Apple's dual-CPU Mac Pros are actually their most competitively priced computers. This isn't a Skulltrail board. We're talking about dual Xeons, ECC RAM, etc. Price out the same system from Dell or HP and you'll find that there isn't much difference in price.
So if other companies charge similar prices, its not a ripoff?
You can literally build a significantly better performing 24-core system for less than the price of that 8 core system. Maybe to you that doesnt mean the 8 core system is a ripoff, but to me it does.
and it's absurd for you not to consider 1/3 of the equipment in a price comparison.
A) Its not 1/3rd of the price. That would be $1100 worth of equipment.
B) I didnt ignore it. I just didnt detail it.
C) absurd is the inclusion of a $50 firewire card, and a $100 OS, for a server.
The bulk of the cost is in the CPU's and Motherboard, and I still had as much as $1340 of headroom. You don't like that fact, thats fine. But dont try to muddy the waters... we are comparing a 24 core AMD server vs an 8 core Intel server sold by Apple for $3300. AMD wins massively on performance in this comparison. AMD also wins on price.
I also have to question the value of the 12-core CPUs from AMD. They have advantages in certain applications, but even in fairly high parallel use environments like VM hosting, Intel's 6-core versions do at least as well, and support a higher clock speed for better single-thread performance.
Really? You dont bother to worry about price anymore? Those 6 core chips that actually compete with AMD's 12 core chips in "high parallel use enrivonments", are significantly more expensive, which is the point. A Mac Pro is a server built on Intel, but AMD is the performance king of the servers at every price point they offer, and thats before the Apple tax.
We'll see what Apples price will be for their 12 core server. My guess is around $4000 considering the difference in price between Intel's 4 core and 6 core server offerings. It will be a huge ripoff.
Meaningless question. Tape is only used for backups, and lots of data is not backed up (rightly or wrongly).
It used to be that all there was, was tape. Tape was main storage, but now tape is relegated to narrower and narrower use purposes each year.
This is the point. Platters replaced tape long before they competed on capacity, and even before they competed on raw bandwidth speed. The main advantage that platters had was seek time.
Now we are in a situation where Flash drives destroy platters on both seek time AND raw speed, not to mention reliability and energy efficiency. There is little hope for platters remaining mainstream. Platters will be used for narrower and narrower purposes, just like tape.
This may not be ideal from the vendor's point of view, but it's not the vendor who's in danger of having their systems attacked so I'm not overly concerned about their public-relations heartburn.
If you are not concerned about the vendors public-relations, then why release at all? It seems to me that the justification for release is precisely that the researchers ARE concerned about the vendors public-relations.. intent on harming it.
Its end users that dont follow security issues that are most at risk, where the releasing of exploits hurts them pretty much directly and immediately.
If its a critical bug in software that a typical grandma (and other non-geeks) uses, I claim that it is ALWAYS irresponsible to release the details of the exploit into the wild. Every single time, no matter how much time has passed waiting for a fix. This belief is formulated on the premise that the vendor's public-relations dont mean shit either way, that its the end users that mean something.
When you are talking about single core chips in dual configuration, the distinction is important.. but when you are talking about 6 core chips in dual configuration, the distinction is no longer important.
That being said.. what a ripoff high end macs are.. their stock 8 core Mac Pro on their store website is $3300.. For that price, it should be 24 real cores.
I'd pay for that. Say a full magnetic drive is $100 for 1TB. A full SSD is $3000 for 1TB. A Hybrid 1TB drive, which features 4GB of flash, is $200 but performs 50% faster than the magnetic drive and deals with simultaneous reads and writes much better. I'd buy that.
Note the trend in the cache hierarchy is that there is large growth in capacity between levels.
If I use all 4GB of my DDR3 memory for non-cache purposes, then by definition a 4GB layer between it and the drive cannot be all that useful.. its just a copy of whats in ram at that point. On the other hand, if I use only 512MB of my 4GB then I already have 3.5GB of faster cache than the flash will offer.
