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User: samoanbiscuit

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  1. Plus of course Intel probably do everything they can legally to keep OEMs from using anything but Intel CPUs.

    They've done lots of illegal things as well. They paid Michael Dell (amongst other OEMs) millions to reduce AMD volumes during the Athlon 64 years, when AMD CPUs beat out Intel CPUs on almost everything that wasn't compiled using the ICC (Intel's compiler). They were found guilty and ordered to pay a ~1.25 billion USD fine. A fine they still haven't paid. This did massive damage to AMD at a time when they were expecting increased revenues as the fruit of their investment in R&D.

    So I'd like to AMD to be competitive. Right now it seems like AMD is competitive for desktop machines, not so much on mobile. Which is a shame.

    It seems to be competitive enough, it just needs a better laptop surrounding it, and the Vega iGPU needs better drivers. The problems seem fixable in few months time.

  2. The power consumption (of the CPU) is already comparable. 2-3Ghz is Ryzen's sweet spot. It's getting the rest of the laptop right that remains to be seen. OEMs have a long history of treating AMD like the redheaded stepchild. AMD also has less power to dictate terms than Intel, but like I said, we should wait for other laptops before we decide Ryzen Mobile is a bust.

  3. The laptop reviewed (HP Envy x360) is a 15-inch laptop being compared to 13-inch laptops. The screen of the review laptop is turned up 100%, while many of the compared laptops were not. Also, there was no hardware acceleration on the video application used in the Ryzen laptop test. Pretty confident that with a more competent OEM they'd fix the screen issues (screen take up a huge chunk of most mobile devices power), put in a bigger battery and an upcoming update from AMD should make hardware acceleration work on more applications. With that solved this should be easily competitive with Intel mobile CPUs.

    I await Acer and Dell's efforts before I'd write Ryzen Mobile off.

  4. But AMD never grabbed the initiative to build on their fab capabilities and manufacturing processes, instead continuing to focus just on low cost CPUs.

    Fabs cost money. It's not about initiative, but the ability to pony up billions for several years. Billions they never got because Intel bribed the major OEMS at the time to refuse to put AMD in their products, or to include them only in their shittiest products, and at small volumes. Even when the Ahtlon 64 was eating Pentiums for breakfast. Dell's existence was basically subsidized by Intel during these years thanks to the bribes

    During the several years AMD had the performance crown, they were largely relegated to dumpster tier OEM products or custom built enthusiast PCs (not the largest market segment) due to Intel's illegal business practices. The 1 billion fine Intel was eventually slapped with is pocket change compared to the opportunity cost of the revenues they could have earned during their time in the sunshine, and how they could have used those missing dollars in R&D, operations and marketing.

    they also had a 2-3 generation advantage in terms of process nodes. Ultimately, AMD threw in the towel and sold off their fabs to Global Foundries.

    Intel only pulled ahead of AMD in the process node race at ~32nm, years after they fucked AMD over financially. And process node shrinks are a function of how much money you can throw at the problem. Since the smartphone explosion lead to major money and mindshare being thrown at third party fabs, TSMC and Samsung are quickly catching up to Intel, and look to be on the verge of surpassing Intel in the next few years. Intel's lead was once thought insurmountable, now these upstarts are snapping at it's heels.

    And unlike the time when AMD acquired another great CPU team, this time, there are no CPU teams left to acquire.

    AMD's hardware teams are easily among the best in the industry, high profile hires are just one part of the story. Intel and nVidia engineers readily acknowledge that fact all the time. Under much more resource constraints than the two incumbents, they regularly put out hardware that challenges and even beats what the two industry behemoths put out. Their driver/software people are a different story, but that's understandable when you compare AMD's workforce (~9000) to Intel (`100,000) or nVidia (~10,000).

  5. Re:Personally I will wait on Intel Reacts To AMD Ryzen Apparently Cutting Prices On Core i7 And i5 Processors (hothardware.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    The performance improvements for AMD are mainly due to Global Foundries opening up a 14nm fab.

