon, and continued to use the old.
In any case, it makes no sense to say the US gallon is a non-standard gallon. If anything, the Imperial gallon is the non-standard one, since the US continues to faithfully follow the standard set in 1706, while England decided to break from the standard and do something different.
Actually, have you heard of micro-op and macro-op fusion? Intel is touting them as a big plus for their Core microarchitecture: basically, they take RISC internal instructions and fuse them into CISC internal instructions (micro-op fusion) and also take sets of CISC external instructions and fuse them into CISC internal instructions (macro-op fusion).
So basically, things are so much more complicated these days that you can't even call x86 chips RISC CPUs with CISC instruction sets.
The RISC philosophy was to have every instruction be as simple as possible, so that the execution of each instruction could be as efficient as possible. The idea was that even though you might have to execute more instructions to get the job done, the speed you gained from the simple instruction set would compensate.
I've had to work with the ARM ISA in the past (I was studying its implementation as a soft core on an FPGA), and I can tell you it doesn't follow the RISC philosophy well, if at all.
One very non-RISC thing ARM did was move the shift instructions into every arithmetic instruction. That's right: there are no dedicated shift instructions. When you need a shift instruction, you have to encode it as part of a move operation or an add. In effect, every add, and, or, sub, etc. is actually a an add+shift, and+shift, or+shift, etc. This is the opposite of the RISC philosophy, and it significantly complicates the hardware, since a variable shifter has to be on the ALU critical path.
Other non-RISC things ARM did include the Java instruction set extensions, the Thumb instruction set extensions (further reduce code size), vector & media instruction set instructions, etc.
I think calling ARM "RISC" is a marketing decision only, done for historical reasons. It doesn't have much to do with the technical reality, IMO. Jon Stokes would have done better to say ARM vs. x86, instead of RISC vs. CISC, which is an outdated idea back from the 80s & 90s.
This benchmark is a system benchmark, meaning that it takes into account power dissipation of much more than the processor alone. It is fair to say that Intel's current server platforms use more power than AMD's server platforms, but this is actually due to their memory technology, and not to the processors themselves.
To be more specific, the Xeon processor in this review is the same processor core as the Merom/Conroe Core 2 Duo core. If you benchmark Conroe on a platform using the same memory technology (DDR2) as AMD, you'll find that Intel's power consumption is significantly less than AMD's. But Intel decided to use a different technology (FBDIMM) for its server platforms, in order to increase maximum memory capacity, whereas the Opteron used a simpler technology which is severely limited in memory capacity per channel, since the outdated parallel multidrop DDR2 bus can't go at speed when heavily loaded.
FBDIMM is like PCI-Express or Hypertransport for a memory interface, meaning that it's serial and point to point, instead of parallel and multidrop. This allows Intel to add many more loads to the memory channel without slowing the channel down, because it is Fully Buffered (the FB part of FBDIMM), which increases memory capacity per channel. However, FBDIMM also turns out to be very power hungry, and Intel is now being forced (by benchmarks such as this one) to release server platforms without FBDIMM in order to lower power consumption for people who don't need large memory capacities. (for some confirmation of this, look here: http://theinquirer.net/?article=42183)
In any case, the results of this benchmark aren't about "chips", they're about platforms. Intel's current chips are pretty good, but their server platforms need some work. That's why Intel's coming out with a whole new platform next year (here's some reading material for you: http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT082 807020032 ).
So a quick answer to your question: Intel's chips ARE better than AMD's, but their platforms aren't. Here's the question you should have asked: Why are Intel's platforms always behind AMDs? The answer to that is basically that Intel has lots more internal politics, and therefore it is slow to change things that have impact across the company, like platforms. Intel has a lot of internal competition: lots of separate groups working on various competing processors, so the processors themselves are usually pretty good (Darwin at work). But the teams making the processors don't have the freedom to change the platform, since that's outside their scope and requires lots of corporate maneuvering. So Intel's platforms are much slower to change than AMDs.