A flash cache between DDR3 and HD would probably need to be somewhere between 64GB and 256GB to be near optimal.. where optimal is a fuzzy target.
They did and continue to regulate offshore oil drilling. BP was drilling there instead of in shallow water precisely because the government said they couldn't drill in shallow water, and BP still had regulations imposed on it in deep water... the regulators failed to protect you, and quite likely actually increased the probability for such a catastrophic failure to happen.
Ummm, try again, Your definition of straw man is woefully bad.
You replied to me about shit other people supposedly said or believe. I sure as hell didnt say it, and sure as hell dont believe it.
Then erected an argument around it, as if it had something to do with my points. Answer your question? Really? Thats a fucking straw man, idiot. I'm not responding to your straw man questions.
Historically, every time Republicans deregulated a public service or utility, the service has turned to shit. Costs go up and service goes down.
Apparently you dont remember when it was forbidden for telephone providers to compete with cable television providers, and vise-versa. Service has gone way up in both cases, and now I have choices for both telephone providers and television providers where before I did not.
If you think the net neutrality is is about regulating the Internet then you should rethink your position. Net neutrality is about who controls the content. Is it you, or Comcast and AT&T?
I do not think that when you say 'net neutrality' that you envision a regulated internet. I think they when the FCC or Congress says it, they envision a regulated internet. Are you really so naive?
You can come back at me with the argument that not running or buying the proper government-mandated software and hardware could be made illegal, but good luck with enforcement, both practically and literally.
Where can I buy a high definition television that does not have the FCC mandated V-CHIP?
This is a simple question, and obviously you seem to think that there is a simple answer. The enforcement will be on manufacturers and retailers, not consumers. Dont bother replying, because I know that you do not have an answer that isnt absurd.
How the fuck are they going to impose their will on the rest of the internet, you know, the parts they don't control?
Why the straw man? Can't you respond to what was posted when you click reply instead of responding to arguments made by other (possibly imaginary) people?
I didnt even try to define what Net Neutrality is.
The problem is that if we have it your way it will be the FCC, or Congress, that defines what it is and isn't.. while also handing them regulatory power over it.
Are things really so bad, right now, that we want to hand regulatory powers over to either of these two? Really? This isn't Canada, where attempts at regulations have essentially "backfired" and fucked over the public.. yet.
Ensuring that ISPs can't discriminate against the little guy (such as myself) is elitest?
How about setting the precedent that the government can?
First it will be FCC's "Net neutrality", then it will be a mandatory proprietary iCHIP for parental controls in every ethernet adapter.
Or it will be Congress's "Net Neutrality", then it will be a mandatory tax on certain kinds of traffic.
Meanwhile, more Democrats in Washington oppose net neutrality than do Republicans. This Al Franken guy just wants to make sure that the FCC doesnt claim the power.
Amiga fans eat your hearts out. Thats not MIDI with an external synth. Thats wavetable synthesis (just like the Amiga) but only.. you know.. way better.
..and considering that the AM3 will hold both the Phenom II 1055T and 1090T, which are both 6 core enthusiast monsters.. I've got to give them +++CREDIT TO TEAM+++.. the machine is upgradeable all the way to the current bleeding edge.
Amiga: 4 channels, later 8 channels.
AppleIIgs: 15 channels, 16 if you perform timing on the CPU.
Then there was the AtariST which was king of MIDI.
PC users sure ate up 4-channel MOD files when they finally got software mixing players for their SBPro's... but the IIgs boys were still laughing at both Amiga and PC's and continued laughing until the Gravis UltraSound hit the scene with support for 32-channels (only 14 at 44.1khz tho)
Hint: The Gravis UltraSound used a licensed and customized Ensoniq ES5506 mixer chip, while the IIgs used the previous version, the ES5503.