    This is pretty incorrect. You don't get 52% IPC uplift just from a process node shrink. The Bulldozer family was a double whammy of bad for AMD because it was a bad design choice as well as them being stuck on an older, less power efficient node.

    Had they released Zen chips on their old node sizes, they would have still realized the IPC gain, but would have had to work with lower clocks and higher power consumption. They're now competitive with Intel on performance/watt, that comes from the node shrink, but they're also competitive on performance/clock, which comes from the new architecture which doesn't have such boneheaded decisions baked in like a shared FPU between two Bulldozer "cores"

    AMD hasnt really designed any bonehead chips. Ever. They just havent had access to parity FAB's.

    Bulldozer was AMD's Netburst moment. It failed hard vs Intel on everything except specific multithreaded integer workloads, and even then only beat Intel at much higher power consumption. Every tech reviewer on the planet who knows what they're talking about has shouted it from the rooftops. The Core architecture pulled ahead of AMD's Phenoms and they never recovered till Zen.

  6. Oh slashdot, you guys never change on Tech Firms Have An Obsession With 'Female' Digital Servants (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Article: There is sexism in the tech industry

    Reaction: SJW! SHILLS! LET ME REFUTE THIS WITH MY STEM LOGIC!

    Article: There is racism in the tech industry

    Reaction: SJW! SHILLS! LET ME REFUTE THIS WITH MY STEM LOGIC!

    Article: There is ageism in the tech industry

    Reaction: All the low UIDs suddenly start talking about how this is absolutely true, and how they couldn't get into Google or whatever because their recruiter thought they were too old. This one, this is the prejudice that truly exists in the tech industry, and they know because they've experienced it.

    If only all that formal logic training taught self awareness.

  7. Re:A change in the Ax meaning? on AMD Launches Enthusiast A10-7860K APU, New Mainstream CPUs and Wraith Cooler (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    Typing this comment out on an older Llano laptop, the APU inside is an A6-3400M with 4 CPU "cores" and 1 GPU core. There was never a correlation between core numbers and A[X]. It's just a way to segment by performance.

  8. Re:What I want to know is on An Ancient, Brutal Massacre May Be the Earliest Evidence of War · · Score: 1

    You've been to Fiji and seen the "i cula ni bokola" forks I take it. Well modern natives being hardline Christian, they're taught an exaggerated take on the brutality of their cannibal past in order to underscore how good they live now with their Christian faith. Cannibalism in Polynesia was ritualistic, done mainly after war or in the process of a ritual of high importance. You don't build an agrarian trader society (which the Polynesians were) if everyone's eating everybody they don't know.

  9. Re: So what? on HP R&D Starts Enforcing a Business Casual Dress Code · · Score: 1

    >I take it you've never heard of Margaret Hamilton or Admiral Grace Hopper who somehow managed to excel in a much more sexist society than we have now because instead of whining about the patriarchy on Twitter or Jezebel, they went and proved themselves better than their male peers. What if a girl entering into STM was only just as good as her male peers? Why does a minority have to out-perform to reach the same results? Don't you think that's unfair, and still biased?

  10. Re:Well, she was an interim. on Ellen Pao Leaves Reddit; Site Founder Steve Huffman Makes a Triumphant Return · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Agreed, she had a lot of contacts within the civil rights movement, both political and ecclesiastical. What's also true is that she was a light skinned, chaste (at least apparently so) sober, respectable middle class black woman. Has she been the same person, but darker skinned, poorer, or with an illegitimate child or other non-ideal domestic situation, she might not have been able to make the impact she did.

  11. Re:Well, she was an interim. on Ellen Pao Leaves Reddit; Site Founder Steve Huffman Makes a Triumphant Return · · Score: 1

    Sorry about that, I'd edit my comment, but slashdot doesn't have that feature.