Summing up: don't confuse a system benchmark for a processor benchmark! TFA isn't about processors at all, it's about systems.
It's not clear if it's possible to write to them in parallel -- if so the device should be pretty damn fast. It's pretty obvious that it's not possible to write to this array of chips in parallel, because you just can't fit enough pins in a tiny package to provide the necessary interface for talking to 24 chips simultaneously. Also, take a look at the picture from TFA: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/upload/news/070905_p10 _hynix.jpg - you can see that all the leads to the different chips are wired to the same pads. This doesn't prove my point - they could all be power or ground connections, but looking at the complexity of the packaging here supports the idea that providing a separate interface to each of these chips would be very expensive and difficult.
In short, this is a capacity optimized device, it's not meant to break speed records.
If you read the fine print, AMD is actually not implementing all of SSE4 on the Bulldozer chip which will be the first to include SSE5. This is disastrous - the SSE "brand" has always implied backwards compatibility: SSE1 contains MMX, SSE2 contains SSE1 & MMX, etc. etc. Now AMD is breaking this, since SSE5 chips will not include all of SSE4. AMD shouldn't have named these new extensions SSE5. As it is, they are forking the x86 instruction set, which is a bad thing for all of us.
The grid is actually remarkably efficient for an energy distribution system - it loses only 9% of its energy input. The vast majority of the electrical losses in this chart come from converting heat energy to mechanical energy to electric energy. Converting energy between its various forms is always expensive (those pesky laws of thermodynamics!!)
I don't think you were listening very carefully to the talk (or know much about Computer Architecture) if you think Dave Patterson is a supercomputer guy. Perhaps you've heard of the Hennessy & Patterson Quantitative Approach to Computer Architecture book (you know, the one used at basically every university to teach about computer architecture). Patterson has been involved in a lot of different things within computer architecture over the years, including being one of the main people behind RISC and RAID (as well as being the president of the ACM).
I saw his talk when it was given at Berkeley, and you really missed the point if you thought it was about supercomputing. The talk was about the future of computing in general, which is increasingly parallel, in case you're unaware of that fact. GPUs are already at 128 cores, Network processors are up to 200 cores. Intel is going to present an 80 core x86 test chip tomorrow at ISSCC. Physics won't support faster single core processors at the rate we're accustomed to, so the whole industry is going parallel, which is a sea change in the industry. Patterson's talk is aimed at the research community, since we don't have good answers as to how these very parallel systems should be architected and programmed. FPGA emulation is a great way to play around with massive multiprocessor configurations and programming strategies, which is why Patterson is advocating it (his RAMP project has researchers from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Texas, Washington involved (among others)).
You also need to have a little more imagination about what we could do with more computing power. Try looking at Intel's presentations on RMS http://www.intel.com/technology/itj/2005/volume09i ssue02/foreword.htm.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they're actually based off of GF104, GF106 and GF108. If you read the articles, you'll see 3 distinct chips pictured: A big rectangular one (GF104), a medium sized, square one (GF106), and a small square one (GF108). These chips are all soon to be launched on the desktop as well.
It always strikes me as amusing that religious people who ostensibly don't agree with Darwin end up with lots of kids, while the stereotypical secular humanist strongly believes in evolution but refuses to propagate his or her genes. It's an interesting disconnect between ideology and reality, on both sides.
From the article: "The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor" . Somehow he misses that the Web is a big platform on the iPhone, and then goes on to whine about native applications not being as open and free as the web! It's like he totally missed the point of his own tirade: if you don't like vendor controlled platforms, use the Web, it's the first-ever platform without a vendor!
For someone who supposedly thinks deep thoughts about these subjects, he's frighteningly short-sighted.
I think Tim Bray's rant on the iPhone is rather ill-considered & rather short-sighted.