Apple IIgs: 1986
Gravis UltraSound: 1992
Amiga never really competed for high end audio. The IIgs kicked its ass very badly. Those 16 channels were PANNABLE as well, not locked to a side like the Amiga.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
it is exactly right that the text was crisper, but only when the dispay was in text mode of course.
There was *competition* in the video card market, so video card makers did many tricks to enhance text mode output. The 'effective' resolution was often a lot higher than the 720x200 the ega/vga specs defined.
720 is derived from 9 pixels wide characters * 80 characters. The text characters were actually 8x8, but a 9th pixel was assumed between each char ('cept with certain high ascii characters, where the 8th pixel was copied to the 9th)
The thing is that these video cards were basically doing card-coded finely-tuned sub-pixel anti-aliasing on these 8x8 characters. Abrash even wrote about leveraging one particular makers sub-pixel capabilities in text mode.. but by then SVGA, particularly 1024x768, and with VESA standardization, nobody wanted to mess with proprietary stuff.
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Apple's dual-CPU Mac Pros are actually their most competitively priced computers. This isn't a Skulltrail board. We're talking about dual Xeons, ECC RAM, etc. Price out the same system from Dell or HP and you'll find that there isn't much difference in price.
So if other companies charge similar prices, its not a ripoff?
You can literally build a significantly better performing 24-core system for less than the price of that 8 core system. Maybe to you that doesnt mean the 8 core system is a ripoff, but to me it does.
and it's absurd for you not to consider 1/3 of the equipment in a price comparison.
A) Its not 1/3rd of the price. That would be $1100 worth of equipment.
B) I didnt ignore it. I just didnt detail it.
C) absurd is the inclusion of a $50 firewire card, and a $100 OS, for a server.
The bulk of the cost is in the CPU's and Motherboard, and I still had as much as $1340 of headroom. You don't like that fact, thats fine. But dont try to muddy the waters... we are comparing a 24 core AMD server vs an 8 core Intel server sold by Apple for $3300. AMD wins massively on performance in this comparison. AMD also wins on price.
I also have to question the value of the 12-core CPUs from AMD. They have advantages in certain applications, but even in fairly high parallel use environments like VM hosting, Intel's 6-core versions do at least as well, and support a higher clock speed for better single-thread performance.
Really? You dont bother to worry about price anymore? Those 6 core chips that actually compete with AMD's 12 core chips in "high parallel use enrivonments", are significantly more expensive, which is the point. A Mac Pro is a server built on Intel, but AMD is the performance king of the servers at every price point they offer, and thats before the Apple tax.
We'll see what Apples price will be for their 12 core server. My guess is around $4000 considering the difference in price between Intel's 4 core and 6 core server offerings. It will be a huge ripoff.
Meaningless question. Tape is only used for backups, and lots of data is not backed up (rightly or wrongly).
It used to be that all there was, was tape. Tape was main storage, but now tape is relegated to narrower and narrower use purposes each year.
This is the point. Platters replaced tape long before they competed on capacity, and even before they competed on raw bandwidth speed. The main advantage that platters had was seek time.
Now we are in a situation where Flash drives destroy platters on both seek time AND raw speed, not to mention reliability and energy efficiency. There is little hope for platters remaining mainstream. Platters will be used for narrower and narrower purposes, just like tape.
CPU (pick one):
2 x AMD Opteron 6168 (1.9GHz) - $760 x 2 = $1520
2 x AMD Opteron 6172 (2.1GHz) - $1000 x 2 = $2000
2 x AMD Opteron 6174 (2.2GHz) - $1300 x 2 = $2600
Motherboard:
ASUS KGPE-D16 Dual Socket G34 - $439
Everything else is cheap.
This may not be ideal from the vendor's point of view, but it's not the vendor who's in danger of having their systems attacked so I'm not overly concerned about their public-relations heartburn.
If you are not concerned about the vendors public-relations, then why release at all? It seems to me that the justification for release is precisely that the researchers ARE concerned about the vendors public-relations.. intent on harming it.