  12. Re:Well, she was an interim. on Ellen Pao Leaves Reddit; Site Founder Steve Huffman Makes a Triumphant Return · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Your complete ignorance of history, especially the history of white supremacy, is laughable. Black people weren't allowed to use the same seats, toilets, pools and rooms as black people. Does that strike you as a time when white people had a positive view of black people?

  13. Re:Well, she was an interim. on Ellen Pao Leaves Reddit; Site Founder Steve Huffman Makes a Triumphant Return · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ellen is a person who brazenly attempted to abuse the gender inequality debate in a high profile court case to make millions of dollars when she was fired for being abrasive, lazy and generally incompetent.

    Actually, it's not at all brazen. The facts of the case painted the firm as pretty sexist. What they could not prove to a reasonable standard was that this background sexism was directly responsible for her not getting promotions and bonuses. Her husband's legal problems also complicate the narrative, and cast doubt on her intentions

    This is why the civil rights movement in the 60s waited for Rosa Parks, even though there had been several incidents of black women being mistreated on buses prior to Ms Parks' case. People are simple-minded, and confounding factors (like illegitimate children, alcohol/drug addictions, unsympathetic looks when it came to these many black women who went through what Rosa Parks went through) make your cause less likely to be successful, as unfair as that is.

  14. Re:If he sold phyiscal copies on 33 Months In Prison For Recording a Movie In a Theater · · Score: 1

    It takes a shitload more than $20 million to make a AAA sci-fi or fantasy movie. A $20 million dollar movie that relies on special effects to keep suspension of disbelief would look pretty shit, even if bloody Meryl Streep and Colin Firth were the two mains. My point with the pyramids is exactly this, we have become accustomed to a certain level of fit and finish in the media we consume. While a lot of money that goes into the media industry might be "squandered" in the opinion of slashdot geeks, but a lot is still spent on stuff that needs buying or people that need hiring in order to keep the quality up. Like I said, I'm talking strictly about Sci Fi and Fantasy movies, which have a requirement for special effects, both on computers and in the real world, and often film in lots of diverse locations. You can't do that with a $20 million budget and still have a product that looks amazing at the premiere. You're right that the little guys won't derive much benefits from the crowdsourcing model, and that's my objection to the anti-copyright people. So you say the current system is flawed (true enough), and you want to replace it? Fine. What are you going to replace it with? A completely new system that might not even work for the media format in question? Suuuuure.

  15. Re:If he sold phyiscal copies on 33 Months In Prison For Recording a Movie In a Theater · · Score: 1

    Nobody builds pyramids to house the bodies of dead monarchs anymore, but thousands of people flock to Egypt every year to see the old ones. I don't know about you, but I quite like big budget science fiction, fantasy and action movies. The stories are a bit dumb, but I have no doubt that without the million dollar budgets, the effects that these movies rely on to function would not be possible. Cutting out copy protection would hurt these movies the most, and I've seen indie attempts at making science fiction and fantasy movies. The writing is normally better, but the effects are almost hilariously bad, and the actors are pretty iffy as well.

  16. Re:Papers on Chromebooks Are Outselling iPads In Schools · · Score: 1

    Why would I want a laptop with a screen smaller than 10 or 11 inches? That sounds useless. I would use a tablet that small, which is what Microsoft seems to be targeting with that rule, but a laptop? No thank you. Besides, even with zero-cost Windows, making a medium-sized tablet or tiny laptop with good internals for less than $99 is going to be a tough proposition, especially with low-end Androids flooding the market.

  17. Re:Papers on Chromebooks Are Outselling iPads In Schools · · Score: 1

    Google's been making some noise about improving the offline capabilities of ChromeOS, and letting approved Android apps into the ChromeOS store. If these things happen in a reasonably quick period, then that's a pocket Linux lappy I would use.

