Sure, you can ship hard disks today, but why? DVDs are cheaper per GB, and in 5 years optical storage will still be cheaper per GB than hard disks. It doesn't matter if you can fit an HD movie on a keychain drive because that drive is guaranteed to cost more than $1.
The P800/P910 is great. I also hear good things about the Treo. The key is to buy your phone separately from the service; yes, this means you will get screwed on price, but freedom is worth it. Once you have your unlocked GSM phone, you can use whatever carrier has the cheapest GPRS.
At over $500 per machine, a Fibre Channel SAN doesn't look like such a good idea in this scenario. OS X doesn't support iSCSI, so an Ethernet SAN is out of the question.
The MPEG-2-over-Firewire HAVi utopia is a nice idea, but it never worked. Handling menus, overlays, and interactivity is too complex.
What will really happen is that each device will have its own decoder and the devices will connect via HDMI (which is just one cable for audio and video). You'll still need a universal remote, sorry.
Every Blu-ray player will support multiple codecs. Thus a disc may use any of those codecs. For example, discs recorded from TV will most likely be in MPEG-2 format, while movies will probably be in the higher quality VC-9 format.
They may lose money on the clueless, but that make up for it on the geeks who don't need support.
Given that geeks are a small part of the population, I'm skeptical. I would bet that they really make money on clueless users who don't even bother to try to get support.
Almost every Opteron block diagram shows the crossbar switch. For example, AMD's 8th-Generation Processor Architecture document from 2001 shows how the SRQ and crossbar are used in a dual-core Opteron (figure 5).
Er, cache coherency works exactly the same way in a multicore chip as in an old-fashioned SMP. Opteron, Xeon, and small Itanic systems use the time-tested broadcast snooping algorithms that are taught in undergraduate courses.
In Power4, the L2 and everything beyond is shared by the two cores. (The fact that the L2 has three slices isn't relevant here.) Many of the upcoming chips have multiple, private L2s, hence the point of the article.
Wouldn't it be saner to build a chip with double the number of execution units and double the number of instruction fetch/decode units and a larger reorder buffer that would appear, say, as four logical processors to a system?
That's like the Alpha EV8. It costs way too much to design and it's questionable whether you could build it at all.
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Sure, you can ship hard disks today, but why? DVDs are cheaper per GB, and in 5 years optical storage will still be cheaper per GB than hard disks. It doesn't matter if you can fit an HD movie on a keychain drive because that drive is guaranteed to cost more than $1.
The P800/P910 is great. I also hear good things about the Treo. The key is to buy your phone separately from the service; yes, this means you will get screwed on price, but freedom is worth it. Once you have your unlocked GSM phone, you can use whatever carrier has the cheapest GPRS.
Blu-ray doesn't use cartridges any more.
Just remember, Jack Valenti says you have no right to backups...
At over $500 per machine, a Fibre Channel SAN doesn't look like such a good idea in this scenario. OS X doesn't support iSCSI, so an Ethernet SAN is out of the question.
No it doesn't; that information isn't even readable using normal accesses.
The MPEG-2-over-Firewire HAVi utopia is a nice idea, but it never worked. Handling menus, overlays, and interactivity is too complex.
What will really happen is that each device will have its own decoder and the devices will connect via HDMI (which is just one cable for audio and video). You'll still need a universal remote, sorry.
Every Blu-ray player will support multiple codecs. Thus a disc may use any of those codecs. For example, discs recorded from TV will most likely be in MPEG-2 format, while movies will probably be in the higher quality VC-9 format.
DRM is orthogonal to codecs. There will probably be only one kind of DRM for Blu-ray, no matter which codec is used.
Yeah, that's basically correct AFAIK.
The government only mandates that VoIP services that act like traditional phone service must support wiretaps.
It's not enough to have Hypertransport links; you need coherency logic to support SMP.
They may lose money on the clueless, but that make up for it on the geeks who don't need support.
Given that geeks are a small part of the population, I'm skeptical. I would bet that they really make money on clueless users who don't even bother to try to get support.
But I agree with your overall conclusion.
Almost every Opteron block diagram shows the crossbar switch. For example, AMD's 8th-Generation Processor Architecture document from 2001 shows how the SRQ and crossbar are used in a dual-core Opteron (figure 5).
100%; AMD already announced it.
Er, cache coherency works exactly the same way in a multicore chip as in an old-fashioned SMP. Opteron, Xeon, and small Itanic systems use the time-tested broadcast snooping algorithms that are taught in undergraduate courses.
No, both cores are connected to a switch which is connected to the memory controller.
In Power4, the L2 and everything beyond is shared by the two cores. (The fact that the L2 has three slices isn't relevant here.) Many of the upcoming chips have multiple, private L2s, hence the point of the article.
Perhaps this is why the Opteron has lots of bandwidth to start with.
Wouldn't it be saner to build a chip with double the number of execution units and double the number of instruction fetch/decode units and a larger reorder buffer that would appear, say, as four logical processors to a system?
That's like the Alpha EV8. It costs way too much to design and it's questionable whether you could build it at all.
Two cores are two CPUs and have the same performance as two separate CPUs. Thus you will be charged for two CPUs.
OK, so is there any advantage to DVD+R? I still don't understand why it was created.
I find dd works well with all filesystems.
If your filesystem has bugs, no amount of RAID will save you.
It doesn't matter if you release everyting in 1080p 90FPS DV files, all it takes is Discreet Media Cleaner and suddenly it's 480p at 30FPS MPEG2.
That's no longer HD. The whole assumption is that people are willing to pay for HD.
The point is, though, that the Cray supercomputers are vector supercomputers, whereas Linux clusters and other similar machines are not.
The article is about the Cray XD1, which is not a vector system. In fact, the XD1 is remarkably similar to an Opteron/Infiniband/Linux cluster...