Its end users that dont follow security issues that are most at risk, where the releasing of exploits hurts them pretty much directly and immediately.
If its a critical bug in software that a typical grandma (and other non-geeks) uses, I claim that it is ALWAYS irresponsible to release the details of the exploit into the wild. Every single time, no matter how much time has passed waiting for a fix. This belief is formulated on the premise that the vendor's public-relations dont mean shit either way , that its the end users that mean something.
When you are talking about single core chips in dual configuration, the distinction is important.. but when you are talking about 6 core chips in dual configuration, the distinction is no longer important.
.. For that price, it should be 24 real cores.
That being said.. what a ripoff high end macs are.. their stock 8 core Mac Pro on their store website is $3300
I'd pay for that. Say a full magnetic drive is $100 for 1TB. A full SSD is $3000 for 1TB. A Hybrid 1TB drive, which features 4GB of flash, is $200 but performs 50% faster than the magnetic drive and deals with simultaneous reads and writes much better. I'd buy that.
Note the trend in the cache hierarchy is that there is large growth in capacity between levels.
.. 65,535 bytes .. 524,288 bytes .. 6,291,456 bytes .. 4,294,967,296 bytes .. 500,000,000,000 bytes
This is on my system:
L1
L2
L3
DDR3
HD
If I use all 4GB of my DDR3 memory for non-cache purposes, then by definition a 4GB layer between it and the drive cannot be all that useful.. its just a copy of whats in ram at that point. On the other hand, if I use only 512MB of my 4GB then I already have 3.5GB of faster cache than the flash will offer.
A flash cache between DDR3 and HD would probably need to be somewhere between 64GB and 256GB to be near optimal.. where optimal is a fuzzy target.
Really? Where can I buy a 1.4TB hard drive that can read/write at 140MB/s for under $100?
You are asking the wrong question.
Instead, how about "Summing up all of the worlds digital data, is more stored on platters, or tape?"
Or maybe, "In 2010-converted dollars, how much money has been spent on platters vs tape?"
Or how about "Will Google ever use tape?"
I asked a subset of this forum's users a question, and it happened to be attached toy our comment.
And I asked you, specifically, where I can buy a high definition television that does not have a V-CHIP.. that isnt an absurd place to buy it.
You claimed that a hardware enforcement would be difficult. The FCC mandates the V-CHIP. Has it been difficult to enforce, or easy to enforce?
How could it ever be "too early" to start thinking about protecting out net neutrality?
With Net Neutrality, the drive to increase competition for providers .. letting more providers service your area .. seems much less likely, doesnt it?
Why bother allowing more competition when the 'New is Neutral' ?
They did and continue to regulate offshore oil drilling. BP was drilling there instead of in shallow water precisely because the government said they couldn't drill in shallow water, and BP still had regulations imposed on it in deep water... the regulators failed to protect you, and quite likely actually increased the probability for such a catastrophic failure to happen.
Ummm, try again, Your definition of straw man is woefully bad.
You replied to me about shit other people supposedly said or believe. I sure as hell didnt say it, and sure as hell dont believe it.
Then erected an argument around it, as if it had something to do with my points. Answer your question? Really? Thats a fucking straw man, idiot. I'm not responding to your straw man questions.
Historically, every time Republicans deregulated a public service or utility, the service has turned to shit. Costs go up and service goes down.
Apparently you dont remember when it was forbidden for telephone providers to compete with cable television providers, and vise-versa. Service has gone way up in both cases, and now I have choices for both telephone providers and television providers where before I did not.
If you think the net neutrality is is about regulating the Internet then you should rethink your position. Net neutrality is about who controls the content. Is it you, or Comcast and AT&T?
I do not think that when you say 'net neutrality' that you envision a regulated internet. I think they when the FCC or Congress says it, they envision a regulated internet. Are you really so naive?
The FCC, via congress, is already capable of something like the iChip.