I wonder if this analysis took into account CFL's poor power factor. Cheap CFLs usually have a power factor of around 0.5, which causes substantial electrical losses compared to Incandescent bulbs, which are purely resistive (and therefore have a power factor of 1.0). LEDs, on the other hand, have a pretty good power factor. http://www.theengineer.co.uk/opinion/led-is-the-answer/299821.article
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_c1060.html How about a little research before posting these stories???
There are plenty of bad things to say about Neocons without accusing them of being racist.
BTW, are you ready to invade Pakistan? Obama is.
If you think Iraq was a mistake, imagine Iraq + the Hindu Kush + Nuclear Weapons. I can't believe Obama gets a free pass while saying we need our troops out of Iraq, now, but we should consider invading Pakistan.
To answer your question, McCain is not my favorite choice, but at least I know what I'm getting. McCain has a proven track record in the Senate of important legislation, especially bipartisan efforts such as
Clearly, McCain knows how to get politics done, and has pursued many moderate policies in cooperation with the Democrats. I think the country needs more bipartisanship, but still needs strong leadership. McCain is a known quantity that I believe will provide both.
Additionally, his former POW status means he understands the military from a unique perspective, which is essential in today's time of war.
Obama is a conventional Chicago politician, despite all the hype about change, and people are starting to realize that he's essentially empty. Obama hasn't accomplished anything substantial. Rhetoric (including memoirs) is no accomplishment, and Obama has nothing else significant to point to. Name one important piece of legislation Obama has contributed to. Name a significant accomplishment Obama has had in the business world. Name any significant bipartisan work he has performed. Name a significant project he's headed.
Obama is a blank screen, an empty slate for people to project their "hope for change".
He's not suited for leading a government - he doesn't have the spine to stand up for himself and pursue what he thinks is right. Obama doesn't take responsibility - he's always blaming his staff for his mistakes, or blaming the media for asking tough questions, or blaming Bush.
I am no McCain fan. But Obama is a very unattractive presidential candidate. If you can't see these weaknesses, perhaps you should try to escape your bubble periodically. I think it's actually rather ironic that in this year of years, the Democrats have nominated a candidate who could actually lose.
England redefined the gallon as the "imperial gallon" in 1824, after the US had gained independence, using a metric inspired definition: 1 gallon = 10 pounds of water. Of course, the US didn't follow suit with the new gallon, and continued to use the old.
The history is rather fascinating - take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallon
In any case, it makes no sense to say the US gallon is a non-standard gallon. If anything, the Imperial gallon is the non-standard one, since the US continues to faithfully follow the standard set in 1706, while England decided to break from the standard and do something different.
So 235 MPG is the right figure for anyone living in your area. =)
ps. Google is your friend: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=100+km%2Fl+in+mpg
So basically, things are so much more complicated these days that you can't even call x86 chips RISC CPUs with CISC instruction sets.
We're in a post-RISC era.
I've had to work with the ARM ISA in the past (I was studying its implementation as a soft core on an FPGA), and I can tell you it doesn't follow the RISC philosophy well, if at all.
One very non-RISC thing ARM did was move the shift instructions into every arithmetic instruction. That's right: there are no dedicated shift instructions. When you need a shift instruction, you have to encode it as part of a move operation or an add. In effect, every add, and, or, sub, etc. is actually a an add+shift, and+shift, or+shift, etc. This is the opposite of the RISC philosophy, and it significantly complicates the hardware, since a variable shifter has to be on the ALU critical path.
Other non-RISC things ARM did include the Java instruction set extensions, the Thumb instruction set extensions (further reduce code size), vector & media instruction set instructions, etc.
I think calling ARM "RISC" is a marketing decision only, done for historical reasons. It doesn't have much to do with the technical reality, IMO. Jon Stokes would have done better to say ARM vs. x86, instead of RISC vs. CISC, which is an outdated idea back from the 80s & 90s.
To be more specific, the Xeon processor in this review is the same processor core as the Merom/Conroe Core 2 Duo core. If you benchmark Conroe on a platform using the same memory technology (DDR2) as AMD, you'll find that Intel's power consumption is significantly less than AMD's. But Intel decided to use a different technology (FBDIMM) for its server platforms, in order to increase maximum memory capacity, whereas the Opteron used a simpler technology which is severely limited in memory capacity per channel, since the outdated parallel multidrop DDR2 bus can't go at speed when heavily loaded.