  18. Re:LLVM funding model doesn't scale on FSF's Richard Stallman Calls LLVM a 'Terrible Setback' · · Score: 2

    left as an exercise to the reader.

    Holy shit you are a pompous shitbag.

    More seriously, because Apple has nothing to little to gain from copylefting Xcode, and a lot more to lose. It makes more sense to focus on an GCC alternative than to trust the GNU team to not put even more roadblocks in place to prevent GCC integration into Xcode. I can't believe you made me defend Apple.

  19. Re:Critical thinking missing on "Squishy Joints" May Have Helped Dinosaurs Grow To Giant Sizes · · Score: 1

    Keep in mind that hundreds of millions of years of extinctions and adaptive radiations have taken place between then and now. It's not only a question of whether insects can exist at the larger sizes they once grew to, but also whether they'd be competitive enough to take back their former ecological niches from the current incumbents. To use a tech analogy, it's like asking whether a flip phone can dominate the premium phone market in 2014, because they once dominated it in 2005.

    Judging from the range and distribution of insects alive in the present, it seems that for most insects, small size and rapid reproduction are the way to go for them. Their body plan, with it's less efficient circulatory system, and less complex brains, seem to put them at a disadvantage if they began to grow larger. Remember that there are a vast array of mammals and birds that specialize specifically in preying on insects.

  20. Re:Slight problem on New Zealand Converting Old Phone Booths Into National WiFi Network · · Score: 1

    You mention a phone booth in a historical site, so I'm thinking maybe you didn't recognize what the more ahem, "modern" phone booths looked like? They're pretty inconspicuous unless you're walking by them.

  21. Re:they have a girl!!!!!!! on Cyanogen Mod Goes Commercial To Make "Available On Everything, To Everyone" · · Score: 1

    I'm sure I'll get modded to oblivion for speaking out against the current PC fad

    Really? Here on slashdot, the bastion of conservative tech news, you'll be downvoted? Psshh.

  22. Re:Oh, gag me. on Why Engineering Freshmen Should Take Humanities Courses · · Score: 1

    You've fallen victim to an pretty obvious problem, which is greedy reductionism. If you actually studied biology, one of the least "STEM-y" of the physical sciences, you would realize that objects can be analysed on multiple levels, and a lower level analysis is not inherently more useful or germane than a higher level analysis (although in the physical sciences, it often is, this is not necessarily the case all the time, especially when dealing with human behaviour, which is why sociology and psychology are both equally valid fields).

  23. Re:Sex versus Gender on Transgendered Folks Encountering Document/Database ID Hassles · · Score: 1

    Lots and lots of things are less ignorant than epyT-R.

  24. Re:Modern Jesus on NSA WhistleBlower Outs Himself · · Score: 1

    In many countries around the world, that would probably be easily doable. But it probably has a higher level of difficulty in China and Russia. For the short term, Snowden is probably very safe in China. They're probably going to take... steps... to ensure this PR gold mine remains at their doorstep for now while they figure out how best to use him.

    Think about it, the USA loves castigating China about their human rights record. Snowden "disappearing" would mean the shoe would be on the other foot when the HoS of the two countries meet.

    He (Snowden) worked in Intelligence, and probably knows a good deal more about the diplomatic relationship between China and the USA than most of use commenting here. There's always a chance he might be wrong, but there's no chance he didn't choose Hong Kong for perfectly rational and logical (albeit to him) reasons.

  25. Re:they moved to DirectX from OpenGL for that reas on Intel's Linux OpenGL Driver Faster Than Apple's OS X Driver · · Score: 1

    OS X has never been the king of performance or speed. Responsiveness and a clean, elegant UI? Yes. Winning benchmarks left and right? No. Companies making apps for Macs generally don't make them because OS X is the most efficient or performant OS on the market, and this news isn't going to make them switch to Linux. Also, because for most people the main reason for buying an expensive Mac is OS X, they aren't likely to switch to Linux because the OpenGL driver works slightly faster.