The FCC is part of the executive branch, and did not need or get congressional approval to mandate the V-CHIP.
You can come back at me with the argument that not running or buying the proper government-mandated software and hardware could be made illegal, but good luck with enforcement, both practically and literally.
Where can I buy a high definition television that does not have the FCC mandated V-CHIP?
This is a simple question, and obviously you seem to think that there is a simple answer. The enforcement will be on manufacturers and retailers, not consumers. Dont bother replying, because I know that you do not have an answer that isnt absurd.
How would it, or even could it, ever be 'too late' ? Support your assertions.
.. I get it .. what you dont get is that Franken doesnt care about 'net neutrality,' and even less so your version of it.
Is there a single thing where its 'too late' for the government to regulate?
You like 'net neutrality'
How the fuck are they going to impose their will on the rest of the internet, you know, the parts they don't control?
Why the straw man? Can't you respond to what was posted when you click reply instead of responding to arguments made by other (possibly imaginary) people?
I didnt even try to define what Net Neutrality is.
The problem is that if we have it your way it will be the FCC, or Congress, that defines what it is and isn't.. while also handing them regulatory power over it.
Are things really so bad, right now, that we want to hand regulatory powers over to either of these two? Really? This isn't Canada, where attempts at regulations have essentially "backfired" and fucked over the public.. yet.
Ensuring that ISPs can't discriminate against the little guy (such as myself) is elitest?
How about setting the precedent that the government can?
First it will be FCC's "Net neutrality", then it will be a mandatory proprietary iCHIP for parental controls in every ethernet adapter.
Or it will be Congress's "Net Neutrality", then it will be a mandatory tax on certain kinds of traffic.
Meanwhile, more Democrats in Washington oppose net neutrality than do Republicans. This Al Franken guy just wants to make sure that the FCC doesnt claim the power.
Here is a direct comparison of a game on both IIgs and Amiga:
Apple IIgs version"
Amiga version
Here is an example of the IIgs's music capabilities.
Here is another one.
Amiga fans eat your hearts out. Thats not MIDI with an external synth. Thats wavetable synthesis (just like the Amiga) but only.. you know.. way better.
..and considering that the AM3 will hold both the Phenom II 1055T and 1090T, which are both 6 core enthusiast monsters.. I've got to give them +++CREDIT TO TEAM+++ .. the machine is upgradeable all the way to the current bleeding edge.
They were not the best for music.
Amiga: 4 channels, later 8 channels.
AppleIIgs: 15 channels, 16 if you perform timing on the CPU.
Then there was the AtariST which was king of MIDI.
PC users sure ate up 4-channel MOD files when they finally got software mixing players for their SBPro's... but the IIgs boys were still laughing at both Amiga and PC's and continued laughing until the Gravis UltraSound hit the scene with support for 32-channels (only 14 at 44.1khz tho)
Hint: The Gravis UltraSound used a licensed and customized Ensoniq ES5506 mixer chip, while the IIgs used the previous version, the ES5503.
Apple IIgs: 1986
Gravis UltraSound: 1992
Amiga never really competed for high end audio. The IIgs kicked its ass very badly. Those 16 channels were PANNABLE as well, not locked to a side like the Amiga.
it is exactly right that the text was crisper, but only when the dispay was in text mode of course.
There was *competition* in the video card market, so video card makers did many tricks to enhance text mode output. The 'effective' resolution was often a lot higher than the 720x200 the ega/vga specs defined.
720 is derived from 9 pixels wide characters * 80 characters. The text characters were actually 8x8, but a 9th pixel was assumed between each char ('cept with certain high ascii characters, where the 8th pixel was copied to the 9th)
The thing is that these video cards were basically doing card-coded finely-tuned sub-pixel anti-aliasing on these 8x8 characters. Abrash even wrote about leveraging one particular makers sub-pixel capabilities in text mode.. but by then SVGA, particularly 1024x768, and with VESA standardization, nobody wanted to mess with proprietary stuff.