FBDIMM is like PCI-Express or Hypertransport for a memory interface, meaning that it's serial and point to point, instead of parallel and multidrop. This allows Intel to add many more loads to the memory channel without slowing the channel down, because it is Fully Buffered (the FB part of FBDIMM), which increases memory capacity per channel. However, FBDIMM also turns out to be very power hungry, and Intel is now being forced (by benchmarks such as this one) to release server platforms without FBDIMM in order to lower power consumption for people who don't need large memory capacities. (for some confirmation of this, look here: http://theinquirer.net/?article=42183)
In any case, the results of this benchmark aren't about "chips", they're about platforms. Intel's current chips are pretty good, but their server platforms need some work. That's why Intel's coming out with a whole new platform next year (here's some reading material for you: http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT082 807020032 ).
So a quick answer to your question: Intel's chips ARE better than AMD's, but their platforms aren't. Here's the question you should have asked: Why are Intel's platforms always behind AMDs? The answer to that is basically that Intel has lots more internal politics, and therefore it is slow to change things that have impact across the company, like platforms. Intel has a lot of internal competition: lots of separate groups working on various competing processors, so the processors themselves are usually pretty good (Darwin at work). But the teams making the processors don't have the freedom to change the platform, since that's outside their scope and requires lots of corporate maneuvering. So Intel's platforms are much slower to change than AMDs.
Summing up: don't confuse a system benchmark for a processor benchmark! TFA isn't about processors at all, it's about systems.
If you read the fine print, AMD is actually not implementing all of SSE4 on the Bulldozer chip which will be the first to include SSE5. This is disastrous - the SSE "brand" has always implied backwards compatibility: SSE1 contains MMX, SSE2 contains SSE1 & MMX, etc. etc. Now AMD is breaking this, since SSE5 chips will not include all of SSE4. AMD shouldn't have named these new extensions SSE5. As it is, they are forking the x86 instruction set, which is a bad thing for all of us.
? i=3073
Here's some more information: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
The grid is actually remarkably efficient for an energy distribution system - it loses only 9% of its energy input. The vast majority of the electrical losses in this chart come from converting heat energy to mechanical energy to electric energy. Converting energy between its various forms is always expensive (those pesky laws of thermodynamics!!)
I don't think you were listening very carefully to the talk (or know much about Computer Architecture) if you think Dave Patterson is a supercomputer guy. Perhaps you've heard of the Hennessy & Patterson Quantitative Approach to Computer Architecture book (you know, the one used at basically every university to teach about computer architecture). Patterson has been involved in a lot of different things within computer architecture over the years, including being one of the main people behind RISC and RAID (as well as being the president of the ACM). I saw his talk when it was given at Berkeley, and you really missed the point if you thought it was about supercomputing. The talk was about the future of computing in general, which is increasingly parallel, in case you're unaware of that fact. GPUs are already at 128 cores, Network processors are up to 200 cores. Intel is going to present an 80 core x86 test chip tomorrow at ISSCC. Physics won't support faster single core processors at the rate we're accustomed to, so the whole industry is going parallel, which is a sea change in the industry. Patterson's talk is aimed at the research community, since we don't have good answers as to how these very parallel systems should be architected and programmed. FPGA emulation is a great way to play around with massive multiprocessor configurations and programming strategies, which is why Patterson is advocating it (his RAMP project has researchers from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Texas, Washington involved (among others)). You also need to have a little more imagination about what we could do with more computing power. Try looking at Intel's presentations on RMS http://www.intel.com/technology/itj/2005/volume09i ssue02/foreword.htm.
For those that are interested, the Berkeley View project website is at http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/, which includes some video interviews with the principal professors involved in the project. There is also a blog at http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/